Replaying the whole war ... it's not necessary

[MrsWargamer]

There is a major problem with any wargame the moment it gets past tactical. You run into the problem of what to do if you don't lose when in real life they did.

But this isn't normally a problem with tactical, and I actually strongly believe that is why most tactical games are successes even when in some cases the designs are full of gaffes.

I love a lot of games at the grand strategy level, but even the ones I love often have issues. The what if barrier that some love without any regard to how impossible their requests are is the main head ache in most cases. It's rarely about getting the local battles correct, it is all about what do you do if the side that lost doesn't lose.

We can code a lot into games, but, it's no small trick inventing non existent history.

I can quote several battles that SHOULD have been fought and weren't and often for reasons no one can understand. Battles that if they had been fought would have dramatically altered the entire war. For their not taking Malta, I think the Axis lost the war. It cost them the Suez and it caused them to lose the Med, and that meant the allies were able to start the march on Rome. If Suez had fallen you can bet the whole of the Middle east was gone, and then the Germans meet the Japanese in India and you can kiss the Russians good buy because they were not in any possible to fight off both Germany and Japan in 43.

But how do you design a game to reflect that? They never took Malta. Although in a wargame, you can always just say screw the losses, I don't care if I wipe out the whole of the airborne, they'll die heroes to their country. I am fairly sure Hitler just lacked any real imagination in the long run.

The thing is, war is about politics gone nasty, but it is still politics that starts wars. And yet most wargames ignore politics or just consider it a secondary nuisance.
Hitler was an idiot for not freeing the Ukrainians from Stalin, but it didn't suit his politics. He was an idiot for throwing away the 6th army, but again, he was never a real general, and all of his early victories did him more harm than he realized later in the war when it was proven beating up the helpless doesn't make you a genius. The fact his generals hung on so long means they should have been running things in the first place. Lucky for us Hitler sucked. The majority of the reason it is so easy to hit Russia in 41 was because Stalin had just given his military a lobotomy. If he had not done so, I dare say Hitler's first year in Russia would likely have been his last.

But none of the above even matters to tactical games.

And the real reason I play most wargames is really to see if I can out general a general in a famous battle. Proving I am more capable that Hitler, well hell that isn't even a challenge. But I also have hindsight. Not to mention I lack his blind obsession with racism deciding what political decisions to make.