Tags
BAT, CMO, Cold War, Command: Modern Operations, Egypt, IL-2, IL-2 Sturmovik, Iraq, John Tiller, Jordan, six-day war, Syria, War Over the Mideast
Since buying War Over the Mideast was the most memorable of my Christmas buying experiences, it seemed like the right place to start when playing my new games. Thus begins another, short series of Six Day War related posts. Return here for a master index of the new posts or all the way back here for all my Six Day War posts from the beginning.
First off, though, a correction of sorts and how I came to realize my mistake.
You see, on that now-unplayable tablet, I had a downloaded (from JTS Software) demo version of Modern Air Power, a designation that describes a (two-game) series and the demo game itself. The latter features a present-day Korean War air conflict to showcase the engine’s features. I did, way back when, play the game on my tablet and found it wanting. It seemed a little bit too simplistic for what it was intended to be. There just didn’t seem to be a “there” there.
That first impression was probably a big factor as to why I had not considered buying into either War Over Vietnam or the follow-on War Over the Mideast. While I could see the full-priced games easily getting more complicated than in Modern Air Power, the demo, I couldn’t see how they would get a lot more fun.
In a footnote, I mentioned that I also had on my tablet Tiller’s Vietnam-era entry in the Modern Campaigns series, called Quang Tri ’72, but that I didn’t think that it was available on the PC. This is the same engine iteration behind Middle East ’67. I did not mention, because I hadn’t really thought about it, that the Modern Air Power demo also seemed lost to me.
Unless I am mistaken*, that has been corrected. Both Modern Air Power and Quang Tri ’72 are free downloads as PC demos. I have “purchased” them both. Again. But that was just now – after I had given my War Over the Mideast a spin.
![](https://ettubluto.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/thirdwave1.jpg?w=1024)
My idea for my return to the Six Day War was to focus** on the northern fronts. I therefore skipped the scenarios exploring the Israeli attacks in the Sinai and Egypt and moved on to the “third wave” of attacks (poetically titled Operation Moked – Wave Three). The Israeli bombing force, having gained total victory in the south, was redirected against targets in Jordan, Syria, and Iraq in reaction to airstrikes from those nations’ air forces, primarily against civilian targets. This is where we start.
It has been, I’ll guess, around six years since I played the Modern Air Power demo so, my memory being what it is, this is a bit like coming at this game with a fresh eye. Opening it up, the game looks decent enough. It uses a pleasant background map showing the airspace above Israel and her vicinity. Units (representing a flight – i.e. multiple aircraft) are displayed by an airplane-shaped icon which moves across the map in real time. Background sounds of air-traffic noises in Hebrew are an interesting enough feature until they start getting repetitive.
It also features the I-did-it-my-way interface that is a feature of Tiller’s older*** games. It took some time to figure out how to make the menu system, across the bottom of the interface, work correctly. In fact, it took me a while to figure out that it WAS the menu system. As it stands, I’d say more than half of the features I either don’t know that they’re there or don’t know how to access them. Twenty years ago we were expected to thoroughly study the manual before playing.
The basics behind me, I began launching my airstrikes. I quickly formed an opinion that this is another table-top/boardgame design brought to the computer. I don’t mean this literally, mind you. It is more of an overall feeling than a suspicion that this is an implementation of somebody’s miniatures rules (although one can’t rule that out).
![](https://ettubluto.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/thirdwave2.jpg?w=1024)
First of all, there is a lack of focus. In a table-top game, the players are responsible for everything… there is no computer to handle lower-level details for the player. This isn’t entirely true here, but is in some cases. Are you supposed to be the air commander for all of Israel? Naturally you do find yourself planning and then executing the operation at that level. But you also choose which weapon an individual flight of planes uses during an attack run. This isn’t as bad as I make it sound, exactly. For example, once a friendly flight gets its sights on an enemy, it will engage and pursue on its own, without micromanagement from the player – except when it doesn’t. If your attacking plane gets “lost” you,the player, had better be ready and waiting with some timely micromanagement.
Also adding to that boardgame feel; despite a “real time” execution and the availability of a computer-system’s infinitely-variable parameters, the game’s control parameters are very discreet. Planes fly fast, slow and either high or low. There is no sense of intricate 3D flight tactics. Furthermore, many things the user controls happen instantly. So for contrasting examples, an aircraft makes the switch between altitudes instantly with no lag whereas the aircraft have a limit on the speed with which they can rotate. Even in the latter case, planes seem to be able to “spin in place” rather than follow physically realistic flight paths. And while in some cases aircraft without orders continue flying the heading they were last given, others just stop and hang in the air at their final waypoint.
The result is a lot more clicking than I prefer to do followed by hyper-vigilance to make sure none of the orders have gone wonky.
In its time, the game was probably best considered to be competition for Harpoon. My best web searching says that Modern Air Power (the series, this time) is about 20 years old. That would have put it in roughly the Harpoon III timeframe. It can thus be seen as part of the valiant struggle to bring a some-33-year-old experience up-to-date, at least into the aughts. This is a victory that, by my measure, was finally achieved by Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations about 10 years ago. Thus the comparison for War Over the Mideast, circa 2023, is against CMO.
![](https://ettubluto.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/firstwave1.jpg?w=1024)
Fortunately for us both, I just bought that one too.
To compare and contrast, I loaded up the CMO scenario Hit Hard Hit Fast (from its add-on DLC Shifting Sands). This one covers the Israeli attack on Egypt and, as best as I can tell, ends before the additional nations to the north become involved. It would have been better, of course, to play the equivalent scenario in Modern Air Power. There are two variations on Operation Moked: Wave One. Let me get back to that. The point is that even dealing with different phases of the operation, these two scenarios are close enough to allow for some broad comments.
In CMO, I made a mess of things and quit even as the first of my bombs began hitting their targets. I failed because I didn’t plan. In CMO, like CMANO before, you can play in a kind of “arcade” style. Each unit can be watched and given orders as events develop. It is also possible to pre-program “missions,” which any flight will follow upon being assigned to it. With an attack this complex, doing it the latter way is a necessity. If nothing else, trying to enter in commands for each unit individual inevitably missed some. As I observed my attackers roaring towards Egypt at just above sea level, I’d come across one who never got the memo – he’d be flying casually at 36,000 feet.
In War Over the Mideast, I failed because I didn’t know HOW to plan.
From the first few seconds, I failed to grasp key timing issues. As I allude to above, some commands are instantaneous while some are not. Click on a flight in an airbase and tell them to go somewhere and, boom, they are in the air and flying on course a fraction of a second later. Click on a second flight with the same instruction and you have a delay – they have to wait for clearance for the runway. I simply did not anticipate the delays inherent in getting all my desired planes into the air (a delay, by the way, that is explicitly shown in CMO). I also didn’t appreciate that my first order of business was to defend against Arab attacks against Israeli targets. This was a simple failure to understand the parameters of the scenario. The Israeli bombing operation was a reaction to Arab attacks so it would of course (in hindsight) make sense to make that the opening of this scenario. The problem is that I’d backlogged my CAP fighters deep within the runway control queues at all of my bases. When the enemy started showing up, there were no fighters available to counter them and no way to expedite any (see, again, my comment is that I don’t know what all I can do in the interface. Maybe canceling a queued launch is simple).
I guess my point is that, with both of these games, I’m going to need another go to even begin to do them justice.
Clearly, CMO, with its nearly two decades of additional development time (and better tools with which to do so) is both the better simulator and the better game. While many features are similar, so many parts of War Over the Mideast leaves one wondering why couldn’t it have done it the CMO way. Absent my accidental purchase, I can’t see myself paying even the reduced price for this game. Even still, it does have a couple of advantages.
War Over the Mideast is “less” than what is in CMO. In that sense, it is a little more conducive to a shorter, lighter gaming experience when you don’t want to submerse yourself quite as fully as CMO gameplay often requires. Secondly, War Over the Mideast, being a dedicated product, has more scenarios focused on the Arab-Israeli Wars than CMO does or, indeed, any general engine would ever be expected to have. Look no further than the attack on the Jordanian targets in Operation Moked – Wave Three. That’s just not an option, at present, within CMO.
I’ll add a third point – although this is entirely speculation based upon the scenario descriptions. The variations between the two versions of Operation Moked: Wave One involve the level of structure presented to the player. The first version, called the Preplanned Variant, is intended to guide the player through the historical attack plan and is apparently more suited for an Israeli player against the AI. In the second, the Israeli’s role is more open ended, creating more variety and more challenge. As a player, I appreciate the availability of a scenario where the hard work has been preset for you and you can just jump right in.
![](https://ettubluto.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/thirdwave3.jpg?w=1024)
I also got out my IL-2. In addition to my usual problems (it’s a tough scenario leaving you outnumbered by your enemies), I tripped over a handful of game issues. First of all, running with the mini-map on causes my machine to all-but-freeze. I’ll admit that some scenarios run better than others, as a general rule, but this was about the worst I’d seen in terms of lagging graphics and interface.
On top of that, I saw some weird flight characteristics. Even sitting on the runway with the engines off, my aircraft rotates counter clockwise… something I’ve never seen before. I also occasionally got some sudden loss of control in the air, as if a piece of the plane had fallen off in flight – although that doesn’t actually appear to have happened. My last run through the scenario ended when my aircraft exploded without any apparent external cause. My best guess is that running on afterburners cooked-off the fuel tank. I was in the process of trying to execute an Immelman so as to turn into my attackers and I was using afterburners to put me smoothly over the top. Boom.
I did get one really useful bit of historical information courtesy of the B.A.T. scenario description (in the user-made Six Day War scenario package). The Israeli version of the Mirage IIICJ (Shahak) was armed with the Shafrir air-to-air missile. All but one of those missiles, fired at enemy aircraft, missed their mark. Even the single missile that hit was not effective enough to have brought down the enemy. Actual kills in the Six Day War came via the use of guns.
When I played Operation Moked – Wave Three, I was trying to keep my fighters armed with missiles – even after noticing that they weren’t all that effective. I guess in my next try I’ll just ignore them. In Vietnam, America saw similar difficulties when trying to kill enemies with the AIM-9. I guess 1967 is too early to try to make up for my lack of flying ability by using stand-off missiles.
Return to the previous post (my second master post) for the Six Day War or continue on to the next article.
*I am not mistaken regarding the fact that the demos are now available. What I may be mistaken about is whether they were available right before Christmas. It could have been an oversight on my part; an inability to find something for which I wasn’t really looking.
**I keep using that word… The Israeli name for their airstrike operation was Mivtza Moked, or Operation Focus.
***In his defense, the interface for the HPS Sims -era games and earlier predated the use of Windows APIs for PC games. This was not a blind refusal to use what was already available as a better alternative.