Strategy Simulations and War Games: Where to Start (Ep.93)

Jack, Adam, and Nuno tackle war games and military simulations, tracing their roots to 18th-century tabletop origins, mapping a path from Company of Heroes to hardcore titles like Combat Mission, and arguing that enjoying the genre means abandoning the urge to win and embracing common sense instead.

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This episode explores war games and military simulations as a distinct genre from traditional RTS and turn-based strategy, tracing the term’s origins to 18th-century tabletop military exercises still used by NATO today. The hosts discuss the genre’s notorious barrier to entry, driven by obtuse mechanics, poor tutorials, and overwhelming abstraction, before mapping a practical progression path from accessible tactical games like Ultimate General: Gettysburg and Company of Heroes through intermediate titles like Men of War and Call to Arms toward hardcore simulations like Combat Mission. A central theme throughout is that war games reward players who abandon competitive instincts in favor of historical curiosity and common-sense decision-making. The conversation closes with detours into space sim X4: Foundations, racing and life sims, and military simulation shooters like Squad, Hell Let Loose, and Arma, which the hosts identify as an underexplored overlap between strategy gaming and multiplayer FPS design.

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Critical Moves Podcast – Episode 93 Show Notes

Episode Title: War Games and Simulations
Hosts: Jack, Adam, Nuno
Episode Length: ~72 minutes

Episode Summary

This episode examines war games and military simulations as a genre distinct from mainstream RTS and turn-based strategy titles. Nuno traces the term’s origins to 18th-century tabletop military exercises still used by modern militaries, including NATO’s use of Command: Modern Operations. The hosts discuss why the genre presents such a steep barrier to entry, driven by overwhelming abstraction, poor tutorial design, and mechanics that punish players used to conventional strategy game logic. They map out a practical entry path through progressively complex titles, argue that enjoying war games requires abandoning the desire to win in favor of historical curiosity, and close with broader detours into space simulation, racing games, and military simulation shooters.

The Origins of War Gaming

Nuno explains that war gaming predates video games by roughly two centuries, tracing back to 18th-century Prussian military exercises used to simulate real conflicts, including notable applications during World War II’s Atlantic theater. He notes the term persisted through tabletop wargaming’s rise before naturally transitioning to digital formats in the late 1980s and 1990s, with modern examples like Command: Modern Operations still used by NATO and the U.S. military for genuine training purposes.

Why War Games Are So Hard to Get Into

Adam and Nuno discuss the genre’s notorious accessibility problems, citing games like Panzer General and Shadow Empire as examples where overwhelming mechanical complexity discourages newcomers before they can appreciate the depth on offer. Nuno identifies three common but flawed approaches to onboarding players: providing no guidance at all, offering university-lecture-level tutorials (citing Command: Modern Operations as an extreme example), or burying newcomers in 500-page manuals like War in the East’s physical rulebook.

Liking the Idea Versus Enjoying the Reality

Nuno argues that many players are drawn to war games conceptually, imagining themselves as brilliant tacticians, but abandon them once faced with genuinely tedious logistics management like tracking ammunition supplies, arguing this disconnect between fantasy and mechanical reality explains much of the genre’s reputation for frustration.

Playing With Common Sense

A recurring theme throughout the episode is that war games become far more intuitive once players stop treating them like conventional video games and start reasoning as if commanding real soldiers, considering fatigue, morale, ammunition limits, and realistic troop behavior rather than optimizing for mechanical efficiency alone.

Abstraction as the Core Barrier

Nuno explains that the more abstracted a war game’s scale (division-level or higher), the harder it becomes for newcomers to intuitively grasp cause and effect, since outcomes are represented through numbers and menus rather than visible action. He recommends starting with tactical-level games, where individual soldiers and vehicles are visibly rendered, making consequences immediately understandable without needing to parse spreadsheets.

Recommended Entry Points

Nuno recommends Ultimate General: Gettysburg (and its sequel, Civil War) as ideal starting points due to their tactical-level visibility, realistic morale systems, and relatively low cost, alongside Combat Mission for similarly granular, soldier-level simulation. For players coming from Company of Heroes, he suggests Men of War and Call to Arms as intermediate steps, praising their modular vehicle damage systems, ammunition management, and historically accurate campaign missions (including a Monte Cassino-style hill assault and Eastern Front ammunition scarcity scenario), alongside the surprising ability to control individual soldiers or tank crews in third-person view.

You Do Not Have to Win

Nuno argues that a fundamental mindset shift is necessary to enjoy war games: they are not competitive or balanced experiences, but historical simulations where losing a desperate, historically plausible last stand can be just as satisfying as victory. He recommends pairing gameplay with historical reading to deepen appreciation for developers’ research and design choices.

Playing Your Own Country’s History

Adam shares the particular challenge of playing as Poland in Hearts of Iron IV, given the country’s historically difficult wartime position, while both hosts discuss the added personal investment that comes from replaying historical battles involving one’s own national history, whether triumphant or otherwise.

Is Stellaris Really a Simulation?

Jack pushes back on categorizing Stellaris as a true simulation game, arguing that while it uses algorithms to represent economic and political systems, it lacks the granular, physically simulated detail of games like Aurora 4X or Cities: Skylines, where individual buildings and events directly and unpredictably affect outcomes rather than following scripted event logic.

Finding Your Gateway Game

Building on the accessibility discussion, Jack suggests that transitioning into deeper simulation requires finding an individualized “gateway game” that gradually introduces consequence-driven mechanics, using his own hypothetical progression from Hearts of Iron IV toward more granular military simulations as an example.

How Paradox Simulates Each Historical Era

The hosts discuss how Paradox Interactive’s grand strategy catalog each centers its core mechanics around the defining feature of its historical period: Victoria 3 emphasizing trade, Hearts of Iron IV emphasizing pure warfare, Crusader Kings emphasizing dynastic politics and family intrigue, and Stellaris representing humanity’s hypothetical era of space exploration and expansion.

X4: Foundations and the Pull of a Space Sim

Jack discusses his long-standing interest in X4: Foundations, a deeply simulated space trading and economy game currently on its ninth major update, while expressing hesitation about committing time to a game whose payoff (described by Adam as potentially not fully unfolding until 150+ hours in) requires such substantial investment. Adam shares his own 10-hour experience with the game, describing its slow-burn progression from single-ship action toward full economic simulation, and notes a colleague’s enjoyment of it as a relaxing, low-commitment Steam Deck game played in short sessions.

Racing and Life Sims

In a lighter aside, Jack discusses his enjoyment of Forza Horizon, Adam describes his fondness for Dwarf Fortress’s granular dwarf-level simulation and Gran Turismo’s relaxed, atmospheric presentation, while Nuno reveals a preference for the accessible, forgiving War Thunder over more hardcore tank and flight simulators.

Mil Sims: Squad, Hell Let Loose, and Arma

The conversation shifts to military simulation shooters, which Jack frames as an underexplored genre borrowing heavily from strategy game logic within a multiplayer FPS format. Nuno names Hell Let Loose as his most-played first-person shooter of all time, praising its realistic tactical employment, and describes the satisfaction of coordinating squad-based tactics in Squad using real communication and battlefield awareness. Adam shares an anecdote about a friend who creates custom 3D weapon and equipment models for Arma, often commissioned by military veterans willing to pay significant sums for personally meaningful, historically specific gear.

Are Mil Sims a Kind of War Game

Jack and Nuno agree that military simulation shooters function as a genuine subgenre of war gaming, arguing that games like Squad sometimes simulate real tactical decision-making more effectively than some traditional strategy war games, given their reliance on genuine coordination, supply lines, and battlefield communication between real players rather than AI. Both hosts float the idea of a dedicated future episode exploring mil sims and other genres that borrow strategy mechanics without being strategy games in the traditional sense.

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Episode Verdict

This episode succeeds by treating an intimidating, often poorly marketed genre with genuine care rather than either dismissing it as inaccessible or overselling its complexity as a virtue in itself. Nuno’s repeated insistence that enjoying war games requires abandoning competitive instincts in favor of historical curiosity offers a genuinely useful reframing for listeners who may have bounced off titles like Panzer General or Shadow Empire in the past. The structured progression from Ultimate General through Men of War to Combat Mission gives the episode real practical value as an onboarding guide rather than just a discussion among enthusiasts. The closing detour into mil sims feels like a natural, well-earned tangent rather than a derailment, and the hosts’ shared recognition of untapped overlap between strategy design and multiplayer FPS mechanics sets up a promising direction for a future episode.