I recently started reading the Consimworld discussion boards. One of the discussions that happened about a year ago was about The Gamers' Operational Combat Series. If you've never played a wargame then this may be a bit confusing, hopefully I won't get too technical.

The OCS is a mostly standard wargame. Hexes, units, one side moves at a time, combat result table. The unique aspects are no Zone of Controls (ZOC) and supply. In most wargames, a unit exerts a ZOC on all adjacent hexes, this usually stops an enemy unit once it enters your ZOC. The effect is that you can man a front with fewer units than otherwise. In the OCS, it's easy to just go around enemy units and hit their rear areas.

Now, most wargames don't have anything significant to hit once you get past the front lines. Usually just Victory Point (VP) objectives like cities. Capturing these doesn't do anything other than give you points. To give people something else to fight for that does affect the enemy, the OCS has supply.

Supply represents food, fuel, and ammunition. You use it to move mechanized units as well as to fight and to a certain extent feed units. You never have enough supply to go all out for more than a couple of turns, so you have to hoard your supplies, store them near units that will need them, and then use them to launch your attacks.

So one of the main strategies is to infiltrate past the enemy and hit their supply dumps. This has to be carefully handled or your infiltrating units will be stuck behind enemy lines when it's your opponent's turn to move. You still need to kill other units to win, but striking at the other guy's supply can really ruin that offensive he was planning to launch.

So the argument was that since it's so easy to infiltrate the front lines and hit supply dumps, players will garrison their dumps with battalions or regiments. This creates an ahistorical situation where if you do achieve a breakthrough, there's not as huge a benefit since the enemy rear areas have adequate garrisons.

Now the argument went back and forth about whether this was historical or not or if the rules should be changed or if it's just a matter of having a different perspective on how you perceive what a player turn represents. One of the points I noticed is that it almost got to the point of it being a flame war. But it never did (or those messages were purged). It does look like everyone calmed down.

Once again, I make the point that it's easy to one side to perceive something that isn't there. People write one thing, the other side misinterprets the meaning, and it goes downhill from there until someone steps in and re-explains it in a clear manner.

It was remarkable that this was a heated yet civil discussion. One of the probable reasons is that wargamers are quite old. The people in the newsgroups and mailing lists I read seem to be in the 30-40 range, at least a good portion is. They're married and have kids and it's just a different crowd than what I see on say a role-playing game list. But that's a topic for another day.