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Rob Zacny

Episode 362: Alternate Histories

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Three Moves Ahead 362:

 

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Alternate Histories

Rob Zacny, Rowan Kaiser, and TJ Hafer range the hills of Gettysburg and traverse the Pacific in a show that talks about games that alter the course of history. Hearts of Iron IV inspired this discussion about how we can change the outcome of historical events to something even more plausible than reality.

 

Hearts of Iron IV, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Europsa Universalis IV, Sid Meier's Gettysburg!, Ultimate General: Gettysburg, Sid Meier's Antietem!, Gary Grigsby's War in the East, STAVKA OKH Decisive Campaigns: Barbarossa, Total War: Attila, Battles of Napolean, Crusader Kings II

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Hadn't finished listening to it yet but you reminded me how I have to get into Ultimate General. Cause on paper it's an only wargame I can get into. Sadly, not being American, I don't know anything about Gettysburg except what the movie Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter told me. Can you direct me to any good sources to be prepared in a gamey way of preparedness? The game itself seems to have very specific assumptions of what I should now about the battle and my general knowledge about American Civil War doesn't seem to help and the game manual is not helping.

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I just love that picture!

@ilitarist

It's a novel and not a work of history, but I think Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels would be a good book to read.

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@spacerumsfeld

Thanks, just what the doctor ordered!

 

This was a very, very, very interesting podcast. In forces me to react with a wall of text.

 

You've mentioned unplausability of history. I think it's a very important in historic game and it's often played in a cheap way. In Hearts of Iron AFAIK daring things like Munchen agreement are the railroaded, very likely thing even though in real life it required luck and merit. Same for things like fall of France in WW2 - it happened so it had to be made trivial for German player to do it. Things like that should be achievements. In EU4 it's not quite like this, but it suffers from another problem: its system are unable to comprehend important things that happened in reality. EU4 has no systems to portray partitions of Poland - more or less peaceful dissolution of one of the biggest European states. It doesn't really portray colonial fight for independence, it breaks when Napoleonic things happen, or Americans trade and assimilate Native Americans. It doesn't force historic outcomes but it doesn't go for everything that happened historically. It's getting there: they've added better colonies (still not great) and forced Religious Wars but we still are far away from sandbox that at least can portray everything that more or less really happened. Same with CK2: it can't portray some important people who switched between religions when it suited them (most prominently Grand Dukes of Lithuania converted from Pagan to Catholic to Orthodox when needed), it doesn't have alliances between Christians and Muslims.

 

Curiously games like Civilization are so abstracted they can do it better. Civ4 Rhye's and Fall mod for Civilization had just added historical starting place and time, some historic events - and it created a system of plausible history. Just tell yourself that those hundreds of real-life states are represented by barbarians or as united civilizations. You can have partitions of Poland there, it's called culture flip. You can have religion switching. Cause you don't have that level of detail.

 

Another thing about historical events: that's because they're events. Games are struggling with this idea for a long time but I'm sure alternative history (or grand strategy games) should embrace the fact they're about history. You need events not to just simulate Pearl Harbor, you need scripts that recognize Pearl Harbor. Remember, say, Rome Total War. When you had a great battle it stayed on a map. You saw it afterwards. That's the thing I'm talking about. If we're talking about, say, Crusader Kings, we should recognize the Battle of Zlampanie where forces led by Duke Bob of Aquitane has beaten the King of France. Give Duke Bob trait "Winner of Battle of Zlampanie". Make French hate him for it. Make Aquitans love him for it. Create century-spanning rivalry between French and Aquitanes. Trigger event that would celebrate anniversary of this battle. When I build a monument later call it "A monument for Duke Bob, winner of Battle of Aquitane". Make French destroy it when they conquer the province with this monument. Let French have a great celebration if they ever win a bigger battle against Aquitanes. Make grandchild of Duke Bob hear the tale about the battle and get hate for French for it as well as force him to become military leader. Or forget about battles, let kings build their own Notre Dam that will become the symbol of their country later. Make famous treacheries known and later immortalized by bards and writers giving descendands of the betrayer reputation hit and present them with a choice of how to react. Don't create a chain of events that creates Napoleon, recognize some great leader as a Napoleon figure and let him become as famous and important as Napoleon was, let everybody in the world know Not-Napoleon is a thing and let people write books about him, love him and hate him. 

 

The closest thing to this are some CK2 events (Joan of Arc and demon child), but those do not leave lasting effect. Civilization 5 has some of it: Archaelogy system is not great but it leads you to real abandoned cities and fields of battle which is great. Plus you remember art from past eras even though it's immersion breaking as you can have Fur Elise in 350 BC.

 

Or, by the way, Borodino. It's funny how you can call it obscure even though it was the biggest battle in history up to WW1 I think. Anyway there indeed it's hard to make a dynamic campaign cause it wasn't a decisive battle and it was more of a strategic and political initiative. Russians have retreated to force Napoleon to support huge supply infrastructure and were ready to give him empty supply-less Moscow. But you can't give away your capital without a battle so they had to fight and not get obliterated. 

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That was a great episode.

 

One game that came to mind during the last third or so was Rule the Waves. It is one of the rare games where it's clear whom the player is acting as, and why. You're not the abstract idea of a country. You're a very specific grand admiral, whose goal is to retire with as much prestige as possible. Why do wars happen? Certainly not because it's for the best of the country; any territorial gains from a war will be insignificant. They happen for three reasons. First, backing down when there are events raising tensions will generally lose you prestige, escalating will gain it. Second, there is a lot more prestige to be gained in wartime. And third, you spend a lot of time designing the perfect warships, but for that to be meaningful they need to see some action every now and then.

 

The game has this total tunnel vision for what matters in history; the evolution of the modern battleship is the only thing worth really modeling. Anything else is just some kind of irrelevant mumbo-jumbo that can be simulated by pure randomness rather than any kind of coherent system. And the game also strips away massive amounts of agency from the player. You allocate the budget, play ship designer, and react to events. That should be miserable. But because you are so clearly playing a specific person with his own agenda, it evokes history much more vividly for me than any traditional wargame ever has.

 

Something similar to the strategic layer of Rule the Waves seems like a great starting point for a wargame driven by personalities and internal politics. Replace some of the random events with an actual system of political actors who drive those processes. So instead of a totally random event that demands you build more cruisers, you need to deal playing the cruiser lobby with the torpedo boat lobby so that you can actually ram through your 15 inch gun development program. (Hmm... It might be time to reread Dreadnought).

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The latest Extra Credits episode, kind fit in the subject, sure is not about alternative story, but how games could deal with fixed historical outcomes and still have some sense of agency and self- expression:

 

 

Now, I think this would be a hard trick to pull for strategy games, since unlike in the game they talk about, which is about subject lot of people might not know about, so there still a sense of suspense/expectation, things like Waterloo, players might know so well, that even if you have some potential choices, the outcome is so well know, that this choices appear meaningless to the player. I mean, it is no impossible to do it, just maybe very hard, specially since the player can play and perform in such optimized ways, that would be very hard to explain, why his actions had no effect in the outcome.

 

This also remind me about a old mod for EU II that was very focused "realistic historical approach" that often it clashed hard with the open nature of the game - per example, playing as England, you as a player, can win the Hundred Years War, but the game was so "history driven" that start in fact to punish me (like a angry Dungeon Master), throwing random event that just screwed me because I "dared" to no do what they expect, at one moment, things got so surreal, that a event just start deleting my armies (and my gold too). I then start another game as France, and pretty much didn´t nothing, just expecting event to kick in and give me stuff (I don´t remember exactly how it worked, but I remember that annex vassals and stuff was way easier). It kind became the question - you give the player two door to choose from, but the instant the player go to the other door you punish him so hard, that you make him wonder, why do you give him this option to begin with?

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I second illitarist's 2nd main point for games with bigger scope.  Smaller scope games can deal with contingencies via authored alternatives but for bigger ones the game system should be setup to recognize, highlight and react to some of bigger events to give stronger sense of history.

 

 

This also remind me about a old mod for EU II that was very focused "realistic historical approach" that often it clashed hard with the open nature of the game - per example, playing as England, you as a player, can win the Hundred Years War, but the game was so "history driven" that start in fact to punish me (like a angry Dungeon Master), throwing random event that just screwed me because I "dared" to no do what they expect, at one moment, things got so surreal, that a event just start deleting my armies (and my gold too). I then start another game as France, and pretty much didn´t nothing, just expecting event to kick in and give me stuff (I don´t remember exactly how it worked, but I remember that annex vassals and stuff was way easier). It kind became the question - you give the player two door to choose from, but the instant the player go to the other door you punish him so hard, that you make him wonder, why do you give him this option to begin with?

 

lol reminds me of HoI3 surrenders with major nations.

 

 

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You've mentioned unplausability of history. I think it's a very important in historic game and it's often played in a cheap way. In Hearts of Iron AFAIK daring things like Munchen agreement are the railroaded, very likely thing even though in real life it required luck and merit. Same for things like fall of France in WW2 - it happened so it had to be made trivial for German player to do it. Things like that should be achievements. In EU4 it's not quite like this, but it suffers from another problem: its system are unable to comprehend important things that happened in reality. EU4 has no systems to portray partitions of Poland - more or less peaceful dissolution of one of the biggest European states. It doesn't really portray colonial fight for independence, it breaks when Napoleonic things happen, or Americans trade and assimilate Native Americans. It doesn't force historic outcomes but it doesn't go for everything that happened historically. It's getting there: they've added better colonies (still not great) and forced Religious Wars but we still are far away from sandbox that at least can portray everything that more or less really happened. Same with CK2: it can't portray some important people who switched between religions when it suited them (most prominently Grand Dukes of Lithuania converted from Pagan to Catholic to Orthodox when needed), it doesn't have alliances between Christians and Muslims.

 

Curiously games like Civilization are so abstracted they can do it better. Civ4 Rhye's and Fall mod for Civilization had just added historical starting place and time, some historic events - and it created a system of plausible history. Just tell yourself that those hundreds of real-life states are represented by barbarians or as united civilizations. You can have partitions of Poland there, it's called culture flip. You can have religion switching. Cause you don't have that level of detail.

 

Another thing about historical events: that's because they're events. Games are struggling with this idea for a long time but I'm sure alternative history (or grand strategy games) should embrace the fact they're about history. You need events not to just simulate Pearl Harbor, you need scripts that recognize Pearl Harbor. Remember, say, Rome Total War. When you had a great battle it stayed on a map. You saw it afterwards. That's the thing I'm talking about. If we're talking about, say, Crusader Kings, we should recognize the Battle of Zlampanie where forces led by Duke Bob of Aquitane has beaten the King of France. Give Duke Bob trait "Winner of Battle of Zlampanie". Make French hate him for it. Make Aquitans love him for it. Create century-spanning rivalry between French and Aquitanes. Trigger event that would celebrate anniversary of this battle. When I build a monument later call it "A monument for Duke Bob, winner of Battle of Aquitane". Make French destroy it when they conquer the province with this monument. Let French have a great celebration if they ever win a bigger battle against Aquitanes. Make grandchild of Duke Bob hear the tale about the battle and get hate for French for it as well as force him to become military leader. Or forget about battles, let kings build their own Notre Dam that will become the symbol of their country later. Make famous treacheries known and later immortalized by bards and writers giving descendands of the betrayer reputation hit and present them with a choice of how to react. Don't create a chain of events that creates Napoleon, recognize some great leader as a Napoleon figure and let him become as famous and important as Napoleon was, let everybody in the world know Not-Napoleon is a thing and let people write books about him, love him and hate him. 

 

The closest thing to this are some CK2 events (Joan of Arc and demon child), but those do not leave lasting effect. Civilization 5 has some of it: Archaelogy system is not great but it leads you to real abandoned cities and fields of battle which is great. Plus you remember art from past eras even though it's immersion breaking as you can have Fur Elise in 350 BC.

 

I'm reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb right now, and one of the many things that it's really driven home is that any historical events of real importance are going to be unpredictable and irreplicable. Predictable and/or replicable events are reduced in importance by the forces of foreknowledge and hindsight. I think it's really telling that many of the seminal events of medieval and early modern history (the Investiture Contest and its aftermath, the Fourth Crusade, the Sicilian Vespers, the Ottoman conquest, etc) are impossible to achieve or even to approximate in Crusader Kings 2 and Europa Universalis IV, for all the clever coding by Paradox. You either make a game where historically plausible things are all that happens, ignoring the silent evidence of how close a call the vast majority of those things were and ending up with a game that is railroaded to the point that it doesn't recognize the player's most meaningful accomplishments,* or you make a game where anything historically possible can happen and end up with Europe Universalis III at release. It's a knife's edge that I'm not sure systematized history will ever be able to balance upon.

 

That said, for players, I agree that a more robust system of contextual traits and events is the closest to "touching history" that the Paradox games can reach. It's time-intensive, but simply having a set of conditions watching for whether a character of X culture holds territory in Y region and is at peace or is at war with a character of Z culture, in order to give them a trait recognizing this, would make everything feel so much more authentic. One of the least-appreciated features of Crusader Kings 2 is the epithet system, mostly because it recognizes a wide variety of conditions and makes the result visible to the player in a way that validates their experience. I wish there were more systems like that in CK2 and less like the fully systematized selection of cardinals and popes, honestly.

 

 

* I was at a historical conference last week and spent lunch talking with Thomas Madden and Alfred Andrea about how the crusades basically wouldn't have happened if Stephen of Blois a) didn't desert the siege of Acre or B) didn't stop in Constantinople to tell the emperor that the crusade was doomed. And that's even not even taking into account that Alexius believed Stephen and that the crusaders defeated Kerbogha without either of them! Between the three of us, we had literally no idea what the world would look like today if the Byzantine emperor had accompanied the crusaders to Jerusalem or if the crusaders were defeated at Antioch, except that it would look nothing like our world as it exists now. Counterfactuals are funny like that: pick a large enough event, and anything becomes plausible.

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That said, for players, I agree that a more robust system of contextual traits and events is the closest to "touching history" that the Paradox games can reach. It's time-intensive, but simply having a set of conditions watching for whether a character of X culture holds territory in Y region and is at peace or is at war with a character of Z culture, in order to give them a trait recognizing this, would make everything feel so much more authentic. One of the least-appreciated features of Crusader Kings 2 is the epithet system, mostly because it recognizes a wide variety of conditions and makes the result visible to the player in a way that validates their experience. I wish there were more systems like that in CK2 and less like the fully systematized selection of cardinals and popes, honestly.

 

 

* I was at a historical conference last week and spent lunch talking with Thomas Madden and Alfred Andrea about how the crusades basically wouldn't have happened if Stephen of Blois a) didn't desert the siege of Acre or B) didn't stop in Constantinople to tell the emperor that the crusade was doomed. And that's even not even taking into account that Alexius believed Stephen and that the crusaders defeated Kerbogha without either of them! Between the three of us, we had literally no idea what the world would look like today if the Byzantine emperor had accompanied the crusaders to Jerusalem or if the crusaders were defeated at Antioch, except that it would look nothing like our world as it exists now. Counterfactuals are funny like that: pick a large enough event, and anything becomes plausible.

 

Yes, CK2 has hints of a "historical" feel in systems like ambitions and titles. My guy had ambition to become a king and killed many people for it, he was excommunicated and got nickname The Devil. It's nice but once he's dead all of it doesn't matter except of small tyranny getting to the heir. It could be so much more like giving eternal/long lasting reputation like "descendand of THAT guy" or personal decision for every descendand to be like The Devil or to do all you can to fight the reputation. Or make descendands of The Conqueror feel the burden of the legacy and force them to be more warlike. Even nickname holder himself should be affected.

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I just love that picture!

@ilitarist

It's a novel and not a work of history, but I think Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels would be a good book to read.

 

I just finished "The Killer Angels" actually and I can confirm with the good Doctor that it is a great book to read, generally, but also is a good intro to Gettysburg.  It depicts the events, albeit not completely, but also presents the various generals and officers in their colorful light.

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An interesting side note about The Romance of the Three Kingdoms: the prologue, which imparts much of the overt political message of the work, was added during the Qing dynasty by the editors Mao Lun and Mao Zonggang. They excised approximately one sixth of the manuscript attributed to Luo Guanzhong, especially poetic asides and praise for Wei,  They added the famous line, "The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, it must divide. Thus it has ever been," to emphasize the cyclical nature of history for China. We're actually not sure if the Mao were Qing sympathizers (seeing Qing as the restorer of Han like the Shu) or not (seeing the Ming remnants to the south as Shu under siege by Wei). Either way, they sought to reinforce the continuity of dynasties early in the reign of the Qing even more than Luo writing during the height of the Ming.

 

Curiously, the original oral version, the pinghua, as well as several plays and poems not in the tradition of the Romance itself, extends the narrative well into the collapse of the Jin dynasty, ending on a minor note with another civil war breaking out. Writing with anxiety about the non-Han Yuan dynasty, it was a story of repeated disintegration and failure rather than unification and dominance. So yeah, there are political agendas at work in the Romance, but they're diverse and sometimes contradictory.

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I just love that picture!

@ilitarist

It's a novel and not a work of history, but I think Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels would be a good book to read.

 

Finished the book some time ago. It was a great read, thanks.

 

I was surprised it didn't concentrate on military action that much - it basically skipped over the first day of battle and that was the day when Union army. It also had historical epilogue about all of the characters and Longstreet - basically the main character of the book - felt very different from the book character. Made me look deeper into him, especially with him being author avatar with all this preaching about modern defensive warfare.

 

Thanks again, didn't expect historical fiction to be that down to earth and concentrated and still not boring.

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