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Tag Archives: Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations

Burn ’em Out

03 Saturday Nov 2018

Posted by magnacetaria in History of Games, review, software

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

BAT, Chris Crawford, CMANO, Cold War, Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations, CUP, F-15 Flight Eagle, IL-2, IL-2 Sturmovik, Vietnam

This is the eighteenth 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.

Sid Meier’s F-15 Flight Eagle was one of my first wargames on the computer.

It wasn’t my first. I think that distinction goes to Chris Crawford’s Eastern Front. Both of these were for the Atari home computer. Both games were played with a joystick, as there was no such thing as a mouse on those early Atari home computer systems. Naturally, for a flight simulation, playing with a joystick actually made sense. Less so Eastern Front.

Two of the sets of missions in Flight Eagle were attacks on North Vietnam. At the time, I don’t think I considered the obvious problem with that. I can only assume that the thinking went, since Flight Eagle was a pretty primitive “simulator” as it was, the distinction between an F-15 and an F-4 was probably not all that great as far as the game went.

I remember the game giving me a very negative feeling about flight operations over North Vietnam. The two missions take place in the Spring of 1972 and have you face very deadly surface-to-air missiles, deployed to prevent you from completing them successfully. I remember rarely feeling good after a session against Haiphong or Hanoi. That feeling is at least a part of the reason I haven’t really done much gaming since with respect to the air war in Vietnam.

Another reason is probably that there just aren’t that many choices. I can think of a couple of Vietnam-themed games, either flight sims or tactical air games, but as it goes with the Vietnam War and other genres, this is just not the most popular era for computer gaming.

All that said, there is one option that we’ve talked about before. The continuing modifications of the IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946 package and, in particular, its “Jet Age” mod, gives us some material for Vietnam as well as Korea.

Since I last flew some jets, this package of modifications has undergone (yet again) some major upgrades. The Community Universal Patch (CUP) of a few years back has been turned into Battlefield Airborne Tactical (BAT). The focus is apparently to simplify the processes for installing, using, and adding to this monster pack of upgrades for IL-2.

For me, who just wants to get to flying around in a plane, the depth of it all starts to overwhelm. The configurability of IL-2 is just astounding. Even with a turnkey system like BAT, there is a seemingly endless combination of options available to the player. It is truly the case that working with BAT is a much simpler process than where I was, running with CUP. Even still, upgrading the system has been a multi-week process of establishing a clean base install and then layering the mods and patches on top of it. It could have gone much faster, but I wanted to make sure I tested after each step so I could understand how any changes were being introduced.

To start flying, and to fit those missions chronologically with the other Vietnam scenarios I’m playing, I started with a campaign called Vietnam 1965. This scenario is built for the “Dark Blue World” comprehensive mod, as well as a series of other mods, and was active in the 2012-13 timeframe. As such, it is actually an older version than CUP (much less BAT). It is also (somewhat) incompatible with both versions.

The problem, as far as I can tell, is that the DBW campaign uses objects that are not supported by the current BAT. Either the naming conventions are a little off, or they are specialized models created just for the Vietnam scenarios (e.g. Viet Cong Infantry models). When trying to play the campaign, it starts out with me standing next to a smoking plane wreck.

Since the Campaign doesn’t work, what I did instead is to load each mission of the campaign individually, using the “Full Mission Builder” (now much better integrated with BAT without trying to use those additional mods that made it work with CUP). What I found was that as long as the player-controlled plane is supported, the scenarios do run even when the mission load is throwing errors. Many of them do have problems with the player-controlled plane, but not all.

vietnam10

An outpost north of Saigon has come under attack and has called in a napalm strike.

The campaign obviously had a lot of work put into it. You can see in the above screenshot an example. The scenario builder created a U.S. remote base down to some very impressive detail. After dropping my ordnance, I flew back to the airbase near Saigon, a trip that showcases the Vietnam map. This, again, displays some impressive effort on the part of the map’s creators. I will say it would be nice if this campaign could be updated to use the 2018 state-of-the-art, but I imagine that also would be a lot of work.

Also in the above, you’ll probably notice that my chosen mission is to provide close air support leading a flight of Douglas A-1 Skyraiders. The bulk of this campaign pack’s missions are flying helicopters, but I’m not quite ready for that just yet. That is assuming, of course, that the helicopter models are compatible between the versions, which I am pretty sure they are not.  But having found and loaded a mission that is supported, the flying goes pretty seamlessly with all the upgrades. Most of the missing models are ground units, which I consider icing on the cake anyway. My plane and appropriate armaments are there, as are my targets. I find the Skyraider is a lot easier to fly than what I remember of the Me-109s. I don’t know if that is an accurate reflection of their characteristics, or a difference in focus when it comes to the IL-2 models.

I will mention a couple of other issues I had, just because I spent so much time chasing my own tail with them. First of all, the “record” function doesn’t seem to work properly if there are issues with the mission file. Or rather, I should say the video-capture’s saving function. Everything seems like it is recording, but then when it is time to save, an error message says it can’t do it. The funny thing is that it worked for me two or three times, and I don’t know why. Success doesn’t seem related to which file I’ve loaded or which CUP/BAT version I’m running. I’ve both succeeded and failed in nearly all permutations I’ve tried.

I did manage to record one bombing run using the CUP version and used it to grab the screenshot posted above. In doing so, I found another compatibility problem post upgrade. Grabbing screenshots also doesn’t seem to work as it once did, though I put in quite a bit of effort with it. Finally I found an on-line suggestion to run the program inside Steam, and then use the Steam screen capture function to record the graphic. That actually worked very well, it just took me forever to get to that point.

Back to that screenshot. Note the display of speed, altitude, and heading down the lower left. I’ve come to count on that being there and never learned to deal with the instrument panel. After upgrading to BAT, that display is gone. Try as I might, I can’t figure out what made it gone. Finally, I just decided to try to learn to land using my own eyes and the actual instrument panel. Sometimes, when I am trying to land my plane, I make it down.

The BAT release has one set of missions, centered around the Tet Offensive, that are created to be compatible. I also notice that the BAT documentation makes much of a Vietnam campaign which begins with the Gulf of Tonkin. As far as I can tell, that new campaign is not yet available.

I’ll continue on with this, but the take-away is that the mod community is providing a lot of good stuff for those of us who’d like to fly the not-so-friendly skies of Vietnam.

Return to the master post for Vietnam War. To get out of the cockpit and experience the air war from the commander’s chair, mosey on to the next article.

Giggity

28 Tuesday Aug 2018

Posted by magnacetaria in History of Games

≈ 48 Comments

Tags

CMANO, Cold War, Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations, Family Guy, master post, Squad Battles, Squad Battles: Tour of Duty, Steel Panthers, timeline, Vietnam, WinSPMBT

A master post for the Vietnam War. The U.S. version. The Quagmire.

After seeing a brief mention of Fire In The Lake in the Wall St. Journal, I picked back up reading We Were Soldiers Once… and Young. From there, I got into looking at all the games/scenarios that take place during America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

The big question, when it comes to Vietnam games, is how do you get this right? What scale or scales were capture the era? How to effectively model asymmetric warfare – either in Vietnam or in general? How do you balance the military portions of the game with the political?

Once upon a time, there was very little to chose from when it came to the Vietnam War. It is still not the most popular timeframe to place a game but, at this point, I would say it has solid coverage. There have been a number of treatments of the war as a whole, including of course the newish Fire In The Lake. Operational level scenarios take on different lengths and sizes as do the tactical games. This goes all the way down to the first-person shooter, with Rising Storm 2: Vietnam being (as of this writing and as far as I know) the most recent addition to the computer games with a Vietnam theme.

As I explore these questions, these games, and read up on the period, I expect I will be writing a lot of posts. This master post will serve as a collection point for them.

Vietnam posts (in order of their appearance) are as follows:

  1. Way back when, I wrote a pair of posts on the French phase of the Vietnam War.
  2. That Wall St. Journal article.
  3. Now in the mood, I again watched Full Metal Jacket to appreciate the recently-passed R. Lee Ermey.
  4. In celebration of Memorial Day, I watched We Were Soldiers.
  5. Skipping ahead, all the way to the end of the war, I watched a PBS documentary on the United States’ final days in Saigon.
  6. I played and critiqued an HPS Squad Battles representation of a pre-Tonkin fight between the Viet Cong and the South Vietnamese.
  7. The Gulf of Tonkin incident and a CMANO scenario depicting it.
  8. I also read the book, We Were Soldiers Once… and Young.
  9. A Steel Panthers scenario depicting an early South Vietnam defense against a Viet Cong assault led to a discussion of game design.
  10. I read the book Incident at Muc Wa.
  11. This post, right here.
  12. Another discussion of Fire in the Lake and, in particular, its tutorial scenario. The focus is on the connection between card-driven game events and calendar dates.
  13. The 1984 Victory Games title Vietnam 1965-1975 is, arguably, the grandfather of all current strategic treatments of the Vietnam War in gaming.
  14. Switching the focus back to computer games, I play one of The Operational Art of War‘s large implementations of the Vietnam War, the scenario Vietnam 1965-1968.
  15. Some discussion of the development path that may have lead from Vietnam 1965-1975 to Fire in the Lake. Specifically, I talk about the elimination of the tactics of operations at one end of the scale and the grand strategic and political decisions at the other.
  16. More Operational Art of War, looking at pair of scenarios, one scaling up and one scaling down from my previous go at it.
  17. Switching gears to look at a First Person Shooter treatment of the War in Vietnam.
  18. For another first-person treatment of sorts, the flight simulator IL-2 takes on Vietnam as well. Some early-war missions involved close air support using A-1 Skyraiders.
  19. Continuing with the air war, a CMANO scenario takes on Operation Spring High, a retaliatory strike against a pair of SAM sites that had successfully downed an American F-4.
  20. Like post #13, this one focuses on Operation Starlite within the bigger picture as we move on Volume 2 of the Vietnam 1965 Combat Operations set of scenarios in The Operational Art of War.
  21. Digging down to a lower level, we look at Starlite in finer detail (but with less historical precision) through scenarios in Steel Panthers and Men of Valor. So as not to lose touch, I’ve accompanied this all with a read through of a Marine Corps historical pamphlet.
  22. At last, I come around again to the fighting in the Ia Drang Valley that I was looking at up in post #4. In this case, I’m looking at Operation Silver Bayonet from the operational level in The Operational Art of War and Vietnam ’65.
  23. While the fighting in Ia Drang Valley would come to dominate Hollywood’s view of November, 1965, there were significant operations ongoing further south. Operation Hump also resulted in heavy fighting with dozens of U.S. casualties.
  24. Also near Saigon, Operation Road Runner put a U.S. mixed-force battalion in the path of a Viet Cong ambush near the hamlet of Bau Bang.
  25. While on a roll with Squad Battles: Vietnam, I go back to the Operation Starlite scenario included with that package.
  26. Once again returning to the We Were Soldiers subject matter, I look at a handful of tactical scenarios taking on the subject.
  27. The next post gives a brief nod to a pair of booklets published by the U.S. Army summarizing the Vietnam War’s big picture.
  28. I then double back to Operation Starlite and, much like the commander at the time, make a second attempt at taking Hill 43, this time with a historically-accurate order of battle.
  29. One more look at the The Operational Art of War and a scenario that attempts to capture the entire conflict at a strategic level.
  30. Wrapping up my articles which cover the fighting in We Were Soldiers, I look at both Steel Panthers and Squad Battles:Tour of Duty for their scenarios covering LZ Albany.
  31. The U.S. Army also has published series of full-length books on their experience in Vietnam. I look at the one covering 1965-1966.
  32. On to Operation Harvest Moon and a pair of tactical scenarios, one from Steel Panthers and one from Squad Battles: Vietnam.
  33. Operation Masher (renamed White Wing) was another 1st Cavalry Operation modeled in the original Operational Art of War scenario package. I discuss that and two other portrayals of this fight.
  34. A Wall St. Journal editorial talks about how the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War may have saved Southeast Asia.
  35. While Operation Masher/White Wing had some attempts to effectively simulate the battle, I had no equivalent scenarios for the fighting in the South. Instead, I look at some purely hypothetical scenarios in two of the games that we know well.
  36. Immediately following the end of Operation Double Eagle (the Marine Corps operation that accompanied White Wing, Marines launched Operation Utah in an attempt to destroy the 21st PAVN Regiment near the village of Chau Nhai.
  37. I make particular note of the crossing from one timeline to another. This leads into Operation Jay and the attempt to locate insurgent units near the DMZ between North and South Vietnam.
  38. We also cross from one scenario into another, in the Vietnam Combat Operations series. Volume 4 picks up where Operation Jay left off with Operation Hastings, which is also depicted in Squad Battles: Vietnam.
  39. At this point, I depart a bit from the chronological organization of my post to read Phantom Warriors: Book I: LRRPs, LRPs, and Rangers in Vietnam. The book covers stories of individual missions by Army special-forces units scattered through the late 1960s and early 1970s.
  40. Chronologically between articles number 36 and 37, Operation Davy Crockett took place in the same region as Operation White Wing. The 1st Cavalry returned to the Bong Son Valley after operating further west to again chase down enemies in the area.
  41. In June, the 1st Cavalry was back near the coast to support a rapidly-expanding operation called Nathan Hale. I discuss a scenario format where a battle is broken up into six separate scenarios over nearly as many days.
  42. In August, the Australian base at Nui Dat came under artillery attack and resulted in a major engagement between forces of the Royal Australian Regiment (RAR) and the Viet Cong’s 5th Division. The Australian contribution to the War in Vietnam is often overlooked in favor of the American experience.
  43. With another book that departs from the chronological narrative, I read an explanation of the how and why the Vietnam War escalated despite the desire of those responsible to avoid just that.
  44. Another Squad Battles scenario is set in August of 1966. This one is a user-made scenario which seems to propose a hypothetical fight between similar forces to those engaged at the Battle of Long Tan (see 42).
  45. Fire in the Lake, once again, provides for a discussion of the simplification of the Vietnam War into a game of blocks and cards.
  46. I finally watched Good Morning, Vietnam, decades after it came out. This followed upon consuming some other Vietnam-related entertainment.
  47. Moving forward into another booklet in the Campaigns of the Vietnam War series, the combination of the reading, the Vietnam Combat Operations scenarios, and Squad Battles: Vietnam is used to look at the larger issue of victory versus defeat for America in Vietnam.
  48. The book The Boys of ’67: Charlie Company’s War in Vietnam begins with the drafting of a new unit in Spring of 1966, follows their tour of duty through 1967, and discusses what has become of the survivors after their war ended.
  49. Squad Battles: Tour of Duty introduced a new Campaign mode, which I didn’t like at the time. I still don’t care for it.
  50. The documentary film The Fog of War covers ground I’ve trodden before. Namely the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam escalation and what went right and wrong with the two. This time, we hear it first hand from Robert McNamara.
  51. The second chapter in Seven Firefights in Vietnam details the U.S. reaction to a November, 1966 ambush on Highway 1, just east of Saigon. Scenarios in Squad Battles and Steel Panthers reproduce the fight.
  52. Two significant battles occurred during Operation Atlanta. After the previous ambush, a second convoy ambush and U.S. response occurred in December, 1966. This is detailed in the book Mounted Combat in Vietnam: Vietnam Studies and has a Squad Battles: Tour of Duty scenario. I read and I play.
  53. Netflix’s streaming shuffle occasioned a re-watch of the film Platoon, which I had seen in a long, long time. My feelings on it have changed a bit.
  54. A Squad Battles: Vietnam scenario supposes a hypothetical encounter that didn’t take place during Operation Cedar Falls in January, 1967.

In addition to the post, I also created a new timeline. My goal with this was two-fold. First, the way I’ve organized my two Cold War timelines, I’ve split the war into two parts. That split doesn’t divide the war evenly or even logically*. A single timeline helps one to see the continuity of the 10+ year period from 1963 or so through 1975.

Second, I needed help organizing all of the scenarios. More than any era that I’ve looked at so far, the Vietnam War has dozens of scenarios from a whole bunch of different games, all scattered across the war’s timeline. It became impossible for me to remember what game to look at to find the next applicable scenario in chronological order. Sorting them all out on the timeline means I can discover various games haphazardly, stick them in their place, and then come back later and see them in the bigger picture.

*As I’ve explained elsewhere, the break in the Cold War timeline was done where it is for two reasons. First, there is a shift in weapons systems between the the more experimental pre-1966 and the structured post-1966 when it comes to American designs. Secondly, at the time I conceived of creating a second timeline, I decided start anew 50 years from the date that I did it.

Gulf War

23 Monday Jul 2018

Posted by magnacetaria in History of Games

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

CMANO, Cold War, Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations, conspiracy, false flag, Gulf of Tonkin, Lyndon B. Johnson, Vietnam

The Gulf of Tonkin incident is more likely to be invoked these days in reference to accusations of some sort of modern conspiracy or “false flag” incident than referencing the historical facts. It was the impetus for the escalation of the Vietnam war but, with our modern eye, we doubt the wisdom of that decision.

It is generally agreed that the “multiple attacks” cited by Johnson in obtaining the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was not an accurate representation of what truly happened. Evidence available now would seem to prove that it was bad intelligence which caused the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy to respond to a perceived second attack. The Government of Vietnam’s position, well after the end of the war, was that the August 2nd battle did occur, but there was no attack on August 4th. Even still, this remains uncertain. The battle occurred at night and combat was directed by radar. Despite the modern understanding of the August 4th incident, there were witnesses on the Turner Joy who have sworn to have seen, with their own eyes, evidence of U.S. hits on North Vietnamese torpedo boats.

Taking for granted that the August 4th fight never occurred, there are more questions that arise. At this point, while there may be people out their who know the actual truth, it is unlikely that it will ever become settled in the public record. We know that, even at the time, Johnson was aware of uncertainties in the information as he made his announcement to the nation. There were several Senators, during the passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, who had grave doubts about the accuracy of the information they were acting upon. In the end, though, the Resolution passed the House unanimously and the Senate with only two dissenting votes. It is likely, however, that decisions to brush aside the uncertainty were made in a good-faith belief that we were responding correctly and waffling would only get in the way of the necessary decisive action.

We know, however, that even as Johnson ordered retaliation, analysts had become convinced that the electronic evidence of an attack was in error. So how far up the chain of command did this knowledge go? While the positive evidence of the attack was acted on immediately, evidence to the contrary was held for further analysis. Was this merely a Cover-Your-Ass move from the intelligence community? Or was it a political decision somewhere in the chain of command to commit to an escalation, whether the facts warranted it or not?

If you believe the government, in this case, was not just wrong, but evil, the conspiracies go on from there. Think about it. The second incident occurred two days after U.S. warships were fired upon and then withdrawn. After moving the ships to safety, those same ships were sent back into the now-hostile waters. Now we are told that another shooting incident has occurred (when it clearly didn’t) and it is that announcement which leads to major policy changes. Might it not be possible that the plan all along was to fake the second incident for political reasons?

We can go on. With the original, August 2nd, incident, the North Vietnamese stuck to two claims. First of all, that the Maddox was on a hostile mission, supporting South Vietnamese black ops on Northern territory and was therefore the aggressor from the beginning. Second, that the torpedo boats did not initiate the attack. Set aside the conflicting logic of the two claims (“I did not kill my wife, sir, but If I had, it would have been in self defense”), their claims are not so far fetched. Contrary to the Johnson administration’s position at the time, we now know the Maddox was on a mission of electronics surveillance (DESOTO). The North Vietnamese General Giap believed the DESOTO patrols were initiated with the intent of provoking a military response and there were, indeed, people within the U.S. administration had considered doing just that. The timing suggests that Maddox was probably not directly supporting the commando raid on a North Vietnamese island, to which a North Vietnamese military response was occurring. But even this is not certain and it would be impossible for the North to tell the difference either way.

As to the second claim, about who actually shot first – that also remains forever controversial. The Maddox responded to approaching torpedo boats by firing warning shots. So could the torpedo boats have interpreted warning shots as an attack, from which they merely tried to defend themselves? Again, if you’re all the way down the rabbit hole, maybe one of those warning shots struck home before the North Vietnamese started shooting. Maybe it was never meant to be a warning shot in the first place?

Less is More

When looking at the Cuban Missile Crisis I expressed surprise that nobody modeled an escalation between the U.S. quarantine warships and a Soviet vessel (perhaps with support) trying to pass through the blockade. While maybe not making for the best “game,” it seems like the kind of historical what-if many would love to explore with CMANO. With the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, someone did just that.

gulf1

Communist torpedo boats have been shadowing Maddox for a day now. Intercepted communications indicate that they are preparing to attack. And there they are.

This scenario is about as simple as you can get. The player commands a single ship (although other friendly assets are nearby) and has enough firepower to annihilate the enemy with one punch of the F1 key. The instructions for conduct of the scenario require that the player return to station, south of the Gulf of Tonkin. The player is reminded that he may engage the North Vietnamese only in self-defense.

gulf2

The orders say that I may engage only in defense. But what level of provocation can actually be considered aggression? How close is too close?

What is left for a game is a few brief minutes of tension. If you intend to experience that for yourself, go play the game before you read about it, because I’m going to give away the punch line (if I haven’t already).

The torpedo boats are faster than the Maddox, so any kind of reaction or evasive action won’t change the course of history. I watched as the torpedo boats approached within a few hundred meters wondering if such provocation should be considered an attack or not. In the screenshot above, I paused the game and mulled over knocking the enemy back a bit.

This exposes a shortcoming of this game engine for this scenario and, in fact, nearly any game engine for any similar situation. The real-life skipper ordered warning shots at this point. I really wanted to do the same but “shots over the bow” are not supported in CMANO. In fact, I can’t imagine anything outside of the Roll Playing Game genre (or an occasional one-off RPG-like element within a strategy game) where a non-lethal show of force might make a difference in the outcome. Computer AIs don’t respond to psychological motivators and can’t really consider the politics and implications of their actions upon the global stage.

In the end, I did not shoot. Especially knowing what really happened, I wasn’t going to be blamed personally for starting the Vietnam War for the U.S. because a boat motored too close to me. I unpaused the game and within a minute or so the commies fired something (I only saw the damage, not what did it) at me. I ordered my crew to take on all three approaching torpedo boats, which were sunk within another minute or two. The victory screen gave me a major victory.

Again, not a fun game per se, but I’m really glad someone out there takes the time to model these little bits of history. Maybe I learned something today.

I Can Always Find My Cuban Skies

13 Friday Jul 2018

Posted by magnacetaria in History of Games

≈ 1 Comment

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, this is based on the idea that the U.S. had available 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.

The quarantine was put into place because it was a positive action, but the least-likely to lead to all-out war. Still, 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 to be executed before the missiles could be rendered operational. Failure to act, and act immediately, 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 also having boots on the ground at the actual missile sites to verify the missiles’ destruction. Thus the airstrike option would probably, inevitably, be followed by invasion.

Those backing a full-scale invasion likely did not see World War III as inevitable. Many simply 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 a military advantage that, supposing the Soviets actually decided to go to war over Cuba, this, too, would be a win for the U.S. Once the Soviets initiated World War III, we could bomb them back into the stone age and be rid of them.

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, after which escalated military action was threatened. In the end, 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. Instead, as the military ramped-up preparations, the problems with an invasion began to become clear. The ramp up was real – 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, 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 enter the quagmire of a new Cuban civil war.

Beyond that, we in the West can mix our interpretation of U.S. intentions with information recently extracted from formerly-secret Russian archives. Much more information about what the Soviets knew and did is available to us now. Certainly, we amateur historians know things that the politicians and planners didn’t know in the 1960s (or even in 1998*). We know that the Russians had considerably more troops in Cuba than the U.S. realized at the time, meaning the invasion would have been tougher for the U.S. than anyone anticipated. The U.S., while concerned about the strategic nuclear missiles, was also 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, because the commander happened to be on this 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 provide is a scenario that simulates the finding and confronting of Russian missile sites, a confrontation that is imagined to take place well into the aftermath of the initial crisis. So I will use that one to represent the type of engagement that might have come out of problems with the quarantine.

Before I open up CMANO, however, I look at the full-scale invasion scenarios that are available in The Operational Art of War and in Steel Panthers. Together these two games supply bookends, exploring the opposite ends of the gaming scale for an invasion.

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.

cube3

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 work within the game’s rules. 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.

cube4

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.

cube5

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 historic 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 invasion’s 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 theirs. 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, Castro was pushing 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 Corps. 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.

cube12

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, in TOAW a key gameplay element in the game is to occupy all six hexes surrounding an enemy position before attacking. Helicopter movement becomes a great way to get a just-strong-enough unit into that sixth hex to allow an enemy to be eliminated. I’d imagine 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 and is tasked with determining what the Russians have lurking around the Caribbean as well as to check whether there really are missile launchers on Cuba.

cube6

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 Russian missiles that, back in the real world, had been removed even though we didn’t know about them. If one assumes that they might have been left in place, one could imagine that, a year on, we slowly develop suspicions about them and once again commence the process of identification. Then, as before, we might try to deal with them through diplomatic channels, considering military action only as a last resort. No matter what, I have to think that once a Cuban/Soviet aircraft let off a missile aimed one of ours, we’d no longer be limiting 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.

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

The instructions, as is common for CMANO scenarios, have us trying to locate the hostile materiel located somewhere in Cuban waters. I am told I should locate the missile launchers 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.

cube8

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 being thrashed by the superior 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 off 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 and the initial version of this scenario.

**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.

We’re Burnin’ Through Your Town

30 Monday Apr 2018

Posted by magnacetaria in History of Games

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Cinderella, CMANO, Cold War, Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations, ding-dong, 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.

norad1

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).

norad2

Whoops. Didn’t United Airlines tell their pilots that there is a war on. Good thing 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.

norad3

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.

norad4

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.

norad5

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 this beautiful array of American weaponry was likely made available as a result of this fear. But the fact is, well before this hypothetical 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, particularly not of the sort depicted here.

So we are left with a simple and fun scenario for playing some global thermonuclear war to pass the time. No complaints here.

 

My Gypsy Road Can’t Take Me Home

28 Saturday Apr 2018

Posted by magnacetaria in History of Games

≈ 2 Comments

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.

cman1

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).

cman2

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.

cman3

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.

Cold War, Reggae Style

13 Saturday May 2017

Posted by magnacetaria in History of Games

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

CMANO, Cold War, Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Tropico 3, Trujillo

I continue to toy with the Tropico 3 scenarios, and I’ve yet to crack open Tropico 4.

The latest scenario is based, very loosely, on Jamaica and its independence moves in the late 1950s and final decolonization in 1962. The key, says the scenario description, is to move away from the agricultural and raw materials markets that were controlled by Great Britain and develop a self-sufficient industrial economy. All the while, as is the key to the game, I try to stay in the right place in the middle of the Cold War politics going on around me.

Of course, as the victory conditions point out, my real goal is to stay in office through the duration of the game until 1980.

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Trade has picked up and I have plenty of money. Now, if I can just get those construction workers to actually build something.

As the years advance into the 1960s, more of the game’s “color” becomes evident. Through radio broadcasts, I witness the Cuban missile crisis taking place nearby, as well as the crisis in the Dominican Republic. Perhaps because I’m getting a little better with the game, the Superpower interplay was also more evident this time around. Having secured an independence of sorts from the United Kingdom, I began courting the Soviets through my local Communist party. Although at one point I became a little too closely aligned with the Russians, I managed to shift the balance by allowing development by some U.S. -connected corporations.

I didn’t manage to anger either superpower sufficiently that they sent warships to my seas, nor did I need to align with either one for protection. I triggered (for the first time) a military conflict with a neighbor, but quickly dispatched them with some U.S. military support.

One might speculate about how many smaller countries have attempted to play such a political game, feigning alignment with communism or capitalism with absolutely know fundamental belief in the system, other than the aid and support that it will bring. Is it a reflection of the real world, or just a clever gameplay element.

Moving on to that Dominican Republic crisis, and a scenario that imagines the assassination of Trujillo took place some years earlier, triggering the installation of a communist-aligned government. As Soviet military aid begins building up on the island, the U.S. government decides it must rely on military force. The result far more detail of what it might look like when that U.S. fleet shows up in the harbor.

slam1

Time to send that Soviet equipment to the bottom of the Caribbean, where it belongs. Orange is Dominican ships and air, with the orange square in the lower left being the target of my operation.

This scenario has the player in the drivers seat. We are working with a carrier (plus escorts), a destroyer and a sub. Our task is to use a carrier strike to eliminate the Soviet equipment from our backyard. The primary goal is the airfield where Russian Migs and bombers are stationed. In addition to whatever advantages we have in force, we also have the element of surprise. We can initiate our attack at our leisure with little-to-no expectation that our presence will provoke a first response from the enemy. In the screen shot above, I’ve located what appears to be all of the enemy forces and am positioning my initial strike. I’ve also noticed that the Dominicans are out buzzing my ships and aircraft in waves, so I’d like to hit them when they’re at the end of their fuel.

This scenario has a lot going for it, and satisfies many of my earlier complaints. First of all, the what to do is pretty obvious. No need to spend days hunting for enemies that may or may not be there. Second is the operation from the position of strength. I have the numbers and decent assets, so I don’t feel that I need to solve a complex puzzle to avoid slaughter. Of course, even with all my advantages, I got creamed in the first play-through.

The scenario, at this point, also solved another complaint I’d had about CMANO scenarios. When I lost and lost big, it was glaringly obvious what I’d done wrong. And at the risk of ruining the scenario for my readers, I’ll tell you what I did. I ignored the third dimension, altitude. I left the altitude settings for all my aircraft at the default assuming, I guess, that the game could deal with it. Thus, all my bombing attacks were from high-altitude while the enemy delivered their bombs rocketing in a sea level, both evading radar and being impossible to intercept by that 36,000 ft patrol. Being so obvious what I did wrong, it became pretty easy to tweak my gameplay and vastly improve my performance in a restart.

That’s the way I like it. Uh huh.

Command Failures

08 Monday May 2017

Posted by magnacetaria in History of Games

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

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

This wraps up a series of posts on the Suez Crisis. See here for the first regular post in the series, here for the previous post, and here to go back to the master index.

My final exercise in the exploration of the Suez Crisis was to be a scenario in CMANO imagining an escalation of the Egypt situation into a global conflict between the superpowers, not an entirely implausible scenario given the events.

The actual scenario, titled Caribbean Clinch, is a user-made scenario that is one of the archetypes of CMANO situations. The player is given a mixed bag of assets with which he is expected to locate and dispatch a mix of enemy surface and subsurface vessels. I’m pretty sure I’ve played a similar setup before. Moving the same basic scenario to different frames allows exploration of the technology available at that time.

carib1

No wheat evident amongst the chaff.

My complaint here is a variation of one I’ve made before. I lost the scenario, having failed to find any of the enemy units. The situation is that the Carribean Basin has a number of commercial vessels which I ended up chasing (often having to re-identify the same ones), and I never located any hostile vessels. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps I was supposed to use more active radar searches than I did? Perhaps my search patterns were poorly conceived?

The point is – I don’t know. For the advanced CMANO gamer, the answer is probably obvious.

In working on my previous article, I was reading about why the disparity between the historical results and the playing experience in the Steel Panthers scenario. Someone suggested that the last thing a scenario builder wants to hear, having put a lot of time into creating a masterpiece of a scenario, is that it is too easy and not worth playing.

By contrast, I play for insight into the historical conditions of the situation represented. If, historically, my side had an overwhelming win, I want to see that happen (or at least have that potential, assuming I do the historically right thing). It is frustrating for me, a casual gamer, to completely fail in the mission and, in doing so, also completely fail to have learned anything about the situation, equipment, or tactics.

Fail_Safe

Having not found satisfaction with my Suez Canal -related scenario, I return to the unfinished business of my Strategic Air Command scenarios of the same timeframe.

To compare and contrast; this scenario also, for me at least, is fiendishly difficult. In that earlier article, I discussed the problems of trying to operate B-47s against the evolved Soviet threat, and those problems are evident here as well. It was a failure of doctrine to keep pace with technology. Unlike that other scenario, at the scale here I don’t think it is appropriate to “pilot” planes using the CMANO interface, so I have to assume there is another, more operational, solution.

But by contrast, the situation portrayed in the user-made scenario Peeling the Onion is both fascinating and unique. So much that even a complete failure is a learning experience. As the player, you are the commander of the “Reflex” operations in Morocco, as well as the supporting air wings in the States. With mid-air refueling, the bases in Morocco allow the bombing of Soviet targets with the B-47s. Furthermore, these jet bombers were expected to fly higher and faster than the Soviet defenses were capable of achieving, and thus can strike their targets without the necessity of escort fighters or other support. Thus, the game even in complete loss is instructional allowing the player to imagine how a commander at that time might have been taken completely by surprise by the latest in Russian technology.

onion1

In this scenario, you are commanding American nuclear bomber bases in Morocco, for striking the Soviet Union from the South. The red area is someone else’s business. For now, there is still peace, but I send a few planes on forward alert just to be cautious.

What makes the difference is that the impossible situation here is one, potentially, faced by a commander in this place and time. The doctrine and forces assumed that the U.S. nuclear strike was invulnerable to defense. By the late 50s, this was no longer the case. So if the commander got the go to launch, what was he to do? He had no counter to the Soviet air defenses, which (perhaps unbeknownst to him) had become effective.

onion4

War! With the outbreak of hostilities, I launch my first strike with everything I’ve got. It will prove to be insufficient.

As with the previous scenarios in the era, I have to wonder if the capabilities of the Soviet forces aren’t a bit on the optimistic side. <Spoiler Alert – from here I talk scenario details> In my initial strike, using all the bombers that I had stationed in Morocco, the Russians had no problem shooting down every one. The Yak 25 fighter moves faster and flies higher than my B-47s, so all I can hope for is a lucky tail gunner shot. Since I’m also outnumbered, I probably need half-a-dozen lucky tail gunner shots in a row to get the bomb through.

I also ran into some frustrating interface issues. At the point I realized none of my guys were getting out alive, it seemed pointless to worry about refueling issues. Yes I had insufficient refueling planes in the theater but, after all my bombers were shot down, I had unused refueling planes. Point being, once a bombing run began, I wanted it completed, whether or not the pilot thinks he could get his plane home again. At one point, I even had a bomber get pretty close to the target, at which point he turned around and began heading for a refueling station. Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to override that behavior (although I know I’ve crashed planes in previous scenarios by accidentally running them out of fuel). It was really upsetting to, several times, finally get the bomber headed in the right direction to then, once again, have it turn around and head for a tanker rendezvous. Finally, I had to give up at let him egress, at which point he was promptly shot down by the planes he had just avoided on the inbound leg. My sole consolation was that I didn’t really believe he was going to make to the target anyway.

One more learning experience. The frustration of being unable to get through the Soviet defenses does provoke emotional reactions. Eventually, I did manage to light off 10 megatons near a Ukrainian city, and boy did that feel good. All of this without context; the scenario deliberately gives no background for the war or the green light to bomb. The Russians goal is only to prevent me from wiping out all their cities, whereas mine is to maximize innocent body count – and yet I feel personally offended when they prevent me from doing so. It makes you think about what happens, psychologically, in a real war.

Fail-Safe

28 Tuesday Feb 2017

Posted by magnacetaria in History of Games

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

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

Throughout the ’50s and early ’60s, World War III meant unleashing the strategic bombers. The nuclear strike would be delivered by dedicated bomber crews, waiting at the ready for exactly this mission. If the enemy were to launch their bombers, we might know of their coming hours in advance and may even have a chance with our defensive fighters to stop, or at least mitigate, the attack. Our imagination was driven, both in the public at large and in the strategic planning, by the massive bombing raids at the end of the second world war. Just bigger bombs.

Until the development of the hydrogen bomb, the combination of yield and accuracy for a rocket-launched atomic bomb far under-performed the delivery of atomic weapons via bomber. For this reason, as well as the political machinations within the armed forces, the post-war focus was on perfection of the strategic bomber capability. Strategic Air Command was founded in 1947 and, in late 1948, was given the mission of delivering a massive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. For the next decade, the service acquired more and better strike planes plus a refueling fleet, leading to an ability by 1957 to have a 24 hour bomber/tanker alert force.

Leading up to that point, the U.S. had developed a decisive technological edge. U.S. bombers, using refueling, could travel across the globe to their targets. The speed and altitude capabilities of the B-47 and B-52 were such that they were largely unreachable by the MiG-15 interceptors used by the Soviets.

As the ’50s drew to a close this began to change. Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union were developing hydrogen bombs and the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles to carry them, providing an alternative nuclear strike capability to the massed bombers. The Soviet Union, with its MiG-17 and more effective air-to-air missiles, became capable of countering the unescorted bomber attack. While this was hardly the end of American’s Strategic Bomber forces, the mid-’50s represented a high-tide of sorts for Strategic Air Command.

Flying High Again

CMANO has two community-made scenarios looking at this particular period. The first explores the missions of aerial reconnaissance variants of the B-47. This configuration of the aircraft came closer to actual combat than the strategic bomber version which, thankfully, were never actually used for their intended purpose. On October 15th, 1952 a B-47B flew out of Alaska. Using special photographic and radar equipment, they captured intelligence on Soviet airfields in Siberia. The missions carried no offensive weapons, although the aircraft were armed with tail guns. Interceptions by the Soviets were generally evaded through superior speed and altitude. According to Wikipedia, at least five B-47s were fired upon and at least three aircraft were lost while overflying Soviet airspace.

The CMANO mission appears to be based on a May 8th, 1954 top-secret reconnaissance mission, detailed here (it is story #2 from this website). It describes an unexpected encounter with the new Russian MiG-17s. The pilots assumed that they were flying outside of the reach of the Russian defenses but instead found themselves being fired upon by the latest iteration of Soviet fighter.

The scenario itself is another boundary-pushing use of the CMANO engine. As the player, we have only six aircraft under our command and four of those are the refueling aircraft. That means we are actually commanding two aircraft in the assigned mission. This is pushing us out of the operational space and almost into the flight simulator territory.

In several attempts at the scenario, I’ve lost the first of my planes almost immediately (within several seconds) after the appearance of a threat. Practically speaking, it means I’m left flying a single plane using the “manual” controls of the game engine.

sam1

Oh no. Here we go now. I’ve detected a SAM launch, which I manage to avoid. Not so easy is when those MiGs suddenly appear on my tail.

As I’ve written before, I’m not a fan of the puzzle-style scenario in strategy games. It’s one thing to make a scenario winnable only through planning, preparation, and judicious use of the available factors. It’s another to require that you get everything just right, or lose.

In this case, reading the story of the similar mission, we can see that the reality was considerably less deadly than the game version for a number of reasons. I wrote about this in the Korean War, how the computer pilots are much more aggressive than their communist counterparts. In this case, part of his success he credits to the fact the MiG-17 pilots didn’t push their advantage.

At the debriefing in Omaha, General LeMay asked, “Why were you not shot down?” My answer was that there was no doubt in my mind the Mig-17 pilots could have shot us down, if they had been willing to come right up our tailpipes! He made the statement that he was “. . . convinced that most fighter pilots are basically cowards anyway.”

Another problem with the scenario was found by a player and posted online. As distributed, the MiG-17s are armed with Kaliningrad K-5 (NATO designation AA-1 Alkali) air-to-air missiles. The scenario hints that one way around the Russian air defenses is to fly a night mission, but these missiles are in the CMANO database as day/night capable, as they use the aircraft radar for guidance. The missiles weren’t actually deployed on any MiGs until 1957. The scenario designer said he added them in after the original scenario development when play-testers complained that the scenario was too “easy.”

Makes me feel even more incompetent than I already did.

With the missiles in the scenario, I would tend to notice them headed for me seconds before my planes were destroyed. So I edited them out of the scenario.

Even without the missiles, and even at night, I’m continuously taken by surprise when one of the MiGs is suddenly upon me. While this part does seem to match the narrative, most interceptions become a fight to the death. As the saying goes, I have to get it right every time and the Russians only have to get it right once. So far, I’ve not been able to get it right every time.

I don’t know what the “secret” to this mission is. Taking hints from Colonel Austin’s story, it may be necessary to manage energy defensively. He was able, in some cases, to outrun his attackers by diving. It may be that the mission requires multiple sorties to gradually expose the defenses (although historically these were one-off, surprise incursions). I also wonder if I’m misusing the B-47s defensive capabilities. I don’t see any defensive measures on board, but maybe I’m missing something. I also assume that I should be flying “dark,” using my own radar only for ground surveillance. Perhaps I should also be looking for approaching enemies. I will say, though, that they’ve seemed even to sneak up on me when I have my radars on.

As interesting as it is to have a unique mission in a unique time period, I don’t think I want to keep rerunning the same scenario with no clear idea of what I’m doing wrong. For now, I’ll take a break from Strategic Air Command to look at the intervening Suez Crisis, and I’ll come back to the 1957 scenario a little later.

NATO versus Warsaw Pact, Vol. II, Part 2

19 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by magnacetaria in History of Games

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

CMANO, Cold War, Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations, IL-2, Steel Panthers, wargames, WinSPMBT, World War III

This is a Part 2 of a two part post. Start with Part 1 here, if interested. In the previous installment, I focused on a 1955 World War III scenario in Germany. This second part moves elsewhere in the world.

As a rule, I don’t like to play a strategy game as I would a First Person Shooter. Running into a “gotcha,” then reloading and trying again and again may work for some types of games, it ruins the mood for me in a historical strategy game.

Part of the historical flavor is that, while we may study the situation in detail, the commanders at the time had none of that hindsight. So any surprise that they faced at the time, to the extent that the game can model it, will be a surprise for we players only the first time through. Add to that the unpleasantness of playing the same thing over-and-over again, trying to get it right… it would seem more satisfying were we to expect a scenario to be a once-through affair.

One could make the counter argument that, as a virtual military person, your real life counterpart has undergone training well beyond even the most dedicated gamer. He knows his own people and platforms inside and out and has also studied the enemy. He may well have spent more time in preparation for an operation than you’re going to spend on the entire game (both in real and simulated time). In that way, playing and replaying a given scenario can be seen as an equivalent to the years of training and experience that precedes any battle.

Wherein I Completely Spoil The Surprise

At this point, I’m going to completely spoil the scenario Waller Takes Charge, from CMANO.

If not obvious from the intro, this one took me a few times to come close to getting right. And right from the get-go, I ran into a gotcha from the scenario maker (it’s a community-made scenario).

Briefly, the scenario places us in command of the Destroyer USS Waller, near Crete at the outbreak of World War III. Quite a bit of nastiness has preceded, leaving us in command of the air wings of the USS Intrepid. We are given the base at Souda Bay, on the northern coast of Crete, and tasked with finding the remaining Soviet ships in the Mediterranean, which are estimated to include a cruiser and at least two submarines.

nuked

Nuked! That can’t be good for morale.

The opening gotcha is that, while I am concentrating on figuring out what assets I’ve got and what I’m going to be able to do with them, unbeknownst to us all (well, if you haven’t been reading this, that is), the Soviets have a flight of four Tu-4 Bulls armed with nukes headed towards the airbase.

My first time through, I sent all my planes back to base, except for a mix of fighters and surveillance, which I sent to provide cover over the Waller and her sister ship DDE Cony. It wasn’t at all clear to me how much fuel I had, and I didn’t want to risk any losses through stupidly stranding my planes too far from my new base. It didn’t help that the planes were constantly complaining that I didn’t seem to know what I was doing, given that they’d already been given the “Return To Base” order at game start.

Is there a commander alive that, at the outset of hostilities, would not only fail to provide a defensive fighter patrol over his own base, but ensure that all his available aircraft are unavailable due to refueling and rearming? That’s essentially what I was doing and the scenario is designed to punish the player for focusing on the goal but ignoring defense. With no defense, those Tu-4s are going to mean an instant loss, even before the player gets started on his given mission – hunting for the Soviet ships.

Doing It Right

Having failed so obviously, it didn’t feel wrong at all to load up the game from the beginning and take the appropriate precautions.

Having done so (and having stopped the threat at the cost of a few fighters), it struck me that this was another easy scenario to throw together in IL-2.

As always, it surprises me when I achieve essentially the same result in IL-2 as I’ve just seen in CMANO. In this case, I was generally able to take out the incoming bombers, although generally losing 1 or 2 fighters in the process. It took me a couple play-throughs, but ultimately I managed to shoot down all of the incoming bombers and land my plane back on Crete.

kill

Taking down one of the bombers with my FJ-3 Fury.

The maps for the vicinity of Crete, complete with airbases, are all available among the various on-line IL-2 content. A little searching can spruce up the basic models for the aircraft with nice paint jobs. However, there was one piece of the CMANO scenario I could not bring over to IL-2.  In the larger battle, I was using a mix of FJ-3 Furies and F2H-2 Banshees to defend the base. The latter plane, unfortunately, is not available in the jets package that I’m using. So my defense had all three defenders flying FJ-3s.

boom

That wasn’t very sporting. As a last flip of the finger, the dying bomber unloads its nuke. They didn’t do that in CMANO

As far as I can tell, my fighter losses in CMANO to the Tu-4 attack were all from the Bulls’ defensive gunnery. That was also true in IL-2; Approach the bombers too slowly, especially from the lower rear, and I’d find myself riddled with bullets. However, in every attempt I also lost either my own plane, or my wingman’s, to the nuclear blast caused by the bomber discharging its ordnance before crashing. It makes me wonder if that was actually doctrine, either from the Soviets or the U.S.? Particularly during the 1950s when the fallout fear was less than later decades. In this particular scenario, I guess it is a smart move. A bomb detonated over open sea has little effect except to take out one or two enemy planes.

But I Digress

Back in CMANO, having successfully defended my base, I tried again to focus on the mission and find the Russian subs. Once again, I was caught in another stupid mistake due to lack of attention. While I was focused on directing my air units, the Waller and the Russian counterpart drifted into range of each other and began firing. While initially panicked, I realized that I was, by far, getting the better of the situation. Unfortunately, what I didn’t watch for is that the enemy cruiser, while farther away, had a longer range on her guns, which were also considerably more deadly than the destroyer gunnery.

crete1

Found you! I’ve managed to pick up the location of the Soviet Cruiser Kuybyshev and it’s Destroyer escort. Those are my two destroyers, in blue. The green is neutral merchant shipping. It wouldn’t do to nuke them.

That prompted another reload. This time through, I concentrated on making sure I could bring everything to bear simultaneously against the Kuybyshev. I held my ships out of range until I had all my aircraft rearmed, and then moved in closer to hopefully support the results of my air attack. That’s when I found out several other pieces of information, (which a responsible commander would have known up front) the hard way.

Regular bombs (unless they are coming from enemy planes against your own ships, apparently) are fairly ineffective against moving ships. The only damage I seemed to do was with my final attack run where I used rockets. Also, the Soviet ships have a speed advantage. Keeping just out of range when the Russians want to close is not an option. Finally, the Egyptians, neutral at the start of the scenario, have an unexpected way of negating our air superiority.

Time for another reload.

At this point, I’m going to give this scenario a break. This reminded me how difficult many of the CMANO scenarios can be – in some cases puzzle-like in their solution. From the orders, one would assume the U.S. has a superiority in forces, that being a requirement to accomplish the states goals. Typically the hunter is the hunter because of his ability to outgun the hunted.  However, without some clever planning, the superiority may actually be with the Soviets in this one. If so, it may be that only careful application of your available weapons, in just the right time and place, will allow you to overcome the otherwise impossible mission. Yes, this is an interesting problem for the commander. But it is less interesting if the nature of the threats, and the thus the combination of tactics to defeat them, is only known through multiple playthroughs.

As I started out, I find that frustrating in a strategy game.

Other Armies, Other Fronts

Just so I’m not left with no accomplishments, I also took on a another Steel Panthers scenario. This one, titled Assault Gun Support, imagines that World War III has spread in the opposite direction, to the north. The scenario is a counter attack with Swedish infantry supported by assault guns against the Soviet aggressors (also supported by assault guns).

As always, fairly enjoyable gameplay. Also, as usually happens, I make my share of dumb mistakes. This time, I lost nearly all of my assault guns in the opening minutes. But the difference is I don’t feel the need to reload and restart just to make it through the scenario. I can live and learn, and maybe accept that I coulda/shoulda/woulda done better than that draw, without having to whittle away at the scenario until I “beat” it.

 

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