This article started as an attempt at some design notes for Next War: Taiwan (NWT), but it quickly also became somewhat of an essay on my general take on game design with the bits of how it affected the Next War games woven in. It’s long and a little rambling at times. Hopefully, you get your money’s worth…

General Design Thoughts
It’s my view that, in the world of game design, there are very few true innovations. Many of the games being produced today, much like any other production endeavor, are built on the shoulders of the giants and pioneers who came before us. That’s not to say innovative mechanics aren’t being produced; I just think that truly innovative items are few and far between and most of what we see today are small, incremental tweaks to something that came before. This is pretty much how I see the genesis of the Next War Series. Gene Billingsley built the original Crisis: Korea 1995 system, but even he admits that many of the underlying sub-systems are tweaked versions of things he saw and liked in other games. When I took over the reigns for the redesign which became Next War: Korea (NWK), it was pretty much the same thing. The order of battle was revamped, the map was updated (and shrunk down in terms of operational space), and the rules were reworked. Much of the original game system remains in the Next War series, although several pieces were refined such as slight changes to the movement, combat, and air systems, and some were replaced entirely such as the replacement of the rules for capturing Cities, Urban hexes, and Installations with the Clearing Operations mechanism. It’s also worth saying that often it’s the collaboration between all the minds working on a project which produce the best results, so, while Gene’s name is on the box along with mine, we couldn’t do any of this without the dedicated assistance of the many researchers, proofreaders, and playtesters.

Orders of Battle & Unit Values
Two of the toughest issues when designing a game are the Order of Battle (OoB) and the values of the units themselves.

In the OoB, unit values are an important part, but I’m not sure there’s a right answer for how to derive them. In Next War: Korea, as mentioned above, I had the benefit of having had a lot of groundwork done for me in terms of that from the Crisis: Korea 1995 game. From that, it was a matter of adapting the Order of Battle to reflect current (or near future) conditions and tweaking the values to represent manning/equipment differences (attack/defense) and training/doctrine (ER). For instance, notice the DPRK tends to be higher attack, lower defense, while the ROK is the opposite. This is because that’s the way they train. The US has a more even distribution of attack/defense values, although defense tends to be higher simply because the defender generally has an advantage (usually negated through the application of superior firepower, i.e., numbers).

In Next War: Taiwan, the situation is a bit different, so the OoB had to change to reflect that. The Republic of China (ROC) has its forces primarily organized by brigades under a corps headquarters. In addition, I needed to be able to demonstrate the PRC’s (People’s Republic of China) abilities (and limitations) in lift capacity, so I broke the divisions down into their constituent brigades/regiments. The primary maneuver unit was now the brigade/regiment rather than the division as it was in NWK. This allowed quite a bit of flexibility, but it also necessitated a change in the stacking rules. Hence, we now have the divisional Formation stacking exception to the normal stacking rules. As long as all the units in a hex (and the only units in the hex) are from the same division, you can stack them all without repercussions, even if you exceed four stacking points. This small change solved two problems. One, the PRC had issues amassing enough combat strength in single hexes, even though this shouldn’t have been an issue given the map scale, and, two, it kept the ROC from massing too many units in a hex defensively because they’re organized by “corps” and not “division”.

One of the other nuances for the ROC is their system of reserves and the large number of paramilitary organizations on the island. The former can be seen in the form of the Reserve brigades which arrive in a random order, not unlike those in NWK. The latter, rather than trying to incorporate them into the game as units with a lot of extraneous rules are, instead, abstracted out and represented by the -1 DRM for Clearing Operations conducted in the ROC.

Combat Resolution Table (CRT)

Where you have units in a wargame, you must have some way of resolving combat. This is sometimes just as difficult to determine as the OoB. In terms of the Next War Series CRT, it’s our intent to show that modern warfare is fairly attritional in nature. Good CRTs have the chance to apply losses on both sides of the roll. A lot depends on just what, exactly, an “attack” factor represents. One thing to mention also are step losses. A question which should be asked is what does the attack factor represent if you also have step losses? Which one is manpower and which one is the application of that manpower to firepower? I actually like the method used in Summer Storm: The Battle of Gettysburg¹ where units have 10 (or is it 12?) “steps” or “increments”, and you only flip the counter, i.e., lose combat effectiveness, after you’ve lost half your increments. Now, the Summer Storm system is an attritional system where every unit involved in a combat takes losses, so that’s partially why it works that way. However, it’s also an elegant way to show losses in manpower yet retain combat effectiveness. The downside is that it either requires lots of markers, Pollard markers, or paper book-keeping.

In the Next War Series, the CRT is non-linear in that results don’t flow evenly across the rows/columns; there are some gotchas embedded within. That simply represents the fact that no attack (or defense) is perfect. There a ton of different ways to manipulate the CRT via column shifts and DRMs that each player can bring to bear. In the end and generally speaking, the player who brought the most assets to the party will win.

Maps & Scale
After you have units you can fight with and a CRT to determine the results, the next step is to figure out how those units get into contact, i.e., the map. Map discussions are interesting and varied, and there are a lot of different ways to approach it. For Next War: Taiwan, we basically started with a downloaded image from the web imported into the graphics program. Then, we put the hex-grid over it, ensured that the scale was correct, and started on terrain analysis. This latter part is a mixture of science and art. There are the terrain features, such as mountains, highlands, rough, flat, cities, urban, etc. which need to be on the map. Those are, generally, easy because they can be picked out on the underlying map if it’s of sufficient quality. But then comes the issue of dealing with what, exactly constitutes Highland vs. Mountain vs. Rough. For the Next War Series, we’ve used the following general guidelines:

Clear:  mostly less than 200m elevation
Rough:  200m to 600m elevation
Highland:  mostly 500m to 1000m elevation
Mountain:  800m+; frequently over 1600m

Maps and terrain analysis also have to take into account what’s important in terms of the overall terrain. Although there are no major differences between NWT and NWK in terms of terrain, Next War: India-Pakistan (NWIP) has a couple of unique items which caused us to alter the terrain effects charts a bit. The first is High Mountain terrain. Although the Series Rules already mention and incorporate this terrain, you won’t see it until NWIP comes out. The other primary consideration in the map area represented in NWIP are the myriad rivers and canals. The combination between the critical importance of those rivers and their bridges and the relative paucity of bridging assets required us to separate out rivers into two categories: minor and major. The rules for this will be introduced in the NWIP Game Specific Rules.

Now, because none of these things occur in isolation, we decided, based on the NWIP terrain analysis, to revisit some of our earlier OoB decisions. Thus, we will also be introducing a new unit type, Mountain Infantry, to reflect the influence such specific skill-trained units would have fighting in terrain like the Kashmir Valley and surrounding area. For all you aficionados out there, the U.S. 10th Mountain Infantry Division will get new counters², and, of course, the rules can be retroactively applied to both NWK and NWT.

The 800lb gorilla regarding map and terrain analysis for NWT, of course, is the fact that Taiwan is an island. For a game system which is primarily focused on ground combat, this was a relatively large hurdle to overcome. The result of that is the addition of the Naval Display with its far broader representation of the Pacific, the inclusion of “Land Areas” to represent significant areas of interest to the belligerent parties in the immediate environs, and the expansion of the naval rules sub-system.

The Naval Sub-system
Obviously, this was a crucial portion of the system for NWT. The Naval Display alone went through several revisions. As I noted in the NWT Game Specific Rules Credits, I think we set a record with that one. The rules themselves were tinkered with throughout design and development to arrive at a good balance between what should be important to the player and what could be abstracted out. The object was not to recreate the Fleet series of games, but we strove to provide just enough rules weight to make it feel right. Fortunately, and in keeping with my mantra that rules systems should be re-used whenever possible to promote familiarity, the vast majority of the naval rules fit neatly within the existing framework of rules for things like Naval Combat (a variation of Strikes) and Mine Warfare (a DRM on the Contested Sea Movement framework). The expansion necessitated some changes, though, that broke the framework, notably in the Sea Control mechanisms. At the end of the day, while I’m OK with how the rules turned out, I think they could still be improved upon.

Series Games
Which brings me to my final point. All three of these games, Korea, Taiwan, and India-Pakistan, use the same basic series rules. The application of the things mentioned above, however, cause them to feel like three completely different games. In Next War: Korea, you see a blitzkrieg style of attack with large formations colliding with one another. In Next War: Taiwan, we have a chess-like match of attempting to apply the right amount of pressure in just the right spot to break open the island. And, along the Indo-Pakistani border we see two armies without the wherewithal to conduct sustained modern warfare wrestling with each other in fits and starts. This varied ability to depict radically different environments without really changing the rules chassis is what I like to see from systems, and I’m excited to see what’s next. Speaking of which…

What’s Next?
I get that question a lot (and, by a lot, I mean A LOT ;-). To answer that question, I’ve been doing Order of Battle research into the following countries: Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Russia, Byelorussia, Poland, & NATO. Mark’s (Simonitch’s) queue may or may not have a prototype map tentatively covering roughly the middle of Kaliningrad in the north to just south of Warsaw and from the Byelorussian border of Poland to just west of Gdansk. The title will likely be something like Next War: “Eastern Europe, Vol. 1″….

1  I’m sure it exists elsewhere, but this is where I first encountered it.

2 Although the 10th Mt is no longer specifically a “mountain” unit, they do receive training in mountain warfare. In addition, the game posits an uptick in such training as the possibility of an intervention comes closer to reality.

Author: Mitchell Land