Some thoughts on solo wargaming

A recent Facebook review on a new solo wargaming book got me to thinking about what I would want to read on the topic.  The review pretty much listed what I don't want and apparently the book in question had all of these!  I don't need force generators or scenarios I can do that myself.  I don't want a history of or definition of what solo wargaming is either, most of my games are solo I understand what's going on...honest.  What I want is a non player opponent who makes decisions based upon the situation, pre battle objectives, and tactical options available.  Ideally it would look at the balance between it's forces and mine and decide on an overall approach that suits it's forces strengths and weaknesses and takes advantage of my forces weak areas.  It would also be nice if it could surprise me from time to time and wasn't so smart that I am never able to beat it!  It's not too much to ask is it.  I suppose what I am looking for is some kind of Artificial intelligence (AI).

I suppose the same goes for Wargames

Funnily enough I had to undertake a long drive today (Well not that funny the weather was dismal) and , as you do, tuned into Radio 4 as my usual channel had poor reception.  Lo and behold I stumbled onto a discussion of the development of AI systems.  It seems that in the early days there were two schools of thought about how to create a workable system.  One was based on mathematical models and in effect created huge suites of 'IF THEN' steps.  The other was bio- computational and sought to create what we now call neural nets.  The first was something that was seemed achievable with the technology available but had limits hard wired in by the drafting of the IF THEN alternatives.  On the other hand the neural net had huge issues around being able to create the thing but would then have been self sustaining as it would set most of its own decision making parameters and would learn as it grew (Sounds a tad scary to me)

If I'm brutally honest I understand the concept of IF THEN chains but Neural Nets are beyond me.  I actually started to try to create an AI opponent using a simple set of IF THEN steps over a decade ago and ran into some of the problems that proper IT scientists hit.  The first is that you have to understand the entire decision making chain and second it gets very clunky very quickly as the length of the IF THEN steps increases.

So why am I bothering to write all of the above?  Well in the absence of any clever IT boffin creating a computerised AI opponent for me I am going to have another attempt at the 'IF THEN' approach.  Here is where my thought process has brought me to so far:

Firstly the AI General tries to gather information about the player's forces by scouting and interrogating the local population.  Friendly locals are going to give more help than non friendly ones.  The number of mounted troops (cavalry and or Dragoons) influences this step as does the number of player mounted troops screening against scouts.

Next there is a pre battle assessment where the AI General looks at his troops and compares them to what he knows of the enemy.  This considers troop types, quality, numbers compared to the player's force and the broader operational situation (for example is an attack at poor odds necessary to pull enemy troops away from another location).  A basic tactical decision is made at this stage about whether to engage in battle, to withdraw, hold the ground, redeploy to a better site and similar overarching matters.

Now comes a more detailed tactical review on how to deploy and actually fight.  This considers the ground held by the two armies and who it favours.  The balance and composition of forces and the possible deployment.

All I have to do is create excel spreadsheet formulas to value those decision factors and If Then statements or other options to fine tune the AI options.  Sad to say that is where it all came to a grinding halt last time I tried this.  So here is the thing do any of my readers have any suggestions on what to include, how to weight the various decision factors or even suggestions for something that has already done what I'm considering or even an AI chat bot that could create tactical decisions?

Answers gratefully received in the comment section.

British Civil War 6mm forces

These are my oldest 6mm figures and are all from Irregular Miniatures.  I bought most of them from the wargames shop that used to be near King's Cross station back in the late 1980's or early 1990's.  After the intervening 30 plus years they are a little battered and in need of some TLC and a rebase.  Some are still awaiting the touch of a paint brush and a first base!

So here they all are.  Zoom in too see the details

Most of them are the original Irregular Miniatures designs with musketeers that are cast standing feet together with musket at port across the chest and that made them fragile.  Unsurprisingly a number have snapped off, or are in danger of snapping off, at the ankles.  Some are the later design which are more robust and have more animation to them.  Those have alternating firing and loading figures on each strip which isn't how I want them.  I prefer a rank to be all firing, all loading or all standing waiting rather than a mixture.  Still a bit of careful work with side cutters will solve that.

Old style musketeers on show here.  Painted 30 years ago.

And here are the newer style figures painted much more recently.

I'm struggling to decide how to rebase these figures.  The pikemen are cast in close order, shoulder to shoulder with no way to split them down. so I am stuck with the casting's frontages of 20mm or multiples of that.  The shot are on 30mm frontages and cavalry on 25mm so unlike DBA or ADLG I can't use a standard base frontage.  I may have to go old school and count each strip as being 100 men and just live with the different frontages as showing different order, pike in close order and shot in order.  No matter what I decide to do, there will have to be an order heading off to Warbases in due course as nothing in my pile of DBA style bases will match.  Plus as you can see from the first image there is some painting to be done!  The other issue is that I will have to ask  Irregular if they can supply the figures needed to complete some units as they are not retailing their 6mm range at present.

6mm Industry News updates

Probably you are all aware of what follows, or you don't do 6mm figures and so hadn't noticed, but a couple of things popped up this week.  

Firstly, Irregular Miniatures have announced that are taking an enforced break from supplying their 6mm ranges.  This is due to family illness, staff shortages and the need to create new moulds as the old ones are showing wear.  Hopefully this is a temporary measure and will be reversed before too long.  I know a lot of people don't like Irregular's style but they paint up far better than you would expect at first glance at the bare castings and most importantly they have stuff that others don't and at a very competitive price.  The good news is that they have said that for existing customers needing figures to complete projects they will do their best to supply the required figures if you email them.  I'm sure you all join me in wishing them all the best with these issues.

The second issue, and one for The Jolly Broom Man to be aware of, is that Baccus 6mm are stopping shipping their ranges to the EU.  This is due to the imminent implementation (try saying that without your teeth in!) of new product safety rules for goods imported into EU member states from non EU countries.  This is going to require significant paper work and EU representation and Peter Berry can't currently find a way to handle this cost effectively or with certainty that it will meet the new requirements.  He has posted to say that he will be looking to return to selling to EU if possible and that if you want any of his cracking figures selling to you in the EU you need to get orders in PDQ.  Peter is pretty scathing about the circumstances which have led up to this situation and to be frank I agree with him.  I have seen other suppliers taking the same position and I expect to see more.

Wargaming is a business of two extremes at one end you have Games Workshop who are now a FTSE 100 quoted company, and not the smallest one either.  While at the other end most wargame figure, rules and other paraphernalia production is at, or around, the cottage industry level.  The UK is a wargaming commerce power house but mostly fuelled from these small businesses.  Being a third country supplier to the EU hits those small businesses the hardest as they have the least spare resource in time and/or money to deal with this stuff.  I wish I had a solution to offer but I don't.

More Moors

The Moors are coming along nicely.  As usual I'm starting by building a DBA3 army but will probably extend to a small L'Arte De La Guerre (ADLG) army later.  In part this is because DBA and ADLG have different ways of depicting the different parts of the army.  

With DBA there is a standard army of 12 elements which depicts the General, and his bodyguard, as one of those 12 elements and defines him as being a standard DBA troop type (with a bonus in combat).  ADLG on the other hand has generals either as a separate base that can be attached and unattached from any unit of the army or as an attached general permanently linked to a single unit (pretty much as in DBA).  On top of which many ADLG infantry units consist of the equivalent of two DBA elements.  That makes it easier (and cheaper) to start with the DBA version of an army, which is why I started where I have.  Come on you all knew I was a cheapskate!  ADLG also uses an army selection points system with standard games having a 200 point budget. There is a version closer to DBA army size using 100 or 120 points.  That said even at the lower point values an ADLG army is likely to have between 30 to 40% more bases than the DBA equivalent because of the infantry basing system.

Anyway back to the moors (cries of Cathy...Heathcliff in a strange North African tongue should now be ringing in your ears, No? OK maybe that's just me then?).  The General's element is now completed along with the additional infantry.  After some thinking and a query to the hive mind on TMP I decided to use Late Roman Heavy Cavalry castings to differentiate the General from his underlings...er... I mean brave fighting men.  I removed the Draco standard from the command figure group and replaced it with one based upon the Infantry standard.  Which may be wrong but at least it's a standard.

All the army to date, but...wait for it...there is moor to come

When it comes to painting horses I rather like liver chestnut and bay horses as the mainstay of my cavalry. To my eye nothing says 'horse' as much as the black tail and manes of a bay. I do throw in some pure brown, black and greys for variety and the very occasional pure chestnut and roan. I rarely do units in 6mm with all the horses in the same coat colours as these are troops on campaign not the parade ground. If you do spot a unit all of one colour watch out, it will be something or someone a bit special and probably has more oomph than other cavalry formations.

The general's element for DBA

As a final thought I realise that I should have created a Moorish army years ago, honestly the scope for puns is huge!  For a start they are almost all bare headed, not a cap to be seen, although I doubt many have been to Ilkley Moor.  I will leave you to work that one out. 😉

The More the Merrier

Or in this case 'The Moor the Merrier' or Mauri, it's the North West African chaps who are the focus of this post.  I was looking through my lead pile and realised that I had bought a couple or three packs of Moorish Infantry.  These were used for various Dark Age types like the Welsh Princedoms and Dal Radian Scots.  The castings are bare legged and only have a tunic so they can be pressed into service as any number of lower class skirmishing foot types in that period.  I have sufficient of those for the time being so I decided to use them as Mr Berry intended, well I had quite a lot of them more (or should that be moor) than enough to cover the DBA3 infantry requirements for a Later Moorish army.

With very little variation in clothing choices, which meant a restricted palette, painting looked like it was going to be easy.  White(ish) tunic,  some dyed cloaks dark skin tone and then just animal skin shields in a mid brown, hair in a dark colour and weapons.   Well at least it it looked easy!  Moors didn't have the really dark skins of Sub-Saharan Africans  so getting that shade right took a few goes and as for the white tunics....Arghh!  White is one of those colours which is difficult to shade (I really must try a contrast type white paint at some point) and it took me a few attempts before I came up with an system that I was happy with.

I started with a white undercoat courtesy of Halfords ever reliable rattle can automotive primer.  I pre-shading on that but didn't like the contrast it gave.  So I had a cup of tea and a bit of a think ( but didn't take off any handles or things what hold the candles*) and decided on a new approach.  I painted all the tunics in Vallejo Bone white which is more of a pale coffee brown and all the flesh in Vallejo German Camouflage Brown a darker mid brown with a hint of something else in the mix possibly blue.  Only then did I apply a thinned wash of GW Agrax Earth Shade.  After which I dry brushed the tunics in Vallejo Ivory and then picked out some high spots in Vallejo Pure White.  It sounds like a lot of work but it doesn't take as long as you might think.  Adding some variations between black and chocolate brown for hair and some pale brown for javelin shafts pretty much completed the main paining.  A coat of varnish and the final touch of silver for spear points and bronze to officers' helmets and that was job done.

A gratuitous close up so you can see the final effect on those pesky tunics

Basing is my usual block paving sand and fine flock patches.  I used less flock than normal as Moors live in the Semi-Arid lands of North West Africa.  I will have to order some Moorish cavalry next time I'm buying from Baccus, then the Moors can be off to the races (see what I did there?). I have completed 44 of the infantry to date and have a further 36 on the painting table nearing completion.

A few more Moors (sorry I couldn't resist it), there are more to come (sorry, not sorry) 

The Moors are an interesting army in DBA, a general who is either cavalry or light cavalry, five Light Cavalry and six javelin armed foot who can be a mix of  light infantry or fast auxilia. Not a lot of punch but a whole lot of nuisance value.

As an aside, and I may already have posted about this.  I read something on a blog a while ago which has been a game changer in terms of brush care.  The occasional use of alcohol based hand sanitiser gel to clean brushes!  The gel means it sticks to the brush and it removes acrylic paint a treat, being clear also means you can see what is being shifted too.  It doesn't seem to damage the glue holding the hair in place, although I take the precaution of washing them out in warm water with a drop of Mrs E's shampoo in it afterwards.  After a second rinse they get a bit of hair conditioner then a final rinse and dry.

* For the education of younger readers go look for Bernard Cribbins' song "Right Said Fred".  It's a tale of the trials and tribulations of two removal men.  As an aside we had a second hand upright piano when I was very young that had both handles and things what held candles!  Life eh?

Edited 24 November 2024 to remove some typos I spotted

The Great War in the Air - Part two

 The charts and tables

If you have looked at the original rules for Flying Circus you will have seen that those rules had a bespoke chart for each aeroplane.  That wasn't going to work with the much larger number of 'planes I had in mind so I took inspiration from another game where a generic data sheet was used and the bits that were not required were blanked out and specific data added into the relevant boxes.

The Control Sheet
You will need one of these for each aeroplane on the table with the relevant min and max data added and irrelevant parts blanked out.  You will also need some markers to track current height, speed, overspeed, ammunition  and damage.

Speed (throttle) shows the current movement points in level flight and is the speed generated by the engine.  If an aeroplane has dived it can gain additional Kinetic Energy (KE) this is acceleration due to gravity less deceleration from drag.  The maximum energy an airframe can 'store' from diving either in a Power dive (PD) or a Steep Dive (SD) is limited by a number of factors.  Lets lump all of those together as 'drag'.  That number is recorded in the Max KE box while the KE which is gained by diving is shown in the Kinetic Energy gain and loss section gains by power diving or steep diving on the left side and conversely the amount lost each turn in level flight (LF) or climbing is on the right .  If the airframe is storing kinetic energy it is tracked on the extra speed from diving track  This energy can be useful or may risk damage if the 'plane exceeds the VNE speed (velocity never exceed) as recorded in the VNE box.  Aeroplanes may also accelerate under power (Throttling up) or decelerate by cutting power and letting drag have it's effect.  The maximum number of movement points that can be gained or lost in a turn by these actions is recorded in the movement maximum gain and loss area.

Height is tracked using a counter on the three height tracks one shows 50 feet increments up to 1,000 feet, one 1,000 feet increments up to 10,000 feet and the last is in increments of 10,000 feet.  To track current height you need three counters one on each track.  Of course all aeroplanes have a maximum ceiling which is recorded to the left of the height tracks along with a box to record the maximum climb rate of the aeroplane.  Note that some manoeuvres can have an effect on the altitude of the 'plane.

Turn codes are the number of hex sides that can be moved through in a single hex and the cost per side in movement points and the number of hexes required in forward flight before making the next turn.  Turn codes A- D are as in Flying Circus.  I added extra more sluggish turns for larger aeroplanes These are turn codes E and F.  Code E costs one movement point for the first hex side and can only turn one hex side in a single hex.  Turn code F costs two movement points for the first hex side and can only turn one hex side in a single hex.  In both codes E and F the aeroplane must move forwards one movement point before making another turn.

The Statistics
You may not agree with some, or all of these and I can't be certain that they are anywhere close to actual performance data.  This is because I tried to find formulas which gave me the same stats as Flying Circus provided for it's original list of aeroplanes.  To do that I had to work with what data was actually available.  I could calculate secondary stats like lift area and power to weight ratios, but its all a bit vague really. Actual aircraft designers should probably look away now! What it does do is generate different data for different 'planes and in general scouts perform better than two seaters perform better than multi-engine types.  In general early war craft are more fragile that later war stuff.  V- strut sesquiplanes with smaller lower wings than upper are also a riskier proposition especially in steep dives but gain lift and turn rate as well as improved downwards visibility.

I used some ludicrously complex formulas to generate some kind of differences between the various aeroplanes and added some wild approximations as well.  Feel free to change anything you like, after all its all pseudoscience really!  What I have is a complicated spreadsheet but more on that next time as it really needs a post of its own, which is code for I need to tidy it up so it makes sense to people other than me!

Mixed emotions!

 A number of years ago I added a plea onto the Baccus forums for the esteemed Mr Berry to create a range of early Byzantines so I could replace my venerable Irregular Miniatures army.  At the time the response was that it may happen but not in the immediate future.  However, I wanted a Byzantine army, specifically one for the 5th - 6th centuries, so I decided to proxy other Baccus figures to that very end.    Sassanid regular infantry had a suitably large shield so I started there and though I say so myself they don't look too bad, yet they were not perfect.  In my mind's eye I had an image of the old Hinchcliffe 25mm figures but in glorious 6mm, but needs must and all that.  At 'The other Partisan' last month I bought some of Mr B's Hunnic Noble to serve as, well, Hunnic Nobles, but also to proxy for Boukellariioi for Belisarius or Narses.  This week in a fit of enthusiasm I started to work on a second unit of Skoutatoi.  No sooner had I started then 'bingly bong' goes my mobile phone to alert me to the fact that Baccus 6mm have launched a new range for a new period.  Yes you guessed it the period is 'Late Antiquity' and the range 'Early Byzantines'.

So this is the cause of my mixed emotions the infantry are exactly what I was dreaming of but I already have proxy troops for that role.  I almost wish that they were not what I wanted, but the entire range is perfect!  Damn you Mr Berry, now I think I may be falling prey to some form of compulsive behaviour disorder.  This is caused by knowing that the exact figures I want are out there so my lovingly proxied Sassanids are no longer ticking the right boxes.  I must have proper Byzantines, I need proper Byzantines!!!

Not 'proper Byzantines' but I was happy with them until.....

So in due course I will, of course, weaken and buy said 'proper Byzantines' the only question remaining is what to do with the demobilised Sassanid proxies, other than use them as Sassanid regular infantry (well that would be too easy wouldn't it).

Proper Byzantines!  (image from the Baccus 6mm catalogue)

Other than the above mixed emotions the new range looks really useful.  It will cover Justinian Byzantines and Maurikian Byzantines, it has the Avar influenced half armoured cavalry (drool)) as well as lance and bow armed heavy cavalry.  At a push it would cover Byzantine armies through to the introduction of the kite shield in the late 10th Century.  The castings look excellent, you can see them here Baccus 6mm and the later Byzantines from the early Medieval range are here Baccus 6mm.  I now have a terrible stabbing pain in my wallet!