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I'm pretty sure that these days the more modern military wargames done by legitimate organizations, that aren't physical simulations (a.k.a. laser tag for grownups), do use computers and have integrations with full-size flight sims and data analysis tools.

I play game called Command: Modern Operation^¹ which can barely be a called a game, but rather a military command simulation at the operational level masquerading as one for civilian mil-sim nerds such as myself to toy around with.

There is a "Pro" version^² with all sorts of data-analysis and integration with other equipment/software that, according to their website, used by a surprisingly long list of military organizations. In practice, I have no idea how much it actually is used as I don't work in the defense industry.

I'm sure there are other tools out there like this, but this is the only one I've used before. If you like these kind of things I highly recommend it. It's the kind of game that comes with a 400pg ebook if that's your kinda thing. Personally, it tickles my autism just right.

[1]: https://command.matrixgames.com/?page_id=5002 [2]: https://command.matrixgames.com/?page_id=3822

You would be wrong about that - boardgames-like wargaming is used by militaries all over the world, including the US.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0okOrVaLCA

Oh, you are 100% correct and I'm just speculating.

I didn't intend to imply that they only used computers these days, just that they are used sometimes.

Though after looking over my comment once more, I see that it definitely reads that way.

Thanks for correction and extra info! If you have any more, please share as I find this all fascinating.

Played some Harpoon, the older series that Command: Modern Operations came from (long story: https://retroviator.com/harpoon/).

Then I got hooked on Rule the Waves recently. Matrix games publishes the latest game in that series as well (from last year): https://www.matrixgames.com/game/rule-the-waves-3

It is a game mostly about staring at a spreadsheet, showing all the ships in your (usually early 20th century) fleet and their most important data, plus the current budget for your navy. There is ship-design and fighting (2D) real-time battles as well, but mostly staring at a spreadsheet.

I worked with a Navy Vet in the 1990s that would play Harpoon and reported that it was pretty much just like sitting in the sub looking at his displays. I don’t know how true that was, but I remember them marketing it as something that the Navy used in training.

I loaded it up once and decided that I really wasn’t into games I had to study for.

Thank you for the info! I saw some good reviews about Rule the Waves when I was first looking at C:MO, so if you say it's good, I'll definitely have to check it out now.

I'm very much a fan of what I like to call "spreadsheet strategy" games. So if you any other recommendations, I'd love to hear them.

Been playing lots of logistics-heavy games like Factorio, Dwarf Fortress, X4: Foundations, HoI4, and Aurora 4X lately. Tried to learn Empire/Imperium, but I had to shelve that goal to focus on work.

For some reason I really love games that I end up spending more time learning and thinking about than actually playing.

I think modern war also truncates decision making, things happen fast, you need computers to crunch the numbers and update battle field realities.

>A game can take a very very long time. Turns might even take days or weeks on particularly elaborate ones. Thus there is a major time commitment during which you must leave the game out and setup for an extended period of time.

The Campaign for North Africa is probably the most extreme example of this.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Campaign_for_North_Afric...

A "proper" game requires 10 players and an estimated 1500 hours.

I don't think anyone is on record as having completed a single game of Campaign for North Africa. Likely not even the author.

Which I guess makes it a game only in the theoretical sense.

Well, there is the recording of Sheldon on the Big Bang Theory.

That topic has come up a few times on wargame forums and there are those that claim to have played it one or more times. You need a big table to leave it set up and play with a group that can get together regularly, but that is not different from running a RPG campaign.

Today any group playing it is more likely to play it using (the open source tool) VASSAL (here is the free module to download to play CNA: https://vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:The_Campaign_for_North_...). I saw a thread on a wargame forum just a few weeks ago looking for players to start up a new game. Playing online probably makes it a bit more likely to be played (but also less fun than to gather around a huge table IRL?).

(Aside: By tradition, an old "gentlemens agreement", between the wargaming community and wargame publishers, when playing a game online with VASSAL every player is expected to own a physical copy of the game. You are not supposed to download the CNA module to play it for free without owning the game. There is no DRM or other attempts to police who plays what, but as long as the system is not abused too much the publishers are happy and most keep allowing those tools to exist. It is a nice contrast to how copyright is handled elsewhere, including in more mainstream tools for playing online boardgames. I guess it is only possible in a small niche hobby like that, and possibly only because the tradition started last century before there was big money in selling digital versions of boardgames.)

> You need a big table to leave it set up and play with a group that can get together regularly, but that is not different from running a RPG campaign.

I think you might be under-estimating how long a 1500 hour game is. A person who works 8 hours a day works 2000 hours in the course of a year.

And if the game's in-person, there's travel time - it's not like a computer game where you can do a 1-hour session every evening for 4 years.

Even a the longest RPG adventures like "Dungeon of the mad mage" (famous for people getting bored without completing it) tend to be less than 500 hours.

That is the modern (well, DnD 3E and later, so this century?) style of RPG campaign, with pre-packaged bundles of adventures to play in series, designed to last some specific time and then it ends. The traditional oldschool form of RPG campaign, still the way many groups play, and definitely the most common form last century (even if there were a few pre-packaged campaign modules for AD&D as well) is to create a group of characters and just keep playing adventure after adventure, more or less connected, replacing characters as they died off or players got bored with their current characters, but not really having a well-defined end, probably just fizzling out in the end as players drop off or the group decide to start a new campaign.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/20/us/dungeons-and-dragons-l...

(A bit extreme maybe, but I heard of shorter campaigns, but still lasting for at least a decade of regular play.)

And I think you underestimate how dedicated some people can be to playing games like CNA. It is a big game, but it is not absurdly long compared to other big board wargames.

Here is a BGG thread from 2010 (well before CNA became a mainstream meme?): https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/580214/

Note how the thread starts out "25 years after playing my last game of CNA".

So called "monster wargames" was a trend around 1980, toward the sudden end of the era of board wargames being almost-mainstream. I do not know if CNA was the biggest of all, but I think not. It was part of starting the trend, but later games were probably bigger and longer.

https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/42904/the-biggest-of-the-...

The actual North Africa campaign lasted a little under three years, let’s round it to 150 weeks. So if you spend less than 10 hours a week playing CNA, your game will take longer than the actual military campaign.

So the classic quote of "the map is not the territory" comes close to erasure here.

I think a big part of the problem is that Campaign for North Africa is a badly designed wargame, in the sense that it's not abstracted enough.

One of its flaws is that it makes you, in the role of the commander (or one of five commanders, anyway), keep track of:

> "[If using the full rules] every individual plane and pilot in the three year campaign."

This is madness! A real commander wouldn't keep track of this, so why must the player? This level of zoom-in is typical of tactical wargames, where it makes sense, but it's nonsense for traditional "cardboard" grand strategy wargames without computer assistance. So it makes total sense that playing this would take more than the actual Campaign for North Africa, since in the real deal those commanders wouldn't track every individual plane.

I don't think this was made to be actually played, and I struggle to believe anyone has actually finished it, regardless of some internet claims.

That's a common issue in 4X games (in a much less extreme form of course), doesn't mean they aren't games, or even bad games.

> [...]

> Because getting seven friends together in the same room for the all-day affair that was a complete game of Diplomacy was almost as hard in the 1960s as it is today, inventive gamers developed systems for playing it via post; the first example of this breed would seem to date from 1963. And once players had started modifying the rules of Diplomacy to make it work under this new paradigm, it was a relatively short leap to begin making entirely new play-by-post games with new themes which shared some commonalities of approach with Calhamer’s magnum opus.

> Thus in December of 1966, Dan Brannon announced a play-by-post game called Xeno, whose concept sounds very familiar indeed in the broad strokes. Each player started with a cluster of five planets — a tiny toehold in a sprawling, unknown galaxy waiting to be colonized.

> [...]

> In practice, Xeno played out at a pace to which the word “glacial” hardly does justice. The game didn’t really get started until September of 1967, and by a year after that just three turns had been completed. I don’t know whether a single full game of it was ever finished. Nevertheless, it proved hugely influential within the small community of experiential-gaming fanzines and play-by-post enthusiasts. The first similar game, called Galaxy and run by H. David Montgomery, had already appeared before Xeno had processed its third turn.

> [...]

Agreed, but do most 4X games even have an endgame? Many sandbox games are endless by design, and the intersection of sandbox & 4X seems to be pretty big.

I think it's different to CfNA in that this game simulates an actual campaign with clear goals, but that endgame cannot be reached in a reasonable time by any owner of this piece of cardboard. I'd say that's bad game design...

Well, yes, they do, for instance later Civilizations even provide multiple kinds of conditions for winning the game ! (Though in most playthroughs, the game will be clearly won or lost way before the endgame, especially in SP you often just declare the game 'won' because it's clear nobody will be able to catch up any more, and "shooting fish in a barrel" is only fun the first few times.)

Sandbox doesn't mean no end goal(s), though you typically get the option to continue playing past the end goal(s).

The masochist in me wants to build a program to simulate the game and see how fast a computer can do it…

Within the wargaming community, keeping these games non-computerized is a deliberate choice. The main intent of manual gaming is to maintain awareness of all the variables you are manipulating. Another benefit to manual gaming is the ability of non-programmers to easily tweak the system. A good exposition of the manual approach to wargaming is Philip Sabin's Simulating War: Studying Conflict through Simulation Games (2012).

> But I quickly learned that the ability to spread out a map, that might be many square meters, and see everything happening on it at once, without having to slide a monitor's viewport around (or zoom in and out) has a number of massive advantages -- and (at the time I was looking at this) there's really no display technology today that can replicate this.

This is why I’d love a wall size monitor.

You can do the same for much cheaper with a VR headset. A popular use for them is to simulate a movie theater or giant computer monitors for flat gaming.

a VR headset is hardly a replacement for an actual monitor especially for long periods of time

>a VR headset is hardly a replacement for an actual monitor especially for long periods of time

Except whenever a "is VR worth it?" post comes up here, half the comments are people claiming that's what they use them for.

I had a conversation with someone from work who uses VR to work exclusively (meaning, he doesn't use a normal monitor or keyboard for work) and it turns out his setup is really different from what I imagined.

He has a high end VR device, not an Oculus (I forgot which though). His chair is weird and positioned weird. He uses a counterweight in his headset. And so on.

Not for me, in other words.

> He has a high end VR device, not an Oculus

Well, duh, would you use one of the cheapest laptops available for work ? (Unless for dogfooding purposes.)

Well, some people do claim one use of the Oculus is this. I remain skeptical that most consumer-grade VR headsets are useful for real work.

(As an aside, in my work experience of more than 2 decades, almost every workplace provided me entry level laptops/computers. Only relatively recently have they started handing out MacBooks or similar equipment. You can do work with entry level laptops in a way you absolutely cannot with entry level VR headsets).

What do you mean by "entry level" ? Did you have to work on an Eee PC during its time ? (I "did", but it was leased for free by the university, not an employer.) About a year ago I checked out laptops available at the supermarket, and most of them still didn't have an SSD !!

Though I think I get what you mean, and also Oculus isn't "entry level" (maybe the first consumer one would qualify today, I have (had ?) one and I can't imagine reading lots of text with that low resolution !), that would be the headsets without 6 Degrees of Freedom (or badly working ones).

I'm not using any hard definition, but by "entry level" laptops I meant low RAM, average-to-low CPU power, low-resolution screen (do you remember 768p screens? I've used that for more years than is acceptable to human dignity [1]), and if an external monitor was given, it was 1080p at best.

And this was for development.

As for the Oculus, I own an Oculus 2 and recently tried an Oculus 3, and while I don't know if calling them "entry level" is fair, I definitely wouldn't want to do any serious work with them, or spend a long time wearing them. For (some) gaming? Sure. Though I get dizzy easily. I do enjoy Beat Saber though!

--

[1] for some reason, hardware procurement at most jobs I've worked (until relatively recently) had it backwards. They thought higher screen resolutions were for "watching movies and playing videogames", while lower resolutions were for "serious work". In fact, it's the opposite: 720p is more than enough to watch movies on a tiny laptop screen, while productivity requires more screen real estate! And as for videogames -- average GPUs at the time I was having these work discussions struggled with anything more hi-res than 720p, so thinking that higher resolutions were "for gaming" was a total logical disconnect. Oh well, I cannot complain now; since the advent of the MacBook for Serious Work (tm) all of these problems seem to have gone away.

Heh, both of the laptops I still use are like this : one is a midrange one from ~2012 and has 768 lines, the other a high end one from ~2016 and in theory 1440 lines, but I run it at 720. In both cases it's because the screens are too small for the typical assumptions with regards to pixel density programs use to have more lines, their graphic cards are frankly not good enough to be able to run more than that, and it saves on battery life.

But then laptops aren't for serious work, that's what desktops are for ! (And nothing wrong with 1080 lines (though I prefer 1200) for a typical size desktop monitor, especially if using more than one screen.)

> But then laptops aren't for serious work, that's what desktops are for !

Where is that? I haven't seen a desktop at any workplace for more than 10 years, possibly more. Closer to 20 likely. And I mean anywhere -- neither small startups nor bigger businesses. Nobody used desktops for work, serious or otherwise. I'd say the only people I know who still use desktops are hardcore gamers (and not even most of them, either!).

In any case, we're getting sidetracked. My main point was that even these entry-level laptops are better than an Oculus headset for working. My experience, YMMV, and all the standard disclaimers.

Have you actually tried it?

briefly. The image is far from being clear enough to replace a monitor. I havent tried Vision Pro from Apple so it may be better.

The key bits of the battles would still always be on the corner of the map.

There are systems for putting a wargame map on the wall and using magnets to attach counters.