Dreadnoughts at Jutland

Crash

Presentation 78%

Graphics 60%

Rules 87%

Authenticity 88%

Overall 69%

Philippa Irving 69%

FRONTLINE With Philippa Irving ME, MYSELF, I Reviews in FRONTLINE are printed for two purposes: one, so that you the reader can enjoy a fairly full description of games that you have no intention of buying. Two, so that, having enjoyed the description, you might decide that you do want to buy the game after all. The primary function of a review magazine like Crash is undoubtedly to enable you to make sense of all the brightly coloured little boxes on the dealer's shelf, and to choose which ones you actually want to part with money for. I also think that it helps to circulate ideas and a general awareness of the computer gaming scene to add to your enjoyment of the hobby; I always prefer reading bad reviews, but for utilitarian purposes - that is, deciding what I want to buy - I admit that the good ones are more useful. And it has occasionally been the case that I've bought a game on the strength of a review to be disappointed in it; it helps to know the reviewer's methods and criteria. And so, for your own information. I shall describe mine. Games are sent to me through the Crash offices in Ludlow to my home in Oxford, sometimes weeks before I have to write the review, and sometimes days. No matter when they arrive, I always try to have at least two sessions on a game. Often, if I like it, and I have a lot of spare time, I play it much more extensively for the sheer enjoyment of it. If a game has extremely complex rules and lots of reading material with it I try not to be irritated by the extra time that entails, and remember what a delight it would be if I'd actually paid for the game. Software which arrives with instructions covering the back of an inlay has my sneaking sympathy, although I try to suppress it. However, I do want to be forced to waste my time with a game, even if I don't enjoy having to plough through lots of salutary background material. A game which forces me to play for ten hours when I really only have two to spare has certainly got something going for it. Some games are impossible to play for more than an hour, either because I finish them on my first attempt (that always has me pulling out the plug) or because they're desperately boring. I usually go back to the desperately boring games a day later, to see if they improve upon acquaintance (several have, quite significantly); some just get played for another hour. It's much easier to write a review of a game I've played extensively and enjoyed. The most difficult reviews to write are those of games which I can see are good but which I don't like or enjoy myself, I don't entirely subscribe to the view that reviews are necessarily a reviewer's personal opinion, I hope I can see that some games which do not appeal to me at all, and which I would never voluntarily play, have lots of strong and interesting qualities which readers who like that sort of thing will enjoy. That's why my reviews are predominantly descriptive. I give my opinion very much 'for what it's worth', and try on the whole to let you the reader understand what sort of a game is on offer. But that doesn't mean that I don't occasionally enjoy doing a really bad review of a game that I can't stand... and I hope you enjoy reading them. THE MORAL DILEMMA Last year the question was raised in FRONTLINE FORUM about whether it's morally justifiable to base games on war. The correspondence raised strong feelings on both sides. It's an issue which probably has to be faced by any thoughtful wargamer, and is worth further discussion. However, this isn't the place to debate the absolute moral issue of whether war is ever justifiable. The universal moral standard, that is always met - though never fully obeyed - in every society, condemns murder. But it also commends bravery, when it takes the form of defending one's immediate circle from danger; and it has to be true that this overrides the killing of another person, and does not categorise it as the murder which the same code forbids, Whether individuals choose to rise above this distinction and categorise all killing as murder doesn't alter the fact that the 'loophole' in human conscience is there, and that's why many sincerely good people have felt comfortable with the concept land indeed the experience) of going to war. So much for the irresolvable; the issue we're interested in is whether buying and playing wargames implies moral agreement with war in general is intrinsically wrong, or has nothing to do with the matter. Can you be an ardent pacifist and yet enjoy a game which simulates closely a historical battle? Or does such a game inevitably imply some sort of acquiesence in the fact of the battle? Should the large-scale slaughter of thousands of men (to put it emotively) be used as the background for a game? The attitude of mind implied in the last question (one that's quite often raised, especially in connection with games based on recent conflicts like Falklands '82) is that a game is of necessity a trivial thing, because games are played for pleasure. Most mental activities voluntarily undertaken are undertaken in the expectation of pleasure. If you read about the battle of Waterloo under duress, it is because you are doing it as part of a school exam. If you read about it for any other reason, it is because you are interested; you mean - if you're honest-that thinking about it and finding out about it is enjoyable to you. If you decide to take history as your subject at university or college, you do so -at least at first-because you think you're going to enjoy history. Two years later, as you plough through the book on Waterloo at half past three in the morning, you may not see it like that, but basically your pursuit of knowledge about Waterloo is for your own enjoyment. The research historians who wrote the book presumably gained pleasure from it, too, but nobody would reasonably suggest that because people enjoy learning about, thinking about and even imagining the battle of Waterloo - a matter concerning the deaths of many men that books about it are wrong. Logically this means that every unpleasant thing that has ever happened ought to be hushed up. The fact that we have a game based on the battle is merely an extension of the principle. Those who play miniature wargames often have a genuine and elaborate historical interest in the subject, and so - sometimes-do those who play computer wargames. But it would surely be wrong to think that a serious, grown-up 'historical interest' would sanction something intrinsically wrong, if it were intrinsically wrong. This holds true so long as the battle or war is a fact, which cannot be altered; and most wargames based on past wars are extremely deadpan, dry and factual. They reduced the experience to numbers, to a greater or lesser extent. If a particular game does not have a two-player option it is more often because of memory restrictions than any bias to one side. Even the potentially unsettling Falklands '82 was an unemotional and dull a game as could be imagined. It seems to me that wargames start to wander into dangerous territory when they approach the ideological: when they assume an inclination towards one side. Fantasy games irritate me in this respect, although of course they bear no relation to the real world; it is always the straight-limbed, clean-living humans from the south battling against the black and twisted evil ghouls from the north. On the other hand, people have as much right to write a game about apolitical opinion they may have as to write a book or an article about it. It doesn't follow that the act of playing the game will imply acquiescence with the view, any more than reading the book or article does. I come to the unexciting conclusion that playing wargames has nothing to do with agreeing with or disagreeing with war. That remains as much a separate issue from wargames as it does from books describing wars. It is merely a different way of exploring the seine material. DREADNOUGHTS AT JUTLAND Producer: Specsim, [redacted] Author: W G Munro Price: £14.95 (mail order from producer) The company which produces this game, Specsim, describes itself as 'an extremely small operation' with one previous game - Carriers at Midway - to its credit. I haven't seen this game but although it only sold to a few customers, their enthusiasm spurred on the author to attempt a more ambitious project: Dreadnoughts at Jutland is the result. Although the material that comes with the program cassette is reproduced in an inevitably basic fashion, it is encouraging to see that for once an amateur concern has taken the trouble to provide the text, if not the frills, of full documentation. Dreadnoughts at Jutland comes with a substantial photocopied 21-page manual. The mechanics of the game and technical details about the ships are well described, but there is no summary of the battle itself. Although one can glean a fair amount of information about it from the rest of the material in the book, this is a serious omission. The author is clearly knowledgeable on the subject: he ought to have indulged his knowledge in condensed form for the benefit of ignorant players like myself! As far as I can gather, the battle of Jutland took place on May 31st and June 1st. 1916. The First World War has never been anything like as popular with wargame designers as the Second, partly because it (presumably) contains fewer interesting campaigns and partly because it still exists in the minds of most people as an unjustifiable holocaust which ought not to be re-enacted as a game. However, sea-battles are different from the mud and squalor of the trenches, and it was in the First World War that machine first really met machine in combat. No machines were more glamorous than the new 'superships'. The first 'Dreadnought'was launched in 1906, the invention of Admiral Fisher. By the time it went into actual combat it had been modified into the battlecruiser - a design which relied on heavy guns and speed rather than armour, the theory being that a ship which was fast enough to get out of trouble quickly was at a greater advantage than one which was simply thick-skinned. The Germans also built battlecruisers, but they had fewer guns and were better protected. In battle, they proved to be the more successful design. Dreadnoughts at Jutland recreates what the designer describes as this 'exhaustively analysed'battle. A preliminary look at the rulebook is enough to make it clear that this is a game full of grim technical detail, aiming at accuracy rather than playability. Games about naval battles seem to me to be either fatuous and shallow, or overly technical and machine simulation orientated; the only game that I can think of which strikes a balance between the extremes is Silent Service. Dreadnought at Jutland is not a machine simulation - there are no buttons to press, and no control over combat - but it certainly relies on factual accuracy, and focuses attention on the ships rather than the battle. The player is given a choice between controlling either the British or German forces, or of a two-player game. The British forces are divided into two fleets, under the command of Admiral Jellicoe and Vice-Admiral Beatty, and subdivided into squadrons - the basic units of play. There are nine squadrons on the British side, made up of battlecruisers, which are dealt with individually and do most of the fighting, light cruisers, which have no offensive capacity and are used mainly for reconnaissance, and destroyers, which can only fire torpedoes. Squadrons contain only one class of ship, for the sake of simplicity. The light cruisers and destroyers are anonymous, but the battle cruisers have names and sets of statistics. Each squadron is under the command of a flagship. The turn sequence starts with movement orders, given to each squadron rather than to each ship. The squadron can be ordered to change direction, by means of a compass bearing and speed setting. The maximum speed of each ship in the squadron can be discovered from the information screen that can be called up at any time, and although a squadron cannot be ordered to travel faster than its flagship's maximum speed, the speed can be beyond the capabilities of certain ships in the convoy. Maximum speed is one of the things that ships lose rapidly when they are damaged, and so it is easy for ships to lose sight of their flagship and fall behind. Keeping a squadron together, particularly in low visibility conditions, is one of the most important tasks in the game. The main screen is a stylised view from the bridge of the flagship of the squadron currently under consideration. Various pieces of information are displayed in a basic fashion below the pictorial viewscreen: the time of day, the direction of the view, the current visibility, plus the course, speed and position of the ship. The screen shows a visual representation of what can be seen from the bridge, with reference, largely, to other ships. The player can choose to look with the naked eye, or go to two further degrees of magnification representing binoculars and telescopes. Ships seen ahead are identified by name, if visibility is reckoned to be good enough. When it is not, it is up to the player to decide whether the ship in view is friend or foe. There are no visual clues given in the rulebook, so this judgement has to be based on experience. The position of all the ships on the map - or those, at least, whose position is known - is plotted on a graph, and a reading of this plot is available only at 15 minute intervals. While I accept that the plot took time to prepare, and that it is reasonable to expect to have an update only infrequently, it is frustrating not to be able to refer to the last plot while waiting for the new one. I also found it difficult to make sense of the information illustrated: it is not at all clear what represents what on the on-screen diagram. There are five scenarios to choose from, even though the battle lasted for no more than a day. Three recreate particular incidents in that period, one allows you to play through something that might have happened, and one, naturally, allows you to attempt the entire confrontation. Solemn realism reaches its height in the scenario 'Night Action', which sounds almost unbearably exciting; 'because of the very poor visibility it is quite likely that there will be little or no contact or action during this scenario...' Combat takes place automatically when enemy ships are within range of each other, and it is displayed visually after the player has entered movement orders. The chances of hitting the enemy are influenced by various factors, including the visibility (which can be affected by the ship having to fire into the setting or rising sun) and the gunning ability of the particular ship. Confusingly, hits on the player's ships are shown from the enemy's bridge. If visibility is poor and the ship cannot identify a target, the player is given the chance to stop the attack. Lesser ships - the light cruisers and destroyers -are either sunk or afloat. The battlecruisers, on the other hand, go through a complex damage sequence before finally sinking. Their gun turrets can be knocked out, reducing their efficiency in combat, their maximum speed can be reduced, increasing their chance of accidently breaking away from the squadron, and general damage progresses through five stages from nil to very heavy. When a ship is damaged, the player is given the option of detaching it from the squadron. A damaged ship slows the squadron down, but getting rid of it when its gun turrets are large reduces the firepower. The range of reality factors 'rulepinned' is very great, and I know that many people get satisfaction out of that for its own sake. While I like to see complexity in a game of this nature, it is not enough to make it enjoyable to play. I found it very difficult to get any satisfaction out of playing Dreadnoughts at Jutland, as a simulation it lacks atmosphere and excitement, and as a game it is not interesting. On the other hand, I realise that some people will enjoy the historical accuracy more than I am able to, and there has certainly been a lot of thought, research and knowledge put into a game which, for an amateur production, is well presented. You will, I hope, be able to tell from my description whether this is your sort of game.