As the Great War of 1914-1918 opened, indirect artillery fire was just beginning to come into its own as a weapons system. In the previous decade or so of technological development, many nations had devoted considerable attention to the improvement of explosives, propellents and fuzes. Advancements in steel-making enabled the creation of both larger-caliber and more portable guns. And modern industrial production methods allowed many nations to field truly vast numbers of artillery pieces supplied with large amounts of munitions.
Little wonder then that artillery plays an important role in two recent wargames that cover tactical combat in the Great War: Infantry Attacks, published by Avalanche Press, and Through Mud and Blood, the third installment of the In The Trenches series published by Jeux Grenier Games.
The games operate at different scales, so it’s no surprise that each treats artillery differently. They’re also set during different periods of the war. Infantry Attacks: August 1914 (as the title implies) focuses on the earliest stage of the Great War, specifically on the opening battles of the war in the East. Through Mud and Blood presents a number of ‘firefight’ scale actions set in various theaters and during different periods — although primarily the later war.
What is surprising, to me at least, is that neither game seems to get artillery quite ‘right’. In both cases I think I see what the designers are trying to do. Unfortunately, both seem to fall a bit short of the mark.
[As a brief caveat, please note that I claim to be neither a professional historian nor a trained historical researcher. I am, however, the grandson of a World War I infantryman and I've widely read and studied the subject for close to 40 years. In my distant and misspent youth I was privileged to sit many hours listening to my grandfather talk about his service in The Great War. Not that that gives me any extraordinary insight into the techncial aspects of artillery, but it did spark in me a beyond-ordinary interest in All Things Great War.]
Infantry Attacks presents artillery as a completely inflexible combat arm. Off-board artillery (my main focus here) is allocated in discrete firing concentrations of bombardment strength points that represent batteries/battalions of various calibers. Each player then lists his available concentrations on a roster sheet and then proceeds to make a turn-by-turn plot of the hexes each concentration will target. Artillery affects only the hex it impacts. ‘Friendly fire’ casualties are possible if friendly forces are adjacent to the impact hex, and there is also a minimalist scatter routine (as in the PanzerGrenadier series).
A player can cancel the fire plot for a given concentration at any time — but once a fire plot is cancelled, that particular artillery concentration can’t fire for the rest of the scenario. On-map artillery batteries can fire at whatever they can spot, and they can also move. But once they’ve moved, they can’t fire for the rest of the scenario, either.
I think I understand the goal of the mechanism. Artillery wasn’t very flexible in 1914, and there were frequent instances of fires shifting to the wrong places at the wrong times or not shifting at all. The mechanism in Infantry Attacks encourages careful planning (especially on the attack) and a scrupulous adherence to the pre-planned schedule.
Historically, even in 1914, artillery wasn’t completely inflexible. Most nations made some sort of attempt to put tools in the hands of the infantry that they could use to communicate with the artillery. Sometimes communications worked in a limited fashion; often it did not work at all. The relationship between infantry and their artillery in 1914 wasn’t exactly a happy one.
For the wargamer, the question is whether or not Infantry Attacks’ fire plotting mechanism is an acceptable trade-off between process and effect. A system that used a couple of tables and a few dice rolls to attempt communications might have a better ‘feel’ to it – but such a system would need to include target reference points and possible pre-plotted fires for each concentration. ‘Real life’ artillery fire planning can be pretty complicated. So would the results, essentially, be the same — only for a lot more work and dice-rolling? And would such a mechanism increase the complexity of the rules?
I’ve only managed to get in a few plays of Infantry Attacks since its arrival here in the swamp. While the artillery mechanism feels very limiting and is at time frustrating to deal with, it occurs to me that the strict limits on how artillery can respond to the changing battlefield is one of the fundamental differences between Infantry Attacks and its parent system, PanzerGrenadier.
The games use the same core game mechanisms to simulate two very different types of warfare. At first encounter, I think a lot of players probably wonder how the same system can accommodate both ‘set piece’ infantry warfare and World War II’s mobile warfare. It occurs to me that one of the key differences lies with the artillery.
Since this subject is running a bit long, I’ll pick up the tale of the “In The Trenches” system in my next blog post.
