American Revolution

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by maximara

WWI gets overshadowed by WWII. Heck, one of the few video games set in WWI (Battlefield I) effectively turned it into WWII with a different skin. Its like no one knows what to do with it.

Part of the reason is that the history of the Great War is overlaid now with layers and layers of a-historical nonsense. Some of it is later-period political stuff added on, some of it is sentiment or anti-sentiment, some of it is just confusion and misunderstanding.

From the POV of the victors, WW II is 'simpler', the issues superficially (but not really) more clear-cut, than WW I. The technology and tactics are also more familiar, again superficially, because of Hollywood and because lots of people have known people who were part if it first-hand, and it's still, just barely, part of living collective memory.

But if you look at the Great War on its own terms, it's a fascinating period of history with many interesting story/game hooks.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by maximara

True but the main reason for trench warfare was there was a mammoth overestimation of how fast objective would be reached.

There is a reason the Operation Archduke mission in the Time Corp section deals with what is viewed as the key trigger to WWI but there were plenty of points where it could have still not happened.

Where that particular war could have been avoided, yes. But IMHO, almost all of the alternative scenarios still involve some kind of blow up at roughly that time. Like an overloaded snowbank on top of a mountain, an avalanche is likely even if one particular stone doesn't fall.

But what's interesting is how many different ways it all could have shaken out. IMHO, a major European/global war of some kind in the 1900-1920 period was almost inevitable, but the details and which power allied with which were highly fluid and could easily have fallen out very differently, with substantial later effects.

Returning to the American Revolution, I think it falls somewhere in the mid-range of 'inevitability'. Pressure had been building up for decades, in part because of unwise decision making in London (as documented by Barbara Tuchman among others), but more fundamentally because the enormous oceanic gap, and the communication and travel gap it generated, led to a widening cultural gap between the Colonies and the home country. Even when there was good will on both sides, they increasingly 'talked past each other'.

I don't know that a crisis of some kind was avoidable, but a full-on revolution might have been, and it's possible that loyalist feeling might have prevailed in some Colonies if the British government had been wiser in preceding years. A time travel campaign might not be able to prevent the crisis, but they might be able to reshape the outcome, maybe creating something like dominion status decades ahead of time.

Which might in turn rewrite history enough that something recognizably akin to the British Empire remained a dominant power into the 21C.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

Where that particular war could have been avoided, yes. But IMHO, almost all of the alternative scenarios still involve some kind of blow up at roughly that time. Like an overloaded snowbank on top of a mountain, an avalanche is likely even if one particular stone doesn't fall.

But what's interesting is how many different ways it all could have shaken out. IMHO, a major European/global war of some kind in the 1900-1920 period was almost inevitable, but the details and which power allied with which were highly fluid and could easily have fallen out very differently, with substantial later effects.

Returning to the American Revolution, I think it falls somewhere in the mid-range of 'inevitability'. Pressure had been building up for decades, in part because of unwise decision making in London (as documented by Barbara Tuchman among others), but more fundamentally because the enormous oceanic gap, and the communication and travel gap it generated, led to a widening cultural gap between the Colonies and the home country. Even when there was good will on both sides, they increasingly 'talked past each other'.

I don't know that a crisis of some kind was avoidable, but a full-on revolution might have been, and it's possible that loyalist feeling might have prevailed in some Colonies if the British government had been wiser in preceding years. A time travel campaign might not be able to prevent the crisis, but they might be able to reshape the outcome, maybe creating something like dominion status decades ahead of time.

Which might in turn rewrite history enough that something recognizably akin to the British Empire remained a dominant power into the 21C.

The book Three Victories and a Defeat: The Fall of the First British Empire makes it clear that, once the Tories came to power, their political ideals and goals were going to lead to a disaster. They built their coalition on people who saw the Whigs as crooks and grifters (they all called the government "The Old Corruption." They were determined to do things right but disinterested in finding out why things were done.

From the 18th Tory point of view Americans were freeloaders. That America had been taxed in lives lost in war and Indian raids, lost trade, years driven away from their farms, and economic chaos, never occurred to the 18th century Tories. Tory attempts to balance the books both ignored the suffering of the colonies and threatened the entire social structure of the colonies.

The Quebec Act and endless drive among the Tories to establish Anglican Bishops in American sees, something central to their identity, threatened to both close the frontier and to cancel all American deeds and inheritances. Basically. if the Tories got their way, all marriages not solemnized by the Church of England would be declared null and void. This would retroactively make almost all Americans illegitimate, in period this would make any inheritances invalid without special arrangements. Further, the Quebec Act, and rumblings by the government, convinced that Parliament was going to cancel all local legislatures.

By the 1770s the Tories had alienated the majority of the population, Even the Loyalists were constantly complaining about how Westminster treated them. The 18th century Whigs knew to build bridges, the 18th Tories totally rejected the idea.

[Tomsdad]

Originally Posted by maximara

I think that a problem with ACW is with Age of Napoleon it would have had an undercurrent of been there done that. Of the various Dixie realities I would say that only Dixie-1, 4, and 6 are viable without invoking any ASBs. Early’s Raid was IMHO to late in the war to do any good and Dixie-2 and 3 have a 'how did that happen' feel.

WWI gets overshadowed by WWII. Heck, one of the few video games set in WWI (Battlefield I) effectively turned it into WWII with a different skin. Its like no one knows what to do with it.

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

Part of the reason is that the history of the Great War is overlaid now with layers and layers of a-historical nonsense. Some of it is later-period political stuff added on, some of it is sentiment or anti-sentiment, some of it is just confusion and misunderstanding.

From the POV of the victors, WW II is 'simpler', the issues superficially (but not really) more clear-cut, than WW I. The technology and tactics are also more familiar, again superficially, because of Hollywood and because lots of people have known people who were part if it first-hand, and it's still, just barely, part of living collective memory.

But if you look at the Great War on its own terms, it's a fascinating period of history with many interesting story/game hooks.

Yep, definitely.

I actually quite liked Battlefield one for the simple reason that it showed more than just slogging through trenches in the western front. I mean where else does the Italian/AH front in the mountains get any love!

I think the several mini campaigns format worked quite well for showing different aspects of the war.

OK yes they did raid every single prototype gun cabinet of the period, but it's a online FPS it need's it's gun bling

[Crystalline_Entity]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

Returning to the American Revolution, I think it falls somewhere in the mid-range of 'inevitability'. Pressure had been building up for decades, in part because of unwise decision making in London (as documented by Barbara Tuchman among others), but more fundamentally because the enormous oceanic gap, and the communication and travel gap it generated, led to a widening cultural gap between the Colonies and the home country. Even when there was good will on both sides, they increasingly 'talked past each other'.

I think lessons were learned in London from the American War of Independence. No other British colony left the empire in such a violent fashion for a long time afterwards (maybe even until after WW2, not sure). I remember reading there was a reasonable amount of sympathy in the UK for the colonists at the time, at least until it became violent, so it's possible that a solution could have been found.

In a way, that's good for Infinite Worlds, either solution is plausible. The Britannia timelines include ones where there was a political solution acceptable to all parties, as well as military solutions where the colonial rebels lost. But equally, you could have alternate timelines where there was a solution in America, but the government in Westminster made the same mistake twice, so there was a War of Indepedence elsewhere in the 19th century. A "South African War of Independence", for example.

Which is a fertile ground for gaming if your group is interested in the different possibilities!

[The Colonel]

I would suggest the other reason that Parliament was so down on the aspirations of the American colonists was fear of a rival. It was not so long ago that Parliament had had to forcefully depose the King, and had since learned to control him by throttling the money supply to the royal exchequer … most parliamentarians feared another assembly that the King could persuade to grant him taxes, or who could otherwise be used to undermine Westminster.

Later independence movements sidestepped this because in the meantime Parliament had taken stronger controls of the reigns of power and was more self confident and better protected from royal meddling.

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by Crystalline_Entity

I remember reading there was a reasonable amount of sympathy in the UK for the colonists at the time, at least until it became violent, so it's possible that a solution could have been found.

There was certainly sympathy in parts of Britain, but (a) So what? 18th century Britain wasn't exactly excessively democratic by modern standards, so even if some independent thinkers and wealthy industrialists sympathised with the general American position, Parliament could just ignore them, and (b) Liberal-minded middle-class Britons who were all in favour of Liberty! would periodically visit London, meet visiting Americans who turned out to be slave-owning plantation aristocrat wannabes who'd come over here to go to the theatre and get laid, and conclude that liberty for slave-owners wasn't a cause worth defending.

I suspect a friendly-compromise political solution would involve American diplomacy hitting cinematic levels of awesome...

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Phantasm

WWI has a few things of note:
- Trench warfare
- Aircraft dogfights
- Armored tanks

All of which were new, and the latter two are also representative of WWII.


And trench warfare is not something anyone really wants to game, as it was a literal meatgrinder, infantry charging machine gun nests.

The first wasn't really new. It went back to the dawn of the gunpowder age. And that is just not counting temporary earthworks like what Romans made.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Phantasm

WWI has a few things of note:
- Trench warfare
- Aircraft dogfights
- Armored tanks

All of which were new, and the latter two are also representative of WWII.

WWI tanks and dogfights are both pretty profoundly different from WWII tanks and dogfights.

Most of the tanks are much larger, very short of power due to the weaker automotive technology, and have nothing like what later tanks would consider a main weapon. Tanks hardly ever fought each other, and anti-tank weapons hardly existed.

...Probably not great for gaming in most cases, since probably the biggest danger to a tank is mechanical failure or getting hung up in the terrain in a location where it's unsafe for the crew to get out and break it loose. But very, very different from the tank action of WWII.

In the air, the planes are also direly underpowered and very light by later standards. WWI is probably the only historical occasion where planes fighting an airship could be interesting or significant, thanks to the weak armament and climbing power of the fighters of the day. The same paltry armament made it possible to build an armored bomber that was highly resistant both to air attack and to most ground fire of the time (a spur for heavy machine gun development later). With poor streamlining, low power, and lightweight construction a lot of air combat maneuvers get pretty different too.

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

The first wasn't really new. It went back to the dawn of the gunpowder age. And that is just not counting temporary earthworks like what Romans made.

I remember studying the ACW and wondering why no-one in command during the Great War seemed to have studied it and learned the lessons of trenches, barbed wire and what have you. Then I saw that they had, and what they had learned is that siege warfare had changed incrementally over centuries - there is a reason that some of the crustier sources refer to barbed wire "abbattis" - they saw no fundamental difference between it and the chevaux frises and similar things of the past.

They had also learned the lessons of the Russo-Japanese War and the Balkan War: that, given sufficient aggression and a willingness to tolerate casualties, it was possible for lightly supported infantry to force their way through modern field defences.

They didn't count on the huge volumes of fortification materials that the Great Powers could create and deliver to their own back yard, which meant that trench warfare could move from siege conditions to ubiquity and that your aggressive, lightly supported infantry might well be able to break one line of trenches, maybe two … but sooner or later you would run out of men. They also missed a lesson available (if not obvious) from the ACW: that the train could bring up men to close a breach faster than the attackers could exploit it.