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On the Blood and Spectacles blog I have put up a Wargame Design post related to the Designer's Triangle:

http://bloodandspectacles.blogspot.com/2023/07/wargame-design-ngs-narrative-gamist.html

A frequent, and hot topic in game design is something called N/G/S. This roughly breaks down into what aspects a game wishes to "lean" into. These are Narrative, Gamist, Simulation. This discussion comes up with Wargames, Board Games, Card Games, and Role-playing Games. Today, I wanted to spend a bit of time talking about these different aspects and how they may relate to your game design.

I discuss what it is, how to use it, and walk through an example with Castles in the Sky. Hopefully this is helpful for all you budding Wargame Designers out there.

Am I way off base, or is there another tool you use when thinking about this topic?

Weird, I think of it in terms of a 2-axis spectrum, abstract to simulation on one axis, narrative to gamist (or "rules-lite" to "crunchy") on the other.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Weird, I think of it in terms of a 2-axis spectrum, abstract to simulation on one axis, narrative to gamist (or "rules-lite" to "crunchy") on the other.

In the 80s, the two poles were "realism" and "playability."

In practice, "realism" meant "complexity," but there was an assumption that including a rule for every factor of a conflict (no matter how inelegant) made it somehow closer to reality.

Today I think there's a sense that gaming can be both realistic and use simple mechanics. The key is understanding what you are trying to do. Back in the day, gamers wanted "chrome" to give a sense of history/detail. Now it is understood that too much of this cripples the design. Think of AD&D, which included "speed factors" and modifiers for the type of damage (piercing, slashing or bludgeoning) to make combat "realistic."

This in a game with magic spells.

Across the board, this level of needless detail has been rejected in favor of simplicity which fosters more imagination and give more time to actually role-play rather than run tactical combat scenarios.

So I don't know that a triangle is the proper way to look at it. It's more a question of asking if the design does what it is supposed to do. To give a well-known example, 40k is "designed" to sell models and new sets of rules. It does that very well. Elements such as simplicity and consistency in rules and game balance have always been tertiary at best.

I don't think I really buy the theory, specifically the idea that "narrative" and "simulationist" are two different things. Both are inherently about accurately representing a fictional event, as contrasted with the "gamist" element of playing the rules construct to win a game. The simulationist aspects support the narrative aspects by allowing players to make in-character choices and have them result in the appropriate outcomes within the game. The rules accurately simulate the value of pikes against cavalry so that when the player roleplaying as the leader of the army forms up their pike lines to protect the ranged troops the result is an effective counter to a cavalry charge.

As an example from your article, consider the battleship > cruiser > escort > battleship rock/paper/scissors match. You have this listed as a "narrative" element but in reality it's a pure "gamist" element. In real life battleships are simply the dominant unit (at least within the context of a major fleet engagement) and other units exist in a supporting role at most. A battleship has a cruiser or three worth of secondary guns dedicated to annihilating escorts and the escorts are largely reduced to scouting roles, fleeing from combat once the enemy is spotted. And from a narrative point of view you would expect the rules to follow this. Your heroic battleship captain has nothing to fear from escorts and can slaughter whole squadrons of them at will, only the enemy battleships represent a meaningful threat and they become the focus of the story. But from a gaming perspective this is bad for balance, and unless you impose historical force lists players will take all-battleship fleets and only buy cruisers or escorts once they run out of points and can't afford more battleships. So to make the game play better you invent a rock/paper/scissors system where you delete the secondary batteries on the battleships and invent some kind of "tracking" element where the big guns can't turn fast enough to engage small ships, allowing a swarm of escorts to overwhelm and destroy battleships as a viable strategy. It isn't realistic and it doesn't match the expected narrative but it does allow more strategy depth than lining up battleships and trading fire until someone runs out.

Similarly, you list "scale and model agnostic" as a "gamist" element but this doesn't fit the triangle model, with each point of the triangle being in tension with the others. It may be more of a priority for some players than others but nothing about, say, describing distances as "10 units" instead of "10 cm" has any conflict with narrative or simulationist goals. Same thing with models. A narrative-focused rivet counter player may be more likely to value using official models than a pure gamer who is fine with proxies. Or maybe the opposite is true, where the gamer is fine with buying the official stuff and going straight to playing while the narrative player really cares about using their third-party models to adapt the rules to their homebrew story and setting. But regardless of who cares more about it omitting rules references to the specific physical miniatures doesn't come at the expense of the other two points of the triangle, it's only in tension with business concerns about using rules to drive model sales.

In real life battleships are simply the dominant unit (at least within the context of a major fleet engagement) and other units exist in a supporting role at most. A battleship has a cruiser or three worth of secondary guns dedicated to annihilating escorts and the escorts are largely reduced to scouting roles, fleeing from combat once the enemy is spotted. And from a narrative point of view you would expect the rules to follow this. Your heroic battleship captain has nothing to fear from escorts and can slaughter whole squadrons of them at will, only the enemy battleships represent a meaningful threat and they become the focus of the story.

This is horribly misleadingly false. The number one threat to early battleships were torpedo boats (which as the name might imply were very small, cheap, and expendable craft), which necessitated the development of what later came to be known as the Destroyer in order to protect Battleships from them - a role which they were very successful at, to the point that Destroyers actually eventually replaced Torpedo Boats entirely as an attack platform. Later on, Battleships were ultimately rendered obsolete by aircraft, particularly small, fast, maneuverable ones that carried bombs or torpedoes. The reality is that more battleships were lost as a result of action by enemy "escorts" (i.e. torpedo boats, destroyers, cruisers, etc.) and aircraft than were lost to enemy battleships.

Narrative and Simulation are not the same at all.

Narrative is about telling stories and spectacle, they do not have to be accurate to reality at all. They can be pure fantasy.

Simulation is about trying to recreate reality. A completely different desire in gamers.

Sure, sometimes they overlap with specific people trying to tell a realistic story, but for other gamers it is the opposite. They want the fantasy story from a Hollywood action movie to play out on the table.

To think they are "the same" is a bias about what wargames should do that you are bringing. I know I tend to emphasize the Narrative approach more than Gamist or Simulation. I struggle mightily on the Gamist side of things. Those are my Bias. It's okay. We all have them.

@ChaosxOmega- I used to think of them as two separate Axis as well. But then I found those two axis overlapped again to create a third "dimension" so to speak. Hence why I moved to a Triangle. Probably not "mathematically optimal" but that is not how my brain works.

Again, it is a concept I ran across in business. The old "you can have it done quick, good, or cheap: pick two"; saying. I had seen someone else represent this idea to me as a triangle a few years ago and that seemed to make sense in this case as well.

The model may not work for anyone else and that's fine.

 Easy E wrote:
Narrative is about telling stories and spectacle, they do not have to be accurate to reality at all. They can be pure fantasy.

Narrative doesn't have to be accurate to our reality, it has to be accurate to some reality. You can have a fantasy world with wizards and demons and such and it will be completely unrealistic by the standards of our world but it still has to have its own consistent rules for how things work. A narrative player needs to be able to take the actions their character would do and those actions need to have the expected consequences. If the lore of your magic system is that opposing elements are counters to each other then shooting an ice demon with a fireball should be effective, more effective than shooting the ice demon with an ice bolt spell. Simulationist design is how you achieve a consistent narrative, without it you may have spectacle but none of it forms a coherent story.


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chaos0xomega wrote:
This is horribly misleadingly false. The number one threat to early battleships were torpedo boats (which as the name might imply were very small, cheap, and expendable craft), which necessitated the development of what later came to be known as the Destroyer in order to protect Battleships from them - a role which they were very successful at, to the point that Destroyers actually eventually replaced Torpedo Boats entirely as an attack platform. Later on, Battleships were ultimately rendered obsolete by aircraft, particularly small, fast, maneuverable ones that carried bombs or torpedoes. The reality is that more battleships were lost as a result of action by enemy "escorts" (i.e. torpedo boats, destroyers, cruisers, etc.) and aircraft than were lost to enemy battleships.

A Fletcher-class destroyer carries five 5" guns and up to fourteen 40mm guns. An Iowa-class battleship carries 20 of the same 5" gun and 80 of the same 40mm gun. The battleship's secondary battery alone is worth 4-5 destroyers. There was certainly some value in having screening units engage (and likely be destroyed by) an incoming threat at extreme range, with destroyers being cheap enough to take in the large numbers required for sufficient coverage, but the idea that a battleship is helpless against small targets is entirely a game balance creation.

And sure, more battleships may have been lost to small ships than other battleships but only because battleship vs. battleship engagements were incredibly rare. WWI was largely a "fleet in being" stalemate with the one major fleet engagement being indecisive and broken off before it could reach a real conclusion, and by WWII battleships were mostly reduced to being shore bombardment platforms and a source of mass AA guns to defend the carriers.

chaos0xomega wrote:
This is horribly misleadingly false. The number one threat to early battleships were torpedo boats (which as the name might imply were very small, cheap, and expendable craft), which necessitated the development of what later came to be known as the Destroyer in order to protect Battleships from them - a role which they were very successful at, to the point that Destroyers actually eventually replaced Torpedo Boats entirely as an attack platform. Later on, Battleships were ultimately rendered obsolete by aircraft, particularly small, fast, maneuverable ones that carried bombs or torpedoes. The reality is that more battleships were lost as a result of action by enemy "escorts" (i.e. torpedo boats, destroyers, cruisers, etc.) and aircraft than were lost to enemy battleships.

Torpedo boats were something of a phantom menace - admirals feared them, but they rarely amounted to anything.

The real battleship killer was the submarine, and that was why there so many destroyers screening them. Against other surface units, they pretty much dominated the fight. Recall that the destroyers at Leyte Gulf never threatened the Japanese battleships, they just delayed and distracted them.

I also don't see how simulation is in tension with narrative. I guess you could say that the rules of the game don't reflect the "reality" of the fluff, but that seems to be a uniquely GW thing. In all other systems, the stories and rules are seamless.

Now sometimes that "reality" is off, such as the insane stats often accorded to late-model Panzers in tactical games, or overstated French Imperial Guard capability, but even there the tension is within the narrative, not against abstract simulation.

 ThePaintingOwl wrote:

A Fletcher-class destroyer carries five 5" guns and up to fourteen 40mm guns. An Iowa-class battleship carries 20 of the same 5" gun and 80 of the same 40mm gun. The battleship's secondary battery alone is worth 4-5 destroyers. There was certainly some value in having screening units engage (and likely be destroyed by) an incoming threat at extreme range, with destroyers being cheap enough to take in the large numbers required for sufficient coverage, but the idea that a battleship is helpless against small targets is entirely a game balance creation.

Thats an incredibly amateur way of analyzing the capability and performance of two platforms relative to one another and fails to address limited fields of fire, weapon placement, elevation, and traverse, rate offire, etc. or to consider the torpedo armament of the destroyers themselves.

Recall that the destroyers at Leyte Gulf never threatened the Japanese battleships, they just delayed and distracted them.

I think that depends on what you mean by "threatened". Destroyed - no, but the reason the Japanese battleships were "delayed and distracted" is because of the heavy torpedo spreads fired from the destroyers which forced Yamato and Nagato to break away from the engagement, because it was and is widely understood that a torpedo is actually a fairly big *threat* to a battleship. Nagato did rejoin the battle after fleeing, but despite over 120 rounds fired from primary and secondary weapons at enemy vessels only lightly damaged one destroyer (so much for Owls theory on that secondary armament!). Haruna and Kongo were not "threatened" by torpedoes to the same extent as Yamato or Nagato (and Haruna struggled to land any hits on the American force, though Kongo made up for it), but were ultimately withdrawn from the battle because the *threat* posed by the tin can task force led Kurita to believe that he was engaging a much larger force of larger surface combatants, thinking he was engaging cruisers and fleet carriers instead of destroyer escorts and escort carriers.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Thats an incredibly amateur way of analyzing the capability and performance of two platforms relative to one another and fails to address limited fields of fire, weapon placement, elevation, and traverse, rate offire, etc. or to consider the torpedo armament of the destroyers themselves.

Yes, of course it's a simplified version. So is the nonsensical rock/paper/scissors model OP proposed, where escorts simply beat battleships because Reasons. The reality is that battleships had abundant secondary weapons capable of engaging lighter ships, weapons that were put there for that specific purpose. A mass attack by torpedo-armed escorts might be a threat but it's far from a magic trump card, especially if the battleships are willing to turn away to avoid the attack and re-engage once the destroyers have fired their limited torpedo stocks. And once the torpedoes are gone the escorts get massacred.

thinking he was engaging cruisers and fleet carriers instead of destroyer escorts and escort carriers.

And this is the key point: he thought he was engaging something bigger. There was a mistake in identifying the enemy ships and had he known he was facing only the lighter units he would have committed to the attack, confident in his chances of winning. If escorts are the magic trump card to battleships as proposed by OP's rock/paper/scissors model he would have run even if he had known what he was really facing. In fact, he would have been more willing to run because under rock/paper/scissors his battleships are better against cruisers than against destroyers. Instead we see the exact opposite: paper runs away from scissors, but only because paper thinks it is running away from rock.

Ever consider the reason why Kurita thought he was fighting something bigger is because of the amount of firepower coming back his way and the perceived level of threat the American force displayed tp hos vessels? I'm sure the 4 heavy cruisers they sunk had something to do with it.

The fact that 2 of his 4 battleships failed to really hit much of anything through the engagement, despite many attempts to do so, should be a clear indicator that your infantile view of "more guns = invincible" isn't how real life works. Those secondary weapons may have been put there to fight smaller vessels in theory, that doesn't mean they were effective at doing so in practice- in the same way that bombers of the era were loaded up with machine guns to defend against enemy fighters in theory (to the point that bombers in combat box formation were initially believed to be invulnerable to aerial attack) but in practice the machine guns had limited effect and bombers were easy prey to fighters - hence the turrets and machine guns were gradually removed in subsequent designs and eventually eliminated entirely with the acknowledgement that the only defense for a bomber against aerial attack was to either fly higher and faster than the enemy fighters could or have a robust fighter escort.

The fact that battleships required escort at all should be a pretty big clue that you're just flat out *wrong*, there's a reason *why* battleships had escorts in the first place - because they were otherwise vulnerable to attack by vessels smaller than themselves. If they weren't vulnerable to such attacks, there would be no need for escort and the only ships major powers would bother to build at all would be battleships, because according to you they would be invulnerable to attack from anything except other battleships while smaller vessels would be easy prey guaranteed to be destroyed with no hope of victory. If those escorts were unable to harm enemy battleships as you contend, then those escorts surely wouldn't be there to escort and protect a battleship from enemy battleships, after all.

The rock-paper-scissors concept, despite seeming relatively gamey, is only a slight simplification of actual British and American naval doctrine of the era.

The issue with the rock-paper-scissor concept is that it comes with a hard counter expectation because, well the rock-paper-scissor game is one of hard counters. No matter how well you play a scissor, it will never be able to defeat a rock.

Meanwhile true hard counters are more rare in warfare. If you are creative, you can find soft counters to theoretical hard counters.

For example, the Taliban did conquer Afghanistan with a purely light infantry force after all vs tanks and aircraft (sure the fact that the GIRoA was unbelievable incompetent helped them a lot). They learned the operational tempo of the American aircraft to better dodge airstrikes and even if not entirely effective, it reduced casualties enough to the point they were able to push offensives into Afghan cities even while the Americans bombarded them.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Ever consider the reason why Kurita thought he was fighting something bigger is because of the amount of firepower coming back his way and the perceived level of threat the American force displayed tp hos vessels? I'm sure the 4 heavy cruisers they sunk had something to do with it.

As has been well-established, Kurita believed he was fighting heavier forces than he was. He was not afraid of destroyers and jeep carriers. If he knew what was in front of him, the battle would have gone differently.

The fact that battleships required escort at all should be a pretty big clue that you're just flat out *wrong*, there's a reason *why* battleships had escorts in the first place - because they were otherwise vulnerable to attack by vessels smaller than themselves.

The word you are looking for is "submarine," which was far more lethal than a destroyer. Destroyer torpedo runs were desperation moves or the result of a single opponent (Bismarck) being subjected to a swarm attack.

Escorts also helped provide protection against air attack.

The rock-paper-scissors concept, despite seeming relatively gamey, is only a slight simplification of actual British and American naval doctrine of the era.

I think that concept can work in some areas, but not here. The primary advantage of destroyers over cruisers or carriers is that they are expendable. One can build a new one in few weeks vs a couple of years for a battleship. Tactically, they are hands-down weaker.

Getting back to game design, one problem is that designers force a construct where it doesn't work in an attempt to create some sort of offset or balance. In that case, realism is being sacrificed for playability.

I do find it curious the argument is about battleships when we have a perfectly fine example of ubership in the aircraft carrier.

I mean, aircraft carriers were one of the inventions that revolutioned warfare to the point that if you don't have a carrier then you don't really have a navy and made their dominance so blatant the battleships went extinct.

You simply cannot fit aircraft carriers in a rock-paper-scissor paradigm.

 Tyran wrote:
I do find it curious the argument is about battleships when we have a perfectly fine example of ubership in the aircraft carrier.

I mean, aircraft carriers were one of the inventions that revolutioned warfare to the point that if you don't have a carrier then you don't really have a navy and made their dominance so blatant the battleships went extinct.

You simply cannot fit aircraft carriers in a rock-paper-scissor paradigm.

Obviously if one is doing a game of naval warfare, it has to be set in a particular era. So if we are looking at surface combatants prior to 1918, torpedo boats were something of a non-starter in terms of actual combat results. Yes, there was a crippling fear of them because these flimsy little craft could sink mighty dreadnoughts, but in practice that did not happen.

Battleships had escorts not to save them from a swarm but to scout out the enemy fleet. Radar was unknown and radio was in its infancy. A battleship needed escorts so that it didn't inadvertently run into a five-to-one situation. While Jutland gets all the press, there were attempts at smaller engagements and swarms of escorts were needed to signal back who was where.

The point is that this was not a rocks-paper-scissors situation, but one where complimentary elements created a more favorable environment.

Are there tradeoffs? Of course, just as with all weapons systems. What's the old joke? Firepower, protection and speed: pick two. We could also add construction time/materials cost to that, but this wasn't really a points-style situation where 50 destroyers were a match for one battleship or something. such a ludicrous matchup would depend on other factors, like the sea state, distance from port, fuel situation.

Again, the worst offender in terms of forcing balance at the cost of realism/plausibility is GW, and they are in a class by themselves.

For the vast majority of games, bad/complicated mechanics are more of an issue than anything else. The 80s craze for "a rule for everything" created supremely kludgy designs and I see lots of that still out there today.

chaos0xomega wrote:
I'm sure the 4 heavy cruisers they sunk had something to do with it.

Sure, but that's yet another nail in the coffin of the rock/paper/scissors model. By OP's model heavy cruisers are supposed to be the counter to destroyers, yet somehow the destroyers won that engagement and did it so convincingly that the other side assumed they must be far heavier units.

The reality is that the engagement is an exceptional case of a heroic last stand won by sheer skill and suicidal bravery, not by the capabilities of the ships in question. It is not representative of what would normally happen when a small force of light units goes up against heavy cruisers and battleships.

Those secondary weapons may have been put there to fight smaller vessels in theory, that doesn't mean they were effective at doing so in practice

In the case of US battleships they were literally the same 5" gun that was mounted on smaller ships. Cruisers had them as a primary battery, battleships took the exact same twin 5" mount and used them as a dual-purpose secondary battery. If the twin 5" is not an effective weapon against destroyers then the rock/paper/scissors model is invalid as the cruisers mounting it are also incapable of engaging the destroyers they are supposed to be best against.

and the only ships major powers would bother to build at all would be battleships

Nonsense. Major powers needed to build smaller ships for a variety of roles: scouting for the fleet, convoy escort where a battleship would be expensive overkill, etc. But the fact that a destroyer is a great ship for escorting a couple of unarmed freighters has nothing to do with the rock/paper/scissors model OP proposes for major fleet engagements.

The reality is that historically every major naval power built as many battleships as possible, to the point of causing so much economic strain that after WWI everyone signed a treaty to end the arms race and limit each country to a fixed number of battleships. And minor naval powers attempted to get the biggest ships they could manage, sparking regional arms races (see the South American dreadnought race, for example). At no point did any serious naval power go with a strategy of countering battleships with a bunch of destroyers or torpedo boats. Nor were those things considered very important in the treaties that ended the battleship arms race. Such minor ships weren't accounted for at all in the Washington naval treaty, and were only subject to very loose limits in the subsequent London treaty.


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 Tyran wrote:
I do find it curious the argument is about battleships when we have a perfectly fine example of ubership in the aircraft carrier.

Yep. In the era OP is drawing from battleships were the overpowered unit, as aircraft became more capable carriers became overpowered and battleships dropped to a supporting role at best until finally disappearing entirely. The balanced rock/paper/scissors scheme is purely a gameplay construct to promote a more diverse metagame.

I think you guys got hung-up on the wrong thing in this thread. This thread is NOT about Naval wargaming per se.

At least we got some discussion going down here in the wargame design ghetto.

 Easy E wrote:
I think you guys got hung-up on the wrong thing in this thread. This thread is NOT about Naval wargaming per se.

At least we got some discussion going down here in the wargame design ghetto.

It's a tangent, but it's a highly informative one on why the triangle model isn't a very good one. You think the rock/paper/scissors model is a thing for narrative players, chaos0xomega thinks it's an accurate model of real combat and directed at simulationist players, Commissar von Toussaint and I think it's purely a balancing tool that sacrifices realism to add more strategic depth to the game mechanics.

 ThePaintingOwl wrote:

It's a tangent, but it's a highly informative one on why the triangle model isn't a very good one. You think the rock/paper/scissors model is a thing for narrative players, chaos0xomega thinks it's an accurate model of real combat and directed at simulationist players, Commissar von Toussaint and I think it's purely a balancing tool that sacrifices realism to add more strategic depth to the game mechanics.

It's not a tangent at all, it's a practical application of the model to see if it has validity, and the limits of the r/p/s model.

Honestly the best r/p/s example is Napoleonic combat where infantry, cavalry and artillery each have distinct ways where they beat one but lose to the other. Cavalry cannot charge prepared infantry, but artillery will savage infantry in a square. Skirmishers make a mockery of artillery, but are vulnerable to cavalry. Artillery needs support or both infantry and cavalry can destroy it.

I think that this point I've set a personal record for refraining from shameless self-promotion, but I'll break down and mention that Conqueror explicitly rejected any attempt to balance tactical effects. Certain weapons are just better, and the balancing is done through points. Just as in real life, pikes beat just about everything, though unarmored pikemen suffer from massed archery.

The key point is that realism dictates the system, rather than vice-versa.

Simulation is a subset of narrative. When the simulation-enjoyer's space marines aren't accurately scaled next to their guardsmen, it reduces the ability for these plastic figures to tell a story that feels accurate to life or lore. In other words it breaks their immersion. That desire for immersion is a narrative pursuit.

Simulation is also tightly linked to the desire for roleplay. Everyone who likes simulation is essentially an RP'er. They're not necessarily RP'ing the characters themselves, but they do want their game pieces to accurately represent the role assigned to them, just like how LARPers want to accurately play their roles.

Simulation and roleplay both come down to players wanting their actors to tell convincing stories. Doesn't matter if the actors are real-life people, detailed figurines, abstract game pieces, digital avatars, or even just numbers in software. All of it falls under the umbrella of narrative.

artific3r wrote:
Simulation and roleplay both come down to players wanting their actors to tell convincing stories. Doesn't matter if the actors are real-life people, detailed figurines, abstract game pieces, digital avatars, or even just numbers in software. All of it falls under the umbrella of narrative.

Wargaming started as a predictive exercise, where the results could be used to influence policy and tactics. I think of it as competitive modeling, and that's how I approach it.

Right. I'm speaking purely through the lens of game design of course.

artific3r wrote:
Right. I'm speaking purely through the lens of game design of course.

There is ample scope for game design within the context of predictive realism. They key element is that the players/participants have to accept the results as plausible within their understanding of the situation.

This is why I think that using mechanics where they don't fit (like r/p/s on surface combatants) undermine the integrity of the design.

Now in some cases, the designer has total control of the setting and can absolutely impose this. Battletech is the perfect example. The designers came up with heat as a proxy for action points, and then had ballistic weapons as a cheat, albeit with a fixed capacity.

Thus, your Mech with a bunch of medium lasers can fire at full volume every turn, but will have a fraction of the AC20 delivery vehicle that gets six very powerful shots per game.

GW was in a similar position, and wrecked that balance by making changes to the game design that directly contradicted the fluff. Happily for them, people looked past it and successive generations have accepted the new mechanics as the fluff.

One could argue that the downfall of WHFB was in part because fantasy players had pre-existing notions of what was realistic that was less amenable to GW's manipulations, since the Old World was almost entirely a pastiche of existing settings.

Dune is a great example of an author doing something like this. Herbert liked the idea of knife-fighting being a very necessary skill, and so came up with personal shields to explain why it was "a thing." Within the context of that setting, it worked, and allowed an otherwise primitive people (Fremen) to dominate opponents who were obviously technologically superior (Sardaukar).

Just to point out, Destroyers were developed to deal with Torpedo Boats, and they quickly replaced the Torpedo Boat as they were better at the torpedo attack then the boats were. Reconnaissance duties were absorbed by Cruisers and Battle Cruisers while Destroyers remained as close escorts to all types of ships.

Therefore, when you think of "escorts" it mostly means Destroyers. To think that Battleship captains did not respect an individual Destroyer makes sense, but they DID respect a flotilla of Destroyers all armed with torpedoes. We can all think of battles where the fear of Torpedoes helped dictate the terms of the engagement.

 Easy E wrote:
Just to point out, Destroyers were developed to deal with Torpedo Boats, and they quickly replaced the Torpedo Boat as they were better at the torpedo attack then the boats were. Reconnaissance duties were absorbed by Cruisers and Battle Cruisers while Destroyers remained as close escorts to all types of ships.

Therefore, when you think of "escorts" it mostly means Destroyers. To think that Battleship captains did not respect an individual Destroyer makes sense, but they DID respect a flotilla of Destroyers all armed with torpedoes. We can all think of battles where the fear of Torpedoes helped dictate the terms of the engagement.

But in the real world, that threat never materialized, nor did destroyer swarms ever become a thing.

Torpedo boats arguably achieved their peak of power when the Russian Navy was randomly sinking British trawlers in 1905. They were scary because the battleship admirals overreacted.

Later on, destroyers made torpedo runs because that was a desperation move or the target was cornered and outnumber (i.e. the Bismarck).

If you are designing a game, the capability of the destroyer to do a torpedo attack may well rent space in various player's brains, but submarines were a far greater threat. That's where destroyers and frigates really became crucial.

And, as I've already said, you can crank out escorts in a matter of weeks. They're basically ablative armor for carriers and battleships.

On the other hand, the supposed decisive naval battles battleships were designed to win also never really materialized.

For all their power, battleships turned out to be way too inflexible, expensive and vulnerable to newer technologies.

So an all battleship fleet is ahistorical, unrealistic and definitely not simulationist.

 Tyran wrote:
On the other hand, the supposed decisive naval battles battleships were designed to win also never really materialized.

For all their power, battleships turned out to be way too inflexible, expensive and vulnerable to newer technologies.

It wasn't about new technology, at least not in the pre-WWII era. It was about how important battleships were. In the only significant war (outside of the Russian fleet committing suicide against Japan) in the era Germany was hopelessly outnumbered in battleships vs. the UK, and therefore outside of a couple inconclusive attempts at splitting up the British fleet into manageable pieces they were forced to resort to a "fleet in being" strategy. Under the rock/paper/scissors model they could have built a bunch of destroyers to counter the British battleships and expected a successful fleet engagement, in reality that would have been suicide.

So an all battleship fleet is ahistorical, unrealistic and definitely not simulationist.

But we aren't talking about literally an all-battleship fleet. We're talking about mirroring the real situation, where battleships (and later aircraft carriers) were the dominant unit and the core of every fleet with smaller units acting in a supporting role. At no point did we ever have the rock/paper/scissors model with a "metagame" of different fleet strategies. Everyone built as many battleships as possible, and if you couldn't keep up in the battleship arms race you ceased to be a significant naval power.

Everyone also keep building destroyers, cruisers, battlecruisers, etc.

Sure we never had a r/p/s, but we also didn't have one type of ship monopolizing fleet building.

Battleships needed destroyers and cruisers for scouting and for defense. An unescorted battleship is a dead battleship.

Destroyers don't counter battleships, but destroyers+cruisers+battleships will crush unsupported battleships. That's what the whole combined warfare is supposed to be about, different warships supporting each other and covering each other weaknesses.

Edit: the problem is that game design tends to be too focused on the guns you can bring and ignores more tricky questions like scouting.

A game that doesn't have fog of war and scouting mechanics cannot be simulationist, because those are among the most important concepts in warfare. And definitely far more important than the battleship measuring contest.

Of course Submarines and their torpedoes were the bigger threat than Torpedo Boats and Destroyers. There was no real counter to Submarines early on in WW1. However, you can't really have a "flying Battleship" game with Submarines. Therefore, Escorts take some of that load instead. It became a design choice.

In addition, in many games Escorts are useless ablative armor, and therefore no one takes them unless they have to. Then, they dash up and get blown up instantly after one, ineffective shot. Yeah, I am looking at you Dystopian Wars, and you BFG! Boring and no real decision making. So the challenge as a designer is how to make an escort worth taking.... ever!

In addition, if you have ever played Jutland you realize that it is a really boring game and gives a similar game play to Yahtzee but with more charts. Therefore, you have to change the dynamics up a bit for the sake of a game by making some decisions as a designer, and this will lead you to different choices.

Hence, the triangle helps you think about these choices in a framework. Going in I wanted some Simulationist elements, but I did not want that to be where the game ended up. How do you off set that then? You have to lean away from reality, and know how, why, and how far you are going to lean.

 Easy E wrote:
Of course Submarines and their torpedoes were the bigger threat than Torpedo Boats and Destroyers. There was no real counter to Submarines early on in WW1. However, you can't really have a "flying Battleship" game with Submarines. Therefore, Escorts take some of that load instead. It became a design choice.

Eh, a lot of sci fi has stealth ships that are pretty much submarines in space.

In addition, in many games Escorts are useless ablative armor, and therefore no one takes them unless they have to. Then, they dash up and get blown up instantly after one, ineffective shot. Yeah, I am looking at you Dystopian Wars, and you BFG! Boring and no real decision making. So the challenge as a designer is how to make an escort worth taking.... ever!

Funnily enough escorts are very useful in the videogame version of BFG, because fog of war.
You cannot shot what you cannot see, specially against the more stealthy faction. A pure battleship fleet is pretty much dead in the void against any half competent Eldar or Tyranid player.

Hence, the triangle helps you think about these choices in a framework. Going in I wanted some Simulationist elements, but I did not want that to be where the game ended up. How do you off set that then? You have to lean away from reality, and know how, why, and how far you are going to lean.

I don't believe you need to lean away from reality, because well reality has many reason for why escorts are still a thing.

But approaching that in a simulationist way tends to be quite complicated and if you want a practical game with a limited scope* it is probably better to lean away from reality.

*Obviously real warfare cannot be limited in scope, and thus a simulationist game needs to acknowledge outside scope elements if it has any hope of being a realistic depiction of combat.