Don Maddox said:
I do think it is a good idea to get the ASLSK into military PXs and local hobby shops. There is a store outside Fort Bragg called The Hobbit that does a decent business in ASL material (or at least they used to).
ASL isn't suited as a training tool at all. TacOps and Decisive Action are the "quick and dirty" tools of choice. They teach correct military doctrine and are set up the way real battles are fought. Although both are complicated and have a steep learning curve, a competent instructor can have students using either product with a reasonable degree of proficiency within a day or to. The lessons on tactics and doctrine can follow shortly after that.
It takes a very long time for a player to be able to use ASL in a competent manner. Trying to teach ASL in a classroom environment would just be painful, and probably boring as hell! It would take months before the students could even "play" the game, let alone learn any lessons from it. Add to this that ASL simply fails to even model some of the most important concepts that a battlefield leader has to cope with and it is wholly unsuitable for use as a tool.
ASL is one of the best wargaming systems for having fun. A warfighting simulation it ain't.
Hi Don,
with regards to the suitability of ASL for training purposes you are absolutely correct in it's current state. In one of my earlier posts I indicated that a major weakness with the system was the sheer omnipresence of the players over all components in the battlefield. This awareness is sheer nonsense as even in the best of conditions, this much knowledge is not attainable.
Consequently, players use this knowledge to their advantage in terms of formulating their tactics and play. This lack of "Fog of War" is typical of most board wargames due in large part of the difficulty to adequately simulate the unknowns for each player. Some games in the past made attempts to address this such as the old SPI game Cityfight. This game goes to pains to simulate the fog of war in an urban environment.
Needless to say the complexity of the game exceeds ASL in a dramatic way. This fog of war is reflected by the requirement to search out the enemy fireteams thereby underlining the importance of recon in a huge way. Where this system failed was due to the high complexity involved and the occasional failure of the fog of war rules not working properly.
In terms of doctrine, the original design of SL was never meant to be a simulation; ASL carried on the spirit of the "Beer and Pretzels" game. Although by the time the rules set evolved into ASL from GI the ruleset was incredibly dense. It still never offered a chapter or optional rules sets to allow for the proper use of doctrine and behavior of troops in the field. This is one of the major weakness of the system and is thus a little behind the times in terms of game design. But, to be fair the modular nature of the ruleset can easily accomodate a set of rules to deal with these issues as optional rules. By putting in some work to model the tactical doctrine and their behavior in the field, the rule set can start to focus more on the forest than obsessively tied up with the trees.
Finding sources of doctrine and battledrill is not really that difficult to find. Rommel wrote a superb book on Infantry tactics as an example of their tactics in the field. Copies of US Army, British, and Canadian field manuals are not impossible to find. Where there may be some issues is with field manuals with the Soviets and the minors. I suppose some indication of how the Soviets drill themselves from a modern context can be found from such sources such as Suvorov but, recent former Soviet declassification of documents in general means better access is the norm. These details may get down the more mundane aspects such as enfilade, line of march and defilade drill. It could get into more useful details in terms of company and battalion level standard engagement and maneuvers exercises. These unique battlefield behaviors can go a long way in allowing players to better simulate how these platoons would behave in an evolving battlefield where command and control are not something to be taken for granted.
Bear in mind the game (SL) came out in the late 70s so the goal of AH at that time was slightly different from companies like SPI who tried to model these elements. AH priority of game design was merely to market a pick up game that removes itself from some of this baggage such discuss and focus in of the fun element. If you wanted to learn more about those elements at that time you would have to gone with SPI's Mech War system and not Panzerblitz in which SL conceptual design was loosely based.
Fast forward game design 10 or 15 years later and you find that most tactical games in fact model in tactical doctrine in their design, however the fog of war componet was still sadly lacking and with the exception of ref or double blind systems. Granted when COD and GI came out AH did introduce scouts but these were removed by the time ASL came out, apparently the designer must have felt these counters were redundant.
Yet if a limited degree of fog of war was modeled in I'm sure players would be screaming for scouts again. Finally, in its current state it is way too complex and dense for most training purposes, I suppose, more than 90% of the rules is noise and could be culled down for professional purposes. We have seen how this can be done successfully to a point with the ASLSK. Yet, even 10 pages of rules is pushing it; it really needs to be stripped down a bit more while factoring fog of war and tactical doctrine considerations to be useful.
In the end it is not at all surprising that TACOPS and of Decisive Action are the standard training tools used by the military, with these computer simulations almost 90% of the physical world is modeled and taken care of by the AI. Where the learning comes in is with the ability of the trainer to focus on tactics and proper technique, perhaps a close metaphor is with computing in which the application user is not as concerned so much my the assembler machine language in the background as he is with the application interface.