A Distant P(l)ain: A Story of Relationships

It's been a few months since my review of COIN games as a whole and I wanted to come back to one of those games because largely I had felt like I had really explored the full potential of the game and why I consider it the best COIN games currently available. As a warning, though, I will largely avoid talking about the historical veracity of the game because, frankly, I do not know enough about the conflict to adequately be able to assess how true to life the game is. What I will concentrate on, however, is how closely the elements of the game attempt to evoke their intended function: I will largely be approaching A Distant Plain (ADP) from a gaming perspective since my otherwise amateurish attempts at historical analysis would be otherwise rather insulting.

So, first of all, why do I consider ADP the best COIN game currently available? For a start, ADP provides the most interesting interactions between the factions in any COIN game to date. Although some of the factions present do not even represent a real, unified structure in real life, the sheer interactions that occur normally within a game of ADP more than make up for this. Since the frame-work of all COIN games are pretty much the same, it is therefore the factions that really make one game stand out from the other. 

When Andean Abyss first came out, it was already clear that it was the mix of the interactions which provided the main fun. The Government fighting the FARC with the help of the AUC, with the Cartel waiting on the side, biding their time. The eventual need for the Government to strike the AUC once it gets too powerful. The temporary alliances between the Government and FARC in order to take care of a troublesome Cartel player. These were all player-created events that really drove the game forward and allowed the players to interact with each other in novel ways. 

When Cuba Libre came out, I was originally worried that the factions were going to play too similarly to the ones in Andean Abyss (something which fortunately did not happen). On the other hand, when I first heard of ADP and saw the factions involved I wasn't immediately thrilled: for a start, I had much more of an interest in Castro's Insurgency than the war in Afghanistan. In the end, ADP became an impulse buy, since I hadn't originally intended to buy it at all. Once I got to play it, however, I was very glad to have made that decision.

So, how do the factions in ADP interact with each other? One of the most obvious interactions is, of course, the nominal alliance between the Government and the Coalition forces. This is an important interaction because I see it as the driving force of the entire game and this single interaction can largely colour the shape of the entire game. In most other COIN games, factions feel rather distinct for each other: the only other relationship in which two factions want to work largely in tandem is the Syndicate-Government relationship in Cuba Libre, but even that one quickly breaks down.

The Government-Coalition, on the other hand, are intrinsically linked with each other. The entire relationship centers around an unequal power balance in which usually Coalition will hold the advantage, but not overwhelmingly so. What really drives this relationship is the relative strength of will of one side or the other. Although largely all COIN games can be about attempting to brow-beat your opponents into aiding you, in no other game can the brow-beating be so effective as in a game of ADP. A strong Coalition player will always attempt to bend the Government to his will and attempt to dictate both the route and the tempo of COIN operations. It is therefore always important for the Coalition player to always insinuate that the actions that you are performing are for the good of both factions. Threats from the Coalition are usually along the lines of 'I'm gonna surge out if you do not do this' which can sometimes be effective.

The really interesting game, however, is when the Government player is the dominating one. In this situation, it is easy for the Coalition player to get exasperated and even have their troops held hostage with threats from the Government of withdrawing their ANA/ANP human shields.  Governing is usually the main way to piss off the Coalition, but bases prevent you from removing support for patronage, although this can be handily defeated by allowing a base to be undefended if the Coalition decided to keep their foot-print in the country too low.

I find the inter-play between these two factions endlessly fascinating. The relationship is an important point of consideration for both other players since the dynamic will largely decide who the main target for COIN operations is. 

It is therefore important for me to now describe what I consider the nominal alliances within the game. It is clear that the first (and more important one) is the one between the Government and the Coalition. Other important ones, however, are the relationship between the Taliban and the Government, the Coalition and the Warlords and the Taliban and the Warlords. Let's concentrate on the first one first.

I am not very familiar with cultural differences between the different ethnicities of Afghanistan, but I can't help but feel that the nominal alliance between the Government and Taliban is intended to portray the shared Pashtun heritage of both factions. One of the most important jobs for the Coalition is instilling within the mind of the Government that the Taliban is a major threat to the Government's aims: this however, could not be further from the truth. The Taliban and the Government have absolutely no reason to fight what-so-ever and largely can ignore each other: this is due mostly to the fact that the Taliban do not really care much about controlling regions (although they sometimes might want to in order to enact Sharia), while the Government does not really care about support/opposition beyond the ability to govern support away for patronage. 

One of the most effective tactics for the Taliban is to spread out as much as possible and cause terror: this will usually create a very low obstacle for the Government to gain control of regions where Taliban are present. It is therefore imperative for the Taliban player to constantly remind the Government player of this in order to prevent him from falling under the sway of the Coalition. A strong Taliban faction is also a handy way for the Government to keep a Coalition player in check, although this can potentially run the risk of depleting the resources of the Government rather fast. 

The second nominal alliance I mentioned was the one between the Coalition and the Warlords. This is usually not so much an alliance but more of an assurance that the two factions do not get into each other's way. The Coalition can be potentially highly damaging to the Warlords, while the Warlords can damage the Coalition by suborning away their protective meat-shields. There is, therefore, very little reason for either factions to fight each other: the rewards are too small and the risks too high. Much like the Taliban-Government relationship, a Coalition player can keep a strong Government in check by allowing the Warlords to operate freely. 

The last nominal alliance is between the two insurgent factions, the Warlords and the Taliban. This is much like the above relationship: neither of the two sides really want to get into each other's way. Taliban can actually be a boost to the Warlords since they help prevent COIN control (of course, Taliban control is just as bad but usually easier to deal with). 

These nominal alliances are what make the game striking and really make it stand out from the other two offerings in the COIN series. The strong nominal alliance between the Government and Coalition is itself split into nominal alliances to two completely different entities, which both the Government and Coalition can make use to strike each other since direct confrontation is so limited. This is why I rate ADP so highly, because this relationship is so unusual and different from any other that I have seen in any other game, war game or otherwise. It even, for my limited knowledge, smacks true to real life, with the Coalition despairing over a Government that just doesn't seem to want to toe the line.

Although I wanted to make the inter-faction relationships the focus of this review, there are a few other pieces that I have picked up while playing the game. First of all, how the Taliban factions differs from the other major insurgent factions (the FARC, the 26 July Movement) in other COIN games. What is different about the Taliban is the ease that they can move around the board, as long as they stay in Pashtun areas. In Pashtun areas, they can remain undetected, move around quickly, recruit even in areas with support. It means that largely the Taliban are almost impossible to eradicate even if support has been created, something that doesn't happen within the other COIN games. That, along with the presence of Pakistan within the game, really changes how the faction functions in comparison to other major insurgent factions (something that I wrongly claimed in my original COIN review).

The other interesting faction within the game is the Warlords. The Warlords have always felt slightly a-historical to me (although really, the Taliban are hardly a unified faction either). I have grown to appreciate, however, the attempts by the creators of the game to make them feel like they actually are a loose conglomeration of different warlords/groups. For a start, the victory condition of the faction is perfect: making sure that no one really controls Afghanistan is a perfect way to represent the fact that the faction is not perfectly unified. There are other elements present which also support this, chief among them the road-protection that the Warlord provide. Overall, they do manage to portray the growing non-Pashtun opposition to the Government and I think the isn't really a way to portray that without forcing the Warlord player to be too schizophrenic in their actions.

ADP, no matter how accurately it portrays the conflict or not, really managed to create an unprecedented level of interaction and such a unique player relationship that I find it hard that something will be able to replicate this again. I am, however, looking forward to Fire in the Lake, since I am highly curious at how a COIN games with two distinct sides will unfold. As it stands, though, ADP is the current gem of the COIN games, surpassing the slightly unpolished Andean Abyss and the fun but slightly random Cuba Libre. I hope to get many more tries at playing this wonderful game and the game rightly received 5 angry scowling King Phillips out of 5.