Tags
Cold War, Steel Panthers, The Operational Art of War, Vietnam, Vietnam Combat Operations, WinSPMBT
This is the ninety-fifth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series or go back to the master post.
With all that I’ve been doing regarding Vietnam-themed games (new and old), I thought it worth a return to Steel Panthers.
First of all, the audio and video problems that I’ve had have not just gone away. I still must* play Steel Panthers in silence and in a tiny window. Nonetheless, Vietnam Combat Operations has pointed me at a rather substantial engagement; one that up until now I had no knowledge of. It seems only right to take advantage of the work put into the Steel Panthers scenario titled Task Force Dorland Attacks and sourced from the book Surprise Attack.
I’ll cut straight to chase and explain that I played to a draw with heavy, heavy losses on my own side. This is a shocking departure from the 7 Americans killed in action (plus 84 wounded) that history actually records. As these things go, Hill 63 was a difficult and bloody battle but it was nothing like what happens in Steel Panthers. I think I lost more lives to enemy sniper fire than Major Dorland lost to all causes.
Part of the problem is me. I don’t play a lot of Steel Panthers and play even less now that I have technical issues. When I play a scenario like this, I’m constantly tripping over hidden enemy positions and suffering substantial casualties as a result. I have no doubt that I could do better. Also, as I’ve speculated before, the scenarios seem to be designed to be “beaten” only after multiple tries.
One of the issues I obviously had, here, is the ability to analyze the terrain and use it to my best advantage. Now and again, I was apt to find a position with good sightlines to known and suspected enemy positions, but I found them one-by-one as an individual unit passed through. Success, as in Squad Battles, surely is enhanced through a careful analysis and then exploitation of the terrain.
As I said before, I rarely find myself in the mood for that. Add to that the distinct difficulty (see above screenshot) with determining relative heights of terrain and, therefore, what might be a clear sightline through it. When I look at this screen, I know I am looking at a hill because it says so right in the middle of the screen. If I squint, I can detect undulations but I can’t, for the life of me, clearly identify peaks and valleys without clicking on each hex and noting the height as the game reports it. Not in the mood.
It’s a shame, because nothing quite matches what Steel Panthers provides in terms of scope and scale – not to mention its obvious ability to allow the creation of a mountain of user-generated content.
After playing this scenario, I found an interesting narrative description of the battle on-line. It is of interest to me because it is short and sweet and contained. Rather than have me summarize it for you, you now have the link. To me, the style reads like it was taken from a book or maybe a magazine article, but the origin is not clear from the linked page.
Said article does make a few things clear; aspects of the battle that must be included in a good scenario representation. The attack was hastily planned; an active field force was reacting to the receipt of radio signals about which they were informed only the day before. The lack of further intelligence and the rugged terrain meant that knowledge about enemy positions was just what we see in that first screenshot. Zilch.
The attackers also had a mixed force that fits just about perfectly with what Steel Panthers offers. The main force was infantry but that was backed up by a handful of armored vehicles (seen as burning wrecks in my second screen) and by infantry reinforcements ready to be delivered by helicopter. While the larger scale of the Campaign Series might also do justice to this action, it seems fitting that the one-to-one representation of vehicles is just the right match for what we know about the fighting.
As with all the Steel Panthers scenarios, we are dealing with a certain compression. The game time is short by perhaps a factor of two-to-three, depending on how you calculate it. The artillery support is, then, correspondingly downsized and the air support, described in the linked article as incredibly accurate and effective, is non-existent. On top of that, the NVA are described as having been surprised by the sudden attack (particularly by the mounted units) and less effective than they might have been. Instead, I found myself contesting each enemy-held hex with intense and bloody close-in combat against a determined and deadly foe.
I am left to wonder whether the battle, as it occurred, could ever be reproduced through the game’s random lethality tables. As far as I can tell, most of the mistakes I made (generally involving advancing into the midst of enemy positions is a less-than-coordinated fashion) were also part of the fight back in 1967.
Remember too, on top of all these concerns, Steel Panthers obviously remains a vastly out-of-date UI that makes it painful to play exactly the larger-unit encounters that it is best suited for. As I said, a bit of a shame.
Return to the master post for the Vietnam War. Continue on for a hypothetical scenario built by a user.
*I’ve got to admit to my share of the blame. As I explained before, I’m playing with the free version of the software. I could always shell out some bucks and, hopefully, be treated to a better experience.