I Didn’t Want to Do It But…

Tags

Cold War, Billy Joel, RTS, Real Time Strategy, left-handed mouse, Armageddon, global thermonuclear war, Cuban Missile Crisis, Cuba, Blitzkrieg, Cuban Missile Crisis: The Aftermath

…there is this thing called the Steam Summer Sale.

Lurking on the edges of Steam’s recommendations for me is a title called Cuban Missile Crisis: The Aftermath. No, not that aftermath. This is a 2005 game, published by 1C and created by independent developers G5. The game was added to Steam in 2015, and so sort-of shows up as a “new” title, depending on how you’re looking at it.

Obviously, the game has some appeal to me, based on the other articles I’ve written recently. The game is sparsely played on Steam and so doesn’t have all that many reviews. The reviews are “Mostly Positive” (in Steam’s own terminology) with both very positive and very negative reviews. When the Steam sale came upon me, the game was discounted to $1.24 with further discounts available if purchased in conjunction with the games sequel (Cuban Missile Crisis: Ice Crusade). Hard to say no to that.

The game might be considered a follow-on to the Blitzkrieg series, taking the World War II combat into the Cold War. Both games have been described as extensions of Sudden Strike, a game originally released in 2000 by CDV (the German publisher of Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood, whom I referred to albeit indirectly). Looking at screenshots of Sudden Strike, it is certainly easy to imagine Cuban Missile Crisis as a reskinning of that World War II title. However, the development of Sudden Strike, Blitzkrieg, and Cuban Missile Crisis have all proceeded independently and concurrently, with different developers working on them, despite the commonality among the publishers.

Perhaps in 2000 (for reference, this is the same time as the release of the original Total War), the mechanics of Sudden Strike felt novel for the RTS genre. Building bases, mining resources, and purchasing/upgrading units were no longer part of the battles. The games were intended to be much more “realistic” and were lauded for the effort. From the beginning, terrain was important both for sighting and cover. At some point on the way to Cuban Missile Crisis, the terrain itself became destructible, adding to this sense of realism. Of course that’s relative. None of these games are reasonable simulations of small unit actions in World War II or otherwise.

There is a closer link between Cuban Missile Crisis to the Blitzkrieg series. The former uses the latter’s Enigma engine as the basis for the games graphics and physics.

As I said, looking at all the riffs on this theme, a key motif was the praise about the increased realism. The combination of the addition tactical factors (line-of-sight) and the removal of classic RTS features (base-building) meant that this was considered more of a hard-core “strategy” title than your typical RTS. But as I said, this is by no means translates into a realistic depiction of combat. While some of these factors might combine in ways to reward realistic strategies and tactics, you have to suspend quite a bit of belief before you start to feel that you’re in command of actual units in a historical war.

Cuban Missile Crisis makes a big jump away from even that tenuous hold on “historical war” with its setting. The game assumes that the U.S. did invade Cuba and that during the (mostly successful) invasion, some of the Soviet launchers attacked the continental United States before they could be taken. That further escalated into a full-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia. The game begins after the nuclear war has completed and has you fighting a conventional war in the post-Armageddon world.

Part of this might be exercising the imaginations of the developers. After all, there are dozens of ways that World War III might have played out and while games usually start with a conventional war with the risk of going nuclear superimposed on top of it, the reverse is also possible. We can imagine leading with the nuclear strike and then whoever is left has to squabble over the rubble. In supposing such a scenario, it also frees the developers from having to adhere to any historical plans, make-up of armies, supply issues, etc. The units on the battlefield are whatever they want to say they are, because the narrative is created from whole cloth.

In this spirit, the various campaigns assume some re-alignments of the major powers, post-destruction. The U.S. is closely aligned with England such that units of the U.S./U.K. mix the unit types of the two nationalities. Likewise, Germany and France have united. Russia and China remain independent.

Lastly, the imagining of a post-apocalyptic world allows certain RTS mechanics to be made part of the story. The idea that supply of your units comes about from seizing enemy supply dumps is a staple of the RTS world, but makes a lot less logical sense when trying to match it to reality. In this game, we have to accept that the nuclear war has created shortages in fuel, units, and ammunition. Any odd construct of a scenario – be it a mixing and matching of units or a goal to seize a fuel supply – can be attributed to this greater theme.

So enough blither-blather. How does the game actually play? Well, that’s the bad news.

It’s Not the Real Thing

First, some good news. Or at least, the news isn’t as bad as it looked like it was going to be. After the initial install, nothing worked. Clicking on buttons didn’t perform an action. I realized I had another hard-coded right-handed mouse game on my system. I spent a while combing through all of the options, but was unable to find any solution. I spent some time Googling for solutions, but I don’t think this game ever became popular enough to generate an on-line “community.”

Finally, I took a look at the installation itself and I realized there were *.cfg files, composed in XML, that contained references to controls including MOUSE_0 and MOUSE_1. Without bothering to look at all the setting in detail, I reversed every reference to these variables in two different files. Surprisingly enough, this seems to have no holdouts. Firing up the game, everything seems to play correctly. Absent a simple in-game interface, this would be the way to go. +1 for the developers.

Now I was ready to play the game.

In the review that I linked to above, the game comes under some heavy criticism. If I had read that review before I bought the game, I probably would have kept my $3. The criticism there pretty much aligns with my own experience, with a few notable deviations.

First of all, if you just figure that you know how to play RTSs and start playing (yes, I did this), you’re going to get walloped. Even experienced players are going to need to start with the tutorial campaign to understand what needs to be micromanaged and what needs to be delegated.

The tutorial scenario wasn’t bad, but it is pretty much without challenge. There is no actual battle to “win” using the demonstrated tactics. The scenario only takes you through how to use the controls for each unit. An intermediate version, where your hand is held while using different units in combination, might have been a nice addition.

The tutorials also highlight some fiddliness of the game. Even the simple selection of units can be difficult. Often I have to forgo clicking on them and “rubber band” whatever unit I’m trying to control, which itself doesn’t work when units are bunched together. Similarly it is difficult to be sure that you are selecting the target which you intend. Part of the game is managing depletion of fuel and ammunition. To give one example, an ammunition truck is provide in-game to transport resupply to fighting units. To make this work, you select the ammunition truck (left-click) and then the unit that requires supply (right-click). But just as selecting the ammunition truck can be hard, so can selecting the target, meaning I’m never entirely sure that my order is going to do something until waiting to see if the ammo actually arrives at its destination.

Then there are other pieces that I’m not sure if I just don’t know how to use them or if they don’t work. Parked there next to the ammunition truck is a medical truck. The manual states “[t]hose who are seriously wounded lose the ability to move and shoot, and remain still in their places waiting for medical assistance.” Medical assistance, again per the manual, can be rendered by regular units or the medical truck. However, there is no command to order the truck to provide such medical assistance. I’ve also never witnessed that my injured soldiers are somehow recovering from their injuries. Is it working? Would it work if I knew how to do it right? Who knows.

While struggling with one of the early scenarios of the campaign, I have to admire the faithfully-dreary reproductions of 1960s mass housing. It’s almost as depressing as the nuclear war itself.

The linked review explains how the AI is instantly-deadly under certain circumstances. A unit which is creeping forward is suddenly blown up. By something. You now have no idea who shot at you or from where. The only way to find out is to move another unit forward to get blown up and hope the shooter is revealed. Maybe there is a certain realism to this, but it is not a fun game. The worst culprit may be, as the review explains, the enemy artillery. In this case, once your unit is spotted, artillery fire rains down until your unit is pulverized. In this case, there is no returning fire as the spotting unit is likely not even shooting and thus can’t be spotted unless you roll right up on top of it.

The tutorial teaches that one of the keys to this is to command your units to advance under an “auto-engage” setting. It’s not the default, so you have to be meticulous in making sure to choose the setting before each command. In this way, you leave it to the computer AI to identify and engage targets, which would otherwise destroy you before you realize what’s going on. On the other hand, when you are on the offensive, the enemy AI will still have a jump on the friendly AI, and can probably destroy you anyway.

After about 5 tries and realizing there was an “easy” setting, I manged to muddle my way through the first battle of the campaign.

Fortunately, there is one more setting that said review didn’t mention. The default setting puts friendly and enemy units on equal “toughness.” There is an easiest setting that gives the advantage to the player. For me, this tilting is necessary to win battles from the offensive (and also makes them a cake-walk while on defense). I can now move into the range of enemy fire and, while absorbing a few hits, identify the enemy and organize a plan to destroy him.

Another welcomed design feature is the speed setting is very adjustable. By default, the motorized vehicles can whip around pretty fast and so slowing down the clock helps a non-RTS guy like me to take it all in better. Even still, I end up playing the game by hitting pause every time something happens. “Giving orders while paused” is a feature I pretty much require to make an RTS playable, but when I spend more of my time paused than running, I begin to question how much “fun” I’m having.

The strategic interface. Key positions are captured on the way to taking the operational objective (the circle with the arrows). Each “tank” is a Kampfgruppe of mixed units, the total being worth a platoon or two.

Fun or not, there is something oddly addictive about this gameplay. With the speed toned down, the balance on “easy,” and with constant hits of the pause button, I can make my way through, and even win, the scenarios. The offensive scenarios present themselves as puzzles that need to be solved. Given the initial unit mix, it seems like the only unit that counts is your main battle tanks. You move them forward to identify enemy units and then hope they kill the enemy before he kills you. Sometimes there is a chance to bring up some artillery to help out, but do that within the range of the wrong enemy unit and you’ll lose it within a few seconds.

The connection to any kind of reality is tenuous and occasionally weird. Artillery on hills, as an example, remains unspotted by units on the ground (that’s a hill in the lower right corner of the middle screenshot). There’s a logic to it all, but as I said, the net result seems more to represent realistic factors rather than in any way simulate them. The game makes much ado about its physics simulation, but with the extremely short engagement distances (and even shorter spotting distances), it is not really a “simulation” of anything. It is just the way that spotting, trajectories, and damage are calculated internally. Now as I said, virtually any of the game’s mechanics can be rationalized as another effect of the nuclear devastation. If you are so inclined, you are invited to accept the game world as it comes.

As a simulation of anything to do with Cold War combat circa 1963-4, we don’t have much to work with here. As a pure RTS with some 60s period chrome, it has its charm. But most of the charm is drowned in the confusing interfaces and the walls of badly-translated text.

 

 

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I Can Always Find My Cuban Skies

Tags

Billy Joel, CMANO, Cold War, Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations, Cuban Missile Crisis, Steel Panthers, The Operational Art of War, WinSPMBT

I’ve read two mutually-exclusive assertions in articles about the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The first is that we were within a hair’s breadth of a full-scale military invasion of Cuba.

Essentially, the U.S. had created three responses to Soviet missiles in Cuba. The first was the blockade, redubbed a “quarantine” so as to make it not an act of war. The second was airstrikes against the missile launch sites to destroy them. The third option was an airborne and amphibious invasion of Cuba which would involve capture of the missile sites plus a regime change for Castro’s government.

The non-response of taking no-action at all was ruled out. As the positive response that was least likely to lead to all-out war, the quarantine was put into place. Some advisors felt that the quarantine would be insufficient – that the Soviets were already well on their way to having first-launch capability from Cuba, even if no additional ships arrived from Russia. This faction demanded that, absent Soviet capitulation, immediate military action was required before the missiles could be rendered operational. Failure to act would surely mean that the Soviets would initiate a first strike. Furthermore, in this analysis, air strikes were probably not a solution. No matter how thorough the bombing campaign, one could never know whether the missile threat was eliminated without boots on the ground at the actual missile sites. Thus the airstrike option would probably, inevitably, be followed by invasion.

Those backing this solution likely did not see World War III as inevitable. Many did not believe that Russia would enter a global war over Cuba. Instead, the assumption was that the Soviets would leave Cuba to her own defense and retaliation would come elsewhere, perhaps via the closing of Berlin. Recovery from the situation could take place after the nuclear missiles in Cuba were no longer a threat. As proposed in Back Channel, there may have been others that figured the U.S. had such an advantage that the case where the Soviets actually decided to go to war, that too would be a win for the U.S. Then we could bomb them back into the stone age and be done with it.

So that’s one version that is suggested by a modern analysis.

As we know, the Russians did not challenge the quarantine and a 24-hour deadline before escalated military action was threatened, a negotiated solution was reached.

Other sources, however, suggest a second interpretation of the facts as they were.

In this analysis, an invasion of Cuba was never on the table. Not really. This view is that, as the military ramped-up preparations for the invasion, the U.S. found problems. Now, ramp up they did – Marines were actually floating on transports ready to hit the beaches right up to, and beyond, when the Russians said they were withdrawing their missiles. But in this analysis, the sources say, the infrastructure to support an invasion just wasn’t ready. For example, there was a shortage of the amphibious craft necessary to establish and maintain bridgeheads in Cuba. Similarly, sources suggest that the plan for “regime change” wasn’t mature enough to be implemented. The lack of an ability to replace Castro would have been a show-stopper when it came time to call Go/No Go on an assault. We wanted to neutralize the threat from Cuba, not entire a quagmire of a new Cuban civil war.

Take whatever opinions have been held about what almost happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis and mix in information recently extracted from formerly-secret Russian archives which have now become available. Certainly, we amateur historians know things now that the politicians and planners didn’t know then (or even in 1998*). We know that the Russians had considerably more troops in Cuba that the U.S. realized at the time, meaning the U.S. would have had a tougher time than they thought invading Cuba. The U.S., while concerned about the strategic nuclear missiles, was unaware of the extent to which the Soviets had also deployed tactical nuclear missiles. In fact, part of the defense plan against amphibious invasion was to use tactical nuclear weapons against the invaders as they came onto the Cuban beaches.

We also know that nuclear war was averted by the obstinance of a single man. A Russian submarine had been targeted by signalling depth charges (depth charges with the explosive power, roughly, of hand grenades) which did some minor damage. In 2002, the Russians revealed that their submarine was on the verge of launching a nuclear torpedo as a response to the perceived attack, but this particular submarine required concurrence of three officers (the captain, the political officer, and the detachment commander) instead of the usual two (the commander happened to be on this particular submarine). While the captain and political officer were ready to launch, the deputy brigade commander demurred. In the end, no nuke was launched and the Russian sub surfaced and was able to flee the battle zone.

I was a little bit surprised not to find wargame simulations of the quarantine and the engagements that might well have broken out if the Soviet and American ships confronted each other directly. Perhaps there would have been no “fair” or interesting fights, at least at that time. What CMANO does have is a scenario of finding and confronting Russian missile sites that is imagined to take place in the aftermath of the initial crisis, so I will use that one.

Before that, however, I look at the full-scale invasion scenarios that are available in The Operational Art of War and in Steel Panthers, exploring the opposite ends of the scale.

I’ve Got a Chance to Make It

One of the original scenarios shipping with The Operational Art of War is “Cuba 62,” a modelling of the U.S. invasion of the island. It is this one that is grounded most in “reality.” We are given approximations of the American invasion forces and the Cuba/Soviet conventional defenses and are set loose.

I tried to implement the actual U.S. invasion plan, at least as far as I could understand it.

The American plan was to concentrate all forces on the beaches between Havana and Matanzas. Following bombardment and aerial bombing for preparation, airborne units would drop inland of the assault locations and then the Marines would come ashore across a stretch of (at least what once was) resort beaches. This would allow rapid seizure of the port in Matanzas and the seat of government in Havana. At that point, army units could arrive via ship and secure the rest of the island. In the above screenshot, I am attempting to follow that plan, at least insomuch as I comprehend it and can cause it to be implemented in The Operational Art of War.

Despite having owned the game for decades, I’m still not really sure exactly how amphibious operations are implemented. In this scenario, it seems possible to simply disembark in a Cuban port, assuming it is unoccupied by enemy units. Assaulting a beach? I’m not sure that is actually possible. I ended up moving all my Marines in via Matanzas and then all my Army units via the same port. This is the only option that matches the plan I’ve just outlined.

The Marines have responsibility for East of the bridgehead, the Army for West. My 101st boys pretty much got stuck behind enemy lines for the whole game, but came out none the worse for it.

As it turned out, concentrating everything at one point made for a slow-but-steady march towards victory. But it was a little too slow and steady. While I was gradually able to isolate and eliminate one commie strong point after another, progress wasn’t rapid enough to score a victory within the scenario’s parameters.

Victory required a rapid conquest of much of the island. I did not do that.

My first instinct, before looking through some details of the actual invasion plan, was to try to hit the island at multiple sites at once. I also assumed that the Guantanamo Bay force would be used to maximize initial success. The real plan, to contrast, called for a single point of invasion and had the Gitmo forces hold back until they could coordinate with the invasions ground forces. I think a multi-pronged invasion would be more successful within the TOAW construct, although I’ve yet to try it out. Even if it is, I don’t know what that says about it’s practical utility in the real world of 1962. One assumes the military planners knew things that a sandbox computer game wouldn’t.

“Cuba 62,” per my experience, is one of those scenarios where the U.S. has a decisive technological/organizational advantage and must use that to “beat the clock.” Back in 1962, Americans almost certainly assumed that such an advantage was there. The knowledge about Russian forces in Cuba far exceeding our estimates came later and one wonders how much that might have flummoxed the invasion plans (ignoring those tactical nukes, as we must). I didn’t try to see which “order of battle” this scenario uses for Russian units.

Another twist on this is that we now know that as Russia began moving towards a peaceful solution involving the removal of the missiles, it was Castro who pushed for open conflict. Have fended off the Bay of Pigs, he was happy to deal the U.S. another whooping. The Russians tried to explain to him that he would have very different results against the actual American Army and Marine Corp. So it is also possible that, while Soviet forces were present on the island, they might have refrained from direct involvement.

For some reference, the map is the same scale as for the Korean War map but with half-day turns (Korea was week-long turns). The scale does work as a game, but I’m not sure it really captures the feel of the fight as well as it could.

It’s Time for Me to Take It

Another version of the amphibious assault on Cuba is part of the vast user-made scenario library in Steel Panthers (WinSPMBT). The beach scenario is the first of four scenarios authored to explore a what-if invasion of Cuba. The full suite consists of the Marines on the beaches, two airborne landings, and one infantry fight. The scenario notes say the series was inspired by the Cuban Missile Crisis -related campaign “Red Thunder”, made for the flight simulator package Strike Fighters 2.

Hit the beach! Marines come ashore on the swampy beaches near Matanzas.

This is a big scenario. It is a big map, for Steel Panthers (see the size of the tactical map versus the mini-map in the lower right corner, above, which is only about a quarter of the entire map), and a large unit count. Note that the screenshot is only about a quarter of the US forces. There are two invasion forces, one to the west and one to the east of the town of Cardenas, and we are only seeing about half of the western wing here.

It also is taking me a few turns to remember all the quirks of Steel Panthers. Checking every unit for suppression is something I’d forgotten about (maybe willfully). The multi-turn process of using indirect artillery requires acclimatization as well.

The Steel Panthers take on this is much the same as Steel Panthers always is. Controlling the units down to the platoon level is generally fun. Steel Panthers is also big enough to capture the full scope of a tactical battle without necessarily scaling down the unit size and map scale. Even though battles often do just that. This being purely-hypothetical, there is no way to say whether it is “to scale” or abstracted. The scenario requires that Marines take a coastal town by landing on the beaches to either side. They then must rush to seize the town within about an hour and a half of landing. Is that a feasible plan? Maybe, if we are relying on shock and awe to achieve quick victory. It also might be better to establish organization upon landing, and then advance in an organized way. Take 5-6 hours instead of 1.

The downside to having the ability to play with every weapon in every unit is that you’ve got to cycle through every unit, every turn. That isn’t so fun. Beach landings can be especially tough because once you’ve emptied your transports, they are still there waiting to be “visited” every turn. For me, when I play Steel Panthers, I’ve found its more important to play the units in the order that the game has them in (next unit) than to try to use them by function or command organization. Otherwise, in a large scenario like this, it becomes too easy to lose track of which units have moved and which still have yet to be commanded.

I can only imagine that the Command Ops engine would be a wonderful treatment for this fight. In many ways, an invasion of Cuba looks similar to Crete (a major focus in the Conquest of the Aegean product.) Besides the fact that it would be an awful lot of work (a map of Cuba plus a 1962 Order of Battle!), the Cold War combatants circa 1962 may have advanced in technology enough to make a World War II game engine unsuitable. In playing the TOAW version I used, with as much frequency as I could, the helicopter insertion capability available in the scenario. As I’ve talked on about before, TOAW a key gameplay element in the game is to occupy all six hexes surrounding an enemy position before attacking. Helicopter becomes a great way to get a just-strong-enough unit into that sixth hex to allow an enemy to be eliminated. I’d imagining that modeling helicopters, and getting it right, is something that the Command Ops engine is just not going to do without further development.

I Know What I Would See There

So lets switch over to Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations.

As I said, there aren’t any currently-available scenarios covering the crisis itself. What is available is a user-made scenario dealing with a similar crisis, something just under a year after the real events. The player commands a naval task along with air support to determine what the Russians have lurking around the Caribbean and to check whether there really are missile launchers on Cuba.

Almost a year later, and the CIA still suspects the Russians of putting missiles in Cuba. I guess the resolution didn’t take.

This is a hypothetical, and one pretty far afield from the actual missile crisis. Set aside the fact that the Russians complied with the missile removal and then some**, if I had to speculate on the nature of a follow-on to the Cuban Missile Crisis, I would expect it to be fast and furious. If the U.S. became aware of Russian non-compliance, they probably wouldn’t have poked around with a few air and sea assets. Given that Russian non-compliance came with an threat of immediate nuclear war, I’d expect a second Cuban Missile Crisis to escalate far faster than the first.

Of course, another way to interpret this scenario is that what the Cubans have there are those same assets that the Russian removed even though we didn’t know about them. One could imagine that, as a year passes, we slowly develop suspicion about them and once again start the process of identification. Then, once again, we might try to deal with them through diplomatic channels with military action only as a last resort. No matter what, I have to think that once a Cuban/Soviet let off a missile aimed at U.S. aircraft, we’d be limit our response to four ships and a dozen or so aircraft. But this is the scenario I’ve got and I’m going to play it.

In many ways, the scenario is really a Vietnam situation on a “hypothetical” map. The mix of aircraft is that of the early escalation of the Vietnam War. You have your Douglas F3D flying with an electronics warfare package. They support Vought F-8 Crusaders, the bulk armed for combat but others stripped down to be used for photo-recon. We expect to face a enemy force of MiG 15s, 16s, and 17s. The naval support is sparse, particularly given the availability of assets this close the continental United States. Much like Vietnam and Korea before, the United States assumes complete superiority in sea assets.

Fidel shot first. MiGs are rapidly dispatched with surface-to-air missiles from my destroyers.

The instructions, as is common for CMANO scenarios, have us trying to located the hostile materiel located somewhere in Cuban waters. The instructions say I should find them and then “wait for further instructions***.” In the meantime, the MiGs decide I’m becoming annoying and try shooting down some of my aircraft. Already, this war is going far further than the original Cuban Missile Crisis ever did.

They mostly come at night. Mostly.

After some back-and-forth shooting, in which I had the upper hand, the sun set on the Caribbean and decided I’d try to wait it out until the next morning to resume the search in the light of day. My fears that this would be another scenario where I simply would be unable to complete the objective were unfounded. Once night fell, two unknown ships began approaching my task force from out of the blackness. The fact that they were emanating weapon targeting radar pretty much let me know they were bad guys, but being the good guy here, I couldn’t really go after them until I had a positive identification.  Or until they began shooting at me, which they did.

A few minutes later I identified the ships as Russian, a frigate and a light cruiser. Yikes. I had terrible flashbacks to the Waller Takes Charge scenario where I ended up begin thrashed by the larger Soviet gunnery. It also means I’m in a shooting war, not just with Cuba, but also with the Russians. You’d think the President would release more air and naval assets, wouldn’t you?

Anyhow, there is a point where you are toe-to-toe with your enemy and you’ve just got to duke it out, because turning tail and running won’t leave you any better off. In this case, numbers prevailed over size. I won’t go into all the details, because the core of this scenario is discovering what’s out there, but I did manage to pull of the “Major Victory” as defined by the scenario author.

As far as these scenarios go, this one was pretty enjoyable. I have to say it was on the easy side, given my win. In the end, I lost a few planes and took a lot of damage to my ships (3 out of 4 were dead in the water by the end, although all could be repaired), but I gave quite a bit more than I got. Of course, now we’re in a hot war with the Cubans AND the Russians, and Cuba has nuclear missile launchers ready to go. I guess its time to roll out that invasion scenario from the top of the article.

All of these “might have been” scenarios, while maybe not that much of a possibility, are still grounded in the real world. In my next article, I’ll take a look into the realm of pure fantasy regarding the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

*The passing reference to 1998 refers to the initial release date of The Operational Art of War.

**There were missiles in Russia of which the United States was unaware. The Soviets could plausibly have kept them there and, if caught, simply said that they weren’t part of the original deal and pushed for more concessions from the U.S. Further, evidence suggests the Russians were driving for an avoidance of escalation by threatening to abandon Cuba, all outside of U.S. diplomatic pressure.

***For what its worth, no “further instructions” were forthcoming. I took the scenario description at face value and did not take any action against the Soviet missile sites. I don’t know if the intent was execute an airstrike.

Goodbye, Vietnam

Tags

Cold War, Last Days In Vietnam, Vietnam

In contrast to the previous documentary, the PBS documentary Last Days in Vietnam is lives up to its 4+ star rating on Amazon. (4.2 on Netflix – 4.4 for me).

Last Days in Vietnam was being removed from Netflix, so I managed to catch it before it went. I am glad I did, although I had to forego a number of other movies being removed on July 1st.

This is a PBS-made documentary about the evacuation of the American Embassy in Saigon. It starts its story with the Paris Peace Accords and the invasion of the South by the North in the spring of 1975 and continues through to the fall of Saigon and the aftermath. Focus is on the decision of the U.S. ambassador, Graham Martin, to not organize an evacuation in advance. At first, his decision was driven by optimism that the Peace Accords would prevail and a solution found. Later, he was afraid (as was pretty much everyone) that hints of an evacuation would cause panic. The narrative also focuses on efforts of lower level officials to salvage what they could and save at-risk Vietnamese – those who had aided the Americans during their time in the country – during a time when such actions were unsanctioned.

The documentary is well put-together. Interviews with participants are mixed with explanatory narration along with film and photography of the events. In some cases, we see the same person who is being interviewed on period film, taken while the events are unfolding.

Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were evacuated from Saigon and other parts of the South in advance of the North Vietnamese take over. But even more hundreds of thousands were sent to re-education camps or into hard labor by the communists. While not documented, it is believed that tens of thousands were executed. Those left behind include those who worked for the Americans, those who were placed in the South Vietnamese government, and the wives, mistresses, and children of Americans who were stationed in Vietnam.

The story told is a sad one. Largely the blame is shouldered by Ambassador Martin, who was asked repeatedly to prepare for the need for an evacuation but would not. A better organized evacuation, started in advance, could have been much, much more effective. Besides the human factor, the task of destroying classified documents and millions in U.S. currency was left to the final 24 hours. It is not discussed in the program, but one wonders how much U.S. information and material was taken by the North Vietnamese invaders and how much of that should have been avoidable through advanced planning.

While Martin is criticized, we see that his heart was in the right place. When the evacuation is called to a halt (by Ford and Kissinger – the latter of whom is interviewed in the show) it is not through lack of concern for the refugees. Miscommunication and misunderstandings across the Pacific likely caused decisions to be made in error.

This would not have been the first time in the Vietnam War, but it would be the last.

 

Oh Havana I’ve Been Searching for You Everywhere

Tags

13 Days, Back Channel, Billy Joel, Cold War, Cuba, Cuban Missile Crisis, Stephen L. Carter, Twilight Struggle

After writing about the startling mention of a Cuban Missile Crisis board game in the Wall St. Journal, I decided I’d go ahead and pick up 13 Days: The Cuban Missile Crisis.

First, however, to get into the mood, I found the book Back Channel by Stephen L. Carter. (For what it’s worth, the hard cover is considerably cheaper than the paperback and actual 30 cents less than the e-book right now). This is a book about the Cuban Missile Crisis, fictionalizing the details of the secret deal between Kennedy and Khrushchev that staved off a shooting war.

As I was trying to decide whether or not to read this book, I was put off by the marketing pitch. Without naming my source, I’ll just say that I got the recommendation for this title from a list which seems to have a considerable political bias. While the books listed should be for a general readership, I notice an emphasis toward progressive-leaning books (and, oddly, Romance Novels) while the list deemphasizes the kind of books in which I’d actually be interested. Before jumping on board, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t being sold a pig in a poke.

Some further searching only confirmed my initials concerns. Blurbs for Back Channel mentioned how Carter was the recipient of awards from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and the NAACP. Reviewers on Amazon praised the book for its insights about black America. Now that may be all well and good, but what I want to read right now is a book about the Cuban Missile Crisis (involving black characters is fine), not a book about being African-American in American in 1962. It turns out my suspicions were misplaced. From all the misdirection, I can only assume that there is a segment of the reading public (a bigger segment than that to which I belong) that would prefer the latter to the former.

Carter is a Law Professor at Yale and, from what I can tell from his bio and from reading Back Channel, has no obvious dedication to one side or the other of our current political wars. Back Channel is the seventh novel that he’s written and he seems to specialize in historical fiction associated with government and politics, in particular included significant historical figures. Right from the beginning, we are introduced to the story President Kennedy himself involved in a secret meeting with the (fictional) teen-aged main character of the story.

The mixing of the historical, the plausible, and the fictional is very well done, making it difficult to know where one ends and the other picks up (although, at the end of the book, the author tries to explain where the boundaries lie). The combination of real history, historic drama, and spy thriller works well. So well that I’ve added some of his other works to my list of books to read.

Also, to my amusement as I read through, I keep encountering the Strategy Cards from 13 Days. It’s an interesting reflection from the chrome of the game. Not only that, I’ve started to see words, phrases and themes from the book popping up in the news (North Korean summit) and fiction (The Expanse).

Twilight Tussle

With even just a glance at the game, there can be little doubt that this design is based on Twilight Struggle. The board looks like a reduced version of Twilight Struggle‘s global map and the timeframe is compressed from decades into the titular 13 days. Even where components do not translate from Twilight Struggle into 13 Days, components are used in similar functions within the new structure. For example, China does not play a role in the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, the China Card mechanic from Twilight Struggle is very similar to the Personal Letter card mechanic in 13 Days.

One of the twists of 13 Days is that there is are two separate decks of cards. The Strategy Cards in 13 Days correspond to the deck in Twilight Struggle. Each card has an operational value (command, in the 13 Days lingo) and an event, which is usable by one side, the other, or both. 13 Days has a second deck. This deck is played in a separate phase. In many ways, these cards are analogous to the scoring cards in Twilight Struggle, but the use is simplified. At the beginning of each round, each player is dealt three cards from the Agenda deck and chooses one. These two cards are now the map locations that will be scored that turn, but each player only knows the identity of the one they, themselves, have selected. Similarly to the way cards are restricted in Twilight Struggle (in that game, by early/middle/late war designation) though, each player is informed as to the three cards the other player was dealt, so they can make educated guesses about what their opponent’s agenda might be.

Within the strategy phase, play is similar to Twilight Struggle, but simpler. Players take turns playing one card from their (hidden) hand, each playing all but one. In 13 Days, the last card in your hand is placed in an Aftermath pile, which is analogous to the Space Race mechanic of Twilight Struggle. The four active cards can be played for points or, if the event is neutral or your own, for the event action. Like Twilight Struggle, if the card you play for points is an enemy event, the enemy gets to play that event (in this case, the enemy always plays their event before you play your points).

So the game is compressed in scope and scale, and that simplicity is reflected in the game play itself. The box says it is a 45 minute game (as opposed to several hours for Twilight Struggle) and, as I said in the previous article, many players say it is more like a 30 minute game once you learn the rules. As one review points out, the game consists of twelve cards played per side and that is it.

Several on-line reviewers agreed that 13 Days lacks the “bite” of Twilight Struggle, without going into detail as to what they meant by that. Based on my initial experience, I would say this. 13 Days does not have the the kind of complex traps that one player can set for another. In Twilight Struggle this may be exemplified by the “DEFCON suicide card,” where you win by forcing the enemy to allow a game ending move on their turn. 13 Days does not allow the game to end prematurely, except in the 3 scoring phases at the end of the round. There is no surprise event that a player can produce that would result an immediate victory. Furthermore, the events are less complex. As far as I can tell, they are mostly slight trade-ups from the operational value of the cards themselves. You get to do just a little more, but may be limited in where you can do it. Also, as far as I can tell, 13 Days doesn’t have the opportunity for a complex series of card plays to achieve a multiplier effect. In Twilight Struggle, playing card X as a headline can be very valuable if you can follow up with card Y and maybe card Z.  I’ve yet to see a clear “one-two punch” in the 13 Days cards.

In addition, the design of 13 Days is far more a “game” with Cuban Missile Crisis accoutrements, versus a game that simulates the Cuban Missile Crisis – even in comparison with the design of Twilight Struggle. I talked before about how the designer explained that Twilight Struggle is not meant to be a simulation – it is first and foremost a game. Nevertheless, the mechanics are very much tied to the the historical situations and outcomes that they portray. Take, for example, Cuban Missile Crisis event in Twilight Struggle. Until deescalated, the game is put on the edge of a nuclear-war-induced end. It may not be a simulation of the Cuban Missile Crisis in any meaningful way, but it clear that the event represents the situation that occurred in 1962.

Contrast that with almost any event in 13 Days. It takes quite a bit more imagination to see the events described as “simulated” by the adding an removing of influence blocks. Yes, playing the game may put you in the mood to think about what happened and what might have happened surrounding Cuba, but the game in no way allows one to explore those what-ifs. I would imagine that any number of settings could have worked just as well for playing similar cards and placing blocks. Practically speaking, the purpose of the setting may be to focus the minds of the players, allowing them to mentally sort the card events. As to portraying the conflict itself? Probably not.

All that said, the opinions from players of 13 Days are generally positive. On Board Game Geek, it currently has a rating of 7.6. This isn’t Twilight Struggle‘s 8.3, but it ranks it among the better games, especially if you are looking in the war/historical genre. While simple, it the interactions are complex enough to keep it interesting. The simplicity has another advantage. The game, even at full price, runs half or less of what most “serious” board games go for.

The game also removes the dice that are a key factor in Twilight Struggle. Randomness is only through the shuffles of the two decks. Nobody can predict what cards they will be dealt nor the 5-10 cards that may remain unused at the end of the game. This means that the key differentiator between players is the knowledge that each player has about their own cards. What cards they have in hand that have yet to be played and which card has been selected as the agenda for that round. In this way, the key competitive factor in the game is the bluffing involved in moving entails. Did that play I just make tip off what agenda I selected? Or am I deliberately trying to make it look like I have played one particular agenda, when it is really something else?

One funny aside I noticed about my own gameplay, when I was doing a solitaire run-through of the tutorial. When I set out blocks, I tend to like them in symmetrical patterns. The fully-influenced battlefield would either have a square, such as the typical five-side on a die, or be in a pentagonal arrangement. However, if I know I have no intention of completing the full five, I don’t start making one of my two “five” patterns. Instead, I’m apt to make a triangle or diagonal shape suited to the total number I intend to eventually leave there. If I did that in a real game, I’d be telegraphing my moves.

I’ll Have Us a War with Those Sons of Bitches and I’ll Make it Look Like Their Fault!

Going back to those DEFCON suicide cards, there is something I wrote about a little bit in my Twilight Struggle article and its philosophy on a nuclear end-game. In this respect, 13 Days sees and raises Twilight Struggle‘s treatment of nuclear war. Twilight Struggle uses the concept of a single DEFCON track to represent how close the world is coming to nuclear war. The concept has been adopted and reused in other games so that for a game player, DEFCON is apt to associate with its Twilight Struggle meaning rather than its historical meaning. DEFCON was, of course, an internal indication of the US military alert level, meaning that the Soviets would have had an equivalent but (not necessarily) equal level. Furthermore, DEFCON 1, rather than being the onset of a nuclear attack, was merely the maximum alert status in preparation for an imminent nuclear war. While the U.S. has never entered DEFCON 1, it is not a forgone conclusion that doing so would mean a missile launch.

The other meaning of DEFCON, championed by Twilight Struggle, is that entering a “hot” war meant a loss. As my previous article discussed, the Twilight Struggle designers credited Balance of Power with the inspiration for this mechanic. I also discussed, though,the curious feature of this in that if you can force the other player to start that war, you don’t lose – you win.

13 Days elaborates on this. Rather than a single DEFCON, there are separate tracks for each side. Furthermore, each side has three different categories (Military, Political, and World Opinion) for which DEFCON is tracked separately. Clearly DEFCON doesn’t mean the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s military readiness rating. Unlike Twilight Struggle, entering DEFCON 1 is not an instant loss. The effect of DEFCON doesn’t occur until the scoring phase at the end of each round. Then, and only then, if you have any one of your three tracks in DEFCON 1, you lose. Furthermore, if you have all three of your DEFCON tracks in DEFCON 2 or higher, you lose.

This serves to model the real “game” during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Both sides didn’t want a full-on nuclear war. So the question was how to avoid that fate while still maximizing your own side’s position.

However, the flip side of the DEFCON mechanic in 13 Days is that, if you can somehow force your opponent into a DEFCON loss, you win. In other words, launching nuclear Armageddon is fine and dandy as long as you can plausibly blame the other side for starting it. This is even more so than Twilight Struggle, where I speculated about the meaning of forcing a DEFCON suicide on your opponent. In 13 Days, it clearly means starting a war – a war whose outcome probably won’t vary all that much depending on who started it.

On the subject, however, Back Channel actually addresses the subject, although from a slightly different angle. Considering the importance of plausible deniability if the black operation goes wrong, the National Security Advisor explains realpolitik to Bobby Kennedy,

‘If it goes wrong,’ said Bobby, ‘nobody will care about who’s to blame.’

‘I beg to differ, Mr. Attorney General. Nowadays, historians hardly care about anything else.’

I’m not sure it really answers the question, but the book is full of indications that “who started it” is a major consideration for many, if not most, of those involved.

Particularly when I consider this game in concert with a detailed narrative like Back Channel, I tend to interpret all the Strategy Card events as political maneuvering. Placing military blocks is less about actual military action than about appeasing or displeasing certain “hawk” factions within your own government. Most events can be interpreted as internal maneuvers or (e.g. U-2 Downed) an actual escalating event that may either be controlled through other actions or spiral out of control. But the abstractness of the game leaves that, I suppose, as an exercise for each player. Does the “Invasion of Cuba” U.S. event imply an invasion of Cuba, or is it merely Kennedy’s readiness and willingness to exercise it as an option? That is, is Cuba only invaded if card play results in a DEFCON loss?

Opposition Research

Having spent some time (and, to date, not finishing) a computer opponent for Twilight Struggle, I figured it wouldn’t be a huge thing to adapt that computer opponent for 13 Days. Naturally, it has been more of a project than I expected, but it was in fact adaptable.

To date, I have a programmed opponent that can play the tutorial scenario, as printed in the manual, from either side. With only a little bit of fudging, it will make all the same decisions as outlined in the explanatory text, with one exception. I’ll get to that in the next section.

It was actually surprisingly to me how easy it was to reproduce the tutorial’s logic. Most of the logic goes through a pair of algorithms that rank the choice of what card to play and the choice of what battleground (in the 13 Days sense, not the Twilight Struggle sense) to play it on. More surprisingly, I found that the tutorial does not have any dynamic dependency in the decision making.

I’ll explain. The logic that I use looks only at the current state. Going into this exercise, I assumed that it would be necessary to react to enemy placements, altering one’s best guess as to what the enemy agenda is. And while the tutorial text hints at just such a bit of figuring, it turns out that it doesn’t really change the selection over what to play next as compared to static logic. To put it another way, the fact that I just added two blocks to a space doesn’t make contesting that space particularly more appealing than if those blocks had already been there from earlier.

Now, I have no doubt that superior play comes from analyzing combinations of moves and creating plans which are carried out over multiple moves. But at the tutorial level, that isn’t really what’s happening. Similarly, I have a theory based on limited play that the order that cards are played in, in contrast to Twilight Struggle, doesn’t have a big impact on outcome. The biggest reason to chose cards in a particular order is more about what information might be tipped off to the other player as opposed to optimizing card combination. Again, an experience player may know otherwise.

Logic and Argument

I’ll indulge myself by going into the details of a couple of moves as the tutorial plays them. If you don’t play the game, it probably won’t make any sense at all. The rules, which includes the sample play-through, are available on-line, so anyone is free to follow along. If you’d rather not, skip to the next header.

So, as I said, the AI program I adapted is good enough to reproduce the tutorial game from both sides, with two exceptions. There are two moves that the computer considers downright dumb and there is no way I can get it to make them (absent just randomly picking from legal moves). I have to say I agree with the machine here.

The first of the two is a Soviet move, and it comes in the first round of the game. I believe it is meant to illustrate the value of misdirection when playing.

In selecting the Agenda card, the narrative explains how the U.S. is lucky with the draw and chooses Italy as the easiest path. Italy is worth the most points and the setup has the U.S. one-up in Italian influence. The playthrough has the U.S. making several moves to “misdirect” the Soviets. The problem is, the Soviet has all the same information that the U.S. player has. He too knows the U.S. drew the Italy card and can see the advantages of using it. Nevertheless, the tutorial suggests that the Soviets do not believe that Italy is the agenda – could happen. Several times during the round, the Soviet player forgoes the option of taking control of Italy – which is OK, given the premise.

The problem comes with the last card played in the round. The Soviet uses the event “Intelligence Reports,” allowing him to take an American card (at this point, the only one he has). The pilfered card, “Suez-Hungary,” allows the Soviets to take control of Italy with very little downside. However many cubes are required to take control are played by the event at no DEFCON escalation cost. Furthermore, as the last card of the round, if it happens to be the right move, there is no opportunity for the U.S. to counter it. The only downside is that each player can only have a maximum of 17 cubes in play on the board. Adding two more cubes now means either having to “waste” a card in a later round to remove those cubes or perhaps having to forego the placement of cubes in a future round because you have run out. To me, unless you are 100% sure that Italy is not the U.S. agenda, taking Italy now with 2 cubes is an obvious play. And of course, there is no way to be 100% sure.

Allowing the AI to play this card as it would like would substantially alter the remainder of the game, so to complete the tutorial requires skipping the event. Furthermore, there is no way that I could figure to reprogram the AI to decide to skip the card, at least not in a way that made sense. (Logically, I could have the AI make a guess as to which agenda the opponent picked and bet everything on that guess, but I don’t think I want to do that).

The other mistake is more obviously wrong, although in the context of the tutorial it doesn’t change the end result. The U.S. holds an event card, “Eyeball to Eyeball.” For operations purpose it is worth one cube, but if the U.S. has the lead in Military DEFCON (which he does), three cubes can be spread over the two Cubas. Escalation still applies, however, so placing more than one has its downside. With this in mind, the player uses the event to place just a single cube in the Cuba Military. It is one of the U.S. agenda cards, but not the one selected. The tutorial notes explain that this deception causes the Soviet player to make what seems (particularly in retrospect) like a bad counter move.

Notice, however, that if the event is used to place just a single cube, the command operation value of the card can also place that single cube. So if the card is to be used, it could be used either way with the same result. However, if you’re going to use the card for its operational value only, then it doesn’t matter whether you are using a U.S. event or a neutral event. So it is absolutely foolish to play a U.S. event for its command value and then place a neutral event in the aftermath when you can do the opposite for no change except to pick up (in this case a single point, but in general) points at the end-of-game scoring. As I said, in the tutorial the Soviets are far enough ahead in the aftermath victory point tally that it makes no difference. But in principle, it is entirely the wrong move.

I dwell on this here because, as a player following along with the tutorial, it was not obvious. When trying to get an AI to make the same “mistake,” however, it became impossible and therefore clear that making the “wrong” move should never be selected algorithmically.

Eyeball to Eyeball

While I now have a copy of the game to play with, finding opponents is a little harder.

To the rescue comes a website created by Alexander Rymasheusky. With permission of 13 Days‘s creators, he has made a browser-based online version of the game.

I open with a heavy hand in Cuba and wait to see how my opponent responds.

It’s really an impressive system. I’m even more impressed having struggled through programming an opponent for the game myself. The program provides a gaming lobby with chat and the ability to create new games or join an already created one. For games that have two players signed on, you can follow on as an observer.

During play, and this is the impressive part, the program enforces all of the rules. As a result, there are no concerns about cheating (or, more likely, just misinterpreting the rules). One can just follow the prompts. Given the way each event can be interpreted as an exception or special case to the rules, this is a pretty deep feature for a free, web game. In fact, I would venture to guess that the combination of a decent UI and rules enforcement may be more than half-way there, if you are talking about programming a full single player mode. Restricting the programmed opponent to playing only legal moves is at least as important to trying to get him to play good moves.

I’ll Return Before the Fire Dies

I was pleasantly surprised to find some good, high-level treatments of the Cuban Missile Crisis in historical fiction and in gaming. As critical as the event was as a piece of history, it doesn’t fit into the mold of your typical wargame. But a little bit of innovation and some stretching of the imagination, and look what we’ve got!

Next up, however, I’ll come at it from the other way. Traditional wargames can explore potential what-ifs. Namely, what if the Cuban Missile Crisis turned the cold war hot.

We’re Burnin’ Through Your Town

Tags

Cinderella, CMANO, Cold War, Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations, global thermonuclear war

Part 3 of a 3 part post. Back to Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

In the previous post, I was disappointed with the CMANO scenario I played. It was too hard for me, yes, but I also didn’t feel like I was learning anything by playing it.

This time I tried the scenario Deter, Detect, Defend, which takes place in 1962. I also got completely destroyed by it (the game said it was a disaster), but in this case it was a fun experience. Why the difference?

This scenario places you in command of NORAD Region 25, headquartered at McChord AFB near Tacoma WA. You’re charged with the defense of the major metropolitan areas of the U.S. Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. With several different types of fighter planes and interceptors (along with batteries of Nike Hercules Surface-to-Air missiles) you must stop what the Soviets have in store for your zone. It is a kind of slow-motion, low-tech Missile Command.

Part of the challenge is that the scenario poses that the nuclear war has escalated so suddenly, you start out on peacetime alert. You must make your initial defense with what is ready at the moment, rather than the full complement of forces.

I have my fighters up, and I’ve been alerted to some suspicious formations headed for Seattle. Smoke ’em?

This scenario is rated as more towards the easy side. If it weren’t for the low alert, the player would have more than enough interceptors to do everything he needs to do and more. What makes the scenario a bit challenging are a couple of surprises hidden away in it. Likely, reading through this, you’ll discover those surprises, which may ruin this scenario if you’re thinking of playing it. Consider yourself forewarned.

Even on easy, as I said above, I lost miserably. In stark contrast to the previous scenario, it is easy to tell why I lost and what needs to be done differently to not lose. Basically, there are a few incoming flights that, if you don’t have fighters in the air and covering the correct sector, you won’t have time to intercept them. Until they were on top of me, I did not realize that their direction was one of the approaches for the enemy.

For some reason, getting Vancouver nuked loses you the game. Hey, I didn’t lose any American cities! Shouldn’t that be a minor victory? (Just kidding, Canadian readers).

Whoops. Didn’t United Airlines tell their pilots that there is a war on. Good think I didn’t just blindly start taking out everything coming in from the East.

What’s fun about this scenario is not just that it is tense without being overwhelmingly difficult. It is also the array of weaponry you have at your disposal (and facing off against you.). The way the scenario starts, with your bases not being on alert, means your initial task is to chose the loadouts for your idle and reserve aircraft.

Some choice it is.

In this confrontation we ,the players, have at our disposal the latest in air-to-air missiles (AIM-4 Falcon) as well as a few exotic beasts. There is the AIR-2 Genie (sometimes called the Ding-Dong), a nuclear-tipped air-to-air missile. I guess that’s one way to be really, really sure you get the kill. You’ve also got your Folding-Fin Aerial Rocket Mk 4, aka Mighty Mouse. This rocket designed for bomber intercept missions was modeled after German WWII systems successfully used against American Bombers and intended to compensate for the extreme high speeds of intercept. Sadly, it wasn’t very effective. While the rockets’ detonation could do plenty of damage, accuracy was a problem. I wanted to give them a try, but never got the chance.

Caught with my pants down. Those little red specks over Vancouver and points south are nukes. I’ve got a pair of Delta Daggers on afterburner headed for intercept, but they didn’t make it in time.

Boom.

Carrying these instruments of the Atomic Age are an array of interceptor planes whose names are scarcely remembered. The F-102 Delta Dart, F-106 Delta Dart, and F-101 Voodoo were, at the time, the top of line. They came as part of the rapid innovation that occurred prior to the Vietnam War. In a few years, we will see technology start to settle into much longer development and operational times. Once you know a country’s platforms, you won’t need to know the exact year. But up through the early sixties, it sometimes could feel like a free-for-all.

When I was a little kid, I had a sticker book for aircraft. It took me from the first aircraft and the First World War up through “modern” designs, which in this case happened to be the early 1960s. It was not just warplanes; there was also an emphasis on some of the experimental planes pushing the speed and altitude records at the time. I can still recall the fascination with the shiny , futuristic jet designs with their exotic-sounding names. For the imaginative, this may have been the height of the “jet age,” or the “atomic age,” or whatever description captures the cusp-of-the-future state of technology of that time.

Ground batteries are locked on to the incoming cruise missiles. Now we wait to see which side’s systems actually work.

I am ignoring, in my narrative, the enemy’s technology. During play, you don’t get the focus of the details of the other side as you do on your own equipment. The fog of war often hides the opponent, eluding precise identification. Coming at us, we see a range of bombers carry nukes as well as cruise missiles, presenting an equally appealing view into the other side of the arms race.

One thing to remember, and it is highlighted in the scenario notes, this situation is all-but-impossible. The politics of the 1960s focused on the Bomber Gap, and that beautiful array of American weaponry was likely made available through this fear. But the fact is, well before this attack took place, the upper echelons of command were aware of what the world now knows. It was the U.S. that had the vast superiority in terms of strategic resources. The USSR simply didn’t have the capability of launching a massive first strike in 1962, of the sort depicted here.

So a simple and fun scenario for playing some global thermonuclear war to pass the time.

 

My Gypsy Road Can’t Take Me Home

Tags

CMANO, Cold War, Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations, Germany, global thermonuclear war, Russian, World War III

Part 2 of a 3 part post. See Part 1 here.

Having failed to find any historical meat to chew on in my strategic-level games, I will instead look at two different CMANO scenarios set in 1961 and 1962. These specifically deal with nuclear weapons. The first of the two scenarios takes place during the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and involves positioning a nuclear armed submarine. Think of it as a CMANO-as-subsim scenario. The second is an imagining of a World War III nuclear scenario, circa 1962. It is an equivalent of the WarGames first strike/defense scenario, except set in a time when strategic bombers were still the core of the both sides’ nuclear capabilities.

A little CMANO aside, first. Matrix/Slitherine has been regularly updating the core program along with their DLC mini-game releases. That’s a good thing. What’s not a good thing is that every time I try to update, I manage to mess up my installation. It all seems to trace back to the fact I have two versions installed from my original disk. There’s the version as it first was delivered. Then there is a second version, the Wargame of the Year edition, which was a (free) upgrade from the publisher. It is that second installation that seems to be the operative one, and yet it is the first installation that seems to have a hold on Windows’ fiddly bits. Ultimately, I have always been able to go to the Slitherine website, download the updates directly, and manually correct the mess I’ve made with the auto-update program. Probably, if I remembered everything that went wrong, I’d also remember not to get into the same problem the next time. But by the time I’m ready to update again, I’m sure I will have forgotten what happened this time.

That IS an improvement!

So back to that first scenario, called Regulus, after the nuclear weapon featured therein.  It isn’t quite the “subsim” that I alluded to above. In the scenario, you actually command three different boats: one, the Growler, armed with Regulus nuclear missiles and two GUPPY class (1960s versions of the World War II Tench class), armed with torpedoes. The three need to maneuver through Soviet-patrolled waters in order to threaten Soviet land targets (with the nukes) and Soviet launch platforms (with torpedoes, one presumes) in the international, but isolatable, waters near the Kuril Islands. So commanding three subs simultaneously is not exactly subsim territory, it is still a game of slinking along blind and listening for signs of threats from the enemy.

Still playing, as I am, Bioshock, I can see some real contrasts between these two game styles. I consider both Bioshock and CMANO to be great games; the state-of-the-art for their genre. However, those genres are very different.

As I said in that earlier article, one of the tricks of the First Person Shooter genre is to take a linear game and present it in a way so that it feels non-linear. Bioshock does a good job with this. The world is fairly open, you can ride around in the underwater Metro going visiting any of the locations that you’ve discovered so far. However, the story moves you forward through the locations and through key events that are structured and preprogrammed. To put it another way, you are free to go backwards to previous levels in any way that you choose to do so, but you cannot skip ahead. The game has various artifices, a broken transport system or a locked door, that help to keep you on track without necessarily seeming like it does so. In this way, you are at almost any time facing exactly the environment that the developer intends for you to face. He has prepared you in both (player) knowledge and (in game) capabilities for the challenge you are about to face.

Contrast that with a military simulation. In the game engine as a whole (distinct, for the moment, from scenario design) you want the player to be free to take nearly any action. The program’s job is to simulate the “world’s” reaction to the player’s moves. The more varied its response, the more unpredictable (while still remaining effective), the better the simulation for most purposes. Of course, that unpredictability can be programmed in from the start – think of scenarios with triggered scripts – but the best of CMANO‘s genre stand out in their ability to handle the widest variety of situations and hold up throughout gameplay, whatever the player decides to do.

When it comes to the generic “sandbox” style wargames, the onus for a good battle will tend to fall onto the scenario designer. If the game can take an arbitrary pair of adversaries and reasonably handle one of them under a multitude of conditions, then obviously that initial setup might well be a bad one. One side or the other could have an edge that makes the game unwinnable (or unlosable). The forces could be so far out of contact that the game times-out before they get a chance to fight. Or perhaps it is just the that choices that you are required to make, while all reasonable, aren’t particularly fun within the parameters of how the game plays. Good scenario design is required to balance all these things that could go wrong in the hope that it will all go right.

Again, focusing on the sandbox games, the developers often depend on the the user community to develop such scenarios in order to fulfill the value proposition of their game, a proposition for which quality control becomes nearly impossible. So for a game like CMANO, there are a handful of scenarios (plus DLC add-ons) from the developers themselves. With those the customer might expect a certain quality. But developer-designed scenarios can’t possibly, of course, cover the whole range of the capabilities of the engine. So for a particular era I’m interested in (say, a war going nuclear circa 1961-2), I probably have to rely some hobbyist about whom I don’t know anything and who probably didn’t have me in mind when he made his scenario. Will it be too easy? Too hard? Focus on parameters different that the ones I’m interested in?

One example, I recall a CMANO scenario I played years ago where the key to it was organized around choosing the initial load-out for your attack aircraft. Perhaps an interesting question to some. But what if you don’t know and aren’t particularly interested in solving that puzzle? Does it leave the scenario unplayable do you? And when do you find out – how many times through the scenario might you play before you realize you are doing it all wrong(ly).

Approaching one of the possible passages through the Kuril Islands through to the Sea of Okhotsk. It’s going to take the better part of the day to approach the “hot” zone.

Going back to the top. Let’s say you’re playing a shooter that wants to choose between one of three approaches. That choice is probably presented, you take it, some cuts scenes might explain your choice, and then you’re in the action. It is also unlikely that, by making the wrong choice, you automatically lose the game. But it any case, you would expect the decision to take you right back into the action. Compare and contrast with the Regulus scenario. As the commander, you need to choose between several different passages where Russian patrols and minefields may lurk. Some are less heavily guarded and others have more natural advantages (e.g. deeper water or wider channels). So which do you take? What if many of the answers are outright wrong?

Suppose, too, that you’re not really up on the technology of this period. How easy or hard is it going to be to avoid detection? Is there a speed/depth combination that will outright kill you every time? And its not simply a case of knowing the technology (as big a hurdle as that might be itself). How “alert” is the enemy? How many assets are deployed looking for you? What kind of research, experience, pre-planning does it take to know what choices to make?

In the Regulus scenario, the way the choices are presented are by placing you far enough out, away from the action, that you can freely choose how you want to approach. So far so good. How could it be done any other way? CMANO simulates the details and that means approach. The problem comes is that your are at least a day away from whatever action might take place. So even running at 1 minute = 1 hour, that still a minimum of a half-hour of doing absolutely nothing except staring at the screen and waiting for something to happen. It’s made worse by the fact that you (or at least I) don’t know where that “action zone” is. And if things start happening while you’re running at 1 minute = 1 hour, you can suffer a whole lot of losses before you find the pause button*.

The reason I wanted to dig into this scenario in the first place is I remember when I saw the actual USS Growler. It is currently  (I think) on display in Manhattan along side the USS Intrepid floating museum. The boat has a Regulus missile on the deck. The Regulus is a design based on the German V1 rocket and was the first ship-based nuclear missle deployed by the U.S. Navy. I recall the protests in the early 1980s that brought the cruise missile technology into the public eye and, up until I saw the Growler, I associated the technology only with “modern” weapons. Just seeing the technology on display got me thinking about the differences between the nuclear age of the 1960s versus the nuclear age of the 1980s.

How about another genre comparison? Since my reinstall of Patrician 3, I’ve been playing it way too much. I’m in some 71 hours in less than two months can be explained, perhaps, because Patrician is a good go-to game when I want to engage in a kind of low-stress but non-trivial game/time waster. As I said, it is quite addictive, for what it is, which is basically a dynamic spreadsheet. It takes some time to learn the layout of land – where to buy, where to sell, and what are fundamentally good prices for each. After that, you’re engaged in a a repetitive cycle of small decisions that gradually build up your wealth and prestige. Each time you feed a town that has run out of meat or improve mood of the poor, it feels like a little bit of victory. It doesn’t take any deep analysis to make good decisions, and the nature of those good decisions are wide open. There are certain goods that I use to make most of my money, and others that I only trade to fill demand. Those decisions I can adapt to my own style while other players are equally (if not more) successful with a different set of choices. Regrets, I’ve had a few. But small mistakes are easily absorbed by all the good decisions you make.

Forward 950 years. For Regulus, it is the opposite. It seems that even one or two mistakes will spell the end of the game. Since you can’t make mistakes and learn from them, without restarting the scenario, you need to learn about the “right” way to do things (really) before attempting the scenario. If you don’t, you fail, and really have no way of knowing why.

An hour or so into the game, this is the first feedback of any sort I’ve received. Game Over, Man.

In the above screenshot, taken from my 3rd attempt at the scenario, I’m attempting to run my submarines deep through a channel between the islands. After painstakingly waiting for them to move into position, they are finally approaching the choke point. So far, I have no contact with any enemy. No sonar search, no depth charge patterns, no engine noises of the enemy moving about above. Then my first message appears – Boom! you’re dead. The scenario does not give any significant feedback about what went right and what went wrong. Likewise, while there is occasionally forum discussion on user-made scenarios, there is also often not.

With this one, I find it not fun and not educational. I think all my issues could have been solved, however, with a nice “debriefing” at the end. Making it dynamic (here’s what you did wrong) might be beyond the capabilities of the CMANO scenario creator, but at a minimum a set of hints about what you need to do right would be helpful. If indeed it is a scenario about how effective the anti-submarine warfare of the OPFOR was and, for even a good strategy, a bad “die roll” can kill you, then make that explicit. If there is a right way to detect when you are in danger of being detected, explain that.

During the development of this scenario, one user explained how he won. He waited for the hot war to start and then began nuking airbases, wiping out the capabilities of his enemy. I suppose that once you’re giving the “weapons free,” anything is fair target, but I would think I should be taking seriously the operational instructions which designate specific targets. Using nuclear cruise missiles as defensive, tactical weapons not only seems like bad form, but a quick way to end civilization as we know it.

(on to Part 3).

*As an aside, at some point (after I finished with this scenario) I finally realized that the Enter Key will shift you back to real time, which does give you a fairly good way to halt time compression in an emergency.

And Do the Other Things

Tags

Cold War, communism, fake news, John F. Kennedy, Josip Broz Tito, space race, Yugoslavia

The 2016 film Houston, We Have a Problem! was released as an English/Slovene language film, premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival. It received some attention at various film festivals at which it played and was nominated as Slovenia’s entry for the Academy Awards Best Foreign Film category. However, it received far more attention for its premise.

The film purports to be an American-made documentary made based upon newly-declassified documents. Those documents show a previously-unknown historical basis for the U.S. manned space program; that it actually was intertwined with Yugoslavian-developed space technology.

As a foreign made film, Houston is bound to appeal to a much smaller audience right of the bat. Also, despite the attention it has received, seems to be difficult to get a hold of. I watched it on Netflix* streaming, but don’t see it available in the other usual places. Amazon doesn’t seem to have it for sale, either as a DVD or as a download, and Netflix has streaming only, no DVD. Netflix must have pushed it on me at some point. I’ve told you all before how I try to avoid reading the synopses of a movie before watching it. In this case, I kind of misread the blurb and thought it was going to be a “the moon landings were faked” film. Once I watched it, I realize the premise is both a lot more interesting, and a lot more complex.

If you want to watch the movie before I discuss it, do so now. This isn’t one of those films where there is a “big reveal” somewhere towards the end. Nevertheless, I believe that most films are meant to be presented in a certain way and are therefore enjoyed best coming into them cold. Fair warning.

So the first half the film develops a premise that the Yugoslavian came into possession of engineer Herman Potočnik‘s advanced rocketry work in the aftermath of the Second World War. The engineering has designed, on paper, a launch vehicle capable of sending humans to the moon. Using this work,  they jump start a space program which, initially, is competitive with the superpowers, getting so far as to launching a pig on a sub-orbital trajectory. At some point, Tito realizes that an expensive space program is a liability, particularly to a nation whose socialist policies are failing to provide for the basic needs. At the same time, the U.S. program is experiencing difficulties in their manned space programs and so Tito markets the Yugoslavian efforts to the Americans.

What’s interesting here is that the film is done absolutely straight. Comparisons are made with This Is Spinal Tap, but while that grandfather of all mockumentaries was made for obvious comedic effect, this one gives only very subtle hints that it is being less than truthful. The packaging material (if you can call it that for a streaming film) heavily emphasizes that the movie is “fake.” Perhaps such warnings are felt to be necessary given how believable the film might be to the unforewarned. The style is exactly what you would expect in a true documentary on the subject. There are current interviews with the participants mixed with archival footage mixed with the documentary crew visiting the key locations in the narrative.

The film proposes that the U.S. and Yugoslavia came to an agreement to transfer the entirety of the Yugoslavia space program to America for a substantial financial sum ($2.5 billion). It then explains that the April 8th, 1961 visit of Tito to Morocco was actually a coverup for the physical transfer of the Yugoslavian space assets to America. In Yugoslavia, the result is that the country succeeds above all the other countries in the Soviet orbit using this injection of Western cash. Meanwhile n the U.S., NASA engineers find out that the Yugoslavian technology is not a solution and, in fact, it has put them even further behind the Russians because now they have dumped billions of the space budget into propping up Tito.

The second half of the film characterizes the entire history of Yugoslavia, from 1961 through to the breakup of the country thirty-one-years later, in light of the ongoing conflict between the President(s) of the United States and Tito to either make the space technology work, or return the money. Again, there is heavy use of period footage shown in a way that clearly (?) supports the proposition. The narrative includes, amusingly, the sale of the failed Yugo automobiles in the U.S. and, ultimately, that the CIA engineered the disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1992 so as to make it easier to recoup the payments made for the space technology.

So the film isn’t really about the space program, U.S., Yugoslavian, or otherwise. In some ways it is about Cold War Yugoslavia, but even that is somewhat incidental. I see several themes here that are what this movie is really about.

First of all, it can be seen as a commentary on “fake news.” As the small print at the end of the credits finally says, some parts of the movie are real and some are utterly false. Watching the movie, could you spot the difference? The only way to discern between the two is to know, a priori, the true history for yourself. An early You Tube teaser for the film apparently resulted in leaving more than half of viewers convinced that, indeed, Yugoslavia had a space program and sold it to the United States.

On top of that, there is another level, presented by philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who opens the film and comments frequently throughout. He is portrayed on a set nearly identical to the one in The Matrix, where Morpheus instructs Neo as to the true nature of the world which he thought was real. Throughout, Žižek questions the nature of reality, deception, and conspiracy theories. One amusing scene has him reacting to his own involvement in the Yugoslavian space story, where he is portrayed as being on the payroll of the CIA.

At least one reviewer also suggested the film is a stab at jugonostalgija (Yugo-nostalgia), the sentiment that life was better under Tito as well as perhaps a hope that someone like him might restore the region to better times. Yugoslavia was a gateway between East and West during much of the Cold War. Tito was allowed some political independence, with which he was occasionally critical of Russian policy. Yugoslavia was allowed more economic interaction with Western Europe which, in part, accounted for a greater level of prosperity compared with the Soviet Republics. Being open, it also served as a showcase for the success of Socialism and thus it was in Russia’s interest for it to have a higher standard of living than the rest of the communist world. As the movie suggests, at least part of that prosperity resulted from playing both sides of Cold War game – itself one of the jugonostalgija legacies of Tito as a shrewd statesman and negotiator.

All-in-all, this is an excellent piece of filmmaking. The same article linked above suggested that the film might pass over the heads of even the more intelligent of viewers, both in the former Yugoslavia and in the United States. That may be true, but the filmmakers have cut a gem for those that can appreciate it.

*Since this post is largely appreciative of Netflix for providing access to a work that might otherwise be unavailable, I’ll mitigate that with a complaint. Netflix has changed the way they display search results. I don’t know how new the change was, but this movie made it obvious. Searching for a movie in the DVD panel will not turn up any results that are streaming only. Likewise, searching in the streaming panel will not turn up the results for available DVDs. When looking for something you want to watch, therefore, it is necessary to search both places.

I End Up in the Same Old Place

Tags

Cinderella, Civilization IV, Cold War, Max Riga, The Cold War Era, Twilight Struggle, World War III

This is a Part 1 of a three part post. Click to jump ahead to Part 2 or Part 3.

Fifteen years on, the Cold War looked very different that it did at its start. Initially, while the United States assumed the Soviets had the largest and most powerful army on the planet, the Russians themselves knew that wasn’t so. The Kremlin may well have had a desire to project power globally, but they lacked the resources to do so. Recovery from the Second World War was a huge task, and Stalin knew he did not want to take on the West.

By the early 1960s, the Soviet Union seemed to be much more aggressive internationally, even if it was more bluster than action. Khrushchev emphasized his (largely illusionary) arsenal of ICBM missiles in combination with their early “space race” advances in an effort to force the United States into a negotiation position. For the public, it was seen as a threat of Russian superiority in an eminent World War III requiring rapid advancement in weapons capabilities. The shooting down of Gary Power’s U2 and then the confrontations in Berlin indicated a willingness of the USSR to resort to military force. In May of 1960, the Soviet Union established relations with the communist government in Cuba. The governments of China and Cuba also extended their reach into promoting communist revolution across the globe, leaving the United States with what appeared to be an ever-growing enemy.

Within this context, I am revisiting my look at the Cold War from a strategic level. Before, I looked at the board game Twilight Struggle. This time, I want to focus on computer treatments of the period and I’ll start with the scenarios available for Civilization IV.

Civilization, at its most basic, takes you from the founding of civilization, through today, and beyond. As such, it is bound to pass through the Atomic Era and the post-World War II technologies. Naturally, it is neither particularly suited as a representation of that time nor is it in any way a given that you’ll end up with a binary confrontation between superpowers when that time comes. As the Civilization franchise has evolved, however, the ability to create scenarios with their own special units and technology trees adds the ability to focus on specific eras, perhaps bringing some unique insights to the game as a historical tool.

The Mexican drug lords have been causing chaos in Texas. Time to send in the troops to bring order to the southern border.

Within Civilization IV, mod-maker MaxRiga put considerable effort into a series of modern mods, specifically targeting on 1901, 1941, 1961, and 2001. There are two scenarios created for the 1961 start, differing in the number of starting civilizations. I decided to start slow and went with the lower number of opponents and an easier setting. I also played as the United States, who starts the game pretty much on top of the world.

I also tried to, at least as far as is possible, funnel my play into the terms of history and interpret what I’m seeing likewise. Of course, this is Civilization. So divisions of Mexicans coming up over the Rio Grande was met with an occupation of both Mexico and Venezuela. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was seizing smaller, independent African countries.

Civilization isn’t a political and economic simulator, even in so much as it has any realism. So eventually the Cold War is bound to become a hot one, otherwise its going to be a long, boring couple of decades of clicking “End Turn.” In my first game, it was some kind of Suez Crisis type indecent that pushed the world over the brink. Egypt and NATO got into a shooting war. While the United States was able to distance herself from that one, the it was the start of the domino effect. By 1968, I was sucked into a Vietnam-style war in Argentina. Well, not quite. I smoked ’em in about a year and a half.

High tensions in the Cold War. NATO and the Warsaw Pact glare at each other across the Iron Curtain.

While asymmetric wars with third-world countries abound, a true Cold War situation prevails in Europe. (I think) it is a side-effect of Civilization mechanics, rather than anything too particular about the scenario or the mod. The Soviets have declared war on NATO. However, the border between the two remains rather calm. What I think is happening is, on the outbreak of war, I moved troops into Western Europe, augmenting what the scenario already stationed there. Because the NATO border cities are garrisoned with U.S. troops, it appears the Ruskies can’t make a move without declaring war on the United States. Like the real 1968, proxy wars are one thing, but the Kremlin doesn’t really want full-on war with the Americans.

So each turn has become a tense affair. Is this the turn that the USSR will hit me with a surprise attack? Will they find a hole in the NATO armor, forcing me to intervene? Am I going to regret  diverting all those resources to South America? For a fairly one-dimensional simulation, it actually serves up an interesting parallel of the Cold War. Of course, it can’t hurt that I’m deliberately interpreting everything that happens in that light.

Of course, when it comes down to it, it is still Civilization. When the wars do come about, it is a matter of stacking units in adjacent squares and trying to knock each other down. Rinse and repeat for each city until you get tired of warring. Again, you can try to stretch it into a plausible scenario. For example, I had forgotten how resistant cities were to permanent occupation in Civilization IV due to culture. When the war (above) eventually turned hot, I was able to grab Cuba, Poland, Kiev, Leningrad (NATO took this one), and Moscow before I called it a day. I also took Rostov, which oddly enough is located where Sevastopol should be. While holding on to Cuba was doable, Kiev and Moscow both had to be reverted to the Russians. Poland, now liberated, joined with NATO. Rostov (not Rostov) turned Islamic and joined the Caliphate. All-in-all a better (from the standpoint of the story) outcome than I would have hoped for.

The mod obviously was a lot of effort. There are some oddities, many caused by the Civilization IV palette itself, but others integral to the scenario/mod design. The tech tree gets a little unwieldy, with the U.S. getting a bunch of WWI era units (and German ones at that) when resources get a little thin. The deeper, Cold-War-themed tech tree adds some nice chrome, but it sometimes seems a bit unwieldy.  Particularly if you want to stick to the historical theme. I would like to engage in the Space Race starting in the 1960s, but the mechanics seem to make that prohibitive.

An army-group strength cohort of Navy Seals was representing something for the scenario design, but I’m not sure what. My Apache gunship can really slaughter me some commies in 1968-9, having been an initial placement in the scenario. The new units’ graphics can vary from a pretty nice add to the South Park-y “Modern Infantry.”

The biggest gap, to me, is the absence of nuclear weapons. An inverse missile gap, if you will. Nuclear bombs and their delivery systems would seem to me to be a defining feature for a Cold War game. The presence of a nuclear deterrent also should have kept me from (as I did) rolling through Western Russia in 1969 and completely eliminating the Red Chinese in 1975. One well placed nuke could completely neutralize my forces, but nobody has any nukes. I poured some research into the Manhattan Project and had, at least theoretically, some atomic capability by 1970, but nobody else did, and throughout the 1970s it does not appear that anyone has built a functioning bomb. A Cold War without an Arms Race? Why bother?

Now, Civilization IV is addictive as it ever was. So there is that. Think of it not as a Cold War game, using Civilization as the programming medium. Think of it as a Civilization game with some Cold War chrome. At the latter it is successful.

I’ve not delved too deeply into Civilization V and the modding capabilities, and I haven’t even taken a first glance at Civilization VI (V is hard enough on my graphics card). Civilization IV, with the expansions in place, seem to be the golden age for mods and user-made scenarios. If support for that really has been weakened in the new versions, it is a shame.

Can’t Take Me Home

Following a number of mods, the maker of the Cold War scenario formed his own company and set out to make a Cold War game from the ground up.

I first looked into this game a couple of years ago, when I first started writing about wargames. I was noticing the absence of strategic level Cold War games but came across his website through the above Civilization mods. At the time, the game The Cold War Era was only available as a download from the website. The download options included both a pay version and a demo.

The demo itself was well conceived. In single-player mode, the game is limited to 10 years of play (1950-1959). When playing multiplayer, the most permissive of the two installations prevails. In other words, if you download the “limited” version, but want to play against someone who has the full, paid-for version, you can play the entire game, unrestricted, in multiplayer.

The game itself gets less praise from me.

As I’ve said before, it pains me to be too harsh. This is not a product from some big game company, but from a fellow player and enthusiast who is trying to create games for which he sees a need. In this case, however, he has made a product which he is selling, and so while it may not be fair to compare it to triple-A titles, it is reasonable to compare to other products in the same price range.

The game is a continuous time, grand strategy treatment of the period from 1950 through to (I think) 2000. While it can be paused (and you can still do everything while paused) in single-player mode, when playing multiplayer there is no pausing. At least in the version I have, there is also no saving. So if you are going to play, you had better be prepared to play straight through.

Two months before the demo-version times out, and I am about to lose. I don’t always know why I lose, I just know that I always do. This was the only game I’ve played that featured armed revolution in West Germany.

Graphics are simple but functional. The user-interface, however, feels less than functional.

The game is a simple one. The world is divided into countries/regions, each of which are either pro-U.S., pro-Soviet, or neutral. Every one of these countries has three areas that you can influence. One is called Influence, and represents the relative domination of the superpowers within the internal politics of that nation. The second is the military, which has the government forces versus insurgent forces. The third is espionage. Having espionage within  a nation allows two other options to either enhance or undermine the stability of that country. Each month, you are able to add influence to any nation on earth in one of these three areas (subject to a couple of caveats), up to the ability of your budget to support it. And that is the entire game. Click, click, click, and then wait for the clock to tick forward (or tick, tick, tick in the case of the actions that take 3 months).

There is more to it. Some of it obvious and some of it under-the-hood. The user manual is, well, let’s just call it a work in progress. For example, it describes the conditions in which “revolution” can be launched, but says nothing about what happens from there. From play, it is clear that an armed revolution prevails when it is unopposed by military forces from the other side. I think. But nothing is said about how military forces are eliminated. One assumes there is some additional random function which uses the relative strengths of the military, but who really can tell?

The user-interface feels patched on to the top of this “real-time spreadsheet” model, as opposed to being designed to present the best gaming experience. It’s not the worst design I’ve seen, but it means the game becomes less one of strategy than a challenge to see if you can keep track of all the moving parts within an interface that doesn’t necessarily highlight them. Winning likely involves being able to click away on a country that your opponent isn’t paying any attention to. Of course, playing single-player can eliminate the frantic feel of the game – I have been playing by pausing at every month to review all of the “hot spots” one-by-one.

Now the biggest caveat in all of this is that I am playing the demo version. The demo version is restricted to a 10-year period up until 1960, but it also seems set up to be nearly unwinnable. Unlike what I think is the normal scenario start, where the two superpower budgets are equal, the demo starts with the player having vastly inferior monetary resources. Add to that, it might be impossible to “win” given only 10 years in which to collect whatever points contribute to that win (again, not explained in the manual). It seems all kind of pointless.

And yet, there is some actual strategy in it. The basic move seems to be to identify neutral countries where you can slowly build support and stoke opposition to that neutral government, and thus be able to flip the government to your side. But the revolution option is a kind of a wild card in this pure-numbers strategy. Winning an armed revolt means flipping all the “opposition” into government, which can suddenly turn a battleground country into a solid lock for one of the superpowers. Within the plan to gain control, you also have to be budgeting for defensive moves as well as advancing along the tech track (Space Race in the basic game, but more to follow). Nothing will ruin your day like discovering that the opponent is about to execute a decisive move, but realizing you don’t have the budget to counter it.

Since I downloaded the demo, it no longer seems to be an option. The Cold War Era has moved its distribution to Steam, and advanced a few version iterations beyond what I have played. The company has also released a sequel, Arms Race – TCWE. The original game now sells for $4.99 and the sequel for $14.99 (the same price as Twilight Struggle, I might point out). The sequel appears to be more of the same, but with better graphics, deeper gameplay, and more bells and whistles. Let’s just say that the cost/benefit hasn’t yet tempted me to buy in at this point.

Another way to look at The Cold War Era is to think of it as a real-time simplification of Twilight Struggle. I say this, because as I was programming my Twilight Struggle opponent, I was thinking of the viability of just such a game. Gone are the Event Cards of Twilight Struggle, and you are left with simply placing Operations Points as a way to vie for control across the Cold War landscape. I think the idea is sound, but I’m not sure the real-time implementation of it actually works.

Sometimes I Feel So Cold

So if Twilight Struggle remains the standard, lets return to that.

My own programmed AI is theoretically capable of making it through an entire game, yet practically speaking, I’m usually met with a thrown exception rather than a victory. It also isn’t that good at winning, although it is good at matching the arc of game play to the historical timeline without being entirely stupid.

Shortly after I wrote my previous Twilight Struggle article, I did in fact spring for the computer version of the game. While much of what I’ve read treats the game as merely an adjunct to table-top play, I think many a gamer would be quite happy with the computer version plus a downloaded copy of the board game rules.

Much of what I’ve speculated upon before purchasing the game has been confirmed now that I’ve played it. The computer opponent is aggressive and challenging and it takes a decent player to beat it. Out the window are any concerns about how the play might conform or deviate from the course of history and, instead, you must concentrate on maximizing your cards’ value within the rules. Well into a game, I’m not sure I even know what countries are controlled or not. Instead, I focus on scanning the board for battleground states with the right combination of own-side and enemy control markers.

Of course, this isn’t a criticism of the computer version. As I said, this stems from the game design and the same would be said about a tabletop game between two competent players. To the contrary, the fact that the computer AI takes the role of “competent player” rather than the more haphazard, exception-throwing personality of my own model is an indication that the programmed opponent has been well done.

As the U.S., I’m attempting to draw Egypt into the North Yemen Civil War in an effort to destabilize the Nasser government and reduce Soviet influence. It didn’t work.

It is also a well done game all around. It’s an attractive interface that straddles the potentially conflicting needs of looking good on the computer while preserving everything about the board game. The controls work well and are easy enough to be intuitive. I’ve yet to see any crashes, glitches, or bugs. The game is designed to play either against the computer or against another player. I will think more often than not, playing against a friend on the computer would be a nice way to save the trouble of dealing with all the little pieces and such. Especially if you want to split the game over multiple sections, and you have cats, children, or a small apartment to deal with.

In addition to not having to deal with all the bits and pieces, the player no longer has to do so much math.

Back when, when I first bought the game, I played a couple of times and lost every game. The computer was clearly able to keep more balls in the air than I could, and while I fought him on one front, he finds a continent that I’m not working on to put a solid hold on. I intended to write this article explaining how I was unable to beat the AI.

It was a bit of an embarrassing position to be in. Shortly after I bought the game, I was telling a another gamer (of both computer and board games) about my purchase and he said something to the effect of , “yeah, that’s a good little game. I like to use it as training tool to prepare for board game nights.” Similar conversation has surrounded the game since it was first obvious that a computer version was coming out – that the audience was going to be the tabletop player who wanted a fix between opponents. To find that the game was too good for me to play against, well that is kind of embarrassing.

So I picked the game up again before I started writing so it will all be fresh in my mind, and I actually won my first game (both first game this year and first game I won). This win came despite being a little rusty with the rules. So I guess the AI isn’t the master that I’d assumed before. But though I am winning, the games are tense affairs with everything I do seeming to be critical. The game has a setting to handicap the game one way or the other, but I’m not entirely sure how that works or how effective it would be once one can reliably beat the AI.

While it’s nice to have some options for the cold war conflict on a strategic level, what I don’t feel here is a sense of the early 1960s. The Berlin Wall, The Bay of Pigs, Gary Powers U2 downing, Kennedy’s announcement of the Moon race, and the Tsar Bomba all hit the public consciousness in a matter of a year or two. So while strategically, we can’t really capture the spirit of the time, perhaps we can do better with some specific, nuclear-themed scenarios from CMANO.

(on to Part 2).

 

B-B-B-Benny and the Jets

Tags

Cold War, Elton John, Philippines

Playing Twilight Struggle put a focus on an otherwise little-considered arena of the Cold War, the newly-independent nation of the Philippines. The islands of that country provide a key node in the game, being the only link between Japan and Indonesia, the latter of which connects into the battleground (not, literally, in Twilight Struggle terms) countries of Southeast Asia.

When I was last looking at that game (surprisingly, it been a year-and-a-half), I did a little reading about the Hukbalahap Rebellion as a historical equivalent to the early war machinations in the Philippines. That insurgency saw a peasant organization which had fought against the Japanese occupation now at odds with the new and newly-independent (from the U.S.) government. The government had a number of reasons it didn’t trust “the Huk,” (as the insurgent group is called), from its anti-landlord politics, its close ties with other communist organizations, and alleged bad actions during the Second World War. The counter-insurgency lasted from fall of 1946 through the spring of 1954, when it largely petered out.

A CMANO scenario set in June of 1958 imagines that the Huk was more successful that it really was and, by 1958, has control of a significant portion of Luzon and threatens, with Soviet help, to expand the revolution country-wide. The United States finds itself intervening on the side of the Filipino government with an available carrier task force.

The Bennington Task Force of the coast of the Philippines. I’ve managed to take out one bridge so far, but the airport (that clump of three enemy targets) seems better defended. My carrier is right in the path for non-hostile planes landing at the airfield, so tensions are high as unidentified planes pass right overhead.

The scenario is purely hypothetical. The Huk Rebellion was entirely over by the time the scenario takes place. Furthermore, in May of 1958, the USS Bennington was between cruises. Bennington was actually deployed during the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis during a cruise that began on August 21st, 1958. The “Benny’s Sweep” incident imagines something like a Korea or a Vietnam, but with a technology that straddles the two periods. The air groups are pretty much what one would have expected from a Korean War deployment, but some newer technology is involved. For example, the first combat deployment of Air-to-Air Sidewinder missiles occurred during the Second Taiwan Straight Crisis. In this scenario, the missiles are ready to use in the Philippines. These are an earlier (less capable) model of those that would be used in Vietnam, but we also are facing the relative less effective anti-aircraft cannons rather that Surface-to-Air missiles.

Some advanced tech showing its stuff. Some AGM-12, really still in R&D in 1958, are peppering the runways. Bringing up the rear, I got some advanced-design air-launch rockets which I’ll be unloading on an anti-aircraft battery.

The scenario is user-made, but it seems to be a pretty solid (and fun) one. It doesn’t really explain why the U.S. needs to start blowing up stuff in the Philippines with only a single carrier at the ready, except to cite “other international obligations” preventing other forces from being there. It also mentions that the U.S. finds the situation in the Philippines “intolerable” implying, I suppose, that delaying an airstrike is impossible.

Spoiler Warning (perhaps) in the next screenshot/paragraph.

 

The Russian cruiser Dzerzhinsky lurks off to the Southwest of the operational area, but could get dangerous. See also the contact designated GOBLIN #103. Who else but the Soviets have submarines?

The Huk’s forces aren’t terribly effective, and as the U.S. you can operate from a position of superior firepower. I do like these scenarios. This superiority is tempered by the presence of Soviet forces in the vicinity. While not hostile initially, it is a fair bet that they would be happy to sink a U.S. carrier if given half a chance. A cruiser against a pair of destroyers is not a fight I want to have. While the Huk also have naval assets, they seem easy enough to steer around or defeat as needed.

In 1949, American was fairly certain the Soviets were behind the rebellion in the Philippines. The U.S. had close ties to the Filipino government and provided counter-insurgency funding, but the conflict ended without escalating into another Korea or Vietnam.

In 2018, we are just as certain that the Soviets were not involved with the Huk. While the movement found fellow political travelers among the communist groups in the Philippines, those communists tended to look down on the peasants as too simple to understand and advocate for Marxist theory. Even still, it would surprise me if the Soviets weren’t at least interested in causing heartache for a U.S. ally as well as exerting a global reach. In 1949, however, their resources were rather limited and it is quite possible that whatever aid they might have tried to provide to the Huk would have been limited on that account.

By 1958, however, it may well have been a very different story. I find it hard to believe that the Soviet Union would not have backed a Filipino uprising simply because they were peasants and, as such, not fully up-to-snuff on dialectical materialism. A post-Sputnik Russia, on the other hand, may well have had the resources to do what they may have been unable to do in 1949 or 1950.

All This Science, I Don’t Understand

Tags

Buzz Aldrin, Cold War, David Bowie, Elton John, game design, Kerbal Space Program, Leaving Earth, Liftoff!, Race into Space, Race to Space, rocket science, Space Program Manager, space race

While I was looking into some information on ICBM development (relative to the SAC games I was playing), I remembered the very popular game of yesteryear, Buzz Aldrin’s Race Into Space. Except that I couldn’t remember that it was actually called “Buzz Aldrin’s Race Into Space.”

I began googling “Race for Space” and came across instead an old “board game” (sort of) from… well, I have no idea. Probably at least 20 years ago.

No copies of the game seem to be for sale anywhere and there is very little detail, either direct or descriptive, about the contents and working of the game. But this image…

Some geeky charts, lifted from a review on Board Game Geek.

really has me intrigued; a very numbers-heavy modeling of R&D costs for spacecraft development presented as a visual space-and-counter game. The engineer in me wants to work through these charts and their ability to predict development. It looks like a nice way to depict the space development process, with the potential of getting stuck iterating on a design (without making progress) or hitting a technological dead-end.

A very similar game (who inspired whom, I have no idea) called Liftoff! was released in 1989. That looked much more like a real game, with board, cards, money (megabucks), and even a poster (woo-hoo!) included in the colorful box. Of course, we wouldn’t expect to find 30-year-old games of this type still on the shelves, so this too is something that, in 2017, is left to admire from afar.

One of the more interesting points, though, is that Liftoff! was turned into a computer game called “Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space” (Oh right… that was the name). In 1993 BARIS, as it is often referred to, was released for MS-DOS, and like Steel Panthers, the BARIS story managed to put a happy coda onto its eventual commercial end. When the developer ceased work on the game, he released the source under a GPL license and the executable as freeware. It has since been ported to Windows, and undergone minor improvements, as well as being available as phone/tablet app.

Of course, when people are still pouring time and effort into 25-30 year old stuff, it only makes sense that a “modern” version might sell. Enter Leaving Earth on your tabletop and Buzz Aldrin’s Space Program Manager on your desktop – not to mention the crazy popularity of Kerbal Space Program and its physics simulation. Leaving Earth streamlines, simplifies, and converts entirely to a card game, the mechanics of the Space Race simulation – making a modern game to replace the old classics. BASPM (that’s not cool like BARIS, is it?) revamps the graphics and adds technical depth to the old classic.

So a quest to figure out what those charts meant left me with far too many games to contemplate. When in doubt, start with the freeware.

BARIS

The freeware version still has the original graphics and interface, but it runs as a (really tiny) window on the modern desktop. In my time spent with the program, I have seen no crashes and no obvious bugs. I will rank it among the better efforts to salvage an old DOS program that I’ve seen. Of course, it is still a 25-year-old game. The features of the game, such as the videos (compiled, mostly, from actual footage), do not make for the most exciting interactions. Even when it was newly on the shelves, The Guardian criticized the game as being “lifeless.”

As I have complained about before, the interface employs what at the time was considered a neat trick. Improved graphics, and the ability to deliver more and better within a game via CD, inspired a form of UI where the player interacts with “the real world” by navigating through (in this case) the various buildings of the space facility to initiate actions. Between the painstaking navigation from building to building and the necessity to prepare, possibly years in advance, for missions, this nifty interface makes it tougher than in needs to be to do what you need to do. Particularly annoying are the buildings you have to click on simply to confirm that the parameters set up elsewhere are, indeed, to be applied. Especially in contrast to current games that help the user along, this is game that probably requires keeping a notebook outside of the game to get it right.

I played through one time without relying on the manual and the result was a bit confusing. After getting far enough in, and pretty much failing in my charge as Space Director, I then turned to the manual for clues. I realize that the failure of the undirected trial-and-error approach is probably designed in purposely. By design, the game allows you to take actions for expedience’s sake that ultimately will result in failure. Rather than just make it obvious (e.g. a rule that says you can’t fly a man mission without X hours testing) it attempts to “teach” you why such a rule would be necessary by mathematical equations based on probability. It is a useful lesson, to be sure, but does it make for the best game? That, I’m not so sure.

As I alternate between game and manual, I think I begin to see the intended use for this game. First, several play-throughs will be necessary to learn the mechanics. There are certain rhythms in the game that a player has to learn. How to keep funding balanced over the budget cycle, for example, or the two-turn cycle necessary to setup launches. Once that is mastered, then several more play-throughs will be required to get the hand of the development/risk cycle. For example, when is a lack of research and testing going to end up in dead astronauts and program failures versus when a excess of research and testing will slow the program to a crawl? Finally, the player can embark in a new series of games focused on finding alternate development paths to get to the moon.

The Soviets get a jump in the Space Race. So far, so historical.

It seems to me that an awful lot of playtime is required to get to the actual purpose of the game. It is designed, perhaps, for when a player might purchase the game at full price and then dedicate months to master it. It is not a design that favors grabbing a quick download to enjoy for a night or two.

Another goal of the game is to provide a view into the Space Race to a generation who was born decades after it ended. They also might be surprised by the popularity of Ben-Hur in its day.

The game was considered to be a difficult one upon release and that hasn’t changed with the years. After a couple of preparatory games, where missions are left undone because I didn’t to all the right preparation, I finally feel like understand enough to make an actual game of it. Still, I’m pretty far from knowing what I am doing. While I am managing to advance my Mercury program without killing any astronauts, I am a bit demoralized by the announcements of Soviet achievements far outpacing my own. I suspect that what I really need to do is create a timeline of the actual NASA program, and try to keep my game program on or ahead of the real-life schedule. Without such guidance, I’m sure I’ll never be (for example) testing Saturn V rockets soon enough to be ready for a first-man-on-the-moon lunar mission.

Gus Grissom returns safely to earth and is lifted aboard a carrier, making him the first American to orbit the earth. My Mercury program has finally borne fruit, although Grissom became demoralized and dropped out within a few years of his historic achievement.

Despite the DOS graphics and the MIDI synth score, the game is still playable today. I think the key to appreciating it is to recognize that the numbers model and the percentages are the real game and that the interface is loosely built around it. Does that suggest that a rework of the AI to streamline and modernize it would greatly improve the game? Would hiding some of the numbers behind a better narrative improve the feel? As I speculated about translating a board game to the computer recently, it could go either way. When the game is the numbers, hiding the numbers and automating the “spreadsheet” portion of the game could actually take away from what makes the game what it is. What is the best way to update this game for the twenty-teens?

Why Buy the Cow?

The Race Into Space story has another parallel with Steel Panthers, although without quite the bitterness involved. While a volunteer team has created an maintained the freeware version of the original code, the company Polar Motion reworked it into a completely new version. Buzz Aldrin’s Space Program Manager, released by Slitherine/Matrix, is quite clearly an updated version of BARIS. Now I have no idea how much code is shared between the two versions, if any, but it is clear that it was the starting point for the new project.

Unlike with Steel Panthers, however, the end result looks very different. Graphics have been updated and the current ability of consumer’s desktops to display a realistic, 3D representation of Space Hardware can look impressive. The interface corresponds to modern design standards, although it still seems to feature the aerial view of the space complex with selectable buildings. From what I’m reading, the game has both added to the technical depth as well as expanded the scope of the missions beyond the “Space Race” into the realm of modern planetary exploration.

I say “from what I’m reading” because, unless I’m missing something, I’m looking at basically an upgrade of a freeware product for the price of a top-shelf game. Yes, some of the graphics look pretty cool, but not necessarily $40 cool. I’m also pretty sure I’m not hankering for a more complex version of BARIS with some additional missions. Mostly, I mention Space Program Manager here as a compare-and-contrast exercise for my next section.

Similarly, I’m not going to dig into Kerbal at this point, except to show the demand for this type of game is out there. I’ve long meant to download and try the demo, but for right now, it looks like the game has got ahead of the demo and none is available.

State of the Art

Let’s compare to the design of Leaving Earth. At a first glance, this game is a re-implementation of Liftoff! It covers the same time period, the same Cold War struggle, and is played through assigning resources to the design and execution of missions. It’s hard to imagine that the Leaving Earth designers weren’t also familiar with Liftoff!, but looking at the details, no one would say that one is an upgrade or revamp of the other.

The compare and contrast shows much of how game design has changed between the boardgame heyday of the 1980s and the boardgame revival of today. First, as a board game, the design reflects the necessity to put value in the product beyond the rules and mechanisms. The components are unique, a pleasure to look at and handle, and have an aesthetic to reflect the period being played. I think this is a huge part of what makes the boardgaming market so big. The designers have learned to make products that players look at and want to own.

But the design is also heavily influenced by the changes in that Eurogames and the subsequent rethinking of game design. It’s a game of cards and tokens, minimizing the role of dice. It’s also hugely streamlined. Does that mean it’s more of a casual game, and less of a “simulation?” Is it, like many Eurogames, simply a mechanic with some contextual chrome lain upon it?

I would argue no.

First of all, Leaving Earth (perhaps more than its predecessor) exists in part to be a teaching game. A chunk of the manual is dedicated to explain the fundamentals of rocketry and orbits and how to plan missions. The relationship between engine impulse and Delta V are all explained to illuminate what a mission “difficulty” number entails. While it is possible to simply look up, on tables, the relationships between payload and booster size, the player is encouraged to design a launch system backwards from final playload through each staging.

Two of the obvious simplifications are costs and reliability.

The cost model in Leaving Earth is greatly simplified relative to its predecessors. Gone are concepts like inflation or managing budget allocations over multiple years. Instead, the costs in the game are charged a fixed amount that expires each turn, and they are adjusted accordingly. So the cost of a Saturn V during the height of that program can be proportional to the much higher budgets of that period. It is a decent way to simulate spending in an governmental environment while also eliminating the lion’s share of the in-game accounting.

Similarly, Leaving Earth has dramatically changed the reliability model that is the core of pretty much every space program simulation. The earlier versions have a reliability percentage that the user interacts with. These can be raised and lowered by events or improved with research spending and are eventually are compared to a die-roll when attempting a mission. What that means is that the probability of a mission success is always known in advance, but there is always some chance for failure. While engineers do spend a great deal of time calculating safety factors and estimating the possibility of failure, in truth, the predictability of mission success is not a known quantity. Worst of all, in the cases of actual mission failures, the cause of the failure is typically not a component that had a chance of failing and did. The cause is usually something behaving in a way that was unforeseen.

In Leaving Earth, the percentage reliability is replaced with a set of dealt cards that either have success or failure. These cards are drawn (while remaining unknown) in the “research” portion of a program. Unlike BARIS and others, research is a one-time cost, not something that is continuously managed relative to the percentages. Testing, on the other hand, is much more explicit. A booster with, essentially, unknown reliability can and should be flown in unmanned missions to prove its capabilities before chancing a failure in an unmanned mission. Ongoing research is modeled by the ability to, after a mission failure, invest additional research money to remove that failure card from the deck. Unlike the dice-rolling version of mission probability, it becomes possible to eventually reveal and/or remove all the cards associated with a particular component making it 100% reliable for the purposes of the game. While this also may not be a “real” representation of a space hardware, which may end up failing even after you are completely confident in its reliability, it does vastly simplify the game.  It also improves it, in my opinion. It is tough to model a historical space program when, at any given time, a freak role can wipe out your schedule and a team of astronauts in a system that you have thoroughly vetted as maximally reliable. It precludes a Space Shuttle Discovery, but fits well within the other simplifications of the game.

Is there life on Mars?

One other area of game design is something that this product really gets. I discussed earlier about the importance of a historical game simulating not what we know now to be true, but what historical figures knew at the time to be true.

One example discussed in the rule book is how scientists at the time expected to find life on other planets. First (although predating the period of the game) there was an expectation of life on the Moon. There was also long an assumption that observations made of the Martian surface showed signs of life. While during the period of the space program, scientists had discounted some of the wilder “martian” theories, the first lunar missions, in fact, had returning astronauts go through a period of quarantine to ensure that they weren’t bringing back any dormant bacteria from the moon. Although we now understand the impossibility of finding living organisms on the moon, the players in the game should (and do) face the possibilities that these wild possibilities are true. An unexplored planet might produce alien life, or valuable resources, or even exotic alien technology.

In another rulebook example, the fleeting belief that Phobos was an artificial satellite created by advanced alien technology ,was held by the Russians. It was based on a calculation of density compared to the orbital mechanics, which found that the moon was far lighter than any naturally-occurring space body could be. It turns out to have been based on bad observations of the orbit and was corrected before it had much of a practical effect on the Soviet space program. Had the misconception persisted, surely the Soviet military would have made a mission to Phobos to obtain this advanced alien technology an absolute priority. Unless the aliens are a real possibility, the players would never commit to a mission we know to be obviously based on a mistake.

This game reminds me of an experience as a tween. I was absolutely enthralled by space-based science fiction, probably due to the influence of Star Wars. I had the novelization of that movie, which I had read over and over, but had to rely on the local public library for variety for my science fiction diet. Unfortunately, nearly all of their science fiction had been published in the early 60s and, even with that caveat, wasn’t of particularly high quality.

I remember checking out one book set around the construction of a space station. The cover had a drawing of the large doughnut-style station, which one imagined as a way to produce an artificial gravity. It wasn’t a great book, but it wasn’t truly terrible either. I don’t really remember the plot, but I believe it had something to do with sabotage during the construction of the space station. What really got me (and the heartbreak stays with me even today) was the final paragraph of the book. Our heroes have defeated evil and put the construction of the station back on track. Once the station is completed, we are told, mankind can continue on their next step of their great journey into space – to the Moon!

I wept in my pillow that night. When the book was written, possibly in the 50s, the direction that the space program would go was unknown. When the book was read, probably in the late 70s, trips to the moon had come and gone and were considered by many to be, to reference the film Apollo 13, routine. The idea that the whole book that I read was not part of some fantastic future, but of a discredited past, just made me feel like I’d wasted the many hours that I’d put into reading the book.

A game like Leaving Earth actually resurrects the mindset of that much resented (by me, at least) author. Depending on the parameters of the game, the path to the moon may actually be via a earth orbiting space station.

I don’t know how popular Leaving Earth is in the boardgaming world, but I do have to wonder whether this is a viable path for a computer game to take. Rather than, like Kerbal Space Program, go down the path of ever more realistic physics, orbital mechanics, and flight simulation, is there a market for essentially a casual game? Something that lets players make a few of the Space Race decisions and, in doing so, appreciate the trade-offs the the physics presents, but not force the player to commit months of their lives to learning the system.