Soft Factors in Wargaming

Brant Guillory, 11 June 2026

It’s the subject of plenty of previous discussions and presentations, and was even the topic for this year’s Connections Online conference.

So what is encompassed in “soft factors”? Well, you could hold an entire conference about it – and we did! RAND published a full research paper on Addressing Commanders’ Needs for Information on “Soft” Factors that focused heavily on influence operations, and very little on a commander’s own unit, showing again how squidgy the “soft factors” term can be. It’s interesting that searching online for any sort of definition of “soft factors” yields plenty of places where that two-word term is used, and perhaps even an example or two provided, but it’s never defined or enumerated.

As with so many other concepts like “media” and “rock & roll” and “wargaming”, the center-mass of the target is pretty obvious, but things get fuzzier the further you get from that middle.

For many folks, it’s enough to lump “soft factors” together as generally “those that aren’t measured by physics” We know how fast a vehicle can drive, max range on the gun, armor thickness in different places, warhead size, aircraft range, fuel requirements, etc Soft factors tend to lump together as the things that aren’t measured with a hard science answer.

Thoughts about soft factors vary widely, and the variation gets even greater depending on whether it’s a professional or hobby audience you’re asking. So of course, we asked both!

We care about soft factors because it’s soft factors that sometimes determine the outcome of a conflict. The Brits vs. the Zulus, the Japanese vs Imperial Russia, and all the other times where a strictly quantitative analysis points to a clear victor – who nevertheless lost.

Superior leadership, doctrine, national will, and aid or opposition can sometimes lead to an underdog coming out on top. They are “soft” precisely because they are hard to quantify.

Why did the ’85 Dolphins beat the Chicago Bears, a clearly superior team? Soft factors.

— Ardwulf

We are used to talking about the human aspects that are–if covered–only treated fairly crudely: (1) leadership, (2) morale, (3) battlefield cohesion, (4) individual/unit technical and tactical proficiency, etc., especially covering changes over extended periods of time. Some have endeavored to include “political reliability” when that was important (e.g., Plot To Assassinate Hitler, the Winter Sturm series of operational WWII Eastern Front games). I’d offer we haven’t done due diligence in what John Boyd might have termed “adaptability,” such as he argues for in his talk, “the Conceptual Spiral” (circa 1993 or so).

— COL(R) Eric Walters, USMC

Digging a bit deeper into the topic, we asked our respondents the following questions:

What do we care about? And why do we care about it?
What can we measure, and how?
What are the limitations of how we measure it?
When do they change, and how do we change them in the game?

What do we care about? And why do we care about it?

As Merle Robinson puts it, “We care about the things that we cannot measure either because the technology/techniques are not tested or it involves those pesky things like human’s internal decision processes. Examining soft factors allows us to consider what possibilities we can estimate and consider how to deal with them before they crop up in reality.”

Ed McGrady

We generally don’t care about it because we are very fascinated with quantitative models that represent the organizational and technical expectations of combat. The fact that actual combat deviates from those expectations is not capable of being acknowledged within the existing power structures of the organizations doing the gaming. Thus we don’t often include these factors or if we do we include them in ways that are unrealistic.

Brian Train

It depends.
“The moral is to the physical as three is to one.” -Napoleon, sometime, somewhere.
“Defeat is a state of mind. No one is ever defeated until defeat has been accepted as reality.” – Bruce Lee.
The most obvious soft factors that affect those fighting a battle of campaign are ones connected with trauma: confusion, reaction to casualties, accumulated stress reaction (e.g. from long bombardment or harassment).
We care about these because they often have the most immediate or significant effect in an engagement.
The next most obvious are those connected with military culture: quality and consistency of unit training and discipline, from lowest to highest levels, as it translates of decisiveness, speed of action/ reaction, cohesion, doctrine or general military attitude (inculcated aggression).
We care about these because they do affect the planning and conduct of operations, but also they do have some effect on engagements.
The next next most obvious are those connected with normal culture – that is, the culture that is impressed on a person from early days, very psychological and formative aspects of identity and which “military culture” tries to suppress, deny or alter: the normal human reluctance to kill or hurt people; ingrained ideas about the integrity of self and how self relates to the group, and to authority figures; deference to authority, crossed with what source that authority comes from (mere age, wealth, social class, family or tribe, popular vote, political affiliation) and how well it works out for the force.
These are hard to tease out but they can place limitations on the effectiveness of military culture above, and affect how members deal with trauma… sometimes it can be obvious and consequential, though: the King’s idiot son has to be put in command of the right wing, because that is what tradition demands (also, the battle of Culloden was made even more of a disaster because the Highland clans fought with each other to see who would be rightmost in line, highest in honour); purchase of commissions etc. (though it was family influence and a purchased commission that allowed Wellington to get as far as he did); status of trades in society (e.g. the army values the equestrian class and defers to the mounted nobility but the logistical branches are looked down on as cowardly shopkeepers, so little talent ends up there).

Supplemental question: Are soft factors always psychological?I would say, almost always – there are some instances where physical limitations unrelated to equipment affect fighting performance… eg.

a Russian unit that overran a Finnish outpost in the Winter War but whose men stopped to gorge themselves on the sausage soup the unit had been cooking because they were literally starving and freezing alive, so leaving themselves vulnerable to the counterattack.
Poorly nourished soldiers with vitamin deficiencies that give them poor night vision – this was supposed to be a major weakness in the Japanese soldiers as how they were portrayed in WW2 but of course it was generally not true; however, it’s obvious that drafting people from all levels of society are going to show up some marked differences in physical condition as well as mental preparedness… the US Army studied this a lot back in WW 2.
the story about how the ARVN troops with their smaller bodies did better with M1 carbines and M-16s than with larger weapons that fired heavier ammunition like the M1 Garand and M-14… not sure how true it was, Korean troops did fine with the M1 in Korea and they were no bigger.

Marc Gacy

Understanding of both the specific situation at hand, as well as the cultural and political context around it.

To better understand a specific time period
To better understand how the lessons from the specific engagement (if historical) can apply to today
To learn what kinds of things to do more or less of

Byron Salahor

The overall effectiveness of a unit, either as a result of formal preparedness (training), or combat history (experience). This is often represented in things like attack values, defense values, morale ratings, or leadership effectiveness or individual skill (pilot)

Intuitively, experience and training should have some affect on expected outcomes. From a historical perspective, EST must necessarily be represented in unit values (attack, defense, etc) because they invariably show up in the battlespace. One wouldn’t expect to see a veteran US Army Ranger unit with the same combat value as a Volksgrenadier unit. From a game play experience, different EST levels add options or choice to game decisions. And generally speaking, choice adds complexity – and in my opinion enjoyment – to a game experience

Ian Brown

Since I first started using wargames to “inform,” I’ve found a few factors that are often poorly represented in conventional wargames but which, in my opinion and past military experience, matter a lot. These are: impacts of war on the civilian population; information/influence; and will to fight. Why do we care about these things? Because despite not being targets one can directly strike with a bullet or missile, they have deep impacts on how nations or belligerent actors fight, how well they fight, and how long they’re willing to fight. And I would argue that from the American military perspective, these are things that SHOULD be large factors in our strategic view but we regularly f$%k them up, and f&%k them up badly.

These factors are interwoven and I could point to many examples from the 21st century. For example, in Iraq–after much flailing and trial and error–we came to understand how care and restraint on our part when conducting kinetic counterinsurgency operations painted a favorable contrast to the brutality and indifference of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) who almost gleefully inflicted civilian casualties thinking it would both cow the civilian population and turn them against us. We could tie an information/influence campaign to that, with social media images and videos of AQI loudly proclaiming their desire for violence against anyone who opposed them compared to images of our troops and local Iraqis patrolling and securing their own neighborhoods, giving gifts to kids, and providing medical aid to those civilians affected by AQI’s brutality. The “Sunni Awakening” in Anbar was the product of many factors but among those factors were how well (or not) civilian impacts, information/influence, and will to fight wove together. Turns out that–as has often been the case historically–brutality inflicted against civilians rarely cows the civilian population but rather turns them bitterly against those inflict that violence and makes them more willing, not less, to resist that brutality and fight back against it, and to welcome the assistance of those who would aid them in that fight.

Fast forward a couple of decades and we’ve seen those factors similarly interwoven in Ukraine, Israel, and Iran. Turns out people don’t like being invaded and will fight back, hard, when they believe that repelling that invasion is existential–see Ukraine. Or if one side, based on the information narrative from the other, thinks that the choice is between fighting and extinction, they’ll refuse to surrender regardless of how much damage they suffer – we started Operation Epic Fury with the words “unconditional surrender” and “regime change,” which leaves the ayatollah and the hardline Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders with a clear choice of fight, even if badly, or find themselves hanging from a gallows. Or it turns out that brutality–especially if widely and gleefully broadcast as a point of pride by the brute–will push people beyond their previous limits to ensure that the brute can never do that to them again. October 7 changed a lot of things in Israel and its immediate environment; but beyond Hamas’ violence itself, it was the information narrative that they themselves broadcast of kidnapping, rape, and murder, that unleashed waves of conflict that has radically changed the entire region through time now.

So we should care about these things because they a) have clear battlefield effects in how wars are conducted, b) shape the commitment of belligerents to the conflict, and c) are among the hardest things to model and so become the easiest to omit in wargame design.

Roger Mason‘s thoughts lead us into the next question. . .

I think each scenario has factors that were critical in the historical event. Examples might be morale or physical condition of the units. I’m currently working on a game that involves temperatures from 0-20 degrees. (Finns versus the Soviets) The Finns had carefully evaluated how long an infantry company was effective in sub 20 degree weather before they lost their ability to operate. They rotated units so they could regroup. The Russians just got weaker and weaker. I used an abstraction to model their operational practices for cold weather.

One of the biggest problems with wargames are units can march for several turns and be 100% effective when then attack. I think the key is evaluating what factors influenced the scenario. I’m interested in agent-based modeling for solitaire games. I published an eastern front tactical game for world at war using this approach ( Night Fight). I recently experimented with a game prototype on the 1862 battle of Perryville (Bragg vs Buell). Instead of linear combat the deciding factor was environmental. It was hot and both sides were short on water. The fighting disintegrated into regimental actions fighting over ponds and small streams. The soft factors drove the historical fighting and my game.

What can we measure, and how?

Byron Salahor, an avowed aviation gamer, notes

I mostly see EST reflected in the following ways: · As part of a units base “value”, whether that be attack factors, leadership range, etc. · As a modifier that is applied where appropriate. · As a structured “choice” paradigm inherent to the unit. As an example…unskilled pilots can do X; skilled pilots can do X and Y, veteran / ace pilots can do X + Y + Z.”

Brian Train

It depends.¹
On what it is you are trying to reflect in your game: a tactical game will be more concentrated on the effects of the first category I cited above, that is trauma.
An operational game which deals with the planning and conduct and evolution of operations might go more into notions of training and doctrine.
And of course we have lots of ways to reflect these things in games: higher preservation levels, die roll modifiers, troop quality indices that affect different parts of the game.

Ian Brown

I would submit that civilian impacts and information/influence are measurable to various degrees and can be implemented with smart game design. For example: fighting in an urban environment almost always creates a displaced population that’s fleeing the violence. This can be modeled by placing some sort of obstacle into the wargame that affects military movement; potentially affects military supply if you are suddenly responsible for the feeding and medical treatment of refugees; and can affect the information domain depending on how well (or not) you or the other belligerent are seen to care for displaced people. Information effects can include possible constraints on rules of engagement or the types of weapons you’re able to use in the urban environment, which in turn can affect how well or how aggressively you’re able to pursue military goals.

I think “will to fight” is much harder to measure and is something that we almost always underestimate. This is complicated by the fact that “will to fight” can vary from the tactical to the strategic level. Another example: at the tactical level, there have been many instances where the “will to fight” of both Ukrainian and Russian units has been eroded to the point that soldiers are willing to surrender rather than continue resistance. Despite the brutality of the war in Ukraine, prisoner-of-war exchanges are something that have happened regularly, which means that tactical units have surrendered regularly. Yet at the strategic level, Russia and Ukraine continue to fight with all the resources they can muster.

While the comparison’s not exact, one could contrast this with American behavior in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are precisely zero instances where an American unit surrendered to AQI or the Taliban, regardless of how dire a tactical situation might have been. Yet strategically, the United States ultimately became exhausted with both counterinsurgency efforts and was willing to wash its hands of them regardless of whether withdrawal might hand the insurgents an unearned victory.

I’ve attempted to measure “will to fight” in one of my own game designs (#Maneuver Warfare) by having a will “tracker” that is affected battlefield losses, control of key terrain, successful information operations, and impacts of conflict on the civilian population. Even so, I don’t know that my model is “right” or even close to right because I only represent will to fight at a single, abstracted level, rather than across the various levels of war.

Achilles from our Saturday Night Fights crew

This is a difficult question. What can be measured, and how and in what sense? In game mechanics things like movement rates, ranges, and such can be given but even here while we may know how far a formation on paper should be able to move in a given time frame the reality will rarely match that. Aspects such as Morale, skill and training effects on combat ability etc are essentially always going to be guess work. Even in a historical situation where we have the results to guide by they can not be more than informed guess work. The how is a question well beyond my poor ability to suggest I think.

Ed McGrady

You can measure a lot of this. We know the frequency of targeting mistakes by the intel community, we know the time delays for different weapons systems to be targeted, we know the rate of combat ineffectiveness based on time, casualties, and fire rates (Ok, the USA has MODELED those, we don’t necessarily know them). We (I) have modeled things like IO and CIVCAS effects and how to incorporate those into games in terms of frequency, deviation, and other statistical effects. We can also incorporate own force casualties and their effect on mission into games.

Marc Gacy loves his lists!

Not exactly sure HOW we could measure these, but I think they are the important factors.

Ability to use the resources at hand
understanding of the rules
specific configurations of units on each side
Understanding of the situation
how to implement the rules
how the rules represent the unique factors of the situation
tactical use of rules to their advantage
Ability to adapt to uncertainty
understanding of why certain level of randomness in a game is present
how to use that randomness to their advantage

A potential how is to use a monitoring tool (akin to what we worked on together years ago) where someone can assess decisions and then ask about how the person came to the conclusion about the decision, maybe using a rank ordering tool of specific factors.

What are the limitations of how we measure it?

Byron Salahor

In no particular order (going to run a bit freeform here): · There are probably TOO MANY soft factors that one could try to implement within any particular game. For example, how do you factor in the effect that very bad weather, sickness, etc., may have on a unit? · There are many counter-intuitive examples of soft factors such as morale in history. Some units when cut off from supply or reinforcement lose heart, give up, or break apart. Others dig in a fight to the last. I am not sure we can truly capture those moments. Having said that, games like ASL and Lock ‘n’ Load allow the creation of “Hero” counters on particular bad rolls.

Brian Train

It depends²
On what you are measuring, and what you expect out of that factor, and what relevance or prominence it had in the historical campaign or could have had.
See the example below about Gurkhas in the Falklands: their reputation preceded them, but it was the fragile psychological state of the Argie conscripts that made it all the more effective. Not everyone feared the Gurkhas as much as these guys, see their campaigns in WW 2.

Marc Gacy‘s one-item list!

Need to decouple understanding of the game mechanisms from understanding of the situation itself

Ed McGrady

There are, of course, lots of limitations. Measuring in one combat situation (Ukraine is a favorite) won’t mean diddly about another (Taiwan). Some things are hard to measure (opinion, morale) but others are quite measurable (screw ups, atrocities, CIVCAS, time delays, etc.). I think a lot of this just requires a willingness to accept engineering estimates of the factors, which, in other terms simply says that common sense guesses are often the best we can (and should) do.

Merle Robinson notes that “The limitation is we can record collections of anecdotal cases and extrapolate possibilities but the data can’t be normalized or empirically proven.”

Ian Brown

Information/influence and will to fight are inherently nebulous concepts, and I think the biggest challenge is that outputs can seem very disproportionate to inputs. A thousand combat camera pictures of U.S. soldiers handing out toys to kids might seem to have no impact on moving the needle of local perception in a favorable direction; but a single social media post about those same soldiers allegedly burning a Quran can cause a very real, very tangible, eruption of violence. I still think it’s important to try and model the connections between informational inputs and outputs precisely because there are many clear examples of information efforts translating into material effects; but good luck writing the equation trying to relate the two.

When it comes to will to fight, I think that’s even harder to measure because it operates at so many different levels, and it’s also not just a single will to fight, but potentially thousands or millions of different human wills whose own desire to fight can change and can be very different from the will of national or organizational leaders to fight. But I think one constant is that will to fight is almost always underestimated, and many allegedly smart strategic thinkers seem oblivious to the historical reality that humans will often resist well past the point of reason. In Iraq, on paper we outnumbered and massively outgunned AQI; they fought anyway. Ukraine, outnumbered and outgunned, fought back despite predictions–including among “smart” people in the West–that they would cave in just a few days. Who knows how long the current Iranian leadership is willing to hang on; but despite the dismantling of their conventional military power inflicted by Operation Epic Fury, that leadership seems no closer to buckling today than they were back in February.

I think it’s important to try and reflect will to fight because ultimately that’s the factor, and not necessarily the material conditions on the battlefield, that determines who wins. But however it’s modeled, I think any wargame designer should have the humility to admit that no matter how much effort they put into the model, they’ve likely undervalued it.

When do they change, and how do we change them in the game?

Marc Gacy‘s got lists

When:

The addition of new relevant information about the current situation,
The desire to represent a new but similar situation,
The desire to game a “what if” scenario

How:

General rule changes for large things
Side-specific rule changes for overall effect (e.g. Italian pasta water – I keed! I keed! More like Soviet disorganization of troops affecting command)
Specific unit changes (e.g. availability, combat factors)
Scenario changes (e.g. weather factors, minimize attrition or collateral damage)

Brian Train

It depends.³
On the scale of the situation, and what is changing in the situation.
Some of the more tactical soft factors are more prone to change with respect to the immediate situation, eg. being suddenly brought under fire from a flank, or realizing that the battalion commander has fled with the unit Comfort Fund, or realizing they are backed into a corner so they fight harder.
The larger less direct factors I cited above are also prone to change, see the evolving character of a military unit as the campaigns and war progresses… the hard core of experienced troops who get most of the stuff done, while replacements cycle in and out (or, just as often, the guy who’s really “short” and gets super-cautious about preserving himself… this individually rotating in and out of theater had a tremendous effect on individual American troop effectiveness, as opposed to someone who was in the field with the entire unit for a period of time, or The Duration.)

Ian Brown

I’d submit that these aren’t things that can be bolted onto a game or injected into a design in mid-stride; I think they have to be baked in from the beginning, because any (good) military planning will be taking those factors into consideration before the bullets start flying. And while I’d accept that local variations on how these factors play can cause the contours of any specific conflict to look a little different, at a fundamental level these factors are eternal. They’ve been aspects of war for the entirety of human history, and I’d argue that they only “change” in the sense of how well or how poorly one belligerent understands their impacts on military operations.

Ed McGrady

Of course all these things change. In rigid games you’d have knock on impacts for accumulating issues (i.e. CIVCAS incidents that mattered (large numbers + innocents + promotion)) so that as you got more and more badness more and more badness occurred to your situation. Other things will tend not to change (intel screw up rate or OODA loop times) but can have outside impacts on the game (i.e. JFACC is using the 3 day ATO planning and approval cycle for targets in China. Whoops, we are getting our asses kicked so lets throw that out and scramble for the next thing to use, that will take time, we are so screwed on planned strikes – now how would you simulate that in a game? First two turns US is unable to coordinate tactical shots with strategic ones, then they have an increasing chance each turn to “fix” this issue and allow tactical flexibility and not approve individual targets rather that gets delegated to the forward commander which now requires the US to devote more satellite and relay bandwidth to tactical air coordination – hope they have it – and so on. As you can see MDO is not simple or uncomplicated.). But you can evolve these things over time.

Byron Salahor

In small scale games, there are a few examples where EST to “change” EST values, rarely within a single game, but sometimes within games that feature “mini-campaigns”. I am thinking about some of the DVG “Leader” games, where pilot effectiveness wanes if you deploy them on too many missions and don’t allow them to recover. · IMHO, I think the ability to change EST is almost entirely lost – or is at least hard to represent – in longer campaign games and / or theatre of war games. As an example…in a game of the ACW…the Wisconsin Regiments don’t become the Iron Brigade until AFTER the battle that earns them that name. So in a game about 2nd Manassas, it makes sense that the Iron Brigade has a higher combat value. But in a game that reflect many months / years of the ACW, how does one reflect the battle experience of ANY unit before – and after – a valiant defense etc? No “entire war” game that I know of uses anything resembling RPG unit characteristics that gain from experience

Ed McGrady follows up with

At the first order (hobby games) we know enough about these at the casual level to incorporate them into a careful tactical or operational game design. We don’t because most designers don’t understand MDO well enough to do that (no shade, most GOFOs don’t understand MDO well enough either).

Your Turn to Sound Off

So, you’ve seen the thoughts from our folks on these key four questions

What do we care about? And why do we care about it?
What can we measure, and how?
What are the limitations of how we measure it?
When do they change, and how do we change them in the game?

In addition to these questions, there’s always the whole “how do you define soft factors?”

Give us your thoughts! You can leave comments below, or in our forums, and we want to hear what you think.

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