It's all rather BASIC

In one of those wonderfully examples of Kant's synchronicity (see my recent blog post about wargame design being an art and/or a science), last weekend I happened to find a copy of the very first wargaming 'publication' I ever produced. It was entitled COMPUTER ASSISTED WARGAMES ...

... and I wrote and sold it not long after the Sinclair Spectrum 48K came onto the market in April 1982.

The booklet was A4 in size, only ten pages long, and was split up into four sections:

1. Introduction ... in which I explained why I thought that computer assisted wargames (or CAWs) had a role to play in wargaming.
2. BASIC ... in which I listed all the main BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) commands used to write programs for the Sinclair Spectrum. (BASIC came in a variety of 'dialects' for different computers [e.g. the Commodore 64 and the BBC computers] that were mostly the same but which had some slight differences.
3. Writing a Computer Assisted Wargame ... in which I identified three stages in the process of writing a CAW:
1. The Program Specification.
2. The Program Layout and Game Mechanisms.
3. Writing the Program.
4. An example of a CAW – the writing of IRONCLAD! ... in which I listed the entire code used to write a CAW for a naval wargame that covered the period from 1875 to 1890.

From what I can remember, I demonstrated the program at at least one wargame show (probably SALUTE) using my Sinclair Spectrum, a cassette tape player (on which the program was stored!), a small black & white portable TV (my computer monitor!), and a number of model ships. I seem to remember that it all went rather well, and I sold out of my booklet.

The game mechanisms are rather interesting, and comprise six different calculations, some of which are done pre-game (the first three) and some of which (the second three) took place during the game. They are:

1. Flotation Factor Calculation ... which is ((2 x (Thickness of the iron Belt Armour in inches + Thickness of the iron Deck Armour in inches)) + (Standard Displacement in Tons/500)).
2. Manoeuvrability Factor Calculation ... which is (Length in feet/Beam in feet).
3. Ram Effect Calculation ... which is ((Standard Displacement in Tons/1000) x (Speed in knots/15)).
4. Number of Hits by Gunfire ... which is (a random number x (number of guns firing x rate of fire) +1).
5. Number of Hits by Torpedo ... which is (a random number x (number of torpedoes fired +1)).
6. Effects of a Ramming ... which is (a random number x (Ramming Ships Ram Effect) +1.

The tape on which the program was stored is now long gone, although I do still have my Sinclair Spectrum 48K ... and I wonder if it would still work today? It certainly generated some interest in CAWs at the time, mainly because the use of computers in hobby wargaming was still rather new.