I think the former is the easiest and most-overlooked one.
As somebody who has tried several times to get a working supply route system that is actually acceptable, no not really. You can make a supply
system pretty easily though and just throw modifiers at it.
The reason why wars happen and will always happen is simply because the amount of territory you hold is the most visible demonstration of success. Even in games like RIOT, Fiat Lux, Multipolarity, and the recent crop of post-province economic mechanics, you still have players going to war
despite there being no shortage of resources.
Think about that. In RIOT, you can build factories. Forever. Your EP could go up
forever with no problems. Why did players go to war still? Simply because without designing interesting, non-military mechanics, everybody ends up going to war. While RIOT did have events (for a while at least), the fact that wars would happen wasn't out of the question.
Even in the Multipolarity line of games, wars still occur despite the mechanics clearly penalizing players who do so because there usually isn't else much to do. There are no internal politics, only politics with your neighbors, and in the end, the most important thing in most games is getting one up over your opponents. The drive to have the best military, most expansion empire, strongest economy, highest tech, and the most prestige will always drive conflict, and war is the easiest outlet for that conflict because the effects are easier to see.
Surprisingly, a decent system that does a better job of forcing players to deal with internal issues is a system that isn't used often except in Valkyrie, Iron and Blood, and These Divided States. Factions, tailored-made and unique to each country, but with some overarching elements that can lead to factions in other countries getting along more often than not, can make internal politics interesting and provide a far better internal dynamic than the current Revolt Risk system.
Didn't guard the docks? Supply shortage. Blew up the airport? No reinforcements. Raped and pillaged everything in my path? Can't cry when the local warlords side with my mortal foe.
In a game with supply costs for units where supply can be underpaid at the cost of combat efficiency, I believe it is very much possible to model attacks on airports and docks simply by adjusting supply costs. It isn't like modifiers to supply costs in previous IOTs don't exist, given MPR had a modifier to supply cost based on tech, and other games had it based on mobilization levels.
Throwing in extra modifiers such as
actual strategic bombings should be possible.
Because in real life, combat is not linear, and field tactics do matter. I won't get into pedantic examples, but suffice to say that a purely numbers game leads to gross obfuscation, indeed trivialization of scale. I'm not saying stats-war is bad and must be replaced as a matter of course; a lot of players want a system that at least looks empirically predictable. But to write off roleplay war completely is a mistake, and I'm immensely frustrated by people who present it as an either-or dichotomy.
I find the problem of players trying to be field officers of their own armies to be just that, a problem. In a game where war orders do matter, the people hurt are not only the people who would perform well in a game like SonRisk by providing concrete orders, but also people who don't know the in's and out's of military strategy. At the heart of most of these games, players are leading a country. The Emperor of Rome doesn't command troops fighting against Federal forces in India himself. He delegates.
The focus should be on grand strategy, not on field tactics, because field tactics can easily be represented with a the RIOT-styled Leadership and Front system which served the game well for a good six turns before I made the mistake of switching to a tech-focused system. The Leadership System had the advantage of representing the command limitations of trying to fight a two-front war far better than any previous combat system I have ever worked with and had the implied advantage of removing the player from the role of a general of an army to the commander of an entire armed forces.
The commander sets goals, guidelines, and targets. The commander isn't usually commanding brigades in Central Asia.
Right now, a RP-focused system often forces the player into the role of Warrior Administrating Poet where he has to not only do something you would expect your staff officers to do, but set policies that should really have been left to the administrative officials in a bureaucracy, and pretty much
control all aspects of governance.
It just doesn't work that way. Why should the President of the Federal Republic of Coastal Nations concern himself with the details of the bombing of a Roman port in Persia? Isn't that what his generals are for? Sure, the President could take a hands on approach and plan the bombing of a Roman port in Persia, but the idea that the port won't be bombed, airstrip destroyed, or highways attacked without implicit instructions from the leader of the country just seems wrong.
Remember that it is about tactics. Do we organise a trap? Target specific areas? Hold the line or retreat till the enemy warns out? Basic things that I am sure the stats have to consider in how the play is conducted.
No, no, and no. IOT is not about tactics unless I'm logged into a site other than CFC right now. IOT has been solidly about grand strategy for years.
A leader a thousand miles away from a front should not be the person planning traps on a tactical level.
So no, the stats do not have to take these things into account most of the time because unlike the strategic bombing of strategic assets, which tree your hide a soldier behind is so irrelevant to the numbers, that it would take a lot of zeros after a decimal place for it to even be represented.
The basic size of a military unit in an IOT is brigade strength at 1000 to 3000 troops, division strength at 10,000 troops, or simply general "armies" which can imply anything from a company to hundreds of thousands of troops. The action of a single soldier when placed against the fact that most wars see tens of thousands of combatants on both sides doesn't matter in the same vein the actions of a single squad during the Battle of Verdun probably really didn't matter.
If players should concern themselves with anything about the war beyond where to commit scarce military assets, then it should be on strategic items, not "we are going to move this company up this street in this city to take that building".
