Adapting Chain of Command

Chain of Command  is perhaps the best wargame I've ever played. Halfway through my first introductory game it was clear that I'd played my last ever game of Bolt Action, and the game's approach to the morale and command side of war have coloured the way I think about wargames ever since.

No game is unimprovable though, and with Chain of Command v2 in the offing it's clear that Rich and Nick agree - so I thought that now would be a great time to talk about my personal philosophy of wargames design, and the things that I'd change if it were me writing the manuscript.

What is the game about?

I have a pretty strongly held opinion about what wargames are. To me, all non-abstract games are thematically about something, and all (good) wargames are about putting you in the shoes of a commander in a given situation. This is something CoC does very well, and it's the lens through which I want to examine the game and make suggestions.

CoC is very concretely about the experience of being a platoon commander in the Second World War, and it does a great job of forcing you to make the same decisions your model counterpart would. These diegetic decisions (where to deploy your sections, when to open fire, whether to press an attack) exist in the universe of the game as well as in the reality of rolling dice. 

Not only do you need to be making the same decisions, as far as possible you also want to be making them with the same sort of information, and the game should give you the same outcomes.

Conversely the reality of a tabletop game often forces the player to make decisions their counterpart wouldn't. To a certain degree this is inevitable - a platoon commander isn't expected to order around individual soldiers in combat, but our models don't move themselves. Ideally in these situations the rules should de-emphasise the non-diegetic elements and move the action swiftly back to the intended focus.

Most of the places where CoC grates on me are the places where the game mechanics don't match this ideal - either because the game forces you to to care about things your counterpart wouldn't, or because the simulation doesn't reflect reality well.

The Command Dice

The Command dice are a great example of a slick non-diegetic mechanism. Rather than attempt to directly simulate the friction of communicating with your troops via runners and radios, the dice abstract this unnecessary detail away so that you can focus on the core decisions to be made: where to focus your attention and where to commit your resources. 

A perennial complaint about the Command dice are the prevalence of double and triple phases- the odds of a double phase are roughly 16%, and a triple phase 2.5%. These are, in my opinion, broadly fine - you can expect both you and your opponent to get a double phase a few times a game, and you can expect a triple phase roughly once a game. Knowing that sometimes you'll have the initiative and sometimes your opponent will forces you to balance risk and uncertainty in a way that seems pretty realistic to me.

I think the problem with multiple phases is that the game can often be quite uninteractive for the opponent of the person with them, and from the online chatter it seems that CoC v2 is going to address this by giving the players more things to do both with full CoC Dice, and with CoC Points. 

However, in my experience CoC Points are already hard to come by (you can expect to accumulate just under one point per Phase on average), so a mechanism to accrue more Points would be good. 

This is where another slight wrinkle with the Command Dice becomes relevant - single 6s are currently useless, which I find deeply un-fun. Therefore, my first tweak would be as follows:

If a single six is rolled as part of the Command Dice, gain an additional Chain of Command Point.

This would get rid of one minor annoyance and make for a slight increase in the number of CoC Points accrued.

Teams and Sections

CoC is built primarily with Northwest Europe 1944-5 in mind - this shows up in several assumptions, but the main one is that all platoons are composed of Sections, each of which is itself composed of two Teams led by a Junior Leader.

The further the game deviates from this, the less well the game handles it. In particular the large single-Team Japanese Sections end up with some odd edge cases as a result, particularly their interactions with mortars (for which see later).

Even with the game's core setting, there is one apparently deliberate choice which I would change: Overwatch.

Currently, all other Unit Actions (section 4.5.4) can be spent on either a Team or a Section - a Junior Leader can order a Team to put down covering fire on a piece of terrain, but they can also give the same order to a whole Section. Overwatch, and overwatch alone, must be applied to Teams individually.

I suspect that this was done for balance reasons, because the given reason (to represent the time taken to give the order) is extremely flimsy, and it doesn't reflect any doctrine that I'm aware of. I would make the following change:

Overwatch can be applied to any Team or Section just like all other Actions.

Other changes are somewhat more specific to the various forces - currently the big Soviet and Japanese single-Team Sections need only one entrenchment per Section. It's possible that the Spirit of Communism/Bushido  (delete as appropriate) makes you more than twice as good at digging as those lazy Westerners, but my suggestion would be:

Single-Team Sections should apply per-Team effects twice:

They require two Entrenchments rather than one.

They suffer two Shock when moving 'At the Double'

The FAQ actually already applies this principle sometimes - as written they take two hits rather than one in a mortar barrage, so it only makes sense to extend it so that these armies don't get an unintended bonus from their lack of sub-Section flexibility.

Mortars

Another consistent source of complaints in CoC is the effect of off-table mortars. They're (rightly) powerful, but the real problem in my mind is that they're both precise and generally available.

Mortars were a battalion level asset. If the battalion was fighting with a fairly typical two up one back deployment, then at any one point you might expect four of the nine infantry platoons to be engaged - but instead of being available something like half the time mortars are always available the first time they're requested, and for subsequent requests the odds are still around 80% that you will get the support eventually. 

The difficulty is that when a powerful asset is only sporadically available, it becomes disproportionately important to the course of the game whether it turns up - the game can turn on a single die roll, which cheapens the actual decision making the players do. This is to some extent an unsolvable problem, but I think the following rules change would be a nudge in the right direction:

Mortar batteries are not automatically available unless the scenario calls for it, instead you must always roll on the Battery Availability table

This injects an amount of uncertainty to the mortar usage -  you will still probably get the barrage, but it won't arrive on a predictable schedule.

The second issue that I have with mortars is that an 18" square mortar barrage will hit the aiming point a stunning 72% of the time on the first go (an average deviation of less than 9" on a 6+ on 2d6), and be exactly on target 42% of the time. Mortars were capable of highly accurate fire, but in 28mm that equates to a precision that many modern guided weapons systems would be proud of. 

I would change the table so that the barrage is only on target on a 10+, and shift all the other results to match

Third, in a game in which an infantryman cannot reliably cross a road in one phase due to random movement, the mortar barrage can be walked around the battlefield in exact 6" increments.  I suggest the following:

If the player wishes to shift the aim point of the barrage, they must roll 2d6 and move it that many inches.

Taken together these changes turn the off table mortars into much more of a blunt instrument - powerful, but imprecise.

There is one more issue with mortars themselves: they deal four hits to each Team, regardless of size. This works OK for regular infantry teams, but a 13-man Japanese section (one Team!) will take the same number of hits as a lone FOO. Instead, I would change it to:

Each Team under the Barrage takes one hit per man in the Team.

This does make the mortar barrage slightly more effective than before in certain situations, but most Teams average around 4-5 men and so the overall effect is small.

Finally, for this section, the way mortars and snipers interact is a not really specified - per the rules currently, it's possible for a sniper to spot for mortars with impunity as they only can only be spotted themselves if they fire.  I propose a very simple clarification:

Snipers cannot spot for other Units.

The reasoning is simple: spotting was simply not part of a sniper's job, and to the best of my knowledge they were never used in this way.

Model Placement & Shooting

I said at the top of the piece that movement is an obvious issue with this level of game, and so it is for Chain of Command. While movement itself is done by Team or Section, there are several areas of the rules in which the exact placement of the individual models matters a great deal - these are all at the wrong level of the chain command for our platoon commander to worry about, so if possible they should be streamlined or eliminated.

The easiest part to fix is in Section 8.2 - 'Who Can Fire'. Unlike most of the rest of the rules, here the game states that firing is done by individual models. There are legitimate edge cases where this makes sense, but the vast majority of the time we can abstract this back to the Team level and simplify as following:

Firing is undertaken by Units. A Unit has line of sight to an enemy Unit if any models in the firing Unit can see any models in the target Unit.

The obvious effect of this will be to increase the volume of fire in dense terrain where strict model-based line of sight would reduce the number of models able to fire, but I think this better reflects the fact that our static models represent real soldiers who would manoeuvre to gain firing positions. 

This also resolves the somewhat farcical situation where you have to carefully shuffle members of the rifle section around so that none are getting in each others' way - it is not the responsibility of the platoon commander to ensure that Pvt Wally and Pvt Jones don't accidentally shoot each other. 

Even if you don't change shooting to work at the Unit level, I strongly recommend that you make an exception to the 'Troops cannot fire through friendly Troops' rule for men within the same Section.

I would also abstract the placement in Section 8.3.2 - 'Targeting and Buildings'. Currently this states that only two models may fire from each window. We don't want to have to care about this level of detail, so I would change it to read:

A Unit may fire from within a building as long as there are openings on that side of the building from which to fire - agree with your opponent before the game if this is likely to be contentious.

Similarly the rules about leaning out of windows exist at the wrong level of detail; I suggest excising that paragraph completely.

A similar change is necessary to the way hits are allocated to the target Unit - currently 9.1.2 'Firing at Troops in Different Cover' is very unclear. Instead I suggest the following:

A Team's level of cover is defined by the level of cover of the majority of the models within it.

This means that we don't need to faff about allocating hits separately for that one model which didn't fit within a house, or arguing whether the model whose base is half in cover counts as in the open or not.

This is another house rule which can be applied even if you keep the current structure of firing - just agree when moving models which cover the Team is in.

Conclusion

These are not every change I'd make if I were rewriting CoC, just those which came obviously to mind when thinking about the game through the lens of who you are playing as. The fact that there are only a dozen speaks eloquently of just how well CoC meets this ideal!

Given that the first run of the new rules are already printed I don't expect the Lardies to adopt any of these suggestions, but I hope you found the post interesting and that it gives you a different perspective on which to judge rules sets.