Victory Conditions: Part 1
(Because of its length, I’ll post this message in two parts. The first part will give background information, and the second will focus on a specific concept for possible application to the game.)
I’m going to take another crack at a subject that I’ve discussed a few times, which is is the subject of victory conditions. As I’ve argued previously, I think that it’s a fundamental consideration to any game design process because it provides a central reference point for evaluating all the other elements of the game. My feeling is that without such a reference point, one simply ends up with a collection of cool game mechanics that aren’t held together by anything coherent. To use a musical analogy: it’s important for a symphony orchestra to include a wide range of instruments played by musicians who each sound great individually, but those individual qualities are meaningless if the individual musicians don’t have a conductor to make sure they play together harmoniously – or, even worse, if the individual musicians aren’t even playing the same symphony.
The idea I’ll be outlining here developed in the following way. It started out from the premise that, fundamentally, the Axis powers in WWII were optimized for fighting a series of short, decisive campaigns (with breaks in between them to allow them to restock and reorganize for the next campaign), while the Allied powers were in a better position to fight a long-term war of attrition. This is, or course, an overly simplified description of the status of the two sides during the war, but it’s a useful starting point for thinking about how this model could translate into victory conditions in a redesigned Global 1940 game.
When I started to consider this model, the first idea that came to mind was this one. If we work from the premise that the Axis has no chance of winning a long war of attrition, then the obvious conclusion is that the Axis has to win early through hard-hitting maneuver warfare, and that the objective of the Allies in this early phase of the game is simply to survive. It then follows that, if the Axis fails to achieve this early win, then the war can be assumed to be changing from a short-term war of maneuver to a long-term war of attrition, and that in such a context the Allies will almost certainly win, and thus that it’s meaningless to allow the game to continue beyond a certain point. The victory conditions that emerge from this line of reasoning are therefore something like this: the Axis powers have to achieve such-and-such an objective by such-and-such a round of play; if they succeed, the Axis powers win; if they fail, the Allied powers win. Ergo, we end up with a game that has a built-in time limit, or more correctly a built-in round limit.
That was my first idea. I didn’t really like it because although it has the virtue of being simple it has the defect of being simplistic. It’s based on the premise which I described in the two previous paragraph, and that premise is itself simplistic. So let’s look at that original premise more closely and try to draw a fuller picture of the situation. Specifically, we need to look at what “winning the war” would have meant in realistic terms on both the German side and the Japanese side in WWII.
On the German side, the conceptual model of fighting a series of short, decisive campaigns initially went well. Germany achieved a quick and complete victory on the Eastern Front, conquering the eastern side of Poland, then got a long break (the Phony War) during which it was able to rest, reorganize, plan and train for the next campaign. It then achieved a quick and complete victory in Denmark and Norway, then another quick and complete victory against the Low Countries and France. Against Britain, however, the German campaign of May-June 1940 did not produce a victory, but rather a second-best result: what I call a “sustainable stalemate.” Germany knocked the BEF out of Continental Europe, forcing it to abandon all its equipment in order to evacuate its men, but it proved unable to invade and occupy Britain or to force it to capitulate. Britain survived and stayed in the war, but was in no immediate (or even medium-term) position to invade and liberate Western Europe or to force Germany to capitulate. Hence, the two sides were essentially deadlocked, and were reduced to fighting each other on the ground in fringe territories (like Africa), in the air (in reciprocal bomber offensives) and at sea (the Battle of the Atlantic), with the air and sea campaigns being the start of attritional warfare between the Britain and Germany. This went on for years, and did not change fundamentally until the mid-1944 D-Day landings in Normandy and Anvil-Dragoon landings in Southern France signaled the resumption of maneuver warfare in Western Europe, and the gradual driving back of the Germans out of France and into Germany.
On the Eastern Front, in 1941, Germany initially tried to win a quick victory over the USSR through maneuver warfare. The Germans managed to push deeply into Soviet territory, but not deeply enough to achieve either a decisive victory. (“Deeply enough” would have meant the Urals, or possibly just the A-A line, but my feeling is that it was simply unrealistic for the Germans to get that far.) Instead, the Germans ran out of steam, then got pushed back part of the way by the Russians…who in turn ran out of steam. This scenario was repeated in 1942-1943, with the Germans pushing eastward towards Stalingrad and the Russians pushing them back. In other words, the two sides engaged in a combination of maneuver warfare and attrition warfare for about two years, with the maneuvering component mainly being a back-and-forth see-sawing of the front (similarly to what happened in North Africa) and the attrition component mainly being a huge consumption of manpower on both sides. The fundamental change on that front occurred in the period following Kursk, when the Russians were able to finally start pushing the Germans back without getting stopped.
How could we define “winning conditions” for Germany in this context? Physically overrunning Britain proved impossible because of the Channel and physically overrunning Russia proved impossible because of its sheer size, so we can rule out physical conquest as an indicator of victory. The number two option then becomes getting Britain and Russia to quit. Germany did make some progress in that direction: Britain’s convoy situation got pretty grim on a couple of occasions, and the USSR supposedly put out some peace feelers to Germany at one point. All in all, however, Britain and the USSR were too strongly motivated to capitulate unless their resources were exhausted – and neither ever go to that point. The number three option then becomes achieving a sustainable stalemate on each front. To “win” in practical terms, Germany would have had to be able to defeat the 1944 Anglo-American landings in France (and any subsequent ones made in 1945 and thereafter) and would have had to be able to keep playing “push me, pull you” with the Soviets on the Eastern Front: falling back from Soviet advances in the winter, and driving forward into Soviet territory in the summer. So on that basis you could say: if the Germans can achieve this on the game board, and can sustain it for long enough, they can be considered to have won by default because they’re holding on to their gains no matter how hard the Allies try to defeat them. Conversely, if the Allies manage to regain and hold significant territorial space that the Germans have conquered, they can be considered to have won because the momentum is on their side. You could call this the “barometer” approach rather than the “thermometer” approach. With a thermometer, the single reading given at a single moment is meaningful; with a barometer, the meaningful information is the trend shown over time, i.e. whether the pressure is rising or falling.
I’m not going to analyze Japan’s situation in much detail because, frankly, I don’t think Japan ever had much of a chance to win. It was already wearing itself down in China when it launched (with the bare-bones forces it could spare) its 1941 campaign of conquest in the Pacific and Southeast Asia, so right from the start it was biting off more than it could chew. In my opinion, Japan’s only realistic chance of achieving sustainable conquests in the Pacific and Southeast Asia would have been if it had done something that can’t be modeled into A&A (because it would distort the game too badly): attacking the British and Dutch colonial territories it wanted, but not going to war against the US. Japan’s vague strategic hope was that the Americans would get tired of fighting a losing war against Japan, and would eventually sit down to negotiate a treaty that would allow Japan to keep its gains. This hope would only have worked if Japan had left it up to the US to decide if it wanted to enter WWII, and thus if the US had gone to war without the powerful motivation and the sense of outrage that Pearl Harbor caused.
