"The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire is written with a profound knowledge of the field, a thorough mastery of the sources and secondary literature, and a lively and engaging style that both specialists and general readers will appreciate." —Peter B. Golden, Rutgers University
Tangential comment but only after reading your post I realised that acoup is an acronym for the blog's full name. All this time I thought it was "a coup" (like a coup d'état) and that "A Collection of Unusual Pedantry" was the blog's tagline.
The comments about the loyalty of the sub-commanders being very strong due to the extremely restrictive information environment reminded me of opposite within the history book Nemesis by Max Hastings.
He covers the end of the Second World War in the pacific. One veteran commented that it seemed that the different commanders and services within the US armed forces were more at conflict with each other than with the Japanese, all trying to get the resources and credit for the successes. (Especially MacArthur in the Philippines).
The radio and news reels of the days could both provide fast information about what is/was happening and also ensure fame and fortune in the domestic environment if your narrative could prevail
MacArthur and Patton were both massive egomaniacs, weren't they? I guess well-adjusted people don't end up as wartime generals.
But the Japanese army and navy hated each other so much that some Admirals and Generals were walking around with bullets in them from unsuccessful assassination attempts from the other service. Not a great way to run a war.
I believe that Stalin set 2 field marshals (Georgy Zhukov and Ivan Konev) on a race to Berlin in the last weeks of WW2 in Europe. Don’t think Stalin cared who won.
Allow me to whine about Ubisoft buying out Settlers, which was initially about (peace time) logistics, and somehow thinking they bought a RTS.
Operational wargames are a thing (at least on boardgames)
https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/181039/favorite-operation...
I'd say that managing your rally points and reinforcements (for terran, mostly) is the only thing that is related to operations, and it's a pretty limited part of both the game and what operations is about.
Or, there are games like Civilization or Total war where, really, c’mon, you know it is just a matter of when, not if, you go to war.
There are plenty of abstract or futuristic war games, so I'm sure someone has done an operational one, but generally this kind of game appeals to someone who wants to play through a detailed simulation, and that's a lot less interesting (and harder to get right!) if you're trying to simulate an original fictional war environment. (I guess simulating the likes of Star Wars might appeal, but then you get into the issue of whether what's seen in the movies can be made to correspond to any kind of logistically grounded simulation at all)
Perhaps a journalist piecing together the information, 6 months to a year after the events. Once the ripples have settled, more or less.
I might be biased as I have been reading 3 part history of the American Civil War, which also suffered from the fog of war and very slow information propagation.
Of course, history is always written by the victors after their glorious triumph has been consolidated and the losers comprehensively defeated.
(Why do I not just say "This sounds a lot like Kriegsspiel?" Because there's so many different varieties of Kriegsspiel, not all of which work like this, so I'm pointing to a particular one that does.)
It's not via mail, it's via discord; there are more details in the submission:
"I set up a channel on a reasonably-popular RPG discord server I’m on, then each commander gets their own thread, using discord’s thread feature. Each commander then gets a little doc with their character writeup and a sheet with their army numbers. They write messages to me, I reply and notify them as events occur, and I keep track of everything on a big spreadsheet and a running Photoshop map file. (...)"
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Also note that in early wargames writing down orders was part of the game, e.g.:
"Players do not speak to each other. Instead, they communicate with their teammates and the umpire through written messages. This is so that the enemy team cannot hear their plans. This is also so that the umpire can delay or block messages if he feels the circumstances on the battlefield warrant it. In the early 19th century, officers in the field communicated over long distances through messengers. There was no radio in those days. Messengers needed time to reach the recipient, and could be delayed or intercepted by the enemy. The umpire can simulate this problem by holding on to a player's message for a round or two before giving it to the recipient, never giving it, or even give it to the enemy."
You have to assume the fog of war does not exist. The enemy knows exactly what you are constructing, no secretly rushing a wonder. It also means you could have a much better feel for the probabilities of winning a military engagement. You could locally run through several turns, pitting their army against yours to see the most likely outcome. The moment the odds tilt in your favor, you would be incentivized to seize the victory, knowing the enemy is running the same calculus.
That would be giving orders for one turn. Why the rush?
> not a lifetime achievement.
That would be those free to play clickers.
It involves strategic decision-making (control and priorities of Earth nations), operational decisions (spaceships and armies take weeks or months to reach their destinations), and a very deep tactical element of 3D space battles (consisting of spaceships having extremely asynchronous capabilities). Logistics and extended-term planning are absolutely key to success in this game
It's been an extremely fun, satisfying experience so far, albeit with a high learning curve.
To make the game fair maps were symmetrical and your opponent started with the same planet on the opposite side.
There was a Google game ai competition in 2010 where you could submit your program and it was ran against programs submitted by other players. At every time step your program was deciding how many ships to send from where to where and the opponent was doing the same.
Was that operations game?
It was called Planet Wars.
Dude who won did it in Haskell and wrote a nice post mortem. The winner of the second place wrote one too. Links here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ef40x/google_a...
Apparently there are some modern incarnations: https://cog2025.inesc-id.pt/planet-wars-ai-challenge/
I have more experience with the discrete version - e.g., Konquest[0].
I think it's not very operational, as getting your ships to battle is as simple as saying go from A to B. Your operational choices boil down to whether you want to pass through planet C, to trade time for flexibility.
While it has perfect information over your own ships, I think the core idea can be easily adapted to have separate players controlling separate planets, with delayed communication, both for people playing this game and for an AI competition.
I don't think that's true, at least when programs play it. Key to victory was making sure that you have enough of forces to capture the planet you are sending your forces to. It was always about having the right sized fleet ready and sending right sized fleet sometimes from multiple sources to capture the planet and increase your production as a result.
It's true that the game had perfect information, instant communication and no randomness in battle outcome. Are those necessary elements for something to be operations game or are those just elements that particularly interest you?
i dont imagine most people can wait 2 weeks for a command to execute...haha