if you want wargaming to be popular, people need a way to get into it. You need a lot fewer of the old grognards laughing in the faces of A&A p_layer_s as they express an interest in tougher wargames , and a lot more introducing people to mid-level games. I'm sorry, but you're not going to get a huge popular following this way. Amen. Ken Agress

Sid Meier's Civilisation isn't a wargame. The war is one of the features in this game. It is quite possible to play (and win) the game without fighting (except against Barbarians) at all. Yes, if you play at low levels. Sometimes it can be amusing to play as an island civiliazation at low level and try and win in isolation, but at any high level, you'll only win by taking everyone else out. I've never won at the highest level except by a policy of concerted war. True, but the real focus of the game is on the economics of your empire and their effects on your population. Ken Agress

As a matter of fact, such things could happen.< Yawn. The 'such things could happen' is a boring straw-man argument. The below account was much better reading for it being informative and historic.<< Well, to each his own.  I happen to value imagination quite highly; therefore I do not confine mine to the merely informative and historic. But that's not the question.  Does simulating the possibility of the dreaded potato attack make a good game? Ken Agress

   I like your imagination, and in fact in reality stranger things have happened.  Ever hear of the 'great potato battle'?  I don't recall the name of the ship involved but in WWII a german sub recharging its batteries on the surface came upon a merchant ship that carried depth charges but no surface guns.  It simply tooled up and ordered the ship to surrender.  One of the sailors got upset, yelled a few obsenities and started throwing potatos at the sub.  A few of his commerads joined in. The german captain apparently mistook the potatoes for handgernades and ordered the sub to dive.  One under the surface the merchant ship released its depth charges and collected the few german seamen that survived.  I'm sure realist war gamers would be appauled by any game that allowed a merchant ship without surface guns a chance of sinking a submarine that approched on the surface. Okay, so strange things happen in war.  Wouldn't you prefer to play a game that assigned a probability to the sub commander figuring out that the ship had no guns (allowing an attack on the surface to automatically succeed, or attack submerged and get blown away), rather than one that randomly determined if the ship carried potatoes that the captain interpreted as grenades so that he could get sunk? Now if the above had happened *twice* we might need to accommodate the special U-boat vs. Potatoes rule... Ken Agress

    When I was a kid, my dad shocked me by railing at me when I returned from the store with chocolate ice cream.   That's not ice cream! he said, I sent you to the store for ice cream.  I pointed to the box and said, It's ice cream; it says so right here.   No, he said, *vanilla* ice cream is ice cream; everything else is junk.  I think in the real world, that sort of thing is called being opinionated. But using your logic of subjective definition, he was right.  If you can view checkers as a wargame by envisioning a battlefield as you play, why is it invalid for him to view chocolate ice cream as junk? Ken Agress