What Generation of Warfare?

[Mbando]

I'm very keen to see how GW develops warfare, which has spurred me to think about GW models warfare. Whatever mass combat and war look like in this game, it will be some kind of abstracted model.

One way of conceptualizing warfare that has currency in the US armed forces is generational warfare*. A quick summary:

1. 1st Generation warfare is massed manpower--"firstest, with the mostest," if you will. It's warfare from the beginning of state sponsored warfare to the Civil War, and is centered on tactical control through formations like lines and columns, and tempo at the operational level. The goal is to disrupt control through the infliction of causalities.

2. Generational warfare is massed firepower--WWII through Vietnam: an increasing lethal battlefield where massed firepower can destroy the enemy physically. At the tactical level it is about steadfastness in taking/giving fires, and coordination and massing of firepower at the operational level. The goal is victory through the attrition of enemy forces.

3. 3rd Gen. warfare is maneuver warfare: trust tactics, combined arms, recon pull rather than push, and the combination of fire and manuever to achieve disruption of enemy command and control: matching strength against weakness to exploit vulnerability. At the tactical level it's about mission orders (an intent rather than explicit instructions), and at the operational level a faster op tempo that creates an additive advantage over time. There are elements of this in WWII, Vietnam, but it comes into full flower for Desert Storm and OIF 1. The goal is disruption of the enemies commanders will.**

Each generation of warfare reflects changing conditions on the ground--certainly the increasing lethality and range of weapon systems, but I would also argue cultural changes--I think the move to maneuver warfare in the US reflects a particular place and time culturally (Ronald Reagan, James Webb, Al Gray, and cultural ideas about autonomy and the relationship between individuals and institutions).

So the "conditions on the ground" GW decides to try and model will affect how war is prosecuted, and how combat works in PFO.

For example, making magic like massed fires--like artillery and ground attack aviation--will push us towards combat like WWII and Korea. But if we have the sort of rock-paper-scissors model of maneuver warfare, combat might be much more dynamic, with a sunday punch delivering an unlooked for knockout blow. I'm very interested in how cohesion will work in the game. In 1st gen warfare, cohesion looks something like standing in the line, your shield protecting the warrior on the left. In maneuver warfare, it looks more bounding overwatch, each element acting with implicit understanding of what the next move should be.

Personally, I think the most exciting would be a 3rd gen model, something like tanks beat infantry, fast movers beat tanks, ground defense beats fast movers, infantry beats ground defense--the fantasy equivalent. The art then becomes about force composition, and the operational ability to bring that to bear more quickly, and more advantageously, than the enemy.

* See Lind, W.S. (1985) The Maneuver Warfare Handbook for more information.

** I don't think 4th gen. warfare makes sense as a model for a game.

[DeciusBrutus]

I would like to see the system be able to support all of those models- with perhaps the rotation where melee formations overcome skirmishers, skirmishers overcome ranged formations, and ranged formations overcome melee formations. In your terms, 1st generation beats 3rd generation, 3rd beats 2nd, and 2nd beats first.

Like how fire-and-maneuver is turned aside by properly fortified positions, but those positions are obliterated by artillery, and artillery is captured or destroyed by small groups acting mostly independently.

[Perverseness]

Thank you Mbando. The paper on 4th gen warfare makes a hell of a read. I see them basing it more off of 1st and 2nd gen than I do 3rd but I have no more insight than any other forum diver

[Ryan Dancey]

I think it will have to evolve over time. In the beginning, if we just get seige warfare to happen I'll be happy. :)

To get up to the 3rd Generation will require a tremendous amount of iteration - many many evolutions of game systems, mechanics, balancing etc. But I agree, that would be ideal.

It's a good vision to aim for in the long term.

[septembervirgin]

Wouldn't third generation warfare just be including quests that cause "status effect" to units targeted by these quests? That is, some quests could attack all (or some) enemy units with poison. Other quests could reduce leadership benefits to all (or some) enemy units. Yet other quests could cause demoralization effects to some enemy units, causing individuals to attack a seen hostile randomly and without relenting unless a Will save is made. There's really no limit to what could be done with quest structured assignments and bonuses being given by these.

There's stories always about lone heroes or bands of heroes that direct enemy effort away from a key point. Teleportation, hasted monks, invisible flying characters, and other magical implementation can provide the equivalent of insertion vehicles.

In City of Heroes, in war zones heroes and villains could do quests to cause minor damage, accuracy, or defensive problems. I think a more dramatic effect would be in keeping with Pathfinder style game-play.

[Kydeem de'Morcaine]

For some ideas on how to impliment, you might check out th Pardus space trader game. It is at www.pardus.at

During a faction war you can help your side with faction war missions. Example might be:

The combat ships escort a trader ship carrying a large bomb that is placed beside an enemy starbase. In pathfinder terms that could be something like a raid to hit a major town and steel all the smiths tools and destroy their forges.

A trade ship migh sneak into enemy territory and harvest all the resources in an area. PF equivalent could be something like setting fire to wheat fields just before harvest so the troops won't have enough rations.

[GrumpyMel]

Well magic certainly throws a monkey wrench into how warfare might be modeled into societies that had Pathfinders level of technology and weaponry. Without magic I think it would logicaly fall under the category of 1st Generation with a bit of 3rd Generation thrown in depending upon who was at conflict.

For example, conflicts against orcs, goblins or even certain barbarian tribes might resemble something closer to the character of the Indian Wars that occured on the early American Frontiers (Rogers Rangers, etc) that I think come closer to what you describe as 3rd Generation then the Conflicts between European Powers with massed formations of troops that is typical of 1st Generation.

That's how I've pretty much always depicted it in PnP Campaigns I've run....but in those high level magic was exceedingly rare, so really had very minimal effect on warfare as a whole.

With High Level magic becoming commonplace, I'm not sure what would happen to the scenario. Although one could rationalize that it could fall into an EW/ECM type situation where it didn't have a huge impact on forces that had relatively equivalent strength in it, as they would generaly be countering the oppositions ability to exploit it. However when there was a significant disparity in abilities between opposing forces it could radically alter the nature of the conflict.

I think it's going to end up a bit of a learning experience for everyone...probably even the Dev's implimenting the systems.

[Onishi]

GrumpyMel wrote:

With High Level magic becoming commonplace, I'm not sure what would happen to the scenario. Although one could rationalize that it could fall into an EW/ECM type situation where it didn't have a huge impact on forces that had relatively equivalent strength in it, as they would generaly be countering the oppositions ability to exploit it. However when there was a significant disparity in abilities between opposing forces it could radically alter the nature of the conflict.

I think it's going to end up a bit of a learning experience for everyone...probably even the Dev's implimenting the systems.

Perhaps what we need is to rethink high level magic. The formation system gives GW complete control over what magic will and won't be used in PVP, and pretty much the spell system as a whole is turned inside out and backwards simply via the concepts of having a much less significant difference in power between new and veteran players. Put simply, what we know about spells and magic from the tabletop, does not tell us the first thing about how/what magic will be implimented in PFO at all, and formation combat can be completely different from normal party combat. For all we know AoE's could not be a factor in formation combat at all,

[Mbando]

Yea Onishi,

what I'm getting at here is that the conceptualization of war is going to have profound effects on the game play--it' a design choice that needs to be thought through. So I would agree that high level magic needs to be thought through, but also low level stuff too.

Massing combatants gives you local combat advantages: you can bring more force/fires to bear at a specific location, you can use formations in ways to leverage combat power/survivability (riflemen on line/hoplites in a shield wall), etc. But you also expose yourself to mass fires. If we have any sort of formation, then just about any standard D&D magic effect we can think of with an AoE damage component has a multiplied effect...unless we have a new idea of what a formation is, and what magic is.

From Ryan's comments I gathered that trained combatants that can act cohesively as units will not be vulnerable to attacks (magical and otherwise) the same way individuals will be. I'm interested in thinking through the mechanisms, because that's part of how war is modeled in this game. For example, there's a big difference between "synchronized shields" as a physical way to defend against AoE effects (we assume they have no overpressure, no intense conduction--they have to touch you to work), and "integrated mages" as an MW/MCM (Magical Warfare/Magical Counter Measures) solution.

I have a personal preference for the latter, particularly because it gives force composition and task organizing more importance--it has that rock/paper/scissors aspect that is more present in 3rd gen warfare than earlier iterations.

I like the idea of warfare being about move and counter move, and about who can execute their OODA loop faster--it's what's compelling about BJJ, a mental chess match that is instantiated based on skill.

[Ryan Dancey]

I think the OODA loop is he key to mass combat. That's where the fun is, in my opinion.

[DeciusBrutus]

OODA? I failed my bardic knowledge check.

[Nihimon]

I believe it's Observe - Orient - Decide - Act. I've seen a number of discussions of the man who came up with it. I believe he's the guy who started the Top Gun air combat school, but I may be getting that confused.

Basically, the premise is to get "inside of" your opponent's OODA loop so that he's still trying to decide how to react to what you did last time while you're already acting on what you've decided to do next.

[Mbando]

Decius,

A USAF fighter pilot (John Boyd) noticed something odd--the US F-86 Saber had a pretty righteous 10:1 kill ratio over the counterpart MiGs in the Korean War, even though the Saber was slower, wider turn radiius, slower climb, etc. But the F-4 Phantom in Vietnam, a relatively better aircraft compared to MiG 17/21s (pretty crude aircraft actually), only had a 2 or 3:1 kill ratio.

Boyd decided that the Saber had two major advantages--a wide bubble cockpit (much better observation), and a full hydraulic control system. So US pilots couldn't do anything better/faster (climb, dive, turn, etc.), but they could gather information and more rapidly shift to any one thing (climb to turn, turn to dive, etc).

As Nihimon points out, what matters in a dogfight is the ability to look around and orient yourself, make a decision, and then act on that decision. If you have an advantage in that loop, then you have a cumulative advantage over time against your enemy, as each move they make gets a little farther behind, until they are responding to moves you made long ago, which can result in panic and further degradation of that OODA loop.

William Lind, one of the creepiest men I have ever met, applied this to a theory of ground combat (Maneuver Warfare). When Al Gray was CG of 2d MarDiv, he consulted heavily with Col. Boyd and Lind, and then later as Commandant, instituted a complete cultural change for the Marine Corps, from attrition (2d gen massed fires) warfare, to maneuver warfare.

The idea is to be able to out-think/out-instantiate the enemy. Because the US military, particularly the Marine Corps, trains for initiative and mission orders (end states, not directions), we have an out-think advantage over much of the world. And because the US military has a culture of cohesion, we have an incredible out-instantiate advantage over much of the world, at both the tactical and operational levels of warfare.

I would really, really dig an abstraction of combat where the ability to get people to work together, and the ability to rapidly think and act responsively, is a primary combat multiplier.

[Mbando]

Ryan Dancey wrote:

I think the OODA loop is he key to mass combat. That's where the fun is, in my opinion.

Music to ears. Please include combined arms as well :)

[Nihimon]

I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but after switching to focus on the OODA loop, our kill ratio went from about 2 or 3 to 1 in Vietman to something like 117 to 0 now.

[hewhocaves]

Big question (may have been answered) - will there be friendly fire? i.e. will a fireball tossed into melee affect the enemy and melee?

The answer to that question is going to seriously affect which gen. of warfare applies to us. Having specialized battle spells that affects *only* the enemy will be big, too.

[danielc]

Mbando wrote:

** I don't think 4th gen. warfare makes sense as a model for a game.

I am curious why you think this. When I imagine the way magic and fantasy animals and elements would impact the battlefied I do see some links to the fourth generation model. For example the use of constructs like drones. So I would like to hear why you thought it would not work.

[The Doc CC]

I'm going to have to agree with Danielc. Mbando, I like the link, but it's 4th Gen Warfare from the USMC's mission and point of view, but 4th Gen includes tons of non-state, non-traditional combatants. And man, nothing like this topic to bring all the troops, vets, and warbuffs out.

The key characteristics of 4th Gen Warfare that I can see are asymmetry, non-state actors, and expansion of the battlespace outside of simply inflicting casualties. (Granted, 3rd gen saw economic devastation used, esp. in strategic bombing, but it was always with an eye toward hampering military production. In 4th gen, trashing the NYSE would be a bigger coup than trashing a ball-bearing plant.) Lawfare, media, economics, IT, terrorism - that's 4th gen more than drones and smart bombs. Indeed, the drones and smart bombs are what killed third gen, by making it unwinnable if you were on the short side of the stick in technology and firepower. Success against a massive military nation-state requires you make the combat more primitive, personal, and media-unfriendly, not that you try to match them fighter-for-fighter, tank-for-tank. You don't beat Goliath with a sword but with a sling.

If two big groups (I'm picking something extremely unlikely for the sake of an example) - say, TGL and T7V - fought an open battle, then that would be first-to-third gen warfare. Now, let's suppose a new group started a dust-up with one of those large factions. Let's suppose they would be steamrolled in a straight fight with either T7V or TGL - let alone by their alliance. That group would be suicidal to try to engage in direct combat.

So maybe they engage in a little bit of economic destruction, chipping at the caravans moving through the area, raiding what they can and costing the groups more money to pay for security on their caravans (economic disruption). Maybe they play the victim when attacked, trying to garner sympathy and disrupt the reputations of the larger force (media). Maybe they try to exploit agreements between factions to cause hostilities or hamper the larger faction from squashing them, or try to manipulate the GW folks into thinking they're being unfairly picked on (lawfare). I'm sure we could all come up with five million possible ways to hamper an enemy in the world of an MMO while denying them a pitched battle.

So...my point is all the nasty behavior from EVE? That's 4th gen warfare. If anything, 4th Gen is easier to do in an MMO; all you need is an outlet for people to be creatively nasty. If anything, 4th gen warfare is something you need systems to prevent from getting out of control rather than something you need to include in as a design feature.

[Mbando]

You guys are raising good points--elements of 4th gen. warfare (non-state actors taking strategic action) have been around for a long time, and could exist in Golarion. But 4th gen. warfare itself--breaking the state monopoly on warfare--seems to go against a major direction of the game as I understand it: state-building.

If the abstraction for war GW comes up with is 4th generational--if 30 players who are non-state actors can successfully prosecute war against a large state, then my guess is that there will not be a competitive advantage in state building. So then I think the game would be less fun.

I fully hope for warfare to be broad, including economic, diplomatic, and rhetorical dimensions, that's very different than a world where warfare is asymmetric.

[The Doc CC]

Mbando wrote:

You guys are raising good points--elements of 4th gen. warfare (non-state actors taking strategic action) have been around for a long time, and could exist in Golarion. But 4th gen. warfare itself--breaking the state monopoly on warfare--seems to go against a major direction of the game as I understand it: state-building.

If the abstraction for war GW comes up with is 4th generational--if 30 players who are non-state actors can successfully prosecute war against a large state, then my guess is that there will not be a competitive advantage in state building. So then I think the game would be less fun.

I fully hope for warfare to be broad, including economic, diplomatic, and rhetorical dimensions, that's very different than a world where warfare is asymmetric.

I'm with you on most of that. If anything, it seems GW's systems have to limit how much 4th gen warfare there could be in order to facilitate state building, unless the players by themselves are simply more interested in state-building and making something last rather than - for lack of a better term - being jerks. Heck, if the outside (non-player) threat is strong enough, being part of a state may be the most prudent move just to stay alive. Leviathan, anyone?

I'd add all warfare can go asymmetric no matter what. The Zealots were at it in the first century of the Common Era, and I'm sure they're not the oldest example. As to thirty players vs a big nation...well...it depends on what those 30 players want. If they could conquer a large group, I'm with you. Boo to that. If they can cause a large group to reconsider expansion into a hex...maybe. Depends.

[Blaeringr]

The advantages of state building would be in establishing good fortifications and a robust economy that will produce the highest quality weapons and armor. The 30 non-state players will have a hard time efficiently competing with that advantage. At least it will take them a lot more work and time to prepare adequately.

[The Doc CC]

@Blaeringr: I'm surprised you didn't jump on a reference to the Zealots like white on rice. Assassination and terror are the ultimate forms of asymmetric warfare.

[Blaeringr]

I can't go warning people about how we're going to undermine them though, now can I? Certain services will only be advertised to "privileged" clients, and only when everything's in place to offer.

[hewhocaves]

Hmm... I think we should remember that large nation-states (what we think of as current nation-states) have taken 6000+ years to develop and are more than just big effective armies. They are a combination of social, economic, technological and military advances. If I understand 'the plan' correctly achieving that level of sophistication will be difficult and maintaining it would be nigh-impossible over long periods of time. I believe the devs are 'counting' on this to keep the game from stagnating.

[Ryan Dancey]

MBando is right on target (no pun intended). The organized group with a physical territory has to be more effective at making war than a non-state group or the game design will fail.

[GrumpyMel]

Mbando wrote:

You guys are raising good points--elements of 4th gen. warfare (non-state actors taking strategic action) have been around for a long time, and could exist in Golarion. But 4th gen. warfare itself--breaking the state monopoly on warfare--seems to go against a major direction of the game as I understand it: state-building.

If the abstraction for war GW comes up with is 4th generational--if 30 players who are non-state actors can successfully prosecute war against a large state, then my guess is that there will not be a competitive advantage in state building. So then I think the game would be less fun.

I fully hope for warfare to be broad, including economic, diplomatic, and rhetorical dimensions, that's very different than a world where warfare is asymmetric.

Well, I think it depends on how you define "successfully prosecute". Since the most logical goal for the guys on the short end of the stick isn't "collapse the enemies kingdom" rather it's "convince the enemy that your more trouble then it's worth to engage and make them decide to change policies regarding you." That should be pretty doable within PFO's framework (IMO).

[danielc]

Ryan Dancey wrote:

MBando is right on target (no pun intended). The organized group with a physical territory has to be more effective at making war than a non-state group or the game design will fail.

Except that rebellion has somethimes worked. The force that did not control the ground at first did win and became the new "owners" of the ground. So if the game wanted to also allow this kind of situation, it woudl need to allow the "non-state" group to be effective given the right situation. OR am I thinking to complex for a game set up?

[DeciusBrutus]

danielc wrote:

Ryan Dancey wrote:

MBando is right on target (no pun intended). The organized group with a physical territory has to be more effective at making war than a non-state group or the game design will fail.

Except that rebellion has somethimes worked. The force that did not control the ground at first did win and became the new "owners" of the ground. So if the game wanted to also allow this kind of situation, it woudl need to allow the "non-state" group to be effective given the right situation. OR am I thinking to complex for a game set up?

For the most part, successful rebellions have controlled the ground at the start of the rebellion. The problem is modelling the case where the government which has jurisdiction over an area does not have physical control.

[GrumpyMel]

@DeciusBrutus

Or at the very least, in many cases had other State entities as "sponsors" for thier activities....

[Ryan Dancey]

@danielc - you need to go to the edge of the world, find yourself a plot of ground with no claimants, make it your own, then make war against your neighbors. You won't be running a "rebellion" in the territory controlled by a successful Settlement.

[Blackwarder]

Any modern non state actor who started some sort of a guerrilla warfare against a state had a base of operation. Be it a semi state (Gaza for Hamas, south Lebanon for Hizzbula) or a safe bases in a neighboring country (north Vietnam. For the viet cong and Pakistan for the Taliban).

If you want to successfully start a rebellion, your first course of action should be to either grab land of have a sponsor nearby and have a support structure in place.

What folks wrongfully call breaking the state monopoly on warfare is, as I said right now, no such thing. Every non state actor is actualy either a. a very weak state actor or b. sponsored by a state actor.

If we take Afghanistan as a case study, the Taliban is a weak state actor who also got another state as a sponsor (Pakistan). If you take away the Taliban links to its sponsors, there is no way in hell that they can actually win against a modern state.

Warder

[Blackwarder]

I just want to point out that the OP is mixing strategy and tactics in his analysis.

Orgenized warfare is more a matter of economy than tactics, an orgenized group's, lets call it a state but it doesn't have to be one, ability to arm, train and feed a military force is it ultimate way of winning wars and in order to win wars you need to be able to distrupt it's ability to do so.

The modern view that non state actors can give state actors a run for their money when it comes to war is false, it drawn from the perception that one side is a state and the other is not while in truth they both are states only one side is vastly superior to the other in terms of technology and economy that the other is perceived to be a non state actor.

As time goes, and the ways of waging war becomes more and more sophisticated the reliance on state actors to build, support and maintain any kind of military force expend, not diminish.

The way I see it, in order to visualize how warfare might work in PFO we need to make a distinction between tactics and strategy, micro and macro if you will.

I'm not going to speculate about tactics, we already have a rough idea of what Ryan is thinking and its more a matter of combat mechanics which should be more related to the middleware choice than anything else.

So that's leave the overall strategy, the macro of making war in PFO. Before we are able to visualize that we need to know how robust the economy is. For example, do you need to periodically change equipment due to tear and wear? And if so how often?how many steps does it takes to fashion an item? And how many men hours each step takes?

How big can a settlement gets? And what does it takes to support it? Does it require everyday things like clothes and food? And if so what does it takes to procure those?

What about training? How long does it takes to train a competent military force? Both character and player?

Those are the kind of questions that in my mind, will shape the face of war in PFO, from the top of my head I can think of two historical examples about this, one from our real world and the other from EVE world.

A. By the late medieval times, the common missile weapon in Europe was the crossbow, it replaced the bow not because it was a vastly better weapon, a skilled bowman could fire faster than a crossbow man, it replaced the bow because it was much easier and quicker to train a man to shot a crossbow than a bow, otoh a crossbow was more expansive to manufacture so it was limited only to the more prosperous countries.

B. I think Ryan talked about this before, but back in the days before the dinosaurs, I used to play EVE. And a s a wet behind the ears pilot I joined a corporation and witnessed a paradigm shift from up close.
When I joined EVE, the status que was that the crop with the best and biggest ships would win, even smaller ships like tacklers had to be pimped out and flown by experienced pilots due to the fact that a new pilot can't use t2 stuff. I was a member of a low sec mining corp, when I joined we had around 50 members and the corp was very orgenized and lead by a couple of guys who played from day one, we had orgenized mining events that netted us personally tons of money and the corp much more. Shortly before I joined the corp was soundly defeated and forced to pay "protection money" to another corp, we just didn't had enough experience combat pilots like the other guys had.
And then came the goons. You see the goons had lots of noob players, most of them couldn't even fly a cruiser, let alone battleships, so they didn't, instead they related on Zerg tactics utilizing their superb organization they cranked out cheap t1 ships by the dozens and stockpiled them near their fronts for quick and easy rearment, sacrificing dozens of ships for an enemy ship.
My corp. witnessing that (from far far away) decided to copy the goons tactics, we went on a recruitment frenzy doubling our numbers and adding some good manufacturers and started stockpiling cheap t1 ships and having mandatory training sessions for all members, when we next were attacked we managed to sworn the opposition and prevail.

The thing is that EVE warfare experience a paradigm shift due to how the game economies worked, the game has reached the point that an orgenized group could manufacture enough cheap and easy to use weapons to pose a credible threat to the older way of doing things. That what's I'd like to see in PFO.

Warder

P.s OMG! Wall of text cries you for gazillion points of damage

[GrumpyMel]

I think the important thing to remember about asymetric warfare is that with rationale actors (and often times they aren't), the goal of the weaker power isn't to defeat or topple the stronger one, it's simply to make it more expensive for the stronger one to fight rather then offer whatever concession the weaker power was seeking.

In the ancient and medieval periods you could see examples of this all over the place. Powers that could easly defeat groups electing to pay them off, hire them as mercenaries or even coopt them into thier own power structure because it was much cheaper to do so then fight them.

A part of what made that such a prevalent practice in those periods was that warfare was common and threat of warfare was almost constant. So states really couldn't afford to get embroiled in uneccesary struggles because they couldn't be sure thier neighbors would allow them the space to do so. E.G. Safer to pay off the mountain bandits to keep them from preying on your caravans or better yet, hire them as mercenaries for your own campaign against a rich neighbor that has been making unsettling noises about your borders.

That's a role that smaller powers can easly play if PFO develops to the point where there are significant power blocs. You don't have to be able to defeat a larger neighbor, you just have to make yourself a hard enough target that you are generaly not worth the effort to tangle with....like a badger or porcupine.

[Nihimon]

Carl von Clausewitz wrote:

We see, therefore, that war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse carried on with other means. What remains peculiar to war is simply the peculiar nature of its means.

- Wikiquote

A hegemonic power stomping Godzilla-like through weaker nations is also trying to raise the cost of the other guy's behavior.

It seems to me there are two basic ends: 1) changed behavior; or 2) exploitation. #1 is the domain of politicians. #2 is the domain of pirates.

[GrumpyMel]

The way a "rebellion" could probably could work in PFO might be a "Civil War" style rebellion.

So imagine you have some large out of game organization that broken itself into 5 in-game settlement charters so that it could control more territory. Now imagine some sort of bitter internal dispute occurs within that organization, maybe the current leader retires and there are 2 rivals to take his place, and the organization splits on those based on sub-organizational lines. So now you have something that was de facto operating as a single organization, even though mechanicaly it still appeared as 5 seperate ones to the game, broken into two factions and it's possible that those factions might even engage in open hostilities with one another...hoping to "break" the other side and convince it to accept the rivals leadership. Wouldn't be a particulary smart thing for said organization to do, since it would make it vastly more vulnerable to external agression...but we all know that as humans our actions aren't always ruled by logic.

So you could have a situation in the game where the settlements of "York" and "Sheffield" declare for the "House of York" and "Lancaster", "Dover" and "Birmingham" declare for the "House of Lancaster" in our version of "PFO - England" which is an entirely out-of-game organization represented by seperate settlements in-game. Heck, you could even have intrigue where "Birmingham" was convinced to switch sides....bring on the popcorn!

At least from the descriptions I've read so far, that's the sort of "internal struggle" that would seem supportable within the games design goals?

[Nihimon]

@GrumpyMel, that seems right to me. It's also something I've worried about enough to ask Ryan if they're going to have any way of enforcing compliance. After lots of thought, I think it's actually better that there won't be any way of enforcing compliance.

This reality has really helped us in The Seventh Veil focus on drawing useful distinctions between what we can and should manage outside of the game, and what can only be managed inside the game.

[Mbando]

Blackwarder wrote:

I just want to point out that the OP is mixing strategy and tactics in his analysis.

You're almost right--I'm mixing strategy, operations and tactics in my analysis, because in the Marine Corps doctrinal understanding of war, they're connected and mediate each other. If you think the Corps' conceptual approach to warfare is wrong, ok. There are certainly people who contest the generational warfare model*. Marines find it useful because it has explanatory (and even more importantly) predictive power, but if you don't, cool.

My focus in this forum is on how abstracting war will affect gameplay in PFO. An abstraction of 4th gen. war, where a relatively miniscule non-national or transnational group can engage in war with nation states--can credibly threaten to impose their will in a violent struggle--wouldn't be fun.

Ryan's phrasing isn't hard to understand: "The organized group with a physical territory has to be more effective at making war than a non-state group or the game design will fail."

* I've presented a pretty abbreviated version of our current model, which is more fully about asymmetrical, hybrid war in a 4 block environment.

[AvenaOats]

I agree with the warfare model of effectively better organized, better tech/skills and maybe size and supplied army in a "war state" should be able to knock out another state's war effort conclusively.

Now where I'm interested is the repercussions afterwards: What does the loser decide to do? Can the disbanded settlement/nation, decide that part of the conditions of war they mentioned, that if defeated by the larger aggressor, they'd resort to asymmetric tactics of harassing and disrupting the aggressor "for as long as it takes"? Then as GrumpyMel suggests, some economic treaty would be in the aggressor's best interests as "compensation and cessation" of hostilities - obviously has political advantage to bring them on side so the new expansion can become productive and one less "front" to worry about.

[Blackwarder]

Mbando wrote:

Blackwarder wrote:

I just want to point out that the OP is mixing strategy and tactics in his analysis.

You're almost right--I'm mixing strategy, operations and tactics in my analysis, because in the Marine Corps doctrinal understanding of war, they're connected and mediate each other. If you think the Corps' conceptual approach to warfare is wrong, ok. There are certainly people who contest the generational warfare model*. Marines find it useful because it has explanatory (and even more importantly) predictive power, but if you don't, cool.

My focus in this forum is on how abstracting war will affect gameplay in PFO. An abstraction of 4th gen. war, where a relatively miniscule non-national or transnational group can engage in war with nation states--can credibly threaten to impose their will in a violent struggle--wouldn't be fun.

Ryan's phrasing isn't hard to understand: "The organized group with a physical territory has to be more effective at making war than a non-state group or the game design will fail."

* I've presented a pretty abbreviated version of our current model, which is more fully about asymmetrical, hybrid war in a 4 block environment.

I'm not going to start a discussion about your analysis, as fun as that might be :), and I totally agree about the fact that what you call 4th gen warfare won't be fun as a main theme in the game.

As I've said in my earlier post, I'm very intrested in learning all there is to know about how the logistic of things, the kingdom building phase will work and how it will effect the way wars are fought in PFO.

Simple things, like crossbows being comparatively expensive to bows but being able to train crossbow man much quicker, or how one train and get mounts can transform the game.

In another thread Ryan talked about being able to have a dragon on your side is awesome.

I'm also intrested to learn how we can effect the other side effectiveness by targeting his resource gathering and manufacturing nodes.

Anyway, we will just gona have to wait and see.

Warder