25 January 2012

GameTalk - Insurgents and Guerillas

How do you model the propaganda value of a tactical defeat? How can you leverage tactical/operational actions to influence your reinforcement schedule for the next 10 turns? What are some systems that tie insurgent recruiting to game-board actions and propaganda/political victories to actions on the battlefield?


Your thoughts below!

By: Brant
Posted by Brant at 16:22
Labels: ,

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

From a tactical perpesctive, Day of Heroes uses an interesting mechanic: in some scenarios, the Somali player can place a roadblock. This roadblock can generate a mob (die roll); the mob can become violent, spawning reinforcements (also die roll). Game developments can positively or negatively affect these tables.
I've only played one game using roadblocks...mechanic seems to work well.

Force on Force has insurgent rules for engagements and campaigns. Each engagement has an insurgency level that modifed by engagement events (causlties to friendly / enemy troops, etc). If roll for reinforcements > insurgency level, reinforcement arrive via "hot spots" on map, and type of insurgent determine by die-roll table.

From a campaign perspective, insurgency support is also determined by die roll modified by recent engagement events. Of interest is that reinfocements may come in the form of supplies or moral boost to existing campaign units instead of just "new units".

Not sure how to model "real world" examples of insurgent reinforcement in a game. During the famous "Thunder Run", the Iraqi Minister of Info (Baghdad Bob) turned the loss of a single Abrams into a political victory. So in this case a US loss is an Iraqi win. However, at checkpoints Curly, Larry and Moe, Iraqi fighters (army, militia, insurgent and jihadis) kept on arriving despite the on-going wholesale slaughter...so an Iraqi loss is also an Iraqi win (from a reinforcement prespective).

Yours in gaming,

Jack Nastyface

25 January, 2012 18:59

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