As I’ve done it hundreds of times, you’ve probably done it hundreds of times too. You’re embroiled in a virtual battle and, faced by a particularly stiff challenge or tough adversary, find yourself scouring your force for ‘old hands’ – the units with the most experience. Experience = skill and resilience, right? The more action a unit has seen, the more effective it is in combat. Computer wargame designers rarely seem to challenge or nuance this ‘truth’. Perhaps they should.
You don’t have to read many military memoirs to find passages that undermine the common ‘more experience = more effective’ assumption. If you’re a subscriber to the idea that most humans have a finite reservoir of courage and composure, a reservoir that is drained by exposure to the dangers and horror of war, and is impossible or almost impossible to refill, then a veteran unit is, inevitably, a unit populated and, possibly, linchpinned by frazzled and fragile individuals.
In real war, martial experience can spawn reluctance as well as competence. Understandably, warriors, especially conscripted ones, who have diced with death on numerous occasions in the past, may feel ‘We’ve done our bit. Someone else should stick their neck out this time’. Ironically, what green units lack in aggro acumen, they can sometimes make up for in naive enthusiasm.
With the odd exception, digital wargames seldom put us in situations where selecting a veteran unit increases the risk of a modified or ignored order, of slower progress, even outright mutiny. We’ve grown accustomed to regarding ‘experience’ as an unqualified positive when, arguably, its actually a double-edged sword. Cornerites, can you think of any wargames with novel takes on unit experience, and would you be interested in playing a title that tackled the subject a little differently?
I’m curious how a mechanic like this might work alongside the more short term fatigue and morale. Perhaps as some kind of trait there’s a risk of getting via fatigue/morale thresholds?
Not a wargame exactly, but Darkest Dungeon has this kind of mechanism whereby your adventurers simulataneously get better and worse as they gain experience but also trauma. I’d also be interested if anyone knew of any work that dealt with this over different time periods. Do the same processes play out in both the Medieval and WWII despite the different nature of warfare? Do periods in which there is a ‘campaigning season’ result in different patterns, when most people get the winter at home to recover?