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Anyone know any games, roleplaying or otherwise, which end up encouraging real/historical tactics? Or generalize those tactics to the magic or tech or whatever makes the setting unique.
I was playing D:OS2 this weekend and found myself thinking, "wow, all these spear-wielding magisters have zero incentive to form up and fight in ranks." It's a chaotic free-for-all.
That is an impressively vague question and one which I can only really answer by saying "yes" and "more than I could list in a single comment".
To start with there's the entire world of tabletop historical wargaming, which (as it says on the tin) is supposed to encourage historically accurate/authentic gameplay. Now, sometimes you end up with games like Team Yankee, which somehow managed to make a Cold War game look more like a Napoleonic one thanks to a business decision to use a miniature scale that is too large for the rules. Games I would recommend include Chain of Command for WW2, Warmaster is good for a fairly wide period of real world history, as well as fantasy. Speaking of fantasy, the Lord of the Rings/Middle Earth tabletop game from Games Workshop is actually great and does an excellent job of capturing the "heroic" but still quite grounded combat you'd expect from that kind of story and out of all the stuff I list here is most likely to be the kind of thing you're looking for. There are tonnes of other good games but those are just ones from the top of my head.
In terms of computer games you're slightly more limited but there's still a pretty decent selection, in terms of realism/authenticity I struggle to think of much that can top the Field of Glory/Combat Mission/Graviteam games. The last two are really not games for the faint of heart though, it turns out that in our modern age, real world tactics are actually quite complicated and unintuitive.
This is what really killed my interest in that game, it's all so incredibly over the top. It's more than a little silly how everyone seems to be able to do these incredibly over the top attacks and have these incredible abilities and yet it is still somehow a standard issue medieval fantasy world.
Sorry! I really underspecified. I should have asked more about emergent historicity.
Consider a spectrum between abstract and concrete strategy games. Chess is a pretty darn abstract form of dudes fighting. Miniature wargames add all sorts of extra rules to flesh it out. For the most part, they hold on to useful game abstractions, like dice, or alternating turns. Once we get to real-time games, though, even those can be stripped out or hidden in the pursuit of verisimilitude.
Slitherine-type games seem to go really far on this simulationist end, though with some pretty unusual focuses. It's bizarre seeing abstractions like "cards" in Shadow Empire, a game which also models planetary hydrology and the military procurement process. But so, so cool. I'm going to have to check out all three of your realist/authentic mentions just to salivate over things I don't plan on learning.
But these simulations, sometimes ridiculously complex, don't usually converge on historicity. The game conceits, or the epicycles which were added to disguise them, keep most games from getting too realistic (and, presumably, boring). So we get Warhammer games where one side can be effectively "tabled" in one "shooting phase," giving up their precious "victory points." Divinity, where my squad can spend all our "action points" beating the tar out of one guy while his friends wait their turn. Really, action economy has got to be one of the biggest sources of this kind of divergence, but it's not like actual economics are safer. Victoria 2 is kind of infamous for keeping its plates spinning with careful scripting and duct tape.
Sometimes you get more verisimilitude by reducing the level of detail. I'd say old X-COM is a good example. Oh, there's plenty of game-mechanics nonsense, but the fundamental "Time Units" system does an amazing job of implying simultaneity. Move, and you risk enemies reacting. Hold your fire, and you get a chance to spend it outside the confines of your "turn." You get interesting game choices which wouldn't be possible in a real-time combat simulation.
So when I asked the question, I was thinking something more like: "what are the simplest, most abstract games which punch above their weight in encouraging historical strategies?" Games which reward pike blocks not because someone programmed an explicit stat bonus, but because the rules of their game world imply the physics of ours.
Ah, you want the Diplomacy of wargames, don't you? Simple rules that end up creating interesting and realistic-looking situations. Except even the big D doesn't work like that. WWI wasn't a free-for-all where alliances were brokered and broken every six months.
It's the same with wargames. On the one hand, you need to understand why historical armies fought they way they did. And this is something actual historians can't agree on. Why did the Helenistic phalanx demolish the Persian army, but lost to the Roman legions, which then never succeeded against the Parthian army? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ How do you distill the lack of knowledge into simple rules?
On the other hand, if you want the rules to create interesting outcomes, you probably want to avoid including clearly broken meta in them.
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I'm interested, tell me more.
Not the person you asked, but I might be able to give an armchair perspective while you wait, because it's a question that interests me a lot.
In the real world, there is no minimap, there is no shared vision, and the terrain is orders of magnitude more complex than most games or even sims portray. You do not necessarily have a perfect or even particularly good idea of where you are, your idea of where your allies are and their idea of where you are is even worse, and the enemy's position is a complete unknown.
This would already be a pretty serious problem, but it is made much worse by the fact that real-world weapons have absurd effective range, penetration and killing power. This reality is greatly magnified for crew-served and mounted weapons, which are fantastic for inflicting what is known as a "mass-casualty event", a situation where multiple people go from effective combatants to dead or dying more or less instantly.
The combination of these two realities mean that it is extremely important to hide basically all the time. Hiding tends to degrade your situational awareness even more, and it's easy to end up with a worm's-eye-view of the world where you are effectively blind in all but a few very narrow sightlines.
Obviously that won't work for any sort of offensive, so you have to leave cover and move. But leaving cover means exposing yourself to an exponentially-increasing number of attack vectors. So you need to do this very, very slowly and very, very carefully, preferably in tight coordination with lots and lots of allies doing the same thing. But again, you probably have poor knowledge of each other's positions, so you need to be even more slow and careful, covering each other as you methodically work your way from cover to cover, clearing or maintaining watch on all the highest-value attack vectors. And often the way you discover the enemy's location is when some of you accidentally walk into a prepared ambush from cover, possibly by a heavy weapon.
The charge of the winged hussars, it ain't. it's more like four-dimensional minesweeper, plus the clearing numbers can lie, and you have to coordinate moves with five people, each of who has a different grid orientation. As @netstack mentioned, there's some games that actually try to simulate this sort of thing, but they tend to be very niche because very, very few gamers are actually interested in that particular flavor of masochism. You can get a small taste of it playing ARMA, that's probably one of the more accessible versions; even playing some of their goofy scenarios versus bots, it's easy to find yourself scrunched up against the back wall of some structure, panicking because you have no idea where the enemy is and you're pretty sure if you break cover you'll never see where the bullet came from. And that's baby's first easy mode, hide and seek against dumb bots carrying small arms.
The Russo-Ukrainian war paints an even bleaker picture. There's a visible range drone monitoring you during the day. There's an IR drone monitoring you during the night. If they notice your dugout, bomber drones will come and drop ordnance on you. You live like a crepuscular mammal in the Mesozoic, leaving your hole during the short twilight hours to empty your chamber pot and pick up the supplies a friendly drone has airdropped for you. This is also when most human-powered attacks happen.
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Thank you. That sounds terrifying.
I think I got the tiniest taste once playing laser tag with my coworkers once. Two of the dozen or so guys were ex military and they were just wiping the floor with everyone. They weren't spec ops or anything, just low ranking army enlisted, but they clearly knew how to move between cover, how to wait patiently for their opponents to move, and how to understand their and their opponents' line of sight. I got tagged a bunch, it was eye opening.
Given the above, it's interesting to me that there are some people who are exhilarated by the experience. I guess some just have a knack for it and are thrill seekers. Definitely not for me.
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