ALWAYS NECESSARY?

A game develops gradually, step by step. It doesn't just appear out of thin air full blown. Each datum has to be discovered individually, and then added, then tested, corrected, and new material added at each iteration. As new material is added, it sheds light on what was there already. The set-up starts from a blank page, and then information is gradually discovered, a piece here, a piece there. 

Do not look at the finished game and imagine that there was an idealized perfected version of that lying already in perfect form in the beyond somewhere that we had access to. That is not how these games are put together. There is no one source in the historical record that tells us everything we need to know—not even close! That journey of discovery is what makes doing the history fun and even exciting. It takes a whole team of people consulting different sources. For example, we still do not know exactly what the 1st and 4th Young Guard Divisions were doing prior to Dresden. I think that they were hovering around Königstein or had actually been ordered to cross there (or one of them might have crossed already). Another example is the French cavalry depot at Dresden. This unit wasn't given a set up hex, because we were not sure if it was a combat-ready unit or just a pass-through point. We don't know if all the men in that unit had horses, or whether the depot was spread out across Dresden and vicinity. We just don't know much about that, except that it had 4,393 men. In other cases, it would not be expected to have a horse for every man, so in the update sheet we noted that the unit should be reduced to account for the unmounted soldiers. But whether that unit was capable of performing in a battle formation is very much open to question. We still had not decided what to do about it when the time for publication drew near.The publication Set-up of Counterstrike was version 2.73. The first version, 1.01, was created nine months before publication. It is a copy of the Four Lost Battles set up. It contains the same armies, but not exactly the same units, and of course the strengths and locations of all the units are different. Not a lot of progress was made until version 2.01 of 1 August 2024. From then on we went through 73 versions, each one correcting a bit here and a bit there, but there is no final perfection, because perfection does not exist.In fact, our first playtests of the Dresden battle used a 2 PM setup (and not the final 5 AM start), because the source maps we have show either 2PM on the 26th or the 27th. That is what the historical record consists of, as far as set up goes. So we had to work backwards, and trace the arrival of each Coalition column through the mountains, descending through the road network, sometimes colliding with other columns with attendant delays. Jack Gill and David Johnson did most of this work, but I gave a precis of the initial development stage in Wargame Design Magazine (Vol V., Nr. 4 ). At that time I was focused on developing the real strength of the Coalition Army at Dresden, and I had Chuck Silverstein's help in determining the attrition going through the mountains. We concluded that Schwarzenberg lost 28,600 men between the commencement of hostilities on the 15th, and the battle on the 26th (see page 3 of the Coalition setup). [1] We calculated the march attrition of each column to develop our game strengths, and this is work that no historian thought of doing (George Nafziger's numbers, to give him full credit, are very close in the aggregate, though not column by column). Otherwise, the historical record merely reproduces the August 15th strengths of the armies. This kind of work is only possible because of the tools we have as game designers.
The maps show the fine work done by David "Spock" Johnson for Counterstrike. The included maps were his original creations, based on historical narratives we received from Jack Gill and other sources. He produced several more PowerPoints like this one on Vandamme's movements, the retreat of the Coalition back through the mountains, and the battle of Goldberg (See Vol V, Nr. 5 ). All of that was original research into corners of history that had never been looked into.

Is there a wargame out there without errata? 

How about the simple "classics" from AH? Waterloo, for example, included HQ units that didn't have any rules for their use. This is a great example of how "errata" can lead to new developments in game design. I think several designers saw those HQ units and were challenged by the idea: Jim Dunnigan and John Prados, among others, came out with rules for HQ units in the '70's. When I began the design of Napoleon's Last Battles, I was determined to include rules for HQ units, which morphed into one of my proudest accomplishments as a game designer, the TLNB Leadership rules. It is possible that without those unusable HQ units in Waterloo, those Leadership rules might not have developed. The point is we cannot live in fear of making a mistake. If we pull-in and play it safe, nothing can grow and develop. In fact you have to let yourself go and push your imagination as far as it can go. [2] Absolute 100% perfection is not in any way an economic possibility for our small industry. The last 10% of errors and omissions takes up 90% of editorial time, and in trying to push the error rate from 99 to 100%, you would be out of business before you got there. 

"Perfection," is just a word. Even vast industrial concerns have product recalls. The game of Chess took 900 years (600–1475 AD) to reach its final form. Our Editors and proofreaders know that 100% perfection is not the goal. Our target is 98%. We cannot do much beyond that, because once you have looked at the same item a certain number of times, you become blind to it. We have only so many fresh eyeballs.

We are Human Beings, and we make mistakes. 

We publish the updates so that players will not have to puzzle-through these mistakes, so that they can feel assured that we have gone over things before it reached their hands. We also keep learning, and when we learn more, that may affect the update. To take our latest game as an example, Napoleon's Counterstrike currently has somewhat less than a half-page update. As the game went to press, one of our playtesters wrote in with a question about the VPs at Goldberg. We didn't have to change the rule, but we decided to include a detailed example to avoid the misinterpretation that the playtester was using. This example is one quarter of the entire update.

• That same playtester suggested keeping secret the selection of the French Player's choice of Victory Conditions.
• John H Gill, the author, contributed to our OrBat for the Dresden Battle. Jack wrote in as he was in the middle of setting up the game to say he had discovered the actual location of French Roadblocks. So we included that info.
• Someone asked a question about Walled Towns, so we pointed out the status of the towns with a red enceinte line.
• The remainder of the update (about half) contains set up hex changes: 11 corrections out of about 750 locations listed. That is less than a 2% error rate, which means we hit 98%. There is one change on the TRCs out of about 40 units listed there, so we were 97.5% to the good. I'll settle for that.

The game could have been played without most of these changes. The changes merely increase the historical accuracy of the set up without actually affecting game play

Click here to see the latest update.

 

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Footnote [1]: This compares with French combat losses of 10,880 and attrition of 31,350 for the three days, August 23, 24 and 25. See this SPREADSHEET (Excel). (Further attrition for the first week of the campaign is detailed in OSG's Special Study Nr. 1.  Each unit's strength had to be calculated separately based on what we could glean of its activities.

Footnote [2]: The advantages to being attracted by new ideas are obvious. Sometimes problems require new solutions, and it is people who take pleasure in novel conceptions who find them. Such people also tend not to be particularly orderly. Perhaps this is because if you are gripped and driven by new ideas, and are also inclined to test or implement them, you need to be able to tolerate the intermediary chaos produced between the time the old idea disintegrates and the new idea takes control.
If you are a conservative, you have the opposite advantage and problem. You are wary of new ideas, and not particularly attracted to them, and that is in part because you are less sensitive to their possibilities and more concerned about their unpredicted consequences. Just because a new idea fixes one problem, after all, does not mean that it will fail to generate another, or several others. If you are conservative, you like things to be where they are supposed to be, when they are supposed to be there.
—Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order, p. 331–32.