"+1 for veteran, -1 for raw." Topic

As a confirmed rules lover having read a lot of rules over the years and played quite a few a common theme is the lumping of troop quality, training and morale into one. Hence the appearance of +1 for veteran, -1 for raw that makes it into all the tables, spotting, firing, close combat, saving rolls, morale etc.
Lately have been thinking about what we mean by veteran and raw. Consider this description of what might be called raw troops.
"‘We couldn't get the new untrained and inexperienced troops to move. We had to drag them up to the fort. The old men were tired and the new afraid and as green as grass. The three days we spent in the breach of the fort consisted in keeping the men in the lines. All the leaders were lost exposing themselves at the wrong time in order to get this accomplished. The new men seemed to lose all sense of reasoning. They left their rifles, flamethrowers, satchel charges and what not laying right where it was. I was disgusted and so damned mad I couldn't see straight."
Is this a failure of training or morale or a combination of both?
With respect to veteran as I point out above many rules have them better at everything, but is that valid. Wigwam makes the point that the gutful men, the 25% of the platoon that do all the killing, suffer 100% casualty rate per month. So maybe in our rules those troops we give combat bonuses to should have worse saving throws not better as they spend more time exposed to bring effective fire on the enemy or to close and assault.
All this is probably most relevant at the lower end of the scale, say up to company level. Once you get to stands representing platoons, companies or battalions you could probably just have ratings for combat effectiveness and resilience ie how long they will stay in the fight.
Thoughts?

You could divide the values between:
Things that require skill and experience. (skill and accuracy with weapons for example, or training in teamwork)
Willingness to take risks.
Reaching the end of your ability to think. (shell shock or blindly running away)
The training factor could be three things: Untrained, trained or experienced
The risk factor would be variable for green troops, baseline for experienced troops and lower for jaded troops.
The end of the line roll would probably be the same for everyone.

Wigwam makes the point that the gutful men, the 25% of the platoon that do all the killing, suffer 100% casualty rate per month. So maybe in our rules those troops we give combat bonuses to should have worse saving throws not better as they spend more time exposed to bring effective fire on the enemy or to close and assault.

Then again, if your opponent knows that some of your units are significantly better than others, then – all things being equal – those effective and "gutful" units are likely to be higher in target priority than the "cowering cowards", which should result in the expected increase in casualties without needing any special rules.

Then again, different rules restrict how freely you can pick targets.

Things that require skill and experience. (skill and accuracy with weapons for example

That is an interesting one. Operational research suggests wartime shooting accuracy is very bad. Like 20 times worse than the worse peacetime performance. The gutful men perform better, depending what figures you look at approaching the worst peacetime/training results. Which raises the interesting possibility that you could be your platoons worse shot in training, but providing you can hold your nerve be your units crack shot in war! It also questions how decisive skill is in combat. I suspect it might be you don't have to be particularly skilled, but providing you are brave enough to use that skill to maximum effect in combat you will win. Then of course there is the whole question of does training and acquiring skill making you braver and more able to cope or were you just braver annyway. Unpicking it all is not easy.

Then again, if your opponent knows that some of your units are significantly better than others, then – all things being equal – those effective and "gutful" units are likely to be higher in target priority than the "cowering cowards", which should result in the expected increase in casualties without needing any special rules.

That is a good point and in a low level skirmish the gutful men are going to be those going to be visible and thus targets while the sheep are going to be hugging the dirt and virtually invisible. Once you start moving up the scale you start getting into the question of target priorities and how troops perceive threat and that is a whole new can of worms.

The Command Decision rules series (they are up to 4th Edition now) differentiate between Troop Quality and Morale. So you could have Veteran quality troops with low morale (they shoot well but tend to stop when fired at – example was UK 7th Armoured Division in Normandy) and you can have Green Troops with high morale (Soviet factory workers units at Leningrad who had little training but were highly motivated).

I am reading a book now about morale in the ACW, but it includes thoughts of combat veterans of other wars. It makes an interesting point about soldiers hunkering down but not fighting, fire weapons just to be firing weapons, and firing effectively.

Morale is a combination of many factors, and can change from battle to battle. A game can't suss out the human factor/experience of combat so, in generalities, it makes sense that troops who have seen the elephant and lived to tell about it, will be more effective on the battlefield than those who haven't.

Where does training fit in? How about ideology? When does the homefield advantage factor in?

Some games have random unit morale.

Given the constraints of a game, probably the best we can do is a +1 for veterans.

Gutful men took part actively.
They will go forward and close assault enemy effectively.
I'm not too sure about their shooting.
Afaik it's roughly 1% of riflemen who outshoot others by far.

Anecdotal at best (and I know that isn't always reliable).
During the Normandy campaign, I think five of the six parachute regiments were untested in battle. They were highly trained and motivated, but I think only the 505/82 had combat experience. They all performed well in the circumstances and everyone calls them "elite."
My father (507/82 in Normandy), and many others, trained for two years before their first day of combat. He stayed with the 507th through the Bulge and Varsity. So in Normandy they were highly trained, but inexperienced. By the Bulge and Varsity they were experienced, but had many replacements, lost some good people, etc. When I asked him when they were at their best, he said Normandy. Although that may be because his favorite officer was wounded in the campaign and did not return.
All this makes me wonder if we are doing it wrong? Is experience really that much better than extensive training? What if the experience is being defeated all the time? Would that make you worse than a highly trained, but inexperienced unit? Finally, there must be a point, where combat attrition reduces effectiveness. But where is that?

@Korvessa

As far as Normandy is concerned I think that applies to more than just Airborne divisions. There is a quote from a 28th Infantry division veteran that by the time of the Bulge the division wasn't the crack unit it had been on D-day.
However Normandy and D-day in particular might be considered a special circumstance. A lot of the divisions earmarked for Normandy had been training for 2 years and had thoroughly practiced all the things they would need to do. They were very familiar with the ground they had to fight over, the objectives of the operation and had rehearsed attacks over similar terrain. They were probably the best prepared army in history.

The Command Decision rules series (they are up to 4th Edition now) differentiate between Troop Quality and Morale.

Yes I am familiar with CD and played it off an on since version 2. One of the best parts of the rules IMHO. Less happy with the rest, thought it over detailed for a set where a stand is a platoon.

In Normandy many of the British troops landing onthe beaches were green by choice. The commanders thought they may do better as they were not fully aware of the horrors. However they were well trained.

Our own system (basicly based on fireteams so about 3 to 5 men typicaly) have a value assigned to them called for sake of something, Leadership. It represents fear, fire, training and fatigue, so somewhat crude. The way the system works is troops are given a starting value, extreems are from 3 to 8.

Typically low starting value troops are high quality and motivated. As the time in a firefight extends the leadership falls as fear, fire and fatigue take their toll. Typicaly we assume the better units fight for longer so may fight to a leadership of perhaps 15 on the basis there actual casualties will be less but ther performace will be sererly degraded (lots of issues lile running out of ammo). Poor quality troops say those starting at 8 will be combat inefective about 13. Their real casualtie rate will be higher, grren troops are less able to use their training/experience to stay alive and they will tend to be more profligate with ammunition.

Furthemore communication is better, i.e quicker reponce to tactical orders for troops with lower values of leadership, so a "training/motivation" effect

Now for simplicity of rules, rather than make troops fire better we discriminate by there abity to shrug off the effects of incoming fire. The die roll is on the basis of leadership, so while a green troops may suppress a vetran set the same, a green trooper will not so easily get up and fight if once suppressed.

Of the Paras at goose green (faulkland war) , one commander was taken by how his crack troops got up and moved forward under the fire that was incoming, anechdotal but good enough for us to support the principal we adopted.

Thre are oppertunities for our stsem to tailor responce if needed. Generally we don't but if sombody needed green super motivated troops they could be allowed to fight on for longer than normal.

We do have a special dispensation for fanatic troops. Normally suppression is an automatic function of the rules syetem. We allow fanatics at least in part to ignore the suppressive effects but this doews make them more vulnerable and they degrade far faster as the obviously have a significantly higher casualtie rate in the real world.

In the end its a subtle decidion, how good an apprximation you need of the world vs the need for fast play.

@UshCha

By green by choice I assume you mean the US and UK weren't rotating units out of the Med and back to the UK for Overlord largely. Some notable exceptions of course, UK 7th Armoured Division has been mentioned and Airborne units, but Overlord was mainly fought by troops that had not seen action.
Your system is interesting and have been thinking along similar lines myself, having a rating that decays over time. How can I get hold of your rules?
I agree one has to make a compromise between playability and how much detail you put in. I am not seeking to add more complexity, but to challenge some of the preconceptions that go into a lot of rules written and to understand more of what is actually going on. What feeds in to how effective a unit is in combat, or when they break under pressure.

There's a comment in Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe to the effect that at division level, training tended to trump combat experience. Mind you, there's some material--in Cross-Channel Attack?--to the effect that veteran units tended to improve equipment by adding field phones and extra radios to tanks, for instance.

I suspect the interaction is different at casting=man level than at base=platoon, and different in horse & musket than in moderns.

And especially in moderns, there's the exhaustion problem--units engaged day after day for weeks. My guess for moderns is that the best units have had some combat experience, but have had time to rest, be brought up to strength and to train and assimilate the replacements. Good luck finding such units. British and US in the ETO in early 1945, perhaps?

You will have to compare playability against realism.
The +1 veteran and -1 raw is common in most rules.
Though the value depends of era and troop ratio. For a 1:10 or higher rule set the raw and veterans are often mixed in the same unit.so the term is often changed from veteran to Elite which implies better training and quality.

Troop quality classifications are more complex than may be initially obvious. The veteran class is the most interesting troop quality, as its not really obvious how to define it. Trained is self-explanatory and Raw is also. Elite could mean well equipped troops with high esprit de corps, or perhaps large men as you may find with Grenadiers. Veterans are trained troops which have experienced something which makes them veteran. I suspect its heavy fighting which results in victory, for at least those troops. Veteran are highly experience, don't panic but neither do they do anything stupid, like perhaps Guards troops may. As a result I suspect they may be rather rare.

So maybe in our rules those troops we give combat bonuses to should have worse saving throws not better as they spend more time exposed to bring effective fire on the enemy or to close and assault.

Neil Thomas does what you suggest in his WW2 rules.

According to Brains & Bullets/Wargames link (the best book ever on this subject) this kind of heroes/zeroes gutful men/sheep/cowards dichotomy is a pretty bad way to think about this e.g. it wasn't that the 'gutful men' congregate around the platoon commander, more that the presence of the platoon commander causes more men to be gutful. Same with heavy weapons (this seems to replicate somewhat in Rowlands' work).

I think the focus on veteran vs. raw/green, or gutful vs. timid, is somewhat (only somewhat) misguided.

The better focus is on troop quality.

It is quite simply true that some units are, collectively, more skilled and capable at fighting than others. That may be due to their experience, or it may be due to their training, or their teamwork and cohesion, or some combination of those and other factors.

But history shows us pretty clearly that equipment is not the dominant factor in determining the outcome of battle. Rather, it is how well that equipment gets used. And that is due to quality of the leadership and the quality of the troops.

In wargaming we get to play as the leadership. So the gamers themselves, and their decisions, give distinction in the quality of leadership. Pretty much every set of rules gives us distinction in the equipment. Although there may be gradients of how much detail goes into those distinctions, they are always present to some degree. What we seem to be discussing here is whether and how those rules give us distinction in the quality of the troops.

My preferred ruleset is ODGW's Mein Panzer. In MP the first metric you get associated with your force is your TQ (Troop Quality) rating. Almost everything that is probabilistic (that needs a die role) starts there. What does it take to spot? Your TQ rating modified by some set of factors. What does it take to hit? Your TQ rating modified by some set of factors. Can you shake off suppression? You need to throw your TQ rating modified by some set of factors.

Don't tell me if they're veterans. Tell me how capable they are as soldiers.

That doesn't mean being veterans is dismissed. Only that it is an input factor, rather than the end factor. Are they veterans? Are they well trained? Does their army have a history of strong NCOs? Roll that all together, with national military and social characteristics if/as you like, and you can get a TQ factor.

As a gamer I can run in with a unit of T-34m41s that have FAR better technical capabilities than the Pz IIIGs I face, and get my TQ=8 hat handed to me on a platter by some panzerwaffe crews with TQ=12, and the game shows me, shot by shot, how and why that happened.

So far, this particular ruleset is the best I've found at answering that very particular conundrum I've faced since my middle school obsession with WW2 history. If the T-34 was such a superior tank, how was it so consistently and decisively defeated in combat? This ruleset shows me what it meant to the outcome of tactical combat, that the Germany troops were more skilled at their craft.

And that same mechanic shows up when Pz38Ts face off with S-35s and Char-Bs, or even when "veteran" Sherman units face off against "green" Panthers.

Perhaps at the level of the individual man, the "gutful" issue applies. But at the squad level, or the crew level, I think the greater factor was the collective skillset. Were they good at the craft of soldiering?

Your tankage may vary.

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)

@Whirlwind

Thanks. I will check out Neil Thomas' rules.
As for gutful men Rowlands work identifies most gutful men or heroes as he terms it as officers and NCO's and Wigram notes that the sheep if well lead will push forward, which largely agrees with Murray's book.

@Mark 1

I think we are talking about the same thing. The terms veteran and raw in a lot of rules simply denotes troops that are better or worse soldiers. As I stated in the OP the modifiers are applied across the board meaning "veteran" troops have a higher troop quality than regular who have a higher quality than raw. It seems to me that whether you give troop quality a numerical value and test against that or whether you use it as a modifier to your basic mechanics doesn't matter. I see nothing inherently superior in using a numerical value. How much granularity you have is a matter of personal choice. The veteran, regular, raw split is quite common, but at the other end you have Command Decision which IIRC had 6, Green, Trained, Regular, Experienced, Veteran and Elite, or rules like Mein Panzer or Tac WW2 which give even more.

I'll go with Whirlwind. Good training combined with combat-proven small unit direct leadership at the squad and platoon level can make troops experiencing their first combat to perform admirably.

The 4th and 5th Marine Divisions that landed on Iwo Jima were composed of mostly new troops but led by NCOs and officers that had been on Guadalcanal and members of Raider units. IIRC they trained in Hawaii for 6+ months before the invasion.

Also, an officer with a pistol pointing at your head does wonders for your motivation and your ability to take action.

If you examine the US MOH awardees you'll see a good percentage are junior enlisted, many in their first combat.

Wolfhag

Fred Cartwright our rules
link

Normally I say try the free stuff. This may or may not help in this case. The "Leadership" impacts a lot of area.

Communication including loss of leaders and their replacement, Removal of Suppression and Reaction (not a part of a Featherstone Clone type set of rules). Plus degradation as a function of combat, slow in a firefight but can be massive in close combat. In addition there are other peripheral uses of the system associated with the unique systems in Maneouver Group.

So the interrelationship may not fully be obvious in the QR sheet.

No figures are removed and the marker that notes leadership for each element also does other jobs. We use a white board maker to track Leadership: it's faster than trying to find a labeled bit of card/plastic (like Stargunt II).

Now I have no problem you using the system in fact it would be interesting to see how you use it but beware, it is a keystone in our system so you may find it difficult to use without other changes to the model you intend to fit it in.

On Lord Hill's podcast of Bull's Troop at Waterloo he points out that troop was very largely veterans with many years of service, yet with Band of Brothers who were only together a few months they were considered veterans and hardly any saw combat yet.

I don't think it's possible to answer this question without being more specific about period and scale. A veteran Roman legionary will be superior to a new recruit, regardless of whether or not the experience has been of victory or of defeat, because in close quarters, experience matters. At rifle range, that may not be so significant. On the other hand, being well trained would be useful in either case.

When it comes to scale, what difference does equipment make? Carrying a semi-automatic rifle vs a bolt action rifle might matter a lot in a one to one skirmish game, but in a game where a stand represents a company or a battalion, the individual soldiers' firearms are all subsumed within an overall assessment of the troops' quality.

Cheers,
John

The system I use a team/section has a Tactical Rating of 1-5. Certain tasks or orders involve passing a TQ test rolling a D6. If they fail, their Squad or Platoon Leader can add their Leadership Rating to the roll AFTER seeing the first roll result. However, when using a Leader for this they expose themselves to enemy fire and can become a causality. You need to use them wisely.

Good units will normally perform without help. A poor unit will need leadership.

Wolfhag

At 5:36 a.m., October 25, 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Wesley Taylor's 1st Battalion, 75th Rangers, began a low-level parachute assault on the airfield at Point Salines, Grenada. Taylor's assault force was followed by the 2nd Battalion, 75th Rangers. Their mission: seize the airfield, clear it out of obstructions and ensure the safety of United States citizens at the nearby campus of Grenada's medical school. Although planned as a surprise assault, Colonel Taylor's Rangers discovered very quickly that People's Revolutionary Army Soldiers, supported by Cubans, were fully alerted and ready to defend the airfield, Operation Urgent Fury was underway.

Most likely, this was the Corporal's first time in combat.

Should highly trained troops like Rangers be considered Poor even in their first combat?

Wolfhag

Considering their opponents were construction workers . . .

Considering their opponents were construction workers . . .

Really? And the VC was just a bunch of rice farmers? The airdrop, from 500 feet, was being shot at while descending by "construction workers" many who were actually Cuban Combat Engineers. Many of them put up a pretty good fight and some may have been vets from Angola.

The Cubans also sent in armored cars which were knocked out by recoilless rifle fire. The Rangers hot-wired a bulldozer and used it to assault one defensive position.

That operation was unlike a war game where you know everything about your enemy's disposition, weapons, and training. Many things went wrong at the worst time.

The first pass over the airfield was waved off because of AAA from ZSU-23s. It was decided to drop at 500 feet because the AAA could not depress their guns enough to hit the plane. The other C-130 had to depart, which meant no reserves. Fortunately, they had support from C-130 gunships.

5 KIA, 6 WIA, some shot on the way down.

A good friend of mine made that drop that day.

Wolfhag

That operation was unlike a war game where you know everything about your enemy's disposition, weapons, and training.

And … I might add one more to the list. That operation was unlike a war game where the players expect that some effort has been made to balance the scenario and the forces.

One of the most basic tactical principals in modern warfare is to be the one who gets there the fastest with the mostest. No tactical commander seeks a fair and balanced fight. No tactical commander EXPECTS a fair and balanced fight.

So you not only don't know what the opponent has (in terms of disposition, weapons and training), but you absolutely do NOT expect that it is well matched to your own, and you are not trying to "bring balance to the force".

In real combat, fair fights are for fools.

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)