The Wargaming Erratic

Pure logic – 0 or 1 take your pick.

Fuzzy logic is a legitimate process using the principle that things can be something other than 0 or 1 but still logical.

Ok so you can apply “fuzzy logic” to scales and a popular example online is the “likert” scale which is commonly used in questionnaires where the results are then subsequently analysed. That’s the questions that ask you about satisfaction but give you “least” “mostly” or “neither nor” type options instead of an exact a scale of 1 to 5.

Anyway I was musing about Fauxterre 1930 – my “nearly mechanised” period (I blame a certain Chris for most of this modern stuff that’s invaded my wargaming).

I was dwelling on the location Fauxterre 1930 in my artificial world and how I would map it.

My problem was that unlike earlier periods on my imaginary planet Edrador, Fauxterre started life as a 20th century concept so mapping was naturally more contemporary and my campaigns felt more compelling with real maps being used, instead of the type I make myself for earlier periods which in fact feel better with the inaccuracy and uncertainty for those earlier times – although I have made exceptions: Crikey I have even resorted to hex maps for some.

In the event a couple of things collided to solve the issue. I remembered a very old website where a guy had been cutting up modern maps into pieces and glueing them randomly then giving them a faint wash. At a distance you could believe the resulting collage they made were just like real maps. So he was creating lots of new worlds daily with this method. Yep – crazy normal just like us wargamers.

I don’t remember the “why” but I do remember the impact it had on me – instant artificial map creation – through collage or fuzzy logic. In this case your eyes told you the reworked map pieces were accurate so the “whole” must logically be accurate.

But the thought of trashing old maps left me cold. He was using newly discarded maps and was not bothered about content.

My first foray in this area was when I retired a giant ring bound world atlas. I decided to create a complete map of Edrador. I merrily cut up the atlas and created a brand new map of the lands. I then traced over the coast outlines, mountains and primary rivers before binning the map pieces themselves.

I actually wrote a history moment into it making my older artificial maps ancient maps discovered by an Edrador mapmaker who I set in the turn of the 17th/18th century. This conveniently allowed me to “retire” some countries and “create” some new ones in their place with no linking history necessary – well as yet.

It was a satisfying exercise.

Mapping Edrador has remained a vague exercise, quite a contrast from my earlier era of accurate mapping for scaled movement campaigns.

And of course some famous authors who promoted such gaming in parallel confessed a different approach!

https://thewargamingerratic.home.blog/2021/06/12/fauxterre-campaigning-without-maps/

Fast forward and nowadays you can pick up maps in charity shops – ok the 50p bargain era has gone but for £1 or in my case the other day £1.50 you can have even antique maps.

I had taken to buying some of these maps for certain parts of Europe for my 17/18th century campaigning (another one of the exceptions noted above).

Then I found a map of Iceland and the linguistics being what they are I suddenly thought I could use the map without the place names distracting my imaginative world version of the map. And then I thought if I turn more familiar maps upside down you get the same effect. You zone out the resulting gobbledegook.

And so right now my approach for more modern Edrador is to go with printed maps used upside down.

And then the other fudge is to ignore scales of the maps except in the general sense of type.

That means I might have a large scale map of a region and then use a smaller scale map to represent an area of the larger scale map. But here is the abstraction – the large scale map might be part of America while the small scale element might be European!

I know it sounds crazy but my campaigning is very abstract so differences are just ignored: it’s another fuzzy logic step. And this is all solo so I don’t need to convince another human to go with the “conceit”.

Fuzzy Logic nicely describes this fudging. The win for me is little investment in mapping for areas only used to fight over and maybe only once as well – all economic and political aspects being off map tabulations or using some other simple mapping technique.