CT Only: Canon Fifth Frontier War Game

[Velocinox]

I was hoping someone could help me find something...

I am looking for the results of the Fifth Frontier War Game that GDW played to determine the outcome of the war for the Traveller RPG back in the 80s.

The site(?I think) I saw had color photos of the game map for each turn and showed the Fleet movements of both sides on a separate hand drawn B+W map.

Any help re-discovering this information would be greatly appreciated.

 

[agorski]

I believe that the Spinward Marches Campaign has a synopsis of the war with maps.

 

[Whipsnade]

Agorski is correct. CT's Spinward Marches Campaign has several sector-sized dot maps showing the course of the war.

On those maps - which are not copies of the game map - fleet positions are almost never shown as single systems. Instead, a fleet's position is usually shown to encompass several systems perhaps showing the extent of patrols and sorties.

Also, the fleets on the maps are indicated by number or name. There are no indications of just what squadrons and others assets comprise each fleet. The only squadron assignment we can determine is that of the battlerider squadron detailed in the book.

I've never seen anything resembling an AAR from GDW concerning the FFW game. You may be conflating your memory of the SMC dot maps with something else.

 

[Velocinox]

I agree it's an excellent source, but the information I was referring to was the raw form of what was used to create that book. It contained photos of the actual game board taken during play, and comments about player decisions.

Thanks though, I am still appreciative of the assistance.

 

[Whipsnade]

I've never seen any material even remotely resembling what you describe and I've never read any suggestion that GDW used the FFW game to plot the course of the war.

In fact, seeing as you cannot recreate the canonical course of the war as laid out in the JTAS TNS items with the FFW game, I find it hard to believe that the game was used by GDW in the manner you suggest.

I believe you've conflated the "Great Game" used by GDW to plot 2300AD's back story with the Traveller's Fifth Frontier War.

Edit: I've asked about the AAR at ct-starships in the hopes that someone in the group there can help you.

 

[Hyphen]

In fact, seeing as you cannot recreate the canonical course of the war as laid out in the JTAS TNS items with the FFW game, I find it hard to believe that the game was used by GDW in the manner you suggest.

Cool! Years ago I began trying to use FFW to create my own version of the 5FW (primarily to confound Smartarse Players Who Knew Too Much - imagine their surprise running into SW fleets in 1105?)

My cursory comparison of TNS reports vs the Spinward Marches campaign book suggested some anomalies - some of which could be accounted for due to different timeline scales; you can argue that an event in SMC was simply never reported in the TNS.

So, from your reading, what's missing? (Or does an old thread already cover this?)

 

[Whipsnade]

So, from your reading, what's missing? (Or does an old thread already cover this?)

There's quite a bit missing and there are several old threads discussing it all. It's been a while, however, so a recap wouldn't be amiss.

Supply rules don't exist - You can pack up an army or two aboard your BatRons, jump from one edge of the map to the other, bombard/invade dozens of worlds, and never run out of Cheetos let alone boots, bullets, and band-aids.

Canonically the Zhodani seige of Efate was substantially handicapped by the continued presence of Imperial SDBs in the Louzy system. Those SDBs raided Zho supply shipping, and harassed Zho reinforcements. Without supply rules, none of that can happen in the game. Without supply rules, none of the commerce raiding repeatedly mentioned in canon can take place in the game.

Double Blind rules don't exist - Canonically, two operations determined to outcome of the war: A Zhodani sucker punch and an Imperial trap.

First, the Consulate launched the Abyss Campaign. That campaign was aimed at Rhylanor and the shock accompanying the loss of that world was meant to force the Imperium to negotiating table.

Next, the Imperium, in the person of Duke Norris, correctly predicted the Consulate's sucker punch and set a trap for it. Rhylanor was reinforced to defeat the Zhodani attack while other forces were stationed in the Abyss to attack Consulate assets when they withdrew from Rhylanor.

The failure of the Consulate's sucker punch and the loss of the substantial assets assigned to it meant that the Zhodani rather than the Imperium was forced to the negotiating table.

Because both players can see their opponent's forces on the map, neither of these operations can be attempted in the FFW game without the use of double blind rules, yet the game has no double blind rules.

The Sword Worlds might as not exist - Only four Confederation worlds are shown and any Confederation offensive is greatly constrained by the odd shape of the map. The Confederation's starting location resembles the narrow end of a funnel. Making matters worse, half of Confederation squadrons can only reach Vilis, one of the so-called "fortress" systems, or Saurus, a system which can easily be made a "fortress" system.

Neither Vilis or Saurus have gas giants, you must control the mainworld to refuel in either system. Vilis has 1C SDBs and 15C troops against which the Confederation has no TL advantage. While Saurus has few intrinsic defenses, thanks to TL differential benefits placing the Imperium's TL16 mercenary unit there will give the Confederation fits.

While half of Confederation forces can jump into the Imperium via Garda Vilis and Tavonni, the other half needs to fight their way out. And what of the canonical Confederation offensive against Lanth? The map funnels any Confederation thrust more towards Frenzie.

The 214th's Sixty Day Offensive cannot occur - Not only are most of the Sword Worlds "missing" but the Lunion and Glisten subsectors - and the Imperial forces stationed there - are missing too. That means the 60 Day Offensive can't happen in the game, the Sacnoth Fleet isn't destroyed off Sting, the 213th doesn't force the Gram Fleet back on Gram, the future Border Worlds aren't occupied, and the Confederation isn't knocked out of the war.

An entire portion of the 5th Frontier War cannot be modeled with the FFW game.

There are several other items too, but those should suffice to explain why I am hesitant to believe GDW used the FFW game to plot the 5th Frontier War.

 

[Kilgs]

I'm surprised I haven't seen more interest in VBAM on these boards. That game, coupled with the TravellerMap online, would be an incredible way to do the Rebellion or any other ideas. VBAM is simple, covers all the bases without getting ground into minutiae, and plays quickly.

I've been working on a version of the Great Game for it.

 

[Baron]

I'm surprised I haven't seen more interest in VBAM on these boards. That game, coupled with the TravellerMap online, would be an incredible way to do the Rebellion or any other ideas. VBAM is simple, covers all the bases without getting ground into minutiae, and plays quickly.

I've been working on a version of the Great Game for it.

What is this 'VBAM' of which you speak? Can you please tell me more?

 

[jec10]

Victory By Any Means.

 

[Kilgs]

http://www.vbamgames.com/

 

[Carlobrand]

... Canonically, two operations determined to outcome of the war: A Zhodani sucker punch and an Imperial trap.
...

Those particular elements of canon always bugged the heck out of me, inasmuch as they relied on an assumed lack of infrastructure to make them feasible, a lack which is frankly hard to justify.

Consider: the canon Zho thrust across the Abyss involved the successive invasions of Mirriam, Calit, Ghandi, Ylaven, Quopist and Tureded - a series of jump-1 to jump-3 leaps across an isthmus bridging the Abyss. Presumably the fleet either started from the Zho base at Rapp's World and made its way past Arden space to a jump-off point at Edenina, or it started from Querion and approached Edenina through Quare.

Let's leave aside the curious lack of Imperial scouts and spies all through the nonaligned region two years after the start of war, and let's instead focus on what happens when the Zho cross the border. Their first stop is Mirriam, which has an Imperial navy base. Their expectation is to proceed from there on what canon says is a 4-week jaunt through 5 more systems ending at Turedad. I will give them credit for not feeling obliged to limit themselves to FFW's rules, and I accept that the main fleet made Turedad in about 4 weeks while subordinate task forces took some of the other worlds along the route to secure a supply line for lower-jump supply ships: FFW has a number of J5 ships available to the Zhos that would have allowed them to leap for Turedad while slower squadrons secured their supply line.

Now let's look at infrastructure. The naval base almost certainly has jump-6 naval couriers. The Imperium also has to keep track of what's going on in its space, so it's not too far-fetched an idea for the Scout Service to have jump-6 craft stationed in all the various star systems watching for raiders and suchlike. A squadron of jump-6, 6G destroyer-sized ships can be had for less than the price of a single light cruiser; the entire war zone could be patrolled by squadrons of such watchgroups, tasked only to watch for intruders and relay word back to the nearest naval base or fleet, for the price of a couple or three dreadnoughts. However, let's leave that aside for the moment and note that the Zho struck at naval bases at Mirriam and Ghandi, places that would have been expected both to be prepared for attack and to be equipped with the means to communicate with other bases.

In the FFW game, the naval assembly point at Icetina would have had word of the Zhodani thrust about two weeks after the Zho fleet struck Mirriam, and would have had running reports on the movement of that fleet running one week behind from the point the Zho struck Ghandi. The idea that it could be done successfully at all is a bit absurd: they crossed a narrow isthmus then left their flank and rear wide open to Imperial reinforcements coming up from rimward, on the way to a strike on Porozlo/Rhylanor, and those Imperial reinforcements would have been receiving intelligence that was only a week old from Ghandi forward. And the Zho would have known that.

In the context of the canon war, same problem from a different quarter: the Zho are penetrating deep while the Imperial Corridor fleet is on their coreward flank, unengaged, free to react and with intelligence on 40th fleet movements only a couple of weeks old.

Even allowing that Santonocheev was initially misled, the sudden appearance of a large force at Mirriam and then Ghandi would have naturally triggered efforts to meet and repel the force. The 40th's maneuver on a map looks uncomfortably like sticking your thingy in a sausage grinder (with ultimately the same results). The only way this works for the Zho is if the Zho assume the Imps are blind to their numbers, so that the Imps fail to appreciate the magnitude of the threat until the force has arrived at Rhylanor and taken the world - several weeks after having overrun the Imperial naval base at Mirriam. Basically, we're being asked to believe not only that ships with power outputs larger than many modern nations are invisible beyond a couple lightsecond's range, but that the Imperium can't station ships in the system to monitor likely fuel sites from the relative safety of the empty space between planets, to use telescopes and imagers to watch who goes there to refuel, then to watch those refuelers go back to the enemy fleet, and then send someone out with a reasonable headcount of how many enemy ships they saw refueling. The Imperial fleet would have had a good idea of the 40th's strength by the time it left Mirriam, and the Zho would have known that.

The attack frankly makes no sense at all unless we hear of a prosecution of Santonocheev as a Zho agent.

 

[Whipsnade]

Those particular elements of canon always bugged the heck out of me, inasmuch as they relied on an assumed lack of infrastructure to make them feasible, a lack which is frankly hard to justify.

It's worse than that actually. You see, the dates in the JTAS TNS items and the dates in the SMC for the same events don't match up. I'm not talking about the well known comm-lag mistakes either, I'm talking about specific events in the war having two completely different reported dates.

For example...

• - JTAS TNS has the fall of Mirriam and Calit announced at Regina on 362-1108 while SMC has the Zhodani 40th Fleet taking Mirriam, Calit, Ghandi, Ylaven, Quopist, and Turedad between 170-1109 and 200-1109.
• - JTAS-TNS has it reported on Rhylanor on 147-1109 that Calit has been retaken by the Imperium while, again, SMC states Calit could not have been taken by the 40th Fleet before 170-1109.
• - SMC also has the Corridor Fleet redeployed from "around Roup" to Rhylanor by 190-1109 while JTAS-TNS has those reinforcements arriving at Porozlo on 239-1109

I could go on but you get the idea.

Back when GT:Behind the Claw came out, it's story of the 5th FW was so different from earlier versions that I spent a good chunk of my free time during a business trip putting together the best timeline of the war I could. I thought the "point of departure" between the OTU and GT's ATU could be found in the differing versions of the war. LKW disabused me of that idea, but my little project showed me that CT lacked any coherent depiction of the war.

Incoherent or not, you still cannot use the FFW boardgame to recreate any of the descriptions of the war.

In the FFW game, the naval assembly point at Icetina...

That's an artifact of the FFW game. Reinforcement hexes don't exist in reality and there weren't a bunch of unassigned squadrons sitting around in some backwater system waiting for fleet assignments in the reorganization phase. The only thing even remotely resembling Icetina in canon was another system raided by the Zhodani early in the war to disrupt an Imperial offensive being readied there.

Even allowing that Santonocheev was initially misled, the sudden appearance of a large force at Mirriam and then Ghandi would have naturally triggered efforts to meet and repel the force.

It did, at least in SMC's version of events.

Norris takes charge on 132-1109, in both the SMC and JTAS versions. Then, according to SMC, the Abyss Campaign steps off on 170-1109. Rather than chase the 40th Fleet through the Abyss, Norris plans on meeting and beating that fleet at it's target; Rhylanor. The Corridor Fleet is moved from Roup/Feri to Rhylanor while the Imperial 23rd Fleet is reinforced and ordered to retake Mirriam and Calit. The 40th Fleet takes Turedad by 200-1109, it and the Corridor fleet clash off Rhylanor sometime after that, the 40th is beaten, and then it seemingly undertakes a fighting withdrawal until ambushed off Calit by the 23rd Fleet on 348-1109.

Finis Zhodani.

The attack frankly makes no sense at all unless we hear of a prosecution of Santonocheev as a Zho agent.

I can't defend the Zhodani plan nor the metagame or in-game thinking behind it. Several accounts mention the 40th relying on surprise, surprise which cannot really occur as you correctly point out. Grabbing Rhylanor by surprise, fortifying it against an Imperial counterattack, and depending on the Imperium not wanting to destroy a world to save it seems to be the thinking here, but it's thinking I do not find plausible.

I can defend Santanocheev, oddly enough. Using the SMC dates, the Abyss Campaign kicks off 38 days after he's been relieved and, while his deployments were not specifically directed at beating a Zhodani campaign across the Rift to Rhylanor, those deployments still apparently allowed Norris to make changes quickly and easily enough to smash the over-strength 40th Fleet.

In a way, Santanocheev is Hooker to Norris' Meade. While Hooker didn't beat Lee at Chancellorsville, in late June of '63 he did have the Army of the Potomac in a position that allowed Meade to beat Lee at Gettysburg.

 

[rancke]

It's worse than that actually. You see, the dates in the JTAS TNS items and the dates in the SMC for the same events don't match up. I'm not talking about the well known comm-lag mistakes either, I'm talking about specific events in the war having two completely different reported dates.

The com-lag mistakes are real enough. The rest do not seem to be. At least not the ones you bring up as examples.

For example...

• - JTAS TNS has the fall of Mirriam and Calit announced at Regina on 362-1108 while SMC has the Zhodani 40th Fleet taking Mirriam, Calit, Ghandi, Ylaven, Quopist, and Turedad between 170-1109 and 200-1109.

• 
  
  Obviously two different events. Mirriam and Calit were captured by unnamed Zhodani forces some time before 362-1108, then retaken by the Imperials before 170-1109, then taken again by the 40th Fleet after 170-1109. No conflict there.
  
  

  [*] - JTAS-TNS has it reported on Rhylanor on 147-1109 that Calit has been retaken by the Imperium while, again, SMC states Calit could not have been taken by the 40th Fleet before 170-1109.

  Not only could Mirriam and Calit have been captured before 170-1109, there is a statement to that effect brought by TNS dateline 362-1108 that they had been captured (This would be the first time they were captured) and a statement by TNS dateline Rhylanor 147-1109 that Calit has been retaken, in plenty of time to be captured a second time after 170-1109.
  
  

  [*] - SMC also has the Corridor Fleet redeployed from "around Roup" to Rhylanor by 190-1109 while JTAS-TNS has those reinforcements arriving at Porozlo on 239-1109

  The Porozlo newsbrief doesn't say what those reinforcements were or where they came from. They could have come from somewhere in Deneb by way of Margesi and Celepina, which would quite naturally bring them to Porozlo before going on to Rhylanor (assuming J3 combat vessels were part of the task force).
  
  No discrepancies so far.
  
  
  Hans

 

[jappel]

Back in 2004, I ran a double-blind game of FFW via e-mail in which a number of denizens of this board participated, including the esteemed Mr. Whipsnade. Players took the roles of fleet admirals, with one additional admiral per side allocating the reinforcements and providing direction to their subordinates. I also enforced somewhat abstracted but reasonably correct communications lag.

I was forced to suspend the game long before completion, but I believe the recaps I and others posted go a long way to illustrating the difference between the wargame and the canon about the war (Efate down by turn 8, no years-long siege for one example). It also helps show the huge impact the double-blind, limited-intelligence, limited communication nature of that playing had on the player's perceptions of what what happening, which may give some other insight into how whacked some of the canon about the war is.

Post-game write-ups here:
http://www.travellerrpg.com/CotI/Discuss/showthread.php?t=12107

 

[DonM]

Back in 2004, I ran a double-blind game of FFW via e-mail in which a number of denizens of this board participated, including the esteemed Mr. Whipsnade. Players took the roles of fleet admirals, with one additional admiral per side allocating the reinforcements and providing direction to their subordinates. I also enforced somewhat abstracted but reasonably correct communications lag.

I was forced to suspend the game long before completion, but I believe the recaps I and others posted go a long way to illustrating the difference between the wargame and the canon about the war (Efate down by turn 8, no years-long siege for one example). It also helps show the huge impact the double-blind, limited-intelligence, limited communication nature of that playing had on the player's perceptions of what what happening, which may give some other insight into how whacked some of the canon about the war is.

Post-game write-ups here:
http://www.travellerrpg.com/CotI/Discuss/showthread.php?t=12107

Thread resurrection powers activated!

I do not see your 5FW rules QA file... wondering if there's some good errata that can be pulled out of that...

 

[jappel]

Don - I don't recall these being so much errata as either clarifications to avoid ambiguous interpretations by the players, or adaptations for converting the tabletop game to a double-blind / limited communication / limited intelligence format. I'm pretty sure I have the original files at home somewhere, though, so I'll see if I can dig them up and send them to you.

 

[jappel]

Went looking over the weekend and found the majority of the documents (including all the turn-by-turn move records) but I don't seem to have a copy of my rules modifications & FAQ.