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My intuition was correct.

As I left you, I was intending to retry the first scenario of the Armored Brigade Prague Spring campaign, figuring I could prevail if I just played it correctly. That turned out to be the case. Being more prepared for the Soviet assault allowed me to defeat it, coming at my better-organized defenses, piecemeal, as they did. Having prevailed, I was able to move along in the campaign and could work through scenarios without halting and restarting. As with many games, there is a rhythm that one has to learn so as to not be completely ineffective.

It was that unfamiliarity of the details of the game that combines with my lack of familiarity with the armies, armaments, and locations of a European War that could have, but never did, take place in the late 1960s. Over the years, I’ve developed a sense for how German Wehrmacht armor stacks up against its Red Army counterparts. But what about when the equipment that I know is obsolete and all new stuff is scattered about the field?

Through Armored Brigade, I encounter equipment with which I have no familiarity. This got me appreciating one of the advantages of board gaming. In (for an example) The Arab-Israeli Wars, if I didn’t know how an Israeli Centurion might stack up against a Soviet-surplus T-34, the answer was right there on the counters. I don’t really miss the wobbly stacks of cardboard counters, the endless thumbing through the rules, or the struggle to get together with an opponent to wrap up that unfinished game. There are aspects of board gaming that I do miss.

– Advancing into the campaign, I have a much better handle on the situation than during my first attempt

On the whole, though, I prefer having all the bells and whistles that an Armored Brigade provides for a wargamer. Furthermore, this campaign structure has provided a valuable context in which to play this, essentially, Red-on-Red set of scenarios. The developer created a historically-plausible story wherein elements resist the Soviet invasion through a nice mix of attack, defend, and meeting engagement encounters, entertaining in their variety. My initial failure notwithstanding, the campaign seems built to escalate in difficulty. It is hard for me to differentiate between scenario design and my own tactical shortcomings, however, so I won’t swear to it.

The Armored Brigade screenshots used in this post are taken from the third scenario of the campaign. Once I got over my initial, massive loss, I’ve been able to get this far fairly painlessly, although this I may be at the point when my honeymoon is coming to its end.

For example, I just found myself going back to a save point because of a stupid mistake on my part. You see, when it comes to units – the enemy is red, the friendlies are blue, and the neutral forces1 are green. For the victory locations (labeled, confusingly, in this scenario as “phase lines) – blue is neutral, red is enemy-occupied, and green is controlled for the win. I lost miserably because all of my phase lines were neutral when I thought I had successfully defended them!

A reload put me back on the right track but, no doubt, I clearly am faced with a bigger challenge; to seize control of a battlefield against what appears to be a superior enemy.

– Zoom in enough, and I can witness the damage dealt to the little Russian men. Note that I’ve also located a tracked vehicle but the fog of war prevents my knowing what kind.

Back as I was recovering from the loss in the first scenario, I decided to further explore the flow of the game through its quick mission function. I threw together a basic, balanced encounter set in 1968 – a standard U.S. versus Soviet meeting engagement somewhere in Germany. As I’ve indicated, this appears to be the core of Armored Brigade – auto-generated battles on real terrain.

Playing it that way confirmed the sense I had about the advantages the campaign has over generating scenarios. While I was happy to be commanding the familiar American equipment, the scenario was without a greater context. That said, it provided some welcomed contrast to the hand-built campaign scenarios. Largely this was due to an evenly-balanced scenario, something I specified in the setup. One way or another, I found my rapidly-thrown together mix to be easy to play, helping to give me a confidence that I really could get a grasp on this game.

– A pair of Su-7BMs are headed in to savage my armor in the open. It would be nice if I had air superiority. The view is pretty at this scale, but not particularly useful.

I could thus return to the Czechoslovakian campaign, competent enough to appreciate the greater meaning of what would otherwise be a very similar battle. While my enemy is much the same, I am told what this fight might mean. In this case, the Russians have air superiority as well as a strategic advantage, with which they are pressing an attack. Why? The story explains that, as a rogue Czech commander, you aren’t really trying to win World War III – you are just trying to hold out long enough to gain some leverage in the ongoing negotiations.

My decision to finally take up mouse and play Armored Brigade has come not a moment too soon, I might add. The buzz around Armored Brigade these days is that the development of Armored Brigade II is proceeding apace. The new version will transition to 3D graphics as well as upgrade the game’s simulation capabilities. Something to start saving up for, I suppose.

– Cold Waters’ campaign reflects the realities of 1968…

Similarly, I was right in my speculation regarding Cold Waters and my ability to get the hang of that game.

Moving from the casual to the realistic difficulty setting produced a more satisfying play experience. I no longer felt a magical ability to defeat any and all comers and don’t feel, anymore, like I am cheating. If anything, this probably pushes me a bit beyond my limitations – although I do manage to both win some and lose some when playing on this setting. I gained enough self-confidence that I felt ready to take on the campaign game. In that last part, I was mistaken.

– … and then diverges.

The Cold Waters campaign screen (see below) is not the turn-based interface sported by Atlantic Fleet. At the strategic level Cold Waters also runs in continuous time, at a high multiple of the real time of the tactical level. What these differences mean for me is I suffer severe bouts of confusion as I try to interpret the campaign level interface. I repeatedly saw that mission opportunities could come and go while I struggled to understand what I was looking at and figure out where I had to click.

Even now that I am modestly comfortable with what I want to do and how I am supposed to do it, it still feels frantic. With the mouse button held down, your boat makes a beeline for the cursor position while the red icons race around you. If your mouse is in the wrong place, or you let up the button, or you’re just not sure where you want to click – the frenetic pace of the Atlantic War races by while you try to wrap your head around it. In several attempts, I failed to accomplish my assigned mission because the time it took me to get my bearings was more than enough time for the Soviets to complete the operation I had been sent to disrupt.

I read some complaints on-line (probably the Steam user reviews) about the campaigns that ring true, even if I’ve not gotten so far myself. The structure of the campaign is that you lose if you are killed or captured. That structure has you repeatedly thrown into difficult missions until you slip up – and then you lose. It seems to some more of an exercise in frustration than challenging game play.

– The campaign map of the North Atlantic. Imagine all the red and blue icons moving. My boat is in the dead center of the Norwegian Sea.

Nevertheless, the campaign system does have its merits. It creates randomly-generated missions that have the advantage of some context within a bigger picture. It also creates an important level of “fog” for the player. You’re given a mission task, which states generally what you’re going to be up against, but you really don’t know for sure what you’ll face. Are there escorts? Aircraft? Enemy subs? If so, how many? The scenario generator requires that you set these parameters (albeit with a level of randomness) yourself. The campaign does it for you. This, in and of itself, might be worth something even if your campaign game failures are getting you down.

I’m learning to ignore those splash screens to focus on living in the game-playing moment.

Because I brought up the new Armored Brigade version, I will also highlight that the Matrix/Slitherine forum is touting the development of a new game in this Cold War naval space. The title is the generic-sounding Modern Naval Warfare, a label that made me wonder which of my games they were about to discontinue.

The answer, my friends, is none of them. Modern Naval Warfare is a new-from-the-ground-up, detailed naval game set in the present. Its first platform is the Virginia Class fast attack sub, the replacement for the Seawolf. Plans are for other submarine makes to follow. Early screenshots and forum chatter tags it as a high-fidelity sub sim aimed at a more detailed level than Dangerous Waters and its predecessors.

There are screenshots and in-game videos out there and, although the game is up to a year out for release, it is looking pretty good so far. It also looks like it is going to stretch the capabilities of the average player’s computer a bit. I wonder if I’ll be worthy? Given its target, I’d have to imagine that they are going to price the game accordingly.

I guess I had better start saving my pennies.

  1. I am still not quite sure who these folks are, within the story’s narrative. Random vehicles and groups of men seem to dot the map, unwilling to engage in the fighting around them. Are they meant to represent civilians in some kind of victory calculation? Are they Czechoslovakian troops that refrain from taking sides? I just ignore them and figure it will all work out. ↩︎