Wargames: Talking Cheese

I watched BattleTech YouTube videos, and I came across a few that started talking cheese. And I saw this in Car Wars, starfighter games, Starfleet Battles, and it is a phenomenon that is especially common in wargames where you can design units.

You can design units to cheese the game mechanics, that is, to take advantage of the rules.

And then, when you talk cheese, you try to make those exploits make sense in reality. Especially if the designs are not even militarily practical or make any sense. Let's take the heaviest weapon in the game, put it on the lightest vehicle or mech we can manage, give it a few token points of armor, and field dozens of them when a scenario calls for a balanced force.

Who needs 300 tons of battle mechs in a scenario when you could have 30 ten-ton armored cars with lasers? Just swarm the other side with tons of cheese, multiple attacks by the buckets full of dice, and then say, "If the rules let me do it, this is a viable tactic."

There would be no need for battle mechs in this universe if that was a viable tactic.

Everyone would be doing it.

BattleTech needs a little suspension of disbelief for the universe to work. Given what we know today? Find them with drones and hit the slow, lumbering behemoths with laser-guided artillery shells. Also, in our endgame BattleTech campaign, we did just that, gave up on mechs, and designed cheap ground vehicles one side could field and lose dozens of and watched the mechs get picked apart with massed fire and artillery.

Yes, they were vulnerable to motive hits, but with this many and this cheap, who cares?

You can hide an AFV in a destroyed house or in a group of trees, while a mech is hard to conceal - and it needs to keep moving to survive. And due to the number of units involved, we could use maneuver and send a force around and hit them from the rear while still keeping them engaged on the front flank. Tons of cheap artillery were deadly.

The games were also unfun and slogged to play.

But we "won."

On a side note, some wargames are designed around the cheese tactic of swarming a big unit, and they do it exceptionally well. Steve Jackson Games' Ogre is probably the best example. But this game is designed around this concept, and it is a blast to play that giant, lumbering, slowly disintegrating monster as it trundles towards its objective. It is also a blast to play the defenders and futilely try to stop the beast in its tracks, knowing you can't destroy the beast outright, but target its tracks and try to slow it down or stop it and leave it as a monument of death that could still kill you if you got near.

BattleTech is different.

Yes, you could take a pickup truck, mount one massive long-range rocket, and send it into battle in the real world. Irregular forces do that. But no professional army does. That does not fit into any modern army's order of battle or tactics unless it is an irregular force, and you don't see defense contractors selling them. BattleTech has this code of honor and chivalry, and it also assumes a more ordered and substantial structure to house forces and mercenary forces.

Most military forces field balanced units that can deal with various threats in war. You can undoubtedly cheese the other side if you have perfect knowledge. But these units are often operating in hostile territory, without great intelligence, and need to be able to deal with a variety of threats equally.

When setting up scenarios, I tend to stay away from cheese units and tactics and use the more BattleTech frame of mind and thinking. I want to be in the commander's shoes when making those deployment decisions. The games are typically more enjoyable, and I feel I am more playing in the real universe of mech warriors than I am on some tabletop, wondering how I can cheese the rules to win easily.