{"id":241,"date":"2005-12-12T11:59:48","date_gmt":"2005-12-12T16:59:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=241"},"modified":"2005-12-12T12:01:30","modified_gmt":"2005-12-12T17:01:30","slug":"saganami-island-tactical-simulator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=241","title":{"rendered":"Saganami Island Tactical Simulator"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I like SF.  I like wargames.  I like naval adventure fiction.<br \/>\nThese tastes put me square in the middle of the target audience for<br \/>\nDavid Weber&#8217;s <cite>Honor Harrington<\/cite> novels.  And yes, I do<br \/>\nenjoy them; Weber may be a hack, but he&#8217;s a very competent hack who<br \/>\ndelivers good entertainment value for my money.  So I was pleasantly<br \/>\nsurprised to learn, this weekend at the annual Philadelphia Science<br \/>\nFiction Convention (Philcon), that there is now an Honor Harrington<br \/>\nwargame &mdash; Saganami Island Tactical Simulator (SITS).<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Weber started out as a game designer writing novel-length<br \/>\ngame tie-ins before launching the Honor Harrington books in the early<br \/>\n1990s.  In retrospect, it&#8217;s a little surprising that an Honorverse<br \/>\nwargame didn&#8217;t get produced ten years ago.  There has long been a<br \/>\nflourishing genre of wargames that simulate 3D space combat;<br \/>\n<cite>Star Fleet Battles<\/cite>, set in the Star Trek universe, is<br \/>\nperhaps the best known of these.  A tie-in to the Honorverse should<br \/>\nhave been a natural.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand&#8230;most tactical space wargames are junk.  As much<br \/>\nas I enjoy SF and wargaming, I can&#8217;t stomach a game that (as so many<br \/>\ndo) just blithely handwaves away the actual physics of space combat.<br \/>\nAnother deeply annoying flaw of most space wargames is that, though<br \/>\nspace is a 3D maneuvering environment, they tend to have at best<br \/>\nrather poor support for modeling 3D movement and tactics.  You end up<br \/>\nwith games that are essentially 2D naval maneuvering with a thin and<br \/>\npatchy SFnal veneer.<\/p>\n<p>If all I&#8217;m going to get is 2D maneuver with funny-shaped ships, I&#8217;d<br \/>\nreally rather play a Napoleonic-era naval wargame like <cite>Wooden<br \/>\nShips and Iron Men<\/cite> or <cite>Close Action<\/cite> &mdash; one<br \/>\nthat sweats the details, that tries to get cannon ranges and<br \/>\nwind-driven movement right.  And in fact I have a lot of experience<br \/>\nwith such games.  In general, I find they reduce space wargames to the<br \/>\nstatus of unsatisfying shams by contrast.<\/p>\n<p>So I am pleasantly astonished to report that SITS (or rather, the<br \/>\nearlier <cite>Attack Vector Tactical<\/cite> game it&#8217;s based on) is a<br \/>\ntrue breakthrough in 3D game design. By use of an ingenious bit of<br \/>\nshaped plastic called a <q>tilt block<\/q>, SITS ship miniatures can be<br \/>\nplaced with an 0, 30, 45, or 60-degree increment of roll or pitch with<br \/>\nrespect to the game table.  The movement and firing rules use charts<br \/>\nthat hide a lot of 3D-geometry and spherical trigonometry under an<br \/>\neasy-to-use interface.<\/p>\n<p>Thus, you can really do 3D maneuvering in this system &mdash; and I<br \/>\ndid, in fact, in a demo game that pitted two Havenite<br \/>\n<cite>Sultan<\/cite>-class battlecruisers against a Manticorn<br \/>\n<cite>Star Knight<\/cite>-class heavy cruiser.  The system reproduces<br \/>\nthe feel of Honorverse battles from the books extremely well, even to<br \/>\nthe point where it models the attrition of missile salvos by several<br \/>\nlayers of defenses from countermissiles down to sidewall.  We even had<br \/>\none of those explosion-wreaks-havoc-on-the-Manticoran-bridge scenes<br \/>\nWeber likes so much happen quite naturally.<\/p>\n<p>Unlike most Peep division commanders in the books, I knew how to<br \/>\nuse my tonnage advantage effectively &mdash; in this case, &#8220;Never mind<br \/>\nmaneuvers, just go at &#8217;em&#8221;.  And the Manties didn&#8217;t have Honor<br \/>\nHarrington on the bridge pulling miracles out of her butt.  So this<br \/>\ntime, the good guys lost.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a sign of good design that I was able to apply the tactics<br \/>\nthat are supposed to work in the Honorverse books and get the<br \/>\nnotionally correct result.  I was also impressed by the fact that the<br \/>\ndesigner, Ken Burnside, modeled physics so carefully in his ruleset<br \/>\nthat there are explanatory sections describing the heat-dissipation<br \/>\nequations he used.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, there is a certain amount of handwavium and unobtainium in the<br \/>\ngame system &mdash; the Weber books are space operas, after all.  But Ken<br \/>\n(who I met and got to talk with) keeps the McGuffins to the bare minimum<br \/>\nnecessary to capture the feel of the Honorverse.  For me, this painstaking<br \/>\neffort at verismilitude makes the whole system far more enjoyable.<\/p>\n<p>The only criticism of this game I have is that it is too<br \/>\ncomplicated to be accessible to most casual or social gamers.  While<br \/>\nKen Burnside&#8217;s components do a tremendously clever job of simplifying<br \/>\nyour tactical information management, the game domain is irreducibly<br \/>\ncomplex and it shows.  Personally, I relish that as a challenge, but<br \/>\nundeniably this game is not going to be a hit with the<br \/>\nbeer-and-pretzels crowd.  Only serious gamers need apply.<\/p>\n<p>For those serious gamers, the rewards will be large.  SITS aims<br \/>\nboth to break new ground in realistic tactical space wargaming and to<br \/>\ncapture the drama and feel of the Honor Harrington novels.  It<br \/>\nsucceeds at both these objectives, combining them with a panache I<br \/>\nwould have thought impossible until I saw it.  Kudos to Ken Burnside<br \/>\nand Ad Astra games for a truly superb design, which I hope and believe<br \/>\nwill permanently raise the bar in space wargaming.<\/p>\n<p>(Note: when I told Ken Burnside I was likely to plug SITS on my<br \/>\nblog, he asked me if I did so to add the caveat that <cite>Attack<br \/>\nVector Tactical<\/cite> is temporarily unavailable due to production<br \/>\nconstraints.  I gather they&#8217;re having to work hard just to keep up<br \/>\nwith the demand for SITS.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I like SF. I like wargames. I like naval adventure fiction. These tastes put me square in the middle of the target audience for David Weber&#8217;s Honor Harrington novels. And yes, I do enjoy them; Weber may be a hack, but he&#8217;s a very competent hack who delivers good entertainment value for my money. So&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=241\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Saganami Island Tactical Simulator<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}