Evil Product Support

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Cold War, left-handed mouse, James Bond, Evil Genius, management simulation

I never played Dungeon Keeper.

I recall playing a version of Sim City, probably a mid-1990s version such as the one linked. I don’t remember playing it much, so I may have had a demo version. The concept of a economic simulation definitely appealed to me, but I’ve come to realize that simply creating a cool economics simulation doesn’t necessarily make a great game. Or even a good game. The execution is important. When not designed well, such games become a frustrating morass of micromanagement. Done right, well, one need only look at the success of the genre over the decades.

While Sim City never got far with me, I did get myself into a few of the more focused games that followed using the Sim City formula. Capitalism and the city-builder series (Caesar, etc) were some games that I did get into around that time. The focus on economic factors (in the former) and history (in the latter) were what aspects that caused these games to jump out of the crowd, at least for me. Quite a crowd it was, I might add. This was a time when the the management sim was branching out in all sorts of directions. Theme Park and the various railroad simulations tempted developers into finding new and innovative subjects upon which to lay the template. And in its time, Dungeon Keeper seemed to do just that.

The big concept behind Dungeon Keeper was not simply to create another variation on the management sim template, but at the same time, create an upside down look at the role-playing genre. Instead of managing a band of adventurers, setting out to sack a dungeon and to gather its treasures, you would be in charge of the dungeon itself and so need to repel those awful intruders. While none of this was exactly new, the combination of them all together seemed rather novel. I’m sure it didn’t hurt that it came at the height of developer Peter Molyneux’s popularity. Another key to its success was its emphasis on humor and the twist that you didn’t play as the good guy but rather as the master of the baddies.

But I never played it. While a great idea, I had other games on my mind. It was successful enough that it spawned its own sub-genre of games. I actually bought Ghost Master, finding it in a bargain bin (an actual, physical one), which is an obvious nod to its Dungeon Keeper predecessor. Ghost Master is, however, another game that I never installed and never played. To this day, I feel guilty about it. I feel like I am a part of the target audience for these games, yet I am not biting. I wanted to play this game and I wanted to like it. I feel like I’ve let those ghosts down.

Let’s jump ahead a few more years as the industry produced even more variations on the theme. One 2004 take on it was Evil Genius, which got its share of attention in its time. It is very cast in the Dungeon Keeper mold, but instead of the Dungeons and Dragons, swords and sorcery theme of the original, this one is based on the world of James Bond movies. Note that it also came out after the Austin Powers film series and, perhaps, draws as much from the parody of James Bond as it does from the (albeit tongue-in-cheek) movie originals. It may not have rated as high as Dungeon Keeper, due to bugs and other problems, but it had its share of admirers. It also went on sale (a virtual bargain bin, this time) pretty recently.

I bit.

Evil Genius illustrates the good, the bad, and the ugly of today’s massive supply of classic gaming experience. I don’t remember how I got it – most likely either a Steam sale or a Humble Bundle – but I really love how these classic titles have, largely, become easy to acquire and run decades down the road. Installing this one, however, I ran very quickly into problems. Once again, I found that the mouse buttons were reversed for me, requiring (as I do) my mouse to be configured for left-handed players. I found this lack of configurability to be intolerable.

To make matters a little worse, as I began searching for a solution, I came across something that confused me further. One on-line critique of the game suggested that the game UI was actually designed with the mouse buttons, in many cases, doing the reverse of what you’d expect from them. Essentially, the article said, for the game to function normally (as in, right-handed mouse) you had to reverse the mouse buttons in Windows. This does not actually appear to be the case. When following through the tutorial, where the mouse-button instructions are explicit, the mouse button matches the tutorial exactly (although, remember, I’ve already reversed them in Windows). I can’t imagine what this writer was talking about, but it cost me an extra hour or so of fiddling before I decided, what ever his experience, it didn’t apply to me.

Mouse buttons are clearly not configurable through the in-game menu so, having found a similar solution recently, I began searching through the undocumented configuration files. There I found a mouse invert configuration that I thought might help me. Once again, this took me quite a while change, test, and verify, so I lost another good chunk of time. Further on-line searching backed up my experience. There is an analysis about what in that configuration file, and how only some of it actually works while some of the configurations are actually dangerous to mess with. The mouse setting was not on the “works” list, so I figured it is not just me.

I also found some other write-ups; instruction on how to get the game patched. Now this part baffled me a little, considering this is a Steam game that I’m working with.

I still considered Steam-purchased software to be a case of paying to buy a game when, in reality, I’m only renting it. If Steam ever decided they no longer wanted to let me use a particular game, they could just take it away. In exchange for less-than-total ownership, however, I not only have access to games (and prices) that I wouldn’t otherwise, I also don’t have to store locally the games that I’ve purchased on line. The bargain should also mean that I’m not hunting for patches and mods and the like. Steam automatically installs to the supported patch, so everything should be up to date. It also has a less-than fully supported system for user-made modifications. While not ideal, this should get the player around the days of research that otherwise is required to bring an older game up to its best available version.

With Evil Genius, however, the version available is the originally-shipped version, version 1.0. While the game was still being supported, the publisher did ship an official patch, but this is not part of the Steam package. To make it more confusing, there was a user-made patch that came out after the developer studio closed (happening only about a year after the game was released). Both sets of patches are available on-line, but there were several versions of the game (and thus the patches) and, apparently, no one version quite matches the Steam release. After chasing some dead links, I finally downloaded a version that seemed like it should work (and so far seems like it does). Part of me hoped that a patch would fix the mouse configuration problem, but it didn’t.

In the meantime, one more possible solution occurred to me. In fact, I don’t know why I never thought of it before, given how long I’ve gone in circles with this mouse-button issue. I guess sometimes you have to be pushed past some mental limit. Anyway, what I realized is that I use a “gaming” mouse and, while I never actually reconfigure anything on it, it is in fact pretty configurable. So back to searching the internet to find the configuration package from the manufacturer. Finally, now, I have a solution where I can swap my mouse buttons before starting the game, using not Windows but the mouse driver, which results in the mouse behaving correctly when I am in-game.

I can’t believe I didn’t think of this earlier. Finally, I can play the game as it was intended.

I stand, surveying my control room, while a conference table awaits me in my inner sanctum.

It is a hard game and, I think, it was meant to be. The intention is not to give the player the thrill of world domination whenever they can spare an hour or so of fiddling. This style of game is one that you play night-after-night for months on end. The instructions are rather open ended and, obviously therefore, open to mistakes. Should I kill every non-friendly that I see? Is there are way to boost my chances at completing a given mission? These things, I think, are meant to be discovered by trial-and-error. Recall that I am playing on easy and, on top of that, you start out in an introductory mode meant to gradually introduce components of the game to you. Even having all these advantages, it sometimes seems hard to make any progress.

In searching for the fixes to my above problems, I came across some other bits and pieces about the game. I saw that, when the game was being actively sold, there was a “strategy guide” available for it. For those who don’t remember, many of the more popular games had third-party hints manuals that would help you optimize your gameplay, provided you had some extra bucks to burn. There are also (or at least there were, many of the links are no longer active) free guides in the form of Wikipedia sites and forums that were made to help bring you up to speed on how to effectively play the game. Clearly players were prepared to invest significant amounts of time and energy into this title.

I also came across some of the original reviews of the game. One that stood out compared it, and not entirely favorably, with Dungeon Keeper saying that, more than anything, Evil Genius made the reviewer want to break out their old copy of Dungeon Keeper once again. I gather that, while Evil Genius was 5 years ahead in terms of graphics and interface (at a time when 5 years meant a lot, mind you), the gameplay package doesn’t quite live up. This I can’t speak to as, like I took pains to say at the beginning, I haven’t played the original.

Just the other day I heard of… some Indonesian junk that’s going ’round.

Evil Genius does have its pros and cons. It does a reasonable job with its atmosphere, making it feel like a Bond-esque thriller rather than just a management-sim grind – at least much of the time. The way the game is split between your underground lair and “the world” does give it a different feel than, say, a sim-hospital. The humor is not bad, given them medium, and often subtle. Little finds, hidden in animations or within the text of the missions, and actually entertain more than a more obvious “here comes the joke” style. I do wonder if I may be reading a bit too much into the above screenshot, though.

On the other hand, the game struggles to live up to expectations, especially when viewing it 15 years on. One aspect of a well-designed game is that it keeps you engaged while you play. While often hidden behind the nifty animations, behind the scenes of Evil Genius are a series of timers so that, once you initiate an action, you have to wait a certain amount of time for it to complete. In many cases, there are a series of times that are all interdependent. For example, to complete a mission, I may have to hire a number of “workers,” train them to be specialists, transport them to a particular corner of the world, and then apply them for a certain amount of time to a given mission. Even in fairly uncomplicated assignments, it doesn’t seem uncommon to have to sit for 5+ minutes watching little people meander around on the screen, with no real in-game possibilities until all the tasks, one by one, complete. Is this really the way I want to spend my gaming hours?

Some gratuitous violence leave bodies everywhere. I particularly appreciated the empty casing flying out of the rifles during the shootout, although it is difficult to see in a still image.

Hours it can be, indeed, is meant to be. This game seems to be a major life-choice for some. By contrast, what I am looking for, these days, are games that I can pick up quickly and put in a few hours when I’m in the mood for that particular style or subject. I can admit the game is clever but it may be asking for more from me than I want to give it.

 

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Your Heart was an Open Book

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Cold War, freedom of speech, Ian Fleming, James Bond, Wings

Something I have picked up in my reading is that there was, once upon a time, a cadre of people who would retire from government service to the British Empire. With their pension, they could move to some imperial outpost in an economic backwater and live quite comfortably for the remainder of their days. Some, obviously, chose to use that life of leisure to write, thus giving me the impression that such a thing was commonplace.

Certainly if I could be spending my mornings on some island in the Pacific writing this blog, with my afternoons and evenings to convalesce, I would jump at the chance. I suspect that, to the extent this really happened, it is an artifact of a bygone world.

When Ian Fleming wrote Casino Royale, he did so from Jamaica. He also wasn’t entirely at his leisure. While he retired from his wartime, military service, post-war he obtained a management position with The London Times. Tasked with oversight of the publisher’s foreign correspondents and blessed, apparently, with a generous vacation policy, he was able to spend three months out of every year in Jamaica. He continued to work as a in this role, at least part time, into the 1960s, well after the publishing and commercial success of many of his James Bond novels.

Shortly after writing Casino Royale, but before its release, Fleming and his wife traveled to Jamaica via New York City. In taking the Silver Meteor from NY to St. Petersburg, the couple followed the route that Fleming had taken during World War II when he visited Jamaica for the first time. This trip, as well as some of Fleming’s other personal experiences in North America, became the basis of his second novel, Live and Let Die, which he wrote over the following few months.

Ironically, given my own introduction to the book, Bond (that is, Fleming), remarks extensively on the retiree culture of St. Petersburg and how Americans gathered there to live off of their pensions. His commentary likely has more to do with the style of living rather than the source of the funding.

Fleming tried to put more gravitas into his second book relative to his first effort. The distinction fades under the shadow of the film treatments of the novels. Live and Let Die (the movie this time) was the eighth James Bond story to be made into a film and the first with Roger Moore as the lead actor. Leaving out the transport of the story twenty years into the future and Moore’s particular interpretation of Bond, the film is only loosely based on the novel. It also comes well into a well-established movie “universe” (as we say today) rather than playing the introductory part of the book. After all, Live and Let Die was written before anyone, except of course Fleming and his editors, knew who James Bond was*.

I did watch Live and Let Die, more than once. Perhaps mercifully, I recall little of it. I do know, from my rating on Netflix, that I didn’t much care for it. Reading the novel, imagery from the Dirty Harry movie The Enforcer spring into my mind, particularly in the novels early chapters, rather than the Bond film. The parallel is, of course, the Harlem-based criminal network operated as an all-black concern.

My other thought, reading this novel, is that you couldn’t publish it today.

In part, the book is something of a “travelogue.” Fleming, the Englishman, through Bond (the Englishman) witnesses the “exotic” culture that is Harlem, gulf-coast Florida, and the black (largely poor, service-industry) subculture of the United States. Then we travel to the Caribbean islands for the “island” culture of superstition and strange religion. For the modern American, the description of New York City becomes more of a time-traveling trip than a visit to a strange land. In either of these roles, the book does so through unflattering stereo-types, cartoonish distortions, and the use of words that are no longer allowed to be uttered. It might be tough for some to “read through” this, to see the story behind the forbidden language. Indeed, the 1950s voice of the narration may well be impenetrable for the modern reader, raised in a world from which such language has been all but redacted. In my opinion, however wrong the use of brushstrokes, the painting itself is not mean-spirited. Black Americans are portrayed as exotic, compared to the English, but not particularly negatively. Yes, they are the Badguy, but it a Cold War spy novel, there are good guys and bad guys. It’s circumstantial, not racial.

I’ll emphasize that the language of the book, shocking as it seems, is within the norms of the early 1950s. Fleming doesn’t stand out with his racial stereotypes or his use of forbidden language. Pre-1960s literature will probably shock anyone who suddenly begins delving into older works. It all makes one wonder what role this plays in the modern effort to redefine the Western canon of literature. It becomes tough to reshape the culture through neuro-linguistic programing if your subjects are simply going to pick up the books of their grandparents and reabsorb the culture you’re trying to squeeze out of them.

Fast forward to 1973 and a very different era. Live and Let Die (the movie, now) was released in an era where “black culture” was portrayed exaggeratedly and provocatively on film. Among our “acceptable villains” of that time, the Black Panther -like organizations were a stock antagonist, a la Dirty Harry. While the book and the film are distinct stories, as well as being distinct in their portrayal of the race issue, this still matters. As I said, my visualization of the book is still bent through the lens of the  1970s, where these themes were introduced to me. There is a power of culture to alter even the black-and-white words printed on the page that you’ll never see if you’re not looking for it.

Behind all the culture shock, we have a fairly decent and engaging Cold War spy novel. There is none of the superhuman physical feats or exotic technology of the James Bond movies. We just follow the path of an agent trying to get to the bottom of a Soviet funding source in the heart of British and American North America. The title is a reference, and perhaps commentary, on the difference between American and British culture, not to mention policy. The CIA agent comments that if Mr. Big (a simple acronym of Bond’s nemesis, Buonaparte Ignace Gallia) is naught but the leader of a crime syndicate, the CIA policy is to “live and let live.” Bond, and by extension England, cannot allow this chaos to advance through the world and prefers a motto “live and let die.”

God save the Queen.

*James Bond was, actually, the author of a bird watching book which Ian Fleming owned. Fleming was an avid bird watcher and when he was trying to come up with just the right name for his spy/hero, the name of this American expert on Caribbean birds fit the bill. One might go on to speculate that Fleming learned from Bond about the Rufous-throated solitaire (Myadestes genibarbis), a Caribbean songbird after which he named the main female character in Live and Let Die, Solitaire.

Fight and Pull Away

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Cold War, Emarosa, Squad Battles, Squad Battles: Vietnam, U.S. Marines in Vietnam An Expanding War 1966, Vietnam, Vietnam Combat Operations

This is the thirty-sixth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

Just in case I was under the impression that every historical operation that is explicitly simulated in Vietnam Combat Operations necessarily ends in its historical outcome, here comes Operation Utah.

Intelligence said Task Force Delta would find the The 21st PAVN Regiment near the village of Chau Nhai. I found nothing.

Recall that Vietnam Combat Operations is a detailed simulation of the entire Vietnam ground war using four-day turns. The scenario is played by following along with a document that narrates the course of the war and, in particular, highlights operations that are modeled in the scenario. Although the player is free to conduct the war as he sees fit, points are awarded for completing historical operations in a historically appropriate way.

In this case, however, I air lifted the Marines to the various villages of Chau Nhai, but made no contact with any Viet Cong or North Vietnamese formations. I did make a bit of blunder in the execution. I moved part of the Marine Task Force assigned to Utah into Chau Nhai a few days early. It could be that I suppressed a trigger that would have put the enemy in my path, had I waited. Or it could be that I simply did not find the enemy unit, which was an outcome for many Vietnam operations.

Unable to visualize this operation in The Operational Art of War, I instead went to a book to get my context for this operation. For me, this book is a new one. The Marines published books that roughly parallel the series that I’ve been reading from the Army, and they did it almost two decades earlier. The corresponding book to Stemming the Tide is U.S. Marines in Vietnam: An Expanding War: 1966 by Jack Shulimson. Similar in scope and size to its Army counterpart, it also follows much the same style. Or, should we say, the Army versions follow the style of the earlier Marine versions. I did not read the whole book, only flipped to the chapter on Operation Utah, so I’ll refrain from general commentary.

Perhaps because it is 18 years older, An Expanding War is not published electronically on a government website. Instead, I found it on Archive.org. Although it is much larger is file size, I find the PDF the preferred version to read it in. The eBooks created by scanning an original printed copy and then the text is converted automatically. That means there are a lot of mistakes in that image-to-text translation. In the PDF, the original scanned image is still there, so even when the computer sees gibberish, you don’t. If you read directly from an ebook format, the original images are gone and the mistakes become a distraction.

The Operation Utah battle was a significant encounter, even though the bulk of the fighting lasted only two days. Casualties on the U.S. side approached 100 dead (98 plus 278 wounded), plus another 30 from the South Vietnamese (in addition to 120 wounded). The insurgents suffered at least 600 killed. When the Marines entered the battlefield, they found themselves debarking in a heavily defended landing zone. Many aircraft were damaged, including both the transport helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters flying close air support. Being a joint operation with the ARVN, a large chunk of the Marine’s difficulty came from maneuvering to support their allies.

Zoomed out for perspective, the screen shows some distance insurgent positions in the high ground near my landing zone.

Squad Battles: Vietnam takes on this operation with its scenario, The Battle at Chau Nhai. The scenario narrows down on a particular subset of the fighting, taking place a few hours after the landings. Difficulties with the insertion aside, the Marines had encountered only light resistance when they were instructed to maneuver into a position to support a stalled ARVN unit. A few hundred meters along their new path, they were hit from prepared positions at close range.

An Expanding War explains how, despite supporting artillery and air being at the ready, the attack came from too close for support to be deployed. This jives with the design of the Squad Battles scenario which, like many in the package, lack any off-board support. In this case, at least, that seems warranted. The scenario design can also be forgiven for leaving off the ARVN units, which put the Marine’s into jeopardy by refusing to provide the support for which they were positioned. If these additional units and their positions weren’t a factor in the fight, leaving them off the map makes no difference. I am again a little baffled by the decision to exclude the mortar support integral to a Marine unit of this size. Mortars were present and were a factor in this battle.

I try to flank the enemies left while he tries to flank my left. Round and round we go.

This scenario is made interesting due to the fact it is a combination of some offense and some defense, with a swapping of roles through the course of the game. While I had read the scenario description, I hadn’t tried to “read into” the scenario description. It is often hard to tell, in advance, how much of a scenario’s notes are simply putting the on-screen fight (in the is case, less than two hours in a multi-day fight) into the larger context, or preparing you for the nature of the fighting you will face with clues about the setup parameters. In this case, it actually improved the experience because I was somewhat surprised by what, after all, was part of the historical course of this battle. Essentially, I was barrelling ahead in full attack-mode when the surprise appearance of extra enemy forced me back on the defensive.

This scenario ended with a favorable score for me, although it felt more like a draw. In the timeline of the actual fighting, the end of the scenario corresponds to a point where the Marine commanders decided to call in close air and artillery support and use it to withdraw to defensive positions. The heavy fighting would continue through the night and another day before the enemy broke off the engagement and withdrew from the field.

Iron Triangle

Tags

Cold War, Men of Valor, Squad Battles: Tour of Duty, Vietnam

This is the thirty-fifth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

From the scenarios I’ve been playing so far, it seems like the 1st Cavalry and the 3rd Marines are fighting the whole of the Vietnam War. However, the area just north of Saigon was also the scene of heavy U.S. activity in that early deployment and ramp-up phase that characterized late 1965 and early 1966.

Fortified position at the top of the mountain.

The Battle for Nui Bad Den is explicitly a hypothetical encounter available in Squad Battles: Tour of Duty. It’s not only hypothetical, it is pretty much impossible.

Nui Bad Den is a lone mountain in otherwise flat terrain near Tay Ninh. With its commanding views and height, it was established as a radio relay station in 1964 by U.S. Special Forces (Mobile Strike, or MIKE). It was strategically located near the communist stronghold that the U.S. called the “Iron Triangle.” While the U.S. controlled and defended the top of the mountain, the Viet Cong (VC) were dug into the lower slopes and the surrounding area. In some places, literally dug in, with tunnels dug through the mountain to provide shelter, storage, and concealment.

This scenario supposes a VC ambush on the U.S. units. As far as that goes, it may be something that happened many times to the American units atop the mountain. The setup in this scenario, however, is that it starts with the U.S. having three different company-strength patrols moving back up the mountain towards their home base. The VC attackers simultaneously strike the base at the top and each of the three companies on the mountain’s slopes. As a result, the player must fight four all-but-unconnected battles, one on the defensive with the other three being semi-offensive. It all seems more than a stretch.

One could imagine, naturally, that the four engagements are taking place, simultaneously, within a single hour. The problem, from the gaming standpoint, is what you’ve done is create a mini-campaign, of sorts, with four company-sized engagements which all kind-of, sort-of depend on each other. Thus the advantage of a battalion-level battle (I spoke of this earlier) is mostly negated.

While I am at it, I’ll resume the play of Men of Valor, which starts its next set of scenarios (Operation) only a few days later and not far from the Squad Battles scenario. In order to give the player a nice overview of the whole war, our Marine from the first operation gets assigned to accompany U.S. Army units in an a different area of operation. I can’t imagine the military swapping privates around between branches like this, but then I can’t imagine much of what I see in Men of Valor actually happening.

Red smoke marks the airstrike location. Also, check out those termite hills.

I do find this game frustrating and often not in a good way. The biggest issue is that you cannot save. The game is saved at checkpoints, a hold-over from the genre’s console roots. A checkpoint is generally followed by a cut-scene which, while not too terribly long, starts to seem so after the 20th time being forced to watch it. You are also treated, with each character death, to a dramatic reading of the letter to your parents as well as a summary of the number of rounds you’ve fired and such. It seems like the point of it all is to punish you for having died before allowing you to hop back to your last checkpoint.

Even worse, though, the checkpoints are not actually saves. If you quit the game and come back to it later, you have to start at the beginning of whatever mission you were on. To put it another way, you are required to survive all the way through each mission in a single sitting. Already been at it for two hours and have something better to do? Too bad, because if you stop now you’ve got to start all over again.

It’s not that the game is too difficult, but it is set up in a way that (unless you’ve read a walkthrough ahead of time) you must discover some of the tricks of the game by trial and error. An example from the first mission in this operation* may illustrate. In one of the sequences, toward the end bit between two checkpoints, a particularly nasty machine gun nest opens fire upon you. With it blasting away, it becomes very difficult to move about the playing area. Trying to think strategically, I decided that taking out that machine gun had to take priority over my stated goal, because otherwise I’d probably get killed before I could finish what I was supposed to do. What I didn’t realize is that, once I complete my goals, the machine gun nest will be “automatically” taken out by one of my teammates. I probably lost more than an hour before I got that figured out. Top top it all off, it was an hour that got thrown away because I ended up quitting before I finished the remainder of that mission.

Plus, as I said before, it is neither realistic nor particularly enlightening regarding the real experiences of a Vietnam soldier. Despite the historical-looking trappings, this is still about running from medikit to medikit, hoping you can replace your health faster than the enemy’s bullets are taking it away.

The kitchen facilities of a VC tunnel complex.

What Men of Valor does bring to the table, though, is the visuals. I don’t mean the graphics, of course, this is a 2004 release on a 2002 graphics engine (Unreal 2.0, for what that’s worth). What I mean is that the tactical games for Vietnam simply fail to capture some aspects of the war adequately.

For example, in one of the newsreel videos I was watching from 1966, the news crew was accompanying a patrol that was pinned down by a sniper. The unit called in airstrikes on the sniper position. An airstrike to take out a single shooter! In another, Stemming the Tide describes battles where 80% of the communist casualties are due to close air support and close artillery support. Generals repeatedly acknowledge that their victories are due to the effectiveness of this “off board,” to use game terminology, units. This doesn’t really come through in the tactical games.

In Men of Valor, it is pre-programmed in of course, but we get get to see small groups of soldiers calling in air support and marking the targets with smoke (see the middle screen shot). Then we are treated to a rather spectacular air strike.

Note also the details, the kind of details I’ve read in the narratives of the battles, rarely come through in any other medium, be the games or Hollywood movies. The giant termite mounds, which provide battlefield cover. The extent of the tunnels, including perhaps a kitchen intended to support a regiment. Men of Valor is one game that, at least, shows you what they look like.

As far afield as this game takes me from the informative simulations in some of my other posts, there does still remain some value in its depictions of the battlefield from the ground level.

*In case it wasn’t clear in any earlier posts, I’ll try to clarify. In the terminology of this game, the “Operation” is the major chapter, each one separated by the passage of many months. “Da Nang,” “Starlite,” and “Iron Triangle” are the first three. Missions are the subset chapters, if you will, and might be days apart. Within the mission, various goals are separated by cuts-cenes, all meant to be within a single day.

Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles. The next article moves on to the Marine Corps sector and Operation Utah.

In Defense of Dominoes

Tags

Cold War, England, Southeast Asia, Steel Panthers, Vietnam, Wall Street Journal, World War II

This is the thirty-fourth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

At the end of January, the Wall St. Journal ran an editorial written by author and former National Security Council staff-member, William Lloyd Stearman. The subject of his article was how America’s active participation in the Vietnam War, while not saving South Vietnam as a nation, likely saved the region from communism. The article is titled, America Lost Vietnam but Saved Southeast Asia, and is likely behind a paywall for you.

He makes a number of interesting points which, despite my immersion in books from the period, hadn’t quite occurred to me in just this way.

First off, he suggests that it was Vietnam that brought the United States into World War II. More than a year before Pearl Harbor (the article actually has a mistaken date for the events in question), Japan had demanded military transit rights in French Indochina. The French acquiesced to their demands after rapidly surrendering under the threat of Japanese military invasion. Ultimately Vichy France, under Axis diplomatic pressure, turned over the whole of Indochina, making it a Japanese protectorate. President Roosevelt quickly announced sanctions which froze Japanese financial assets in America. The British and the Dutch followed, within days, with similar policies. Says Stearman, it was this act by the United States which convinced Japan that the U.S. would, in the end, use its fleet to block Japanese expansion in the region. In an effort to preempt an American attack, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

The author then continues on to talk about the effects that America’s active involvement had in South East Asia, possibly saving Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and Indonesia from communist takeovers. The U.S. ramp-up, he says, inspired British intervention in Malaysia and Indonesia. Similarly, Suharto may not have fought the Chinese-backed coup, which took place in Indonesia on September 30th, 1965, had he not witnessed the actions of U.S. forces in Vietnam. Had that coup in Indonesia succeeded, it is likely that the Philippines would have been destabilized by their own communist insurgents. Given that the U.S. had a long standing defense agreement with the Philippines, and that a civil war there would have likely triggered that agreement, this would have begun a U.S. involvement on an even larger scale than the one in Vietnam. At least, so opines Stearman.

He also draws one more controversial conclusion about the Vietnam War. He says that contrary to popular opinion, which generally declares that the Vietnam War was unwinnable no matter the U.S. strategy, North Vietnamese sources acknowledge a path to American and South Vietnamese victory. This line of thinking says that, had the U.S. and ARVN blocked the Ho Chi Minh Trail, particularly through Laos, the communists in South Vietnam would have been denied critical supplies and reinforcements. In fact, the North Vietnamese did not understand why Washington did not authorize such an action, particularly as everyone knew that the “neutrality” of Laos had already been violated by the communists.

This jives with one of Moore’s points at the end of We Were Soldiers…, although in his case he is talking more about the pursuit of combatants into Cambodia and Laos as opposed to preemptive disruption of the inbound troops and supplies. Of course, Stearman doesn’t address the counter-argument that extending the war into Laos would have either turned domestic opinion against the war or, perhaps worse, caused the conflict to spill well outside of Vietnam’s borders and across the Cold War -embroiled globe.

This discussion of Britain, Malaysia, and Indonesia prompted me to pop open a Steel Panthers scenario, called Operation Claret, that deals with British Fighting in Malaysia and Indonesia. It models an encounter between British special forces and Indonesian Marines which took place in October, 1965 as part of England’s secret operation across the border into Indonesia during the Indonesia/Malaysian hostilities of the mid-1960s.

Defending the bridge.

This is a different kind of scenario altogether. The British, the preferred side for a player versus the AI, are on the defensive. They start in possession of all the victory locations but with insufficient forces to hold them. In the fight that is modeled, the British must cover their withdrawal across the international border back into Malaysia.

My game ended up in a draw, perhaps due to some confusion about how the scenario should be played. The British forces are insufficient to hold all of the the victory locations. Further, the victory point tallying overemphasizes losses on the British side, meaning it is even more important to give ground so as to reduce your own casualties. At the same time, the British teams are unusually effective, often neutralizing multiple Indonesian units in a single turn. This might be the most effective I’ve ever seen units in Steel Panthers and, I can only assume because I didn’t try to look it up, must be due to a mismatch between unit quality in this scenario.

Point being, what looked like initially a very strange scenario due to its very low unit count actually did turn out to be an interesting exercise for this game engine.

Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles. Going forward, you can return with me to the speculative scenarios in Squad Battles and Men of Valor.

Where’er We Go They Dread the Name of Garryowen

Tags

Cold War, Combat Operations: Stemming the Tide, Squad Battles, Squad Battles: Tour of Duty, The Operational Art of War, Vietnam, Vietnam 1965 Combat Operations, Vietnam Combat Operations

This is the thirty-third in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

Today, we take three or four different views of the 1st Cavalry operation in Binh Dinh that took place at the outset of 1966. This province was strategically important to the U.S. operations in Vietnam and yet, at the same time, a stronghold of communist support. Encamped somwhere in Binh Dinh was a North Vietnamese division commanding two NVA regiments and a Viet Cong regiment. The U.S. high command made uprooting this enemy a priority and the task fell, again, to the 1st Cavalry.

Operations Masher and Double Eagle, in the greater context.

There were actually two operations, conducted in concert, which were slated to target the insurgents in this area. Masher was the designation given to the 1st Cavalry operation in the Bon Song valley but, just to the north, the U.S. Marines were conducting Operation Double Eagle.

Once again, Vietnam Combat Operations provides an organized context for these operations within the wider war. Note that the “1965” part of the scenario title has been dropped as Vietnam Combat Operations, Volume 3 extends through the end of 1965 and into 1966. As before, it is a very different scenario experience. To play, I carefully follow along with the instructions on my tablet, meticulously completing each turn. I’m struck, as before, that the results of the game really do match the narrative I’m reading in Combat Operations: Stemming the Tide. This really shouldn’t be a complete surprise, as the Vietnam Combat Operations documents cite Stemming the Tide as a source.

By mid-February, my fighting has shifted to the Kim Son Valley, where I’ve located a VC and and NVA division.

It does say something for the skill of the scenario designer that the game engine is playing along properly. Note that in the first screenshot, I’ve located one of the NVA regiments near the coast in the northern part of the province, similarly to how the historic operation progressed. More impressively, the fighting moved south, between the first and second screenshots, pretty much on the historic timetable. In this grand operational scenario, I’m in the right place at the right time.

I also continue to be pleased with the way combat happens when and where it is supposed to but doesn’t happen where it shouldn’t which, as I’ve said before, seems very difficult to engineer in a TOAW scenario. For the first time for me as I play this series, the pace is picking up. While Operation Masher (by now, it was relabeled Operation White Wing as Johnson found terms like “Masher” a little too violent and bad for public relations) is the largest engagement across the entire map, I have several more smaller engagements, involving both U.S. and South Vietnamese -only forces. I’ve wound up stretching the limits of my air support to cover all the fights adequately.

Opening moves for Operation Masher at a finer scale.

The original scenario set for The Operational Art of War also had a scenario for Operation Masher/White Wing called Bong Son 1966. The scenario name is a reference to the provincial capitol, which was centrally located relative to the actions in this operation. The “Battle of Bong Son” is also used as a descriptor for the first phase of the campaign which included the first insertion points and the initial fighting for the 1st Cavalry, first near the city and then around the “Bong Son Plain” to its north.

The scale of this scenario is similar to the early 1st Cavalry foray in Ia Drang. Somehow, though, it captures the feel of the operation much better (again, using Stemming the Tide to set expectations) than the earlier scenario did. Significantly, the setup of the scenario means that I follow a similar path through the province as the actual fighting did, moving from North to South as the turns go by. There is significantly less of the feeling that the historical order of battle is simply scattered across the map, leading to an entirely ahistorical set of fights.

But it still isn’t perfect. Or, to put it another way, it doesn’t live up to the feeling of Vietnam Combat Operations, Volume 3. Most significantly, the enemy is all over and ubiquitous. The scenario introduction explains how the ARVN forces were given the task of holding open the coast, freeing up the US forces to hunt for communist forces inland. Very quickly, however, my ARVN units were under threat in the southern part of the map while my 1st Cavalry forces were getting pinned down in the north. It seems I had chosen my landing spots a little too far apart and the enemy was threating to smash me apart, piecemeal. You can kind of see this in the above screenshot. Sort of. If you know what you are looking for.

The real operation that was characterized by an inability of the US to find the communists. There were many instances where the US was sure they had nailed down the location of at least one of the targeted regiments. Airmobile forces were inserted to find and fight the enemy while specifically trying to prevent him from slipping away from battle. Yet time and time again the US forces would come up empty handed. To this day it isn’t known for sure, in many cases, whether the insurgents slipped through the holes in the 1st Cavalry’s blocking force or whether the intelligence on their whereabouts was bad from the get-go. What we do know, however, is if the enemy found himself at an advantage, he would fight.

With this context, Vietnam Combat Operations, Volume 3, captures it all much better as, most of the time, you’re staring at an empty map and wondering where the enemy is. In Bong Son 1966, the enemy seems to be everywhere and often in superior numbers to your own. While I think it is less accurate, it does capture a certain feel of the Vietnam War. As a US commander, it must have seemed like if you made even a small slip-up and left a company somewhere unsupported, the NVA or VC were bound to appear and extract payment for your oversight.

Into the Kim Son Valley. Note also the major NVA forces along the coast.

There is another characteristic of the TOAW system that, although I’ve complained about it before, seems to work here. The ideal operation would have the US move into an area and try to fix the enemy position and destroy it. When the US were unable to completely blocked all the retreat routes out of the battle area, the communists seemed to inevitably find a way to escape the trap. In this, the TOAW mechanic, which often requires that all six hexes surrounding a unit be occupied in order to win a battle decisively, seems to capture the necessity, in Vietnam’s operations, to thoroughly engulf the enemy before an attack.

In terms of capturing the right feeling, it works better than I expected it would have.

The Bong Son 1966 scenario also provides another segue, allowing us to drop down one more level of detail into Squad Battles: Tour of Duty‘s depiction of this operation.

A zoomed out view shows most of the active battlefield in a single screen.

The Squad Battles scenario, called The Battle at Kim Son, is configured to take place on February 16th. The scenario notes don’t make it clear whether this is to recreate an actual portion of the battle from detailed reports or just be representative of the type of encounters that were occurring in this time and place. Trying to match up with the narrative in Stemming the Tide, it is possible that this reproduces an encounter that 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry had while trying to set up blocking positions during a sweep of an area called the “Iron Triangle.” Certainly this designation is to be confused, by future generations, with the other Iron Triangle, north and west of Saigon. Back to this battle, a company of the 2/5 encountered NVA forces entrenched on high ground while attempting to move into their assigned position.

Once again, this scenario seems to be lacking the available artillery support that proved decisive in so many battles. At least, this time, you have access to the U.S. command’s mortar support. The battle also has a large enough force and the tactical decisions that I noted are needed to make these scenarios work.

I didn’t do all that well in my play-through, getting my effort scored as a minor defeat. I did manage to take two out of three objectives (often enough for a win in Squad Battles) but I also took more losses than I inflicted. In a war where victory was determined by kill ratios, this is a significant failure. I think my biggest mistake is that I should have used smoke, from my mortars, to help close in on the enemy without taking losses.

Part of me wouldn’t mind retrying the scenario with a better strategy in mind. However, I’d run into that problem with so many of these scenarios. A large part of the challenge is that I didn’t know what I was facing. Do I need to hold a force in reserve for defensive purposes? Where is the strongest portion of the enemy force? Having played once, I now know the answers and the joy of discovering that is lost. It also is much easier to win a scenario if you know where all the surprises are waiting.

Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles. Up next, a Wall St. Journal article puts the Vietnam War in a context of Domino Theory.

Come a Little Bit Closer

Tags

Cold War, Neil Young, Squad Battles, Squad Battles: Vietnam, Steel Panthers, Vietnam, WinSPMBT

This is the thirty-second in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

Shortly after the the campaign in the central highlands, the Marines in the northern part of South Vietnam organized a search and destroy operation near Tam Ky code-named Harvest Moon. It lacked the major engagements of the Plieku Campaign, but I again found a pair of Steel Panthers/Squad Battles scenarios set within it. The scenarios are, to some extent, speculative and in any case lack the strategic importance of more recent tactical scenarios. Playing them, I consider what works and what doesn’t at this level and in these game engines.

This scenario has the US and ARVN defending a village centered around a large church.

First to the Steel Panthers scenario. The setup is similar to several other base defense scenarios that I’ve played recently. The Marines are in a defensive perimeter around their camp and the NVA infantry, played by the computer, comes at you in a sudden attack. The uniqueness of this one is that the Marines are defending a stone church, giving them a type of fortified position not often seen in Vietnam scenarios.

The scenario takes place in the unlikely village of Bi Phu. I say that because, first of all, I’m unable to find any reference to the village name or to any fighting that may have taken place here. Secondly, if Google translate can be relied upon (which is hardly a given, I know), the name means “tragic,” which would be a terrible thing to call your home village. The scenario notes source this battle from Don’t Bunch Up: One Marine’s Story by Captain William Van Zanten, a book I haven’t read, so I am hesitant to doubt anything about its authenticity. Reports for the unit described in the scenario notes don’t line up with the action reports referencing the unit at that time. Of course, even a minor typo in creating the scenario could just make it impossible to look up the information.

Like many of the base-defense scenarios, the player has little “strategy” to figure out. As the attackers come, you must halt them with small-arms fire as well as a couple of off-board assets. Eventually, you kill them and they stop coming. I think my only move in the whole game was when a section of the church caught on fire and I relocated the ARVN soldiers in that hex out of harms way. I appreciate having a unique village map created but otherwise I don’t see this one does much for me.

They enemy came out of the jungle and I chased them back in.

Squad Battles: Vietnam models an encounter occurring during the wrap-up phase of Operation Harvest Moon in the scenario The Battle at Ky Phu. A Marine battalion of three companies is returning to base along a road when they are assaulted by the Viet Cong. The placement of victory locations, three along the Marine’s road and three in the VC-controlled bush, incentivizes both sides to be on the attack.

I had just complained, somewhat, about the smallness of the LZ Albany scenario which, essentially has the same order of battle. No off-board artillery here, but the player does get one flamethrower. Accounts of the battle describe the Marines’ use of both Huey gunships and accurate artillery support. Nearly three-quarters of the VC losses were caused by artillery fire.

That said, the setup of this one does make a difference and it is enough to put it over the threshold to “interesting.” I would say the key to making this one worth playing is that, first, the player commands a full battalion. Second, the ground being fought over is varied and interesting. There are hills, fields, streams, and fairly substantial sight distances around the map. Third, the player’s goals are spread out across the map, but not so spread out that there aren’t some decisions to be made. How much do you hold back to defend the victory locations you hold at the beginning? Do you assign, basically, one company per enemy held objective and take them in parallel or do you try to use one company to support another? If you can’t plan to take all of the objectives, should you even waste lives trying?

On top of those details, the programmed opponent is able to do a little bit with this one. Like the player, the program sees it should both attack and defend. Variety is the spice of life.

Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles. The next article covers Operation Masher, renamed to White Wing.

Long Form

Tags

Africa, Cold War, Combat Operations: Stemming the Tide, Vietnam

This is the thirty-first in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I am reading Combat Operations: Stemming the Tide, May 1965 to October 1966 written by John M. Carland. This is another series of books funded by the U.S. Army chronicling the Army’s experience in Vietnam. Like the two shorter works I looked at before, these are for sale by the government (roughly the same price as on Amazon) but are freely available as a download. After all, we here in American did already pay to write the thing so we might as well have access to it.

In contrast to Buying Time, 1965-1966, which covers the same period, Stemming the Tide is a full-length book. As such, it talks both about the high-level, strategic issues but also gets down into individual engagements with far more detail. It’s not quite the level that a book dedicated to an individual battle, like The First Fight, would be, but it is obviously (with five times the page count) more detailed than my previous foray.

It is a good read and a fairly easy read. Still, it does impress me as a book written by the military for the military as opposed to the outreach to the public that the U.S. Army Campaigns series seems to be shooting for. Of course, that is an opinion coming from a non-military person so take of it what you will. The fact is, the book details items, like command structures, that would seem to be far more interest to someone “in the biz” than an outside observer. There were also a number of cases* where I noticed the use of “insider” language.

Like before, this one also is a very informative companion to the Vietnam 1965 Combat Operations scenarios. I’ll not dwell on that any further.

One unique insight I got from reading this book is the amount of effort that goes on behind the scenes to make the war happen. This book gets into a level of detail that begins to demonstrate the amount of work involved with moving, for example, the 1st Infantry Division from the U.S. into Vietnam and to begin operations. Whereas the shorter versions did talk about “security operations” and the like, Stemming the Tide gets into more specifics. It gives me a new appreciation of the difficulties involved.

A division doesn’t just move, load up their rifles, and start hunting commies. Locations have to be chosen and then the actual base must be constructed. When the division in question is one of the early deployments, that means that the engineering and construction support isn’t available yet, so arrangements have to be made. Local contractors, from a third world country mind you, are needed to construct a base that not only must serve as a secured military outpost, but also as a home to gaggles of teenagers and young-adults for up to a year. Supplies have to be sent in from overseas and delivered across inadequate infrastructure. Most critically, somebody has to figure out all the things that need to be done and the right order in which to do them. The role of a commanding general, in this, is far more than any combat planning required of him.

It also explains the outsized requirement for support forces over combat forces. Stemming the Tide explains, “[o]ut of a total of 82,300 U.S. soldiers and marines in South Vietnam in August 1965, no more than 20,000 served in maneuver battalions. By the end of the year 155,000 soldiers and marines had arrived, but only about 31,000 were in maneuver units.”

The book also includes political factors. One that stood out for me is the polling data collected toward the end of 1965. In Vietnam, the U.S. had entered a sort-of-truce and was preparing a series of sticks in case the North Vietnamese were unwilling to come to the peace table’s carrot. The plan, which was very much what was subsequently executed, was presented to the public at large and was polling at about 60% in-support.

We’re too early in the war (and I’m still only part way through the book) to decide whether the U.S. had already made the fateful decisions that will ultimately cost them this war. At the start of the year in 1966, the Generals assumed that, given the resources they requested, they would prevail. The civilian leadership had promised the resources as requested. It is evident that the text criticizes Johnson for not making the acceleration of force build up happen, though either the call-up of reserves or an extension of commitments. The analysis of the book is that the slower build-up of forces, constrained by political considerations, allowed the communists to match and exceed that build up with additional forces of their own. Therefore, the U.S. never achieved the advantage in forces that the plan was counting on.

From the flip side, we also can never know whether Johnson was right. Perhaps it is true that the avenues available to him that would meet the requested force build up were, in fact, so politically unpalatable that they would have caused a collapse in support for his presidency, his social programs, and (likely) his prosecution of the Vietnam War.

*One that I just now remembered to look up is the repeated use of the laager. This is a Afrikaans variation on the Dutch word for army camp that describes the result of “circling the wagons.” For students of Boer history, this might invoke the 1838 Battle  of Blood River where the use of the laager defensive formation resulted in an overwhelming defeat by the Voortrekkers of a Zulu army 20-50 times their number. It’s an intriguing word to use in the context of small U.S. formations holding out against superior Vietcong numbers, but perhaps not one that most people without a West Point history class under their belts would readily understand.

Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles. Continue on for a pair of scenarios depicting Marine Corps operation Harvest Moon.

Ambuscade

Tags

Battle of Ia Drang, Cold War, Squad Battles, Squad Battles: Tour of Duty, The Operational Art of War, Vietnam, We Were Soldiers Once...and Young

This is the thirtieth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

The day after securing Landing Zone X-Ray, American units moved out and away from the battlefield on foot. Having defending the landing zone decisively, a B-52 strike was called in on the Chu Pong Mountain, where their North Vietnamese opponents remained dug in, while the Americans moved safely away from the bombing targets. Doctrine dictated that friendly forces be outside of a 3 km safety zone. A march, rather than a helicopter evacuation, would provide less indication to the enemy that the airstrikes were coming.

The two battalions were to march to two other areas. The 2/5 was to assemble at LZ Columbus and the 2/7 split off and headed for LZ Albany.

After reading We Were Soldiers Once…, it remains unclear to me what the bigger plan was. The men of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry had been sent into LZ X-Ray as to reinforce Moore’s battalion as the fight developed. They had been marching and fighting for over 50 hours straight as they made their way to Albany. In some cases, the unit orders indicated that their goal was assemble at LZ Albany to be evacuated from the combat area. Others suggest that Albany may, instead, have been a temporary halting point, and a further march would follow. Some commanders’ orders indicated they were to expect to encounter the enemy in the vicinity of Albany while others anticipated an uneventful march followed by a ride back to base camp.

Whatever the higher-ups thought would happen, its seems clear that the North Vietnamese were far more prepared and organized than the Americans understood. Shortly after noon, as the lead elements of the 2/7 were arriving at the clearing designated Albany, an NVA ambush hit them all up and down the marching column.

Here they come. My lead elements have made it the “copse of trees” in the center of the clearing, but they’re going to be stuck there, alone.

As the scenario opens, I get a feeling of “being there” that exceeds most Steel Panthers scenario implementations. The map feels like a reasonable depiction of the ambush area, based on Moore’s description, and the sudden appearance of enemies from everywhere at once and my almost instant inability to respond is very much what happened. My own situation quickly became worse than the historical situation. When the attack commenced, I moved my command units forward in the landing zone into the “copse of trees,” as shown in the above screenshot. While things don’t look too bad so far, in was only another 10 or 15 minutes before everyone forward was wiped out along with any other unit who tried to cross the clearing.

Following the scenario instructions, I attempted to move all my subordinate commanders backwards to reunite them with their commands. This turned out to be another big mistake. In the actual fight, only one commander, Captain Forrest of the 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry, returned to his unit. The 1/5 was at the rear of the column and Forrest sprinted the distance to return to get his people organized. In my game, not a single headquarters unit survived long enough to make to their “zone.” By about 10 turns in, there are no longer any command units remaining on the map.

I’m really feeling surrounded and helpless. This is one heck of a fight.

As the battle progresses, though, some of the usual Steel Panthers problems creep in. I’m realizing in some of the Vietnam scenarios (where I have a detailed written account of the battle to compare), the time as determined by turn number probably shouldn’t be taken literally. In most of these battles, there are various lulls in the action as the attacking side regroups and prepares for a fresh assault. In most tactical games, however, the player needs to maximize the pace of his attacks if he wants to get the most victory points within a fixed turn count. So, for example, at Ap Bau Bang, where the Viet Cong attacked in several waves, one might image that a turn or two of “quiet” could, in fact, represent a much longer pause between attacks. Nevertheless, there are limits to such an indulgence.

At LZ Albany, there was a good hour of chaos before US forces could organize a defense. Just like the American battalion was caught by surprise, brigade and division support were also unprepared. It took about that long for air support to be called into the area, followed soon after by artillery. In the game, however, air and artillery support is delayed by only two turns (six minutes), plus a few more turns for the requested support to respond. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to allow that with this distortion of time, the scenario still reasonably simulates the confusion immediately following the VC assault.

On the other hand, it took all afternoon and into the evening until it was determined that LZ Albany was secure enough to allow reinforcements by helicopter. With the attack beginning about noon, it was near 6PM before helicopters brought in men and supplies  and began to evacuated wounded. Yet, on the computer, an additional company (and then some, I think) is flying in on helicopters before that first hour is up.

This goes too far to be considered just a “distortion” in the clock. The only way that I might be able to square that circle is if I read deeply between the lines within the scenario instructions. It is possible, I suppose, that if the U.S. had completely secured LZ Albany at the outset of the attack, reinforcements via helicopter could have come in much sooner. Of course, I don’t know how one might determine what would have made the landing zone safe, nor does this scenario have any kind of dependency of that sort. In my case, I figured there was no way I was getting my helicopters safely down in the main landing zone and, instead, I found a three-hex clear spot near the center of my column (it’s just left of center in the above screenshot). So, in addition to the timing, I’m landing forces in an area that, in reality, is way too small to support them. Even when a perimeter was finally established in the Albany clearing, it was initially too small to support helicopter landings. A hex, at this map’s scale, just wouldn’t do.

Another problem impacts all ambush-type scenarios and “base defense” settings in general. Steel Panthers has a system of automatic retreat when a unit begins to waiver. The idea is that a unit will back away from the line of fire, often using smoke to cover its retreat, and do this during the enemy’s turn. On a good day, particularly if you’ve retreated back into the security of your own lines, that unit can recover morale and cohesion and perhaps get back into the fight. On the other hand, if the unit is cut off or surrounded, retreating will only expose it to additional fire and eventual destruction.

In this scenario, however, where there is an inner defense of Americans beset on all sides by attacking North Vietnamese, there is no clear “backwards” direction. What is, on one side of the perimeter, a retreat to safety is to units on the other side a blind charge into enemy lines. This is exactly the fate of many units in this scenario, both U.S. and NVA. Units wavering will advance towards and often through the enemy lines to inevitably be eliminated. In fact, it seemed like a fairly decent percentage of unit losses, on both side, were due to them wandering out of cover, stunned, right into the fire of their enemies. On a small scale, one can write it off as simply a higher lethality of fire, and ignore the details. Happening so regularly, it is frustrating.

By the end of the scenario, I was left less impressed than I was at the start. These oddities detracted from that feeling, at the outset, that this one was coming close to getting things just right. But it is still a well-done attempt.

The WinSPMBT map seems a bit too big, but this one looks too small. The scenario seems to small as well.

Switching over the Squad Battles: Tour of Duty, the most obvious difference is the size of the map. Comparing, side-by-side, features depicted by these two programs should look similar on the screen. Steel Panthers uses 50m hexes and Squad Battles features 40m hexes. If anything, that should expand Squad Battles to be the larger of the two.

When I first opened up the Squad Battles take, however, my thought was that this one is the correct scale. Accounts describe as LZ Albany as a fairly small clearing, even compared to the other sites in the Battle of Ia Drang. The Steel Panthers version did just seem too expansive, although the obviousness of the error didn’t hit me until I saw the Squad Battles take. Setting helicopters down in Albany was challenging enough. Finding 3-hex landing zones all along the trail tells me the map was a little too detailed.

As I played, though, I realized that the scenario feels too cramped. Part of it, yes, was coming off Steel Panthers, which set my expectations just so. However, as I’ve been playing, I’ve also been reading Combat Operations: Stemming the Tide. While fighting the Squad Battles LZ Albany scenario, I plunged forward to the section on LZ Albany in the book and found the battlefield dimensions given therein. Captain Forrest, it is written, had to advance 500-600m from the position of his company at the rear of the column to meet with commander Colonel McDade, at its head. This figure roughly matches the total size of the battlefield in Squad Battles.

Stemming the Tide also describes the LZ Albany clearing as such: “An irregular square from three hundred to four hundred meters in length and width, the landing zone had a grove at its center measuring about one hundred fifty meters west to east and one hundred meters north to south.”

Counting hexes, so you don’t have to, the Steel Panthers map has the “grove” just about right, but has way too much clearing surrounding it. For the Squad Battles map, it is almost as if someone found somewhere the size of the grove and assumed that those dimensions were for the total clearing. On that map, the “grove” is but a single hex (40×40), covered in the screenshot by Colonel “Lopez.”

The feeling of being “too small” extends to other areas. To simulate the ambush, initially all U.S. forces are “fixed” – they cannot be moved by the player. This is intended to simulate the surprise factor in the ambush, which is fine as far as it goes. Some units remain fixed even by the scenario’s end. Again, the idea may be that some of the column remained unable to maneuver throughout the first 45 minutes of fighting (5 minute turns, 9 turns). But removing a percentage of the units from the control of the player makes for that much less of a “game.”

Defense of the LZ clearing is accomplished primarily through air-delivered napalm strikes.

Even those units that are there already seem a subset of the American forces. Missing is any off-board artillery support. Granted that came after the air strikes, which are part of the game, but it is a noticeable omission particularly for someone who has just completed the Steel Panthers take. Also missing are the mortar companies that were part of the 1st Cavalry company structure, as well as any other support platoons that one finds (accurately or not, it is hard to say) in Steel Panthers.

Along with everything else that went missing between Steel Panthers and Squad Battles, gone also is the sense of narrative. In Steel Panthers, as I said, there is that sense of shock and confusion. There is the mad rush to seize the grove and to reunite the command structure. Then the air and artillery begin to arrive, and you can attempt to organize your defense. Chronologically, the Squad Battles version is probably the more accurate one, but it doesn’t bring the player into the battle.

Just to wrap up this post, I’ll toss in one more screenshot for the Plieku Campaign, this time from Boonie Rats 1965-1972. The last time I was playing it, I halted just before the major November Army operations, with the intent to return later. Having brought Campaign for South Vietnam through into 1966, I thought I’d just catch up Boonie Rats to the same date.

Leaving operation planning to the computer means that the NVA struck Pleiku, not Plei Me, in late November 1965.

Notable here, in the above screenshot, is the drift away from the historical Plieku Campaign (and the direction of that drift). You can see, if your eyes are sharp, that the NVA (gold highlight on red) has launched a major operation against Plieku City itself, defended only by ARVN (red highlight, with yellow on a tan background). The recently-deployed-from-the-US 1st Cavalry is riding to the rescue, but in this case is assembling in force to save the provincial capital, rather helping to lift the siege of a military outpost. I’d say the ahistorical situation is a result of the natural aggressiveness of the Operational Art of War programmed opponent and the hex-and-counter mechanics that emphasize taking territory.

Consider it one more data point showing what works and what doesn’t in TOAW.

Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles. The next article discusses a book on this period of the War.

Up and Up

Tags

Cold War, The Operational Art of War, Vietnam, Vietnam 1965-1975

This is the twenty-ninth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.

I finally swung back around to pick up the last of the large-scale Vietnam War scenarios for The Operational Art of War. This one is called Campaign for South Vietnam and covers the war stretching from May 1965 to April 1975 (give or take, depending on certain scenario parameters). Campaign for South Vietnam takes Operational Art in an unexpected direction, adding in strategic-level decisions atop the operational engine. In fact, one might go so far as to suggest that the strategic level is the game and the actual, TOAW combat resolution is just discovering the implications of your strategic-level decisions.

If this is reminiscent of my commentary on Vietnam 1965-1975, this should be no surprise. Campaign for South Vietnam has its roots in converting the old board game to TOAW. At some point in its development, the scenario took on is own personality. The mechanics of Vietnam 1965-1975 would never convert over one-for-one and this scenario builder doesn’t try, but neither does he make any secret that he borrowed heavily from the Victory Games design.

TOAW Scenarios

Vietnam 1965-1968

Hex side: 5 km
Turn length: 1 week
Unit: Battalion/regiment

Vietnam 1965 Combat Operations, Vol. 1

Hex side: 4 km
Turn length: 1 week
Unit: Company/battalion

Boonie Rats 1965 – 1972

Hex side: 10 km
Turn length: 1 month
Unit: Regiment

Campaign for South Vietnam

Hex side: 5 km
Turn length: 1 month
Unit: Battalion

Vietnam 1965-1975

Hex side: 10 km
Turn length: 2 turns per season
Unit: Battalion/regiment

One disclaimer I’ll toss in up front is that I am playing with the version of the scenario that shipped with TOAW III. Forums discuss a newer Version 5.1. A notable change has to do with a particular design quirk in the original whereby the on-screen clock ticks by in weeks which are actually months. The update tries to rescale everything to make the scenario calendar match the game engine. I’ve always wondered why it was necessary to fudge the scale in the first place.

That forum also seems to contain some playtesting trial-and-error involved with getting the scenario to run in TOAW IV. As much as that would seem like a great step forward in playability for this scenario, it is not clear that they could get it working. It isn’t included in the installed scenarios for TOAW IV. If problems remain without some version-IV-specific editing, I wouldn’t be surprised. Campaign for South Vietnam tortures strategic-level play out of the engine and there is bound to be some level of reliance on quirks and specifics that throw things for a loop when going to the upgrade.

As a test of all this theory, I did give TOAW IV a try myself and ran into at least one problem. Part of the design of the scenario is that the player can trigger, through the disbanding of dummy units, the deployment of additional U.S. formations to the theater. Once you request deployment, there is a variable (at least, I think it is variable) delay and then the units are placed in a deployment zone in the Ocean. When they arrive on-map, they are only at 50% readiness. They player, therefore ,has to make a choice between “rushing” the units into Vietnam at partial readiness or waiting a month and then transporting them at, or near, full proficiency. Neither the delay nor the reduced proficiency are working when I request units in TOAW IV. This could be due to a change in the way something is calculated after the update, or it could be a mismanagement of the game options (which would be my fault, not the scenario’s). At this point I don’t know if it is readily fixable, nor do I know what else might be wonky in the newer version.

I’ll stick with TOAW III.

My hypothetical Operation Starlite and more-or-less the right time and place.

Like Vietnam 1965 Combat Operations (although in an entirely different direction), this is a unique use of the TOAW engine and one that creates a genuinely novel game. Victory is, like other full-war scenarios, determined by the Engine Event Variable (EEV), but not directly. Victory is governed by the victory points as computed by TOAW, and the EEV comes into play only indirectly, but has a huge role in the course of the game. Management of that variable, furthermore, is simpler than in Vietnam 1965-1968. Changes are driven mostly by what Vietnam 1965-1975 called commitment. So requesting additional units and requesting them rapidly will drive up the EEV. Conversely, sending the boys back home (if you will) will bring it back down.

Playing against the management of commitment (via the EEV) are the victory points. Traditional objective hexes, of course, provide victory point awards as do combat results. Thrown into the mix, however, are transient victory points awarded for “pacification.” This variable award is based on communist occupation of provinces. Effectively this requires the U.S. player to not only hold the cities but also actively seek out enemy units concealed in the rural areas. Finally, the losses also get some special treatment. Losses in battle count against the suffering side but the U.S. is much more sensitive to losses in the field. So U.S. losses hit the victory point accumulation disproportionately but they also contribute to the commitment (EEV) level.

The various simplifications seemed to have improved gameplay over the similarly-designed Vietnam 1965-1968. The method of requesting additional forces not only gives the U.S. player complete control, but it is easier to wrap your head around than the Vietnam 1965-1968 method, which uses the Theater Options to manage forces. The tedium of “running the roads” that I complained about before is mitigated by the month-long turns. Movement allowances are big enough to allow U.S. units extensive movement within a single turn. The same movement/turn length also fixes the supply problem. When it only takes a single turn to get into your operational area and start fighting, you don’t need to plan 4-5 turns ahead to keep units resupplied. The unit count also seems more reasonable, which helps reduce excessive counter pushing. Finally that month-long-turn scale again helps to mitigate the issue with turns’ timing-out before you complete a multi-phase battle. More often than not, you can count on begin able to spread your combats out over multiple rounds according to your plans, not some capricious internal variable.

So, in a number of ways, this seem to get things right where other scenarios struggled. I wondered before if the TOAW engine was capable of handling a Vietnam-style war but, so far*, it seems to be doing well. In particularly, the use of the Event Variable to drive events (namely, the point at which the U.S. will be forced to withdraw due to political considerations) is a much better use of the TOAW infrastructure than Vietnam 1965-1968‘s EEV-driven victory conditions.

Since I’m pausing here to keep all my historical what-ifs in sync, I’ll repeat something that is mentioned in the scenario document for Campaign for South Vietnam. The author points out that this game will almost certainly not re-enact the major battles of the Vietnam War. In order to do that, both players would have to be attempting to recreate the historical conditions. In a single-player game, the programmed opponent is going to do things that will certainly deviate from history and I, as the opponent, will have to react accordingly.

That said, this game really has a feeling that it is guided by meaningful decisions at the strategic level which then are implemented operationally. The operational tail isn’t wagging the strategic dog, as Vietnam 1965-1968 felt like. Neither is this, like Boonie Rats, simply a “grand-operational” game where the units come into and leave South Vietnam on the predetermined historical schedule, all but blind to what is actually happening on your game board. While I don’t expect my game to actually track historical outcomes, I get the sense that attempting to win the strategic game will force me into making similar decisions as happened 50 years ago.

Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles or move on to the next article, finishing of the Battle of Ia Drang with LZ Albany scenarios.

*As with Boonie Rats 1965-1972, I stopped my strategic-level play at roughly the same spot I’ve halted with my other games and reading; early 1966.