Grubby Old Grenzers

 Grenzer regts 16 and 17

So, June quickly draws to a close, not a bad month in the world of Austrians, despite a crippling work schedule (Sir Elton John and Lady Ga-Ga being demanding souls), nonetheless, I got over 90 figures whacked off. This included finishing the second 48 of Grenzer. This means I now have 96 of these critters, all with green facings. Subsquently I can use them either as 2 x 48 man units or as 3 x 32's which is some nice flexibility. Eventually I will add another 2 x 48, so will be able to field 4 x 48 or 6 x 32!

 32 man Grenze units are pretty weak in ITGM, which seems accurate.They fight and morale as militia - i.e only plus 1 for morale but they do fire as if they are veteran. So 48's can be a bit pokey in the right circumstances  (sat in a village is always a favourite) They are still a bit hopeless in woods though (move as militia) which doesn't seem quite right. I might need to think about this.

Front Rank officer throwing his weight around with his slimmer Connoissuer squaddies

I'm going back on track with painting line infantry next, this will be the seventh German btn, probably with pale grey facings. The first batch have just been undercoated and are awaiting the old Army Painter treatment.

After six months of not buying (m)any Napoleonic figures my purchasing gland has been getting twitchy. I've been checking out the Sash and Sabre range- I've got some samples on order from Old Glory UK, command for both line and grenadiers. Even if they are not quite what I'm after I'm sure they can be shoe'd into a unit somewhere. I'm over halfway with the line infantry, and will wind up with 16 btns of Germs and Hungarians....but it doesn't seem QUITE enough...so maybe a division of the S&S chaps would round off my army nicely. We'll see.

FR command, Connoiseur and Elite make up the rest

The other Company I've been looking at are Alban. While I like their infantry a lot, I don't think they will fit very well with the massed Elite units, which is a shame. However, the hussars they make look fabulous, and I don't think a cavalry unit will present the same asthetic problems. I don't have any Hussar figures yet at all (that may change very rapidly) but Austrians really should have plenty. I'd like to wind up with 3 units, and I might make them 48 man regts.

3 x 32 or 2 x 48...the choice is mine

Saddened to hear of the death of Paddy Griffith, I re-read his "Forwards into battle" recently. A fairly seminal work IMHO, one of those books that upset a few folk because it challenged the way they LIKED to think warfare was conducted, and arrived at conclusions which weren't cosy with their view. Part of what good historian should do.

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SNAFU

SNAFU: Situation Normal, All Fucked Up

I just wrote about having time away from the business. There are various approaches to freeing up time, and I wanted to mention what I think is the wrong way and of course, what I think is the right way.

The wrong way is streamlining. The book The 4-Hour Work Week sounds an awful lot like how I described my extended vacations. It's a New York Times bestseller that my own book will certainly never live up to. I can take months at a time off with 3-4 hours a week of actual work, but it has nothing to do with streamlining. I tried streamlining after reading this book and it was a short lived disaster. This book is about creating a turn key business, a machine really, that shaves off all the hard edges so you can spend as little time as possible running your business. I've mentioned it before, but this is not a hobby game store road map for more time. We thrive on exceptions and hard edges.

There is a lot to learn from business process books about creating processes and procedures, but in general, more and better customer service, more and better options, are the answer, rather than streamlining and offering less. I think doing one thing well is the key, but offering everything possible within that one thing with stellar service is why customers choose you. It's your Unique Value Proposition. Once a framework of processes and procedures was in place, I then empowered managers to create their own policies and procedures, sometimes with a few tweaks from me. It requires they understand the philosophy of the company. Overall though, it's not unusual for me to stumble on a new policy or procedure in my own business that I've never heard of. That's exactly what I want.

Policies and procedures to me are about how we can regularly hit high performance goals doing our one thing. If I can't do something repeatedly with high levels of success, I don't want to do it at all. For example, people ask me occasionally to ship them a game. We don't ship. If I made an exception, we would be in new territory and we would most certainly screw it up. If I'm going to ship, I'm going to ship a lot and I'm going to do it right, with a plan. Policies and procedures created by staff are often ones I might have shaved off, 4-Hour Work Week style, but their desire to serve the customer has lead them to create new systems to make customers happy.

What you won't find in a 4-Hour Work Week scenario is the huge amount of variability and passion required to run a store like this. It's complete, but bounded, chaos. A primary goal for us is to create a wide range of possibilities with policies and procedures addressing each, along with boundaries that limit customer demands. There is always that guy (or girl), who wants it one way, but it's the other. That's unfortunate for them.

We saw this with our recent ding & dent sale, amazing deals with long lines. There was the person who complained bitterly about waiting outside, even though we had little control or ability to let hundreds of people in early. There was the customer who wanted an even larger discount because the box was damaged! People will always want more and ironically, the closer you get to free, the more of your time people will consume. Post a photo of free stuff on a table to your Facebook page and watch your time evaporate as you answer endless questions.

There's a Zen saying, "If you want to control your cow, give it a wide pasture." This is a reference to your mind. If you want to control chaos, give it wide boundaries. Let chaos roam about and eventually it will get tired and take a nap. Some employees will not like this, as the chaos is hard to wrap their head around. It's why it takes six weeks for new employees to gain basic competence. Some customers will attempt to game the system or call out inconsistencies in the chaos. That's all part of roaming the pasture. Bounded chaos is the strategy.

With our wide boundaries, we can have strong customer service ... with hard limits. It's a chaotic environment with many variables, but employees are empowered to make important decisions, with leadership being fairly flat so most everyone is empowered. Leadership has to back employees for this to work, so rather than the customer is always right, the philosophy is employees first. It's common with some big businesses like the Virgin company. Am I the best boss? Heck no, but I'll always back an employee if they're following policies and delivering great service.

Do I fire customers? Yes, but very, very rarely. We have half a dozen permanently banned individuals in year 15: the double dealer, the white supremacist, the homophobe, the serial shoplifter; you get the picture. I recently fielded the question, "Where in your book does it say I should go fuck myself?" Grab me a pen, my friend. There's always room for another chapter.

This all works because I have really, really good staff, especially managers. I support them and let them run with the vision. All the credit goes to them.

What Isn’T An Advergame

We have already discussed the idea of advergames here at GAMING CONCEPTZ (you can check it here and here). On the other hand, it is also important to contextualize what cannot be considered an advergame.

We've already explained that an advergame is an advertising piece of campaign that : requires planning and an interface that puts together a brand/product/service and the gameplay

In this context, an advergame is not a ready-made game that one can simply insert a logo or a company's feature. In the following hypothetical example below, we see the interface of the classic Pac-Man game with elements from McDonald's brand. To insert these elements on the gaming interface does not make this game an advergame; there is no strategic view or branding planning, we only notice elements scattered in a videogame screen.



According to Cavallini (2006), the notion of advergame – a neologism formed from the juxtaposing of the words "advertising" and "game" – could be described as a marketing strategy that uses games, mainly electronic, to advertise brands and products. That includes a large range that goes from complex games that are developed specifically for advertising purposes to common casual games – much more complex than to only insert a logo in a classic gaming interface.

---

Reference:

CAVALLINI, Ricardo. (2006). O marketing depois de amanhã. São Paulo: Digerati Books.

#GoGamers

Sega CD - The Other CD Expansion

The Sega CD is treated like the unwanted step-child of the CD expansions.  Early CD systems and expansions before the PlayStation were not the breakthrough product their manufacturers hoped they would be.  They did not deliver the substantially superior gaming experiences they promised and were generally considered too expensive for what they did deliver.  And what they delivered was often unimpressive, ports of cartridge games with enhanced audio and superfluous cutscenes, FMV games which relied on route memorization, PC game ports that had no business being run on hardware that did not have a hard drive, a keyboard or a desk with which to use a mouse and interactive entertainment software which was barely interactive and not entertaining.  Today we are going to take a look at the Sega CD, its hardware, its quirks and ultimately the games that make it worth considering as a device on which to play games rather than to put on a collector's shelf.

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You say "obsessed" as if it is a bad thing.

LEGEND OF LOTUS SPRING

On this most romantic of days, why not play through a traditional Chinese love story in The Legend of Lotus Spring (1999, Xing Xing). Taking place in a beautifully re-created Garden of Perfect Brightness (Yuan Ming Yuan or the Old Summer Palace) in Beijing during the Qing Dynasty, it recounts the tragic love story between Emperor Xian Feng and his concubine HeHanQu, a woman who he lovingly renames Lotus Spring.

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Top 11 Best Highest Paying URL Shortener Sites to Earn Money Online

1. Cut-win: Cut-win is a new URL shortener website.It is paying at the time and you can trust it.You just have to sign up for an account and then you can shorten your URL and put that URL anywhere.You can paste it into your site, blog or even social media networking sites.It pays high CPM rate.
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Review - Book, AFM Volume 2, Part 2, A Treatise On Soviet Operational Art

This was a truly great find by Andy Miles who kindly posted it onto the Red Storm Rising facebook page.  It's not quite the British equivalent to the FM 100 series, it was written in 1991 from the perspective of understanding Soviet Operational Art as the British along with most Western Nations had given this particular subject a stiff ignoring for most of the Cold War. As the author puts it, the Western Nations experience of operations during WW2 was at a different order of Magnitude to the Soviet and points out that whilst the Western allies deployed some 3 Army Groups comprising 91 Divisions on a front of 400 km, in 1944 the Red Army had 10 fronts with 57 Armies and over 560 Divisions and Corps deployed on a frontage of 3200 km.

AFM Volume 2 was produced in 3 parts and whilst this review focuses on Part 2, I will look to pick up on parts 1 and 3 at a later date, for completeness the parts are:

• Part 1 is a Book entitled "Background to the Soviet Army 1986",  Christopher Donnellys "Red Banner The Soviet Military System in Peace and War (1988)" is the updated version of Part 1
• AFM Volume 2, Part 2, A Treatise on Soviet Operational Art
• AFM Volume 2, Part 3, Soviet Tactics

So what's different between this and the FM 100 series, its based on a similar variety of sources including the Vorisilov Lectures, which it contextualises against a late 80s Force structure and is fundamentally focused on the conduct of operations at Army and Front level, and the general Force Composition and task orginisation required to deliver that. I think it does this well focusing on the Soviet Approaches to Offensive and Defensive Operations, it also provides a variety of commentary on effectiveness and some interesting discussion around both drivers for change and the future, which is where it differentiates itself from the FM 100 series.

Equipment and Organisation is considered at a high level and with only sufficient detail to facilitate the main discussion and demonstrate the mapping between doctrine technology and force structures, which frankly the Soviets were masters of.

 It  broadly follows the structure of the Vorisilov Lectures material and includes a deal of informed comment, the main chapters cover:

• Equipment and Organisation
• Operational Planning, Context and Concepts
• Strategic and Operational Marches
• Offensive Operations
• Operations in the Enemys Depth
• Defensive Operations
• Combat Support
• Air Operations
• Amphibious Operations
• Logistics
• Command Control and Communications

Annexes include High level org charts and Broad equipment TOEs for Divisions, Armies and Fronts both within and outside of the Western Group of Forces

This is a book that you can either read or dip into, having said that the approach to dipping into it is likly to be go read the whole section on offensive opps and related elements on combat support. The Upside over reading the Vorisilov Lecture material is that the hard work of placing it in the context of the late 80s has been done and this work draws on wider material as well.

The author CJ Dick of the Soviet Studies Research Centre understands his subject well and attempts to explain the Soviet concepts as they stand rather than trying to equate Soviet military thought to  western ideas, an approach taken in a number of the US manuals which generates some very confusing discussions on echelonment and reserves amoungst others. These subjects are covered with far more clarity in this volume.

I particularly like the categorisation of the Cold War period into a number of Eras based on the prevailing doctrine and the discussion around its impact on force structures and organisation. These are articulated as:

• The Nuclear Era. Doctrine and force structures dominated by the concept of Combat under nuclear conditions
• The Era of a Conventional Phase. This period was dominated by the impact of two ideas.  The first was driven by the NATO's adoption of flexible response, which would lead to a Conventional Phase at the start of any war and if surprise could be achieved and Soviet Operational art delivered offered the potential of a conventional victory. The other was the vulnerability of tank heavy formations in conventional war demonstrated during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. 
• The Era of Conventional War. The result of the INF treaty and the failure by both the Warsaw Pact and NATO to upgrade their nuclear capabilities, lead to a belief in the increasing likelihood of an extended conventional phase or the possibility of a wholly conventional war

This is then neatly mapped to the evolution of the organisations and structures that occured over this period.  The rate of change that was feasible for an organisation the size of the Soviet Army also receives some attention. All of this starts to provide a degree of clarity to the variation in content of key sources on the organisations and structures employed within the WGF at different points in time.

Looking at the diagrams and discussion it seems clear that this work fundamentally underpins The Genforce Mobile Force Handbooks written in 1997 as OPFOR guides which provide excellent commentary on what was essentially Soviet organisation and practice but which because they are OPFOR guides I have always had concerns over how they were adapted and how representative they were of what was rather than what was aspired to.

Some of the organisational structures proposed in both this and AFM volume 2 part 3, Soviet Tactics are quite different from what is discussed elsewhere and I have yet to digest what that means and how or whether to reflect it into my current projects. 

As well as this post I have updated the Post on free resources on Soviet Organisation and Doctrine.  All up an excellent find, resource and for free well worth a read. I have a physical copy of the Vorisilov Lectures Operational Art and would love to find a physical copy of this to add to the collection but so far have looked without success. An excellent perspective on Soviet Operational Art

References:

Red Banner The Soviet Military System in Peace and War, C Donnelley, (1988) @ amazon
AFM Volume 2, Part 2, A Treatise on Soviet Operational Art
AFM Volume 2, Part 3, Soviet Tactics
Voroshilov Academy Lectures
Review-Web Resources, The Essentials of Cold War Soviet Doctrine and Organisation for Free
Genforce Handbook, Mobile Force Part 1, Operational Art and Tactical Doctrine, 1997
Genforce Handbook, Mobile Force Part 2, Tables of Organisation and Equipment, 1997

Other Book Reviews:

Rapid Fire Able Archer Rule Set
Review- Book, Today's Army Air Corps, P Beaver, 1987
The Race to the Swift

Soviet/Russian Armour and Artillery Design Practices
Modern African Wars (3) South West Africa
Red God of War, Soviet Artillery and Rocket Forces
Iron Division, The History of the 3rd Division 1809-1989
Jane's Armour and Artillery 2002/2003

Rats Tales and Royal Scots in The Gulf

Warpaint, Colours and Markings of British Army Vehicles 1903-2003, Volumes 1-4

Air Battle Central Europe, Alfred Price

Confrontation, The Strategic Geography of NATO and the Warsaw Pact

Mil Mi 8/Mi - 17 Rotary Wing Work Horse and War Horse

A History of Soviet Airborne Forces 

Soviet Tactical Aviation

A History of Soviet Airborne Forces

Soviet Tactical Aviation

Armies of NATO's Central Front

Red Thrust, Central Front

The Soviet Afghan War, How a Super Power Fought and Lost

Weapons and Tactics of the Soviet Army

Soviet Air Land Battle Tactics

The Military Balance

Encyclopaedia of the Modern British Army

The Soviet Conduct of Tactical Manoeuvre

First Clash

The Third World War

The British Army in Germany

The Cold War Bookstore contains links to over 60 Cold War titles covered in my book list

Ali's Post-Octopalyse Week 1 WIP Wednesday!

   Ok, so, I figured WIP Wednesday was a good way to show off my post-Octopalypse work. Especially considering I expect to start a lot more than I finish this month. Thing is, we are planning to play both Dark Age and This is Not a Test here in the old headquarters, and I have bupkis for both. And if there's one thing Second Class Elitist hates, it's gray soldier syndrome. And I'm not crazy about it myself. That being said, I'm not exactly playing high equipment lists in either game, so I need a LOT of models for both.

   I'm not that fast. As you saw last month, I can finish one or two models a week, tops, if I do them start to finish. It doesn't matter how many models I need. That's my pace. Period. So, I need an alternate plan to avoid playing with unpainted models.

   So here's my plan. I'm going to start by getting everybody table ready. Good old fashioned "basecoated in 3 colors, details exempt, base addressed" style. Across the board, all 2-3 dozen I need to get through a campaign-length ordeal. Then I'll go back in and build them up as I get a chance.

   I was really hoping to show you both my starter squad for Dark Age and my initial force for TNT, but that was not to be. The tardiness begins already. At any rate, I at least got started on Dark Age. I'm happy with the Coils for now, but I'm going to do a lot more guilding on Michael this weekend before I feel he's ready enough to move on. By the way,yes, that ruddy brown is the primer- we were short on the usual black and white, and I thought the reddish brown would go well with, well, frankly, any post-apoc. I'll explain my color scheme when I get a little further along.

   So there it is. Next week- the beginning of Tribals, promise!

(Sample) Size Matters

Sample Size Matters

On this blog and others, on twitter (@mwkraus), at conferences, and in the halls of the psychology building at the University of Illinois, I have engaged in a wealth of important discussions about improving research methods in social-personality psychology. Many prominent psychologists have offered several helpful suggestions in this regard (here, here, here, and here).

Among the many suggestions for building a better psychological science, perhaps the simplest and most parsimonious way to improve research methods is to increase sample sizes for all study designs: By increasing sample size researchers can detect smaller real effects and can more accurately measure large effects. There are many trade-offs in choosing appropriate research methods, but sample size, at least for a researcher like me who deals in relatively inexpensive data collection tools, is in many ways the most cost effective way to improve one's science. In essence, I can continue to design the studies I have been designing and ask the same research questions I have been asking (i.e., business-as-usual) with the one exception that each study I run has a larger N than it would have if I were not thinking (more) intelligently about statistical power.

How has my lab been fairing with respect to this goal of collecting large samples? See for yourself:

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European-Asian Divergence Predates The Industrial Revolution

Stephen Broadberry describes new estimates of per capita GDP which say that the economic divergence between Western Europe and other civilized parts of the world predates the industrial revolution.  (H/T Marginal Revolution).  This is more consistent with my own theories (linked below) than the idea that the Great Divergence magically appears from nowhere around the year 1800.  Nevertheless I feel compelled to point out shortcomings in these kinds of estimates, on any side of such debates.

There are the usual correctable, but sadly seldom corrected, problems with datasets comparing European economies over historical periods, for example using "Holland", and leaving out, presumably not only the rest of the modern Netherlands, but the entire area of the exceptional Low Country late medieval industry and wealth (Flanders, Brabant, Hainault, etc.), most of which migrated (along with most of the skilled craftsmen and merchants) to the Netherlands during the 16th century wars there.  The southern Low Countries, until those wars, were the leading centers of European textile manufacture and probably also had the most labor-productive agriculture.

Worse are these and all other attempts to compared historical European "wealth" or "income" to those of non-European cultures before the era of cheap global precious metals flows (initiated by the exploration explosion) allows comparison of prices.  How do you compare the "wealth" or "income" of rice-eating and cotton-wearing Chinese farmer to a milk-drinking, oat-eating, and wool-clad Scottish peasant? It it is neither very useful nor very reliable to try to reduce such cultural and even genetic differences to mere numerical estimates.

So it's no surprise to see such conjectural and subjective estimates subject to major revisions, and I'm sure we'll see many more such revisions, in both directions, in the future. That said, many of the economically important innovations in northwestern Europe long predate not only the industrial revolution, but also the Black Death (Broadberry's new date for the start of the Great Divergence), including the following biological bundle:

(1) heavy dairying

(2) Co-evolution of human lactase persistence and cow milk proteins

(2) delayed marriage

(3) hay

(4) greater use of draft animals


These innovations all long predate the Black Death, except that thereafter this biological divergence, especially in the use of draft animals, accelerated.  After a brief interruption the lactase persistent core resumed its thousand-year conversion of draft power from humans and oxen to horses, including super-horses bred to benefit from good fodder crops -- the Shire Horse, Percheron, Belgian, etc., and of course the famous Clydesdale of the beer ads.  Draft horses figured prominently in the great expansion of the English coal mines from the 14th to 18th centuries. They both pumped the mines and transported the coal to navigable water.  Due to lack of horsepower for pumping and transport, the Chinese use of coal, though already well established by the 13th century visit of Marco Polo, where both mine and consumer were within short human-porter distance to navigable water, failed to grow beyond that limit until the coming of the railroad.  Similarly draft horses, alongside the more famous water-mills, played a key role in the early (pre-steam) exponential growth of the English textile industry, the economically dominant feature of the early industrial revolution.

Greater use of draft animals led to higher labor productivity and larger markets for agricultural output, and thus to greater agricultural specialization. Higher labor productivity implies higher per capita income, even if it can't be measured. For civilizations outside Western Europe by contrast, much less use was made of draft animals with the result that these effects were confined to within a dozen or less miles of navigable water.

Contrariwise, northern Europe has always been at a severe ecological disadvantage to warmer climates when it comes to growing rice, cotton, sugar, and most other economically important crops.  However these seem not to have had an anti-Malthusian effect in increasing labor productivity -- the increased efficiency of rice in converting solar power to consumable calories, for example, simply led to a greater population rather than a sustained increase in per capita income.