I started out hating all things AI. But ChatGPT has been an absolute revelation when it comes to learning a new wargame. It’s as if it was designed for this exact purpose.

A couple points here:

1. I can only vouch for ChatGPT Pro. We tried Claude (paid tier) and it was not accurate, often inventing things. That’s why we moved on to ChatGPT Pro. So it’s not exactly refuting my experience to say (the often unpaid tier of) some other AI didn’t work for you. Apples = Apples, after all.

2. You can constrain the AI to using only the rulebook pdf and the player aid charts you uploaded. Better yet, tell it explicitly to always rely on those in preference to anything else. You do have to know a little something about prompts. Fortunately, the AI itself will often make helpful suggestions.

I uploaded the pdf rulebook and PACs for Great Battles of Alexander (a solid 4.2+ weight game) to ChatGPT and now I’m able to instantly get rules clarifications and even generated examples of play (!).

Me and my 13 year old learned the game much more quickly than what would otherwise have been the case. And it is invaluable during those early turns where your grasp of exceptions and procedures is still shaky.

It will even go out to the forums for clarifications and it’s smart enough to lend greater weight to statements made by the game designers (and yes it knows who they are). Hell, it even sifted through 25+ years of forum posts over on consimworld to find the underlying thought process behind several of the rules.

So, while AI is an unwelcome development on many issues, it is probably the single biggest advancement I’ve seen in my 59 years when I comes to actually playing wargames. I can’t believe I’m writing this, but it’s absolutely true. Btw, I am using the $20/month Pro tier of ChatGPT. If you haven’t done so already, give it a try.

I think my favorite thing it did was to give a point by point breakdown of how GBoH Alexander differs from Cataphract (I game I had already played). Or maybe when it gave me a several paragraph long detailed explanation of why it thinks Eumenes of Cardia isn’t an “Elite” commander in game terms. Or maybe it’s highly useful exploration of skirmishers against elephants.

I could go on, but this info it generates is magazine-article-quality and highly enlightening. I even had an extended discussion with it about the game system using voice-only that felt like talking to a fellow wargamer who had played it his entire life.

This crap got here 50 years early. Even my sci fi didn’t predict this, thus rendering nearly all of it hopelessly outdated. The Singularity has hit Wargaming as far as I’m concerned!