Saganami Island Tactical Simulator
<p>I like SF.  I like wargames.  I like naval adventure fiction.<br />
These tastes put me square in the middle of the target audience for<br />
David Weber&#8217;s <cite>Honor Harrington</cite> novels.  And yes, I do<br />
enjoy them; Weber may be a hack, but he&#8217;s a very competent hack who<br />
delivers good entertainment value for my money.  So I was pleasantly<br />
surprised to learn, this weekend at the annual Philadelphia Science<br />
Fiction Convention (Philcon), that there is now an Honor Harrington<br />
wargame &mdash; Saganami Island Tactical Simulator (SITS).</p>
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<p>Weber started out as a game designer writing novel-length<br />
game tie-ins before launching the Honor Harrington books in the early<br />
1990s.  In retrospect, it&#8217;s a little surprising that an Honorverse<br />
wargame didn&#8217;t get produced ten years ago.  There has long been a<br />
flourishing genre of wargames that simulate 3D space combat;<br />
<cite>Star Fleet Battles</cite>, set in the Star Trek universe, is<br />
perhaps the best known of these.  A tie-in to the Honorverse should<br />
have been a natural.</p>
<p>On the other hand&#8230;most tactical space wargames are junk.  As much<br />
as I enjoy SF and wargaming, I can&#8217;t stomach a game that (as so many<br />
do) just blithely handwaves away the actual physics of space combat.<br />
Another deeply annoying flaw of most space wargames is that, though<br />
space is a 3D maneuvering environment, they tend to have at best<br />
rather poor support for modeling 3D movement and tactics.  You end up<br />
with games that are essentially 2D naval maneuvering with a thin and<br />
patchy SFnal veneer.</p>
<p>If all I&#8217;m going to get is 2D maneuver with funny-shaped ships, I&#8217;d<br />
really rather play a Napoleonic-era naval wargame like <cite>Wooden<br />
Ships and Iron Men</cite> or <cite>Close Action</cite> &mdash; one<br />
that sweats the details, that tries to get cannon ranges and<br />
wind-driven movement right.  And in fact I have a lot of experience<br />
with such games.  In general, I find they reduce space wargames to the<br />
status of unsatisfying shams by contrast.</p>
<p>So I am pleasantly astonished to report that SITS (or rather, the<br />
earlier <cite>Attack Vector Tactical</cite> game it&#8217;s based on) is a<br />
true breakthrough in 3D game design. By use of an ingenious bit of<br />
shaped plastic called a <q>tilt block</q>, SITS ship miniatures can be<br />
placed with an 0, 30, 45, or 60-degree increment of roll or pitch with<br />
respect to the game table.  The movement and firing rules use charts<br />
that hide a lot of 3D-geometry and spherical trigonometry under an<br />
easy-to-use interface.</p>
<p>Thus, you can really do 3D maneuvering in this system &mdash; and I<br />
did, in fact, in a demo game that pitted two Havenite<br />
<cite>Sultan</cite>-class battlecruisers against a Manticorn<br />
<cite>Star Knight</cite>-class heavy cruiser.  The system reproduces<br />
the feel of Honorverse battles from the books extremely well, even to<br />
the point where it models the attrition of missile salvos by several<br />
layers of defenses from countermissiles down to sidewall.  We even had<br />
one of those explosion-wreaks-havoc-on-the-Manticoran-bridge scenes<br />
Weber likes so much happen quite naturally.</p>
<p>Unlike most Peep division commanders in the books, I knew how to<br />
use my tonnage advantage effectively &mdash; in this case, &#8220;Never mind<br />
maneuvers, just go at &#8216;em&#8221;.  And the Manties didn&#8217;t have Honor<br />
Harrington on the bridge pulling miracles out of her butt.  So this<br />
time, the good guys lost.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s a sign of good design that I was able to apply the tactics<br />
that are supposed to work in the Honorverse books and get the<br />
notionally correct result.  I was also impressed by the fact that the<br />
designer, Ken Burnside, modeled physics so carefully in his ruleset<br />
that there are explanatory sections describing the heat-dissipation<br />
equations he used.</p>
<p>Yes, there is a certain amount of handwavium and unobtainium in the<br />
game system &mdash; the Weber books are space operas, after all.  But Ken<br />
(who I met and got to talk with) keeps the McGuffins to the bare minimum<br />
necessary to capture the feel of the Honorverse.  For me, this painstaking<br />
effort at verismilitude makes the whole system far more enjoyable.</p>
<p>The only criticism of this game I have is that it is too<br />
complicated to be accessible to most casual or social gamers.  While<br />
Ken Burnside&#8217;s components do a tremendously clever job of simplifying<br />
your tactical information management, the game domain is irreducibly<br />
complex and it shows.  Personally, I relish that as a challenge, but<br />
undeniably this game is not going to be a hit with the<br />
beer-and-pretzels crowd.  Only serious gamers need apply.</p>
<p>For those serious gamers, the rewards will be large.  SITS aims<br />
both to break new ground in realistic tactical space wargaming and to<br />
capture the drama and feel of the Honor Harrington novels.  It<br />
succeeds at both these objectives, combining them with a panache I<br />
would have thought impossible until I saw it.  Kudos to Ken Burnside<br />
and Ad Astra games for a truly superb design, which I hope and believe<br />
will permanently raise the bar in space wargaming.</p>
<p>(Note: when I told Ken Burnside I was likely to plug SITS on my<br />
blog, he asked me if I did so to add the caveat that <cite>Attack<br />
Vector Tactical</cite> is temporarily unavailable due to production<br />
constraints.  I gather they&#8217;re having to work hard just to keep up<br />
with the demand for SITS.)</p>
