"Wargame Strategies" Topic

"I have been thinking recently a little about strategy. Now many people would respond to this by exclaiming ‘Thinking? You? Really?' but I shall attempt to persevere. Wargames and wargamers, it seems to me are very good at being tactical. We know about handling pikemen and musketeers to advantage in an English Civil War game, or moving that Sherman up to blast the bunker while the infantry go in. We are quite good at all sorts of things like this. We study tactics, we consider how to make the best moves given the rule set, and so on.

It might come as a bit of a blow, then, to discover that tactics do not win wars. Tactics, of course, might win battles, and winning battles is a useful (although not actually a necessary) condition for assessing who is going to win the war (remember Phyrrus?) but a particular bit of tactics, such as fire and movement, or when to call in an artillery barrage is not necessarily going to triumph. Often, after all, keeping a force in being is sufficient not to lose the battle or campaign, rather than winning a battle…"

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Armand

The trouble with strategy is that it generally involves too many variable for a workable set of rules, it is rarely purely military either.

True…

Armand

Miniatures wargaming is not well suited to playing out strategy, or, for that matter, logistics. Even if you're playing a Napoleonic battle with miniatures representing thousands of soldiers, it's still basically a tactical game. The baggage trains are the closest thing to logistics, and strategy's only effect is on victory conditions.

A campaign game may allow defining and implementing strategy, but the strategic aspects of the campaign will be played out somewhere other than on a miniatures table.

There are many good games for working through strategy (and logsistics), but I don't think miniatures games are.

Thanks.

Armand