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<center><IMG SRC="strat.gif" ALIGN="BOTTOM" Alt ="Strategy and Wargame Genres - a history of these genres. The origins and influence of Miniture Wargaming and Boardgaming. Developments such as hez-grid, turn base and real-time."></center>
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'Wargame' and 'Strategy' game genres have developed from the hobby miniature wargaming and boardgame. To understand the designs in this genre you will have to steep yourself in these hobbies.
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To a non-computer wargamer his hobby means any period or subject that simulates some form of combat. Strategy merely means when a whole war or campaign is simulated rather than the tactical nature of a battle. Boardgamers play similar games at the strategic or tactical level. At the strategic level players compete with military units that must be created and supplied with economic factors. Some boardgames simulated only economic competition such as the railroad construction in <EM>Rail Baron</EM>.
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To a computer game publisher, wargames are a specialist group that comprises games that have a miniature wargame or boardgame look to them. They only appeal directly to members of these hobbies or people who like to partake in such a 'nerdy' pastime without having the bother to create models. Many games that wargames would recognise are called Strategy games. They include games mainly inspired by the economic boardgames and science-fiction games using wargame type rule-systems that publishers are loath to equate with their nerdy brethren.
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<IMG SRC="wargame.jpg" ALIGN =Left WIDTH =250 HSPACE= 10 Alt = "A Napleonic Miniatures Wargame">Wargaming owes its origins to the Prussian Army of the 1870's who trained their officers in tactics on a table with iconised wooden blocks to represent the troops. A set of rules called Kreigspeil, acted as a guide for an arbitrating umpire. By the 1960's in Britain the hobby comprising fighting battles with miniature figures on a table with model terrain was becoming popular.
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Players used a set of rules organised that gave instructions on how units could be moved and how combat could be worked and the element of chance could be introduced using dice. The figures used were originally meant to be toys (H.G. Wells 'Little Wars') or made up from kits as plastic models. Later specialist companies appeared producing purpose made metal figures, artillery pieces, tanks, etc. Painting and creating pieces of terrain to extremely high standards and authenticity in details of the period uniform to give the illusion of fighting a real battle became a major part of the hobby.
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All historical periods were explored by miniature wargamers including fantasy and science-fiction battles. Great personal ingenuity and research into the chosen period was shown in devising rule systems to simulate accurately the warfare of the age.
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The most popular period became that of fighting battles between ancient civilisations. This was mainly because a small company calling itself 'Wargames Research Group' produced a set of rules that were adopted for play in tournaments or competitions. The rules had a point system in which very different forces in type and size could be deemed to have an equal chance of winning under the rule system. The colour and splendour of the Napoleonic period and the mighty clashes in World War II between man and machine closely followed.
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<IMG SRC = "boardgam.jpg" ALIGN = left WIDTH = 250 HSPACE = 10 Alt = "Avalon Hill's Longest Day Boardgame">Boardgaming as a hobby became popular in the 1970s in the USA with companies such as <EM>SPI</EM>, <EM>GDW</EM> and <EM>Avalon Hill</EM> producing a wide variety of games. They covered almost as many periods as the miniature wargamers. The games were fought on a map of an area with hexagons printed on to act as a means of counting movement and deciding the facing of the units.
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In the 1950s and 1960s, the military experimented with computer wargames. Britain's Defence Operational Analysis Establishment developed a number of high level grand tactical wargames. As a training tool they proved useful but as the number of variables used was very complex they proved useless for determining which factors were the most important.
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Mainframe computers had become available to students at universities by the 1970's. Flow diagrams and decision trees in systems analysis were used to describe a process. Wargaming rules were written like instructions to a computer. Boardgames used a strict legal style language to define the rules. Boardgaming and miniature wargaming rules both used a pseudo code style to define the systems underlying a battle. If a unit is fired upon, will it continue as normal, have its performance degraded by the confusion or retreat in disarray?
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There was considerable overlap in the two hobbies with English Wargames playing boardgames and Americans starting to play with miniature figures. Indeed some of the best boardgames such as <EM>Civilisation</EM> and <EM>Kingmaker</EM> were developed by English Boardgame designers. Although boardgames tended to be of a more strategic nature, some of the best games were of a tactical nature and were heavily influenced by the miniature wargamers. Avalon's Hills <EM>Squad Leader</EM> series of games by John Hill had a miniature's look and rule system. The counters represented individual tanks and sections although the scenarios were abstract being more strategic in nature. I know of one miniature rules system that was based on the <EM>Squad Leader</EM> rules system!
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Although wargames some times fought battles with other players, each commanding a force on each side, multi-player gaming was developed by the boardgamers at the strategy level. <EM>Diplomacy</EM> (Philmar/AH), one of the first boardgames that simulated the arms-race prior to World War One inspired the greatest level of player interaction and intrigue. The players took control of one of the countries in Europe and could make pacts with other players to attack another player or agreements not to attack each other. Players would phone each other up the night before an arranged game was due to start and try and make deals before the game had officially begun. A player might try to persuade the others that another player situated next them was a weak target and the players should attack him together. Alternatively, he might claim an opponent posed a great threat to both of them and they should have a formal non-aggression pact to counter an attack from this player! The computer conversions of the game are disappointing and have yet to capture its true game play.
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<IMG SRC="hez.jpg" ALIGN =Left WIDTH =250 HSPACE= 10 Alt = "An early SSI wargame with hez-grid">Traditional boardgame publishers such as Avalon Hill and SPI were the first to make computer wargames for consoles such as the TRS-80, Pet and Apple. The machines could do little and were expensive, traditional wargamers could do much more without them. Avalon Hill soon lost interest as computer wargames were only of interest to very nerdy programmers. Their designers left to join such companies as Microprose and SSI who appreciated their skill.
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Chris Crawford was a pioneer of the computer wargame. Crawford's <EM>Tanktics</EM> released in 1978 by Avalon Hill used the traditional boardgame hezgrid. However, it was difficult for players to relate to as it used alphanumeric inputs to control the game and had a cryptic screen design. <EM>Eastern Front 1941</EM>, was more of a revolutionary design with a relatively easy to use joystick input system. He used complex victory conditions rather than the simple ones used by boardgames. He had found that the computer allowed him to use much more complicated 'rule-system' to define the simulation than was possible in a boardgame, in which the calculations were done by hand. He dumped the boardgame hez-grid system for a square grid as they obscured movement. Boardgames generally use hez-grids rather than squares, as this avoided having units adjacent on the diagonal and allowed six directions of movement rather than four. The relationship of how units relate to each other in space and time can be transferred from miniature wargaming to computer wargames, rather than using hez-grids as the sole definition of a space.
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Crawford was discovering that simply transporting one medium to another does not work as you copied the weakness of the original system and lost many of the best features such as multi-player interaction.
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<IMG SRC="mfog.jpg" ALIGN =Left WIDTH =250 HSPACE= 10 ALT = "Micropose's Fields of GLORY">Few extra game design developments have occurred since Crawford's <EM>Eastern Front 1941</EM>, hez-grids or square-grids are generally still used, but become invisible to the player. Wargames have been done in real time rather than turns or phases with varying degrees of success. More complicated rule and database system have been used than such mammoth boardgames as <EM>Drang Nach Osten</EM> with 1,800 counters. The main improvement to computer wargames as with many other computer genres, has been to the graphics and the addition of multimedia sequences. Miniature wargames try to make the figures and terrain look as much like the real battles as possible. Strangely, most computer wargames try and make the display look like miniature wargaming rather than try and represent reality!
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Many wargames are extremely dreadful having been developed by programmers with only a superficial understanding of the original hobby. As software many of them look good but play badly. Britain has a high count of wargamers but computer game developers seem to have little interest in this 'nerdy' genre and have learnt little from it. This is a shame. The game rules and systems in wargaming have much to teach designers all game genres. Most wargame development goes on in the USA that has a larger game market and of course is heavily boardgame influenced.
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The main problem with even the best wargame design is the tendency to produce a game engine and then produce as many games as possible from it, before technological advancements force them to develop a new engine. This problem is far from unique to computer wargames. The reason is, of course, to produce games as cheaply and efficiently as possible. The problem is that wargames developed this way tend to play the same.
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Taking a hypothetical example; the games may look different but that unit of Hannibal's elephants has much the same artificial intelligence and code defining tactics as their next game with Patton's armour. The developers fail to think what are the tactics that make warfare at the time of Hannibal unique and different and then developed the necessary artificial intelligence and game systems to recreate them.
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<EM>SPI</EM> in the 1970s released a boardgame every couple of months with a magazine on a different historical subject. If the game was a success they then developed it a bit further and put it in a box. Some of their games had original design systems but most of them were much the same. A different strength number on the counter might be the only difference between a unit of ancient elephant or a regiment of Patton's armour. Could this have been the reason why they went bankrupt and <EM>Avalon Hill</EM> in which all their boardgames are markedly different is still publishing?
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Strategy games have been influenced from the economic and strategic level boardgames and miniature wargame campaigns but there is also a strong original streak in this sub-genre. The player is given control of a some large socio-economic item to build up such as a country or city. The player given various decisions to take that determine how effectively the item develops. The designers build in various assumptions into his model and random factors may play a part. The player is given various graphs of statistics to help him judge his performance and adopt his strategy. The games are now generally in real time to increase the games pace.
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<IMG SRC="simcity.jpg" ALIGN =Left WIDTH =250 HSPACE= 10 ALT = "The sequel Simcity 2000"><EM>Humurabi</EM> was an early strategy game in which you assumed the role of an ancient Sumerian ruler. It was a text game in which the player allocated resources. The economic model was random with no consistent structure. <EM>Utopia</EM> allowed the player to rule a whole city and competed with an opposing island to create the most utopian world possible. Maxis' <EM>Simcity</EM> allowed the player to build a city. It made town planning fun and spawned a series of strategy games including <EM>Sim Earth</EM>, <EM>SimFarm</EM>, <EM>SimAnt</EM>, etc.
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<IMG SRC="populous.jpg" ALIGN =Left WIDTH =250 HSPACE= 10 ALT = "Bullfog's Populous">Bullfrog's <EM>Populous</EM> was very much in the mould of the other strategy games but was called by an alternative name; the god game. (I suspect this name came from the film Jason and the Argonauts, in which gods played a game which controlled the actions of mortals.) The player creates a world in which the inhabitants lived, worked and battled. It had for its time good gameplay, graphics and interface and helped make the genre mass-market.
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<IMG SRC="civ.jpg" ALIGN =Left WIDTH =250 HSPACE= 10 ALT = "Sid Meir's Civilization"><EM>Sid Meir's Civilization</EM> is an example of how you can take an idea from a boardgame and adapted it to the computer successfully. Civilisation, the boardgame, was set in ancient times and the player competed with other human opponents to make his race the most civilised. It included technological development, combat between states, trade and diplomacy. Microprose bought the name of the game, and Meir adapted it to the computer. He took technological development from ancient times to mans conquest of space. The player competed with computer opponents and had to explore a randomly generated world. The player could conquer all these opposing races or be first to develop a star ship that takes colonists to the nearest star to earth. Meir stressed the elements that computer could do well in the game. It has proved to be a far better game than any straight conversion of the boardgame.
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Meir's ability to take elements from the original wargaming hobbies and adapt them to meet the strengths and weaknesses of the computer has made him one of the best game designers in the world.
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<IMG SRC="cc2.jpg" ALIGN =Left WIDTH =250 HSPACE= 10 ALT = "Command and Conquer"><EM>Command and Conquer</EM> has helped popularise the wargame to players who have no knowledge of either miniature wargames or strategy boardgames. The game has proved massively popular and has spawned many imitators from developers, hoping to cash in on the real-time strategy/wargame genre it helped put on the map. The game was however far from being a one off original than suddenly emerged on the games scene. Its direct roots were from the earlier Westwood game <EM>DUNE II</EM>. This had the units and the collection of a resource worked out but lacked the addictive game-play elements. <EM>Dune II</EM> was a sequel to the original Dune by a French developer. This game ultimately had its roots in the Avalon Hill boardgame of the same name. The problem with <EM>DUNE</EM> was that it tried to capture the events of the book and this together with the limited number of troop types stilted the game. The final game-play of <EM>Command and Conquer</EM> was remarkably similar to the game <EM>Warcraft</EM> in which you must collect resources to build up your base and then forces, while holding the enemy at bay. Finally the player has enough troops to find and attack the enemy base and its resource collection units.
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