Originally this musing was included on the "Musings" page but since it has developed a life of its own I thought this musing might have just turned into an essay and as such, needed a page of its own so here it is.

THE FALLACY OF MOBILE INFANTRY IN OGRE AND GEV

One thing that I really enjoy about OGRE and GEV is watching how other players handle their allotted infantry units.  Infantry are the cannon fodder of most OGRE and GEV games, you get a bunch of "free" points of them at the beginning and what can you do with the infantry points that you're given but use them?  You can't trade infantry points for armor units or vice-versa so you're left with a situation where you can either make what you are allotted work or you just do the best that you can.  One of the hallmarks of a veteran OGRE and GEV player (more so with OGRE due to terrain constraints) is how that player uses their infantry.  Most players use their infantry like a handful of sand in a brawl; a quick throw to the eyes of your opponent might distract them long enough for you to use your hands and feet (their GEVs and heavy armor) to deliver a telling blow.  But what becomes of the sand that you threw?  Such is the way with most players and how they handle their infantry in the game.

Steve Jackson, in an article where he talked about the differences between the first edition of OGRE and the second edition once said that he made a mistake in designing a basic armor unit (aka the infamous "GEV problem").  It was a simple mistake but one which had a vast impact on the game.  The gist of the mistake was that he made the GEV far more powerful than a heavy tank through a simple cost basis error (where you picked your initial units based on armor attack strength instead of the now traditional one armor point for a heavy tank or GEV, two armor points for a howitzer, etc.).  The end result was that the Heavy Tank cost twice as much as the GEV and yet it was only about half as effective.  The same could be said for the Mobile Infantry units as provided in the game; the description of MI renders them not very cost effective and not much better than a standard squad of non-powered 20th century infantry ... worse, actually.

In the 20th century, a single soldier armed with an anti-tank rocket, RPG or anti-tank guided missile can destroy a tank single-handedly.

In OGRE and GEV, a single squad of six soldiers in power armor (attack strength of 1) have zero chance of destroying a heavy tank (defense strength of 3) ... if they all fire at the same target.  Using the CRT provided in the game, an attack strength of 1 vs. a defense strength of 3 would result in a 1:3 ratio which is less than the lowest 1:2 ratio that is given on the CRT for results.  Since the 1:3 ratio is less than the 1:2 ratio on the CRT, we are told that any ratio less than 1:2 automatically results in "NE No Effect" every single time.  You don't even need to roll dice to determine the outcome.

So, six soldiers, in power suits, armed with what we are told is "conventional and anti-tank weapons", standing next to a heavy tank, can wail away on the heavy tank all day long with their weapons and the heavy tank doesn't even have to break a sweat.  Using the basis of the rules given, the MI will be lucky to scratch the paint on the Heavy.  The only way that a squad of MI can hope to take out a Heavy Tank is if they team up with another squad or two of MI and combine their attack strength.  With two additional squads of MI linked up, giving a total attack strength of 3, vs the Heavy Tank's defense strength of 3, you finally get a decent 1:1 ratio meaning that 33% of the time you're going to have no effect on the Heavy Tank, 33% of the time you're going to disable the Heavy Tank and 33% of the time the three squads of MI will kill the Heavy Tank outright.   What that really means is that an individual soldier in a power suit is about 1/18 as effective as a contemporary 20th century soldier without a power suit and high tech weapons.

How can this be?

The battlesuit (or power armor or power suit) is an interesting staple of military science fiction (E. E. "Doc" Smith's "Lensmen" and Heinlein's own forerunner MI Mobile Infantry from his "Starship Troopers" novel are the most notable and familiar examples).  I always thought that one power suit equipped soldier should at least approach somewhat the combat power of, say, a GEV, maybe not a heavy tank, but a GEV isn't too much to ask for now is it?  OGRE and GEV take place on tactical nuclear battlefields where even the infantry carry and use tactical nuclear weapons yet in the stories like Smith's and Heinlein's, each individual MI is a small one-person army, one soldier can cover a lot of ground and dish out a lot of damage in short order.  Like I said earlier, in OGRE and GEV, one soldier is about a 1/24th as effective, strength wise, as a heavy tank and 1/12th as effective as a GEV.  

The power suit, as it stands in OGRE and GEV, is simply window dressing; just so much more fiction with little effect other than giving an excuse as to why individual human beings would be able to survive for even short periods of time on the battlefield of The Last War.  That, I believe, is what makes it so hard to incorporate the game down to the level of individual soldiers, the lines between trying to play a game with a group of individually moved and operated soldiers at the scales used by OGRE and GEV become logistically prohibitive. The "other" game to come out of the OGRE universe was "BATTLESUIT" which tried to give players a taste of soldier to soldier combat during the Last War while at the same time being completely incompatible with either OGRE or GEV (a design philosophy that alienated the game from the other two and relegated it to an interesting diversion at best among fans of the genre).  SJG's "Battlesuit" should have been the wake-up call that something in the fiction and the game mechanics was ... wrong ... in regards to how the infantry were described and handled.  It wasn't and even though "BATTLESUIT" was unnecessarily complicated, it was still somewhat enjoyable to play.

I think the inherent problem with OGRE and GEV, in regard to the MI, is that the player is trying to deal with an entire squad of MI rather than one single soldier at a time.  Power armor will make an individual soldier stronger, increasing their ability to fight and move.  Each soldier will become as strong or stronger than a squad of regular, non-power armor equipped infantry.  A single soldier will be able to range far and wide, using the enhanced abilities of the power armor to traverse and control larger amounts of territory on the battlefield.  Putting six power armored soldiers together in an area about a kilometer and a half wide brings the strength of the individual soldier drastically down in scale.  This severely dilutes the strength of each soldier in the squad and leads to interesting problems with trying to bring the game down to an individual soldier level (where a single mobile infantry unit could engage any other MI unit as well as armor and OGREs and do it all on a OGRE / GEV scale map).  

SQUAD SIZE - in the original musing on DataPulse, it was formulated that the Paneuropeans, true to German history, engaged in a modified form of Blitzkrieg type warfare involving infantry and armor in lightning fast attacks.  The Paneuropean Mobile Infantry suits were cheaper and more cut-rate in electronics than their Combine counterparts ... think of the 1980's rivalry between the US M1A1 Abrams MBT and the Russian T-80 MBT.  Pan MI were organized into squads of 10 soldiers versus Combine squads of 6 soldiers.  In that regard, the 6 power suited soldiers in a Combine squad were the equivalent in firepower of the 10 power suited soldiers found in a Paneuropean squad.

Solving the MI problem in OGRE and GEV - The key to correcting the problems with MI is resolved in two simple steps:

1) One Infantry Strength Point equals One MI Soldier - Change the description of MI in OGRE and GEV to represent not a squad of soldiers in power armor but rather each strength point of infantry would instead represent one single power suited soldier, thus making a soldier in a battlesuit half as powerful as a GEV and one quarter as powerful as a heavy tank.  This starts to fit in line with the more traditional role of a battlesuit as a man amplifier system, turning the soldier into a one man army of one.  Of course, there are certain tweaks which must be propagated throughout the game, namely the advent of the GEV-PC (which we will deal with next) and combining infantry units to form larger groups (squads to platoons) but again, the fiction and the story support this change as well and they do so rather nicely.

2) Give MI Anti-Personnel and Anti-Armor Capability - Allow MI to fire on vehicles (non-infantry, all armor units) with an attack strength of 2 and a range of 2.  This represents the MI soldier's allotment of light tactical missiles and drone assisted weapons platforms allowing for anti-armor and anti-vehicle attacks and gives an individual soldier a good standing against most armored vehicles (the way it should be).  The MI soldier will still retain their 1/1 attack capability against all other Infantry as well as any D0 targets.  Only the MI AP weapons are doubled in overrun situations.  The AP capability of MI is the same as OGRE and Super Heavy AP weapons in all other regards, that is, the AP ability is only effective against other INF units or D0 units.  MI cannot attack vehicles (other than D0 units) with the AP attack.  MI cannot attack other INF targets with the 2/2 anti-vehicle attack.

In closing this bit of rambling, if you (the player) start to think of your strength points of infantry not as "squads" but rather as "individual soldiers" then the alternate fiction begins to fall into place nicely.  Now when you start a game and you get twelve strength points of infantry, don't think of that as having 12 squads (or 72 soldiers) in power suits, think of it as having twelve individual soldiers in power suits.  Grouping three such equipped soldiers together should be the limit for terrain and tactical common sense, especially in a tactical nuclear battlefield, thus the largest group of infantry in a game might be a squad of three soldiers, in power suits, operating as a 3/1 strength unit.  Other non-MI units such as militia would still be considered as groups of unarmored personnel.  One power armor equipped soldier should easily be equal to ten regular, non-power armor equipped soldiers (and may cost just as much!). 

The one thing I didn't understand in SHOCKWAVE was the GEV-PC.  It was capable of carrying three squads or 18 heavily power armored infantry!  That seems a bit illogical.  To carry 18 full armored MI and their equipment and their drones would require a huge hovercraft, one not really set up to survive for long on the battlefield.  It would be big, hard to maneuver (with 18 MI on board!), and an easy target.  Since we're told that a squad of MI in OGRE and GEV consists of 6 soldiers, I'm basing my logic on that approach.   

Now, imagine the typical battle kit for today's soldier, his / her gear, and how much space this takes up.  

Have you ever been inside a Bradley fighting vehicle?   A Bradley is huge on the outside but cramped on the inside.  

Designing a hovercraft or even a heavy track layer to carry 18 MI would require a vehicle three times or more the size of the average 18 wheeler truck, easy!  If each powersuit, according to official canon is 7 feet tall (a little over 2m) and weighs 1500 pounds without the soldier inside or any spare equipment, then we are in trouble!  

Let's look at the Paneuropean GEV-PC.  It carries 18 MI soldiers, each at 1500 pounds and 7 feet tall.  1500 x 18 is 27,000 pounds worth of MI infantry onboard!  See where I'm going with this?   GEVs are light, you would need a huge hovercraft with a lot of lift to carry 18 Paneuropean MI into battle quickly, and that hovercraft would be so big, it would be an easy target.  The enemy would brew it up before the infantry could ever get out ...  

Now, if you assume that each strength point of infantry is a single soldier in a battlesuit and that a squad of MI consists of three soldiers in battlesuits, carrying three strength points of MI wouldn't be that big of a stretch of the imagination.  Each GEV-PC, in effect, would carry a single 3/1 squad of MI.

BACK