Giggity

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
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.

In addition to the post, I also created 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.

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But We’ll Die for Good Pay

Tags

Cold War, Congo, Steel Panthers, Steve Earle, WinSPMBT

When I watched the movie about the Siege at Jadotville, I lamented the fact that were no games to accompany my viewing. Move history forward a few years, though, and coverage for the events in what had become the formerly-Belgian Congo was solved by scenario creator Tom DeShetler and his work with Steel Panthers. It is Scenario 172, “DRAGON ROUGE (Red Dragon).”

One of the ways to get around the fiddliness of off-board artillery is to have it all pre-configured. The scenario opens with a bombing attack of the town.

Throughout 1964, a communist rebellion raged against the government of Joseph Kasa-Vubu. The Simba rebels had coalesced around exiled political supporters of the murdered Patrice Lumumba and were backed by the communist governments of Russia, Cuba, and China. They quickly took control of roughly half of the Republic of Congo. With the national army of Congo letting the rebels capture territory largely without a fight, the government turned to mercenaries to combat the insurgents.

As the rebels captured territories, they took as hostages white Europeans. By late fall, the number was in the thousands with at least a thousand being held in Stanleyville. The government worked with the West to come up with a solution, one that ultimately consisted of a joint operation between Belgian troops, mercenary forces, and U.S. air support.

This is the first air drop scenario that I’ve played in Steel Panthers.

This scenario makes for a unique experience. Not only does it provide a look at a conflict that otherwise probably won’t see much game-wise (I don’t expect John Tiller to put out a $40 scenario package on the Congo Crisis), but it also has some unique features. It has a combined operation of mercenaries and the Belgians and a combination of para-dropped forces and some heavier vehicles. The objectives are interesting, both seizing territory and rescuing civilians (who are also represented on the map and controlled by the player). A few surprises also wait for the player as the scenario plays out.

 

Punctuated by Moments of Terror

Tags

ARMA, Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm, FPS, Pham Van Dinh, Steel Panthers, Vietnam, wargames, WinSPMBT

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

One of the scenarios in Steel Panthers is a fairly obscure battle which took place in December of 1964. It is a portrayal of a Viet Cong (VC) attack on an Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) base during the period where the communists were moving towards a strategy of more direct military engagement on the battlefield. It is suggested that, against the AI, the player take the side of the ARVN.

My ARVN troops are well entrenched as the take on the communist human wave assaults.

The source material is a little thin on this assault, which took place near Tam Ky. That said, the size and scale of the Steel Panthers implementation seems about right to fully and accurately portray the battle. The game lasts for an hour and a half of real time, a reasonable duration to depict a sudden and overwhelming attack. The ARVN, at least (I don’t think the VC order of battle is in anyway documented), is represented fully in a one-to-one ratio.

Being on the defensive, the player’s decisions are greatly simplified. Mostly, whenever it is your turn, you just have to designate targets for each of the units on your side. Occasionally it is necessary to pull a unit back out of an untenable defensive position, but for the most part remaining dug in is preferable to maneuvering around. As I’ve said before when it comes to Steel Panthers, managing the individual weapons and vehicles can be fun, but it gets tedious to visit every unit on every turn for, in this case, up to 31 turns in a row. To add to the tedium, the computer turns are incredibly long.  As each VC attacker advances, they come under fire from multiple defenders. For all of the clicking and shooting, though, not much is really happening. Most of the time the VC units are halted and pinned down by our defenders.

This got me to thinking how this should be done right, given the capabilities of modern games. I’d say the scenario demonstrates that this is a very good size and scope for portraying Vietnam engagements. However, if a game simply brought the Steel Panthers graphics and UI into the current era, it would still suffer the tedium of all that micromanagement. Putting this scenario into an RTS would certainly move things along, but then you lose most of the fun (actually getting involved with the individual weapons) and create a click-fest hell for the player. There is a reason almost every RTS has a unrealistically small unit count.

The key here may be to simulate command, communications, and control in a realistic manner for the time and technology.

One example that might work with a turn-based game, otherwise mostly similar to Steel Panthers, is what is used in Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm. That system uses a special form of “WeGo.” That is, orders are entered, and then the resolution of those order are resolved for both side simultaneously. The catch in Flashpoint Campaigns is that the two players don’t enter their commands simultaneously. There is variability on how long between “turns” each player has, as well as a limit (not known upfront) as to how many units can be commanded.

In Flashpoint Campaigns, it is ostensibly modelling curtailed communications due to the jamming of signals on the World War III battlefield. Of course, this isn’t an effect that has actually happened, so we aren’t trying to accurately simulate the resulting communication issues. Rather, it is a matter of what makes for kind of a nifty game mechanic meshing pretty well with something that may well have been a major factor on the battlefield, had such a battle actually occurred in that time and place.

But what if we looked at the actual communications issues during the Vietnam era. For this case, let’s rely on the the LZ-XRay battle, because we are familiar with the issues of command having read the book. In that fight, Hal Moore had limited ability to command his platoons. He knew where he had sent them, but the details of his intentions were left to his captains and lieutenants to carry out. In the case of the “Lost Platoon,” the execution of the command was quite a bit different then the formulation of it. Further, once the chaos of battle hit, communications were dependent on radios and their operators. The radios could fail, sustain damage, or just not work properly. Operators could be injured or killed and then replaced, or not.

I can only begin to imagine what the details might look like, but there seems that a good system, based on commanders and communications, could simulate the tenuous ability to control across an entire battle of the size in these Vietnam fights. The added bonus is that the micromanagement goes way down and the amount of thinking and planning goes way up. If you are unsure whether you’ll be be able to command your units in the next round, or even when that “next round” will come, you have be be judicious about what commands you give.

Another possibility is the First Person Shooter (FPS). At the time Steel Panthers was fresh, the height of FPS technology was Doom II. Fast-forward 10-20 years and the FPS genre now encompasses commanding squads in a way that rivals an RTS treament of small-unit actions.

While there is FPS coverage of Vietnam, it is a little sparse. A 2004 release, Men of Valor, attempts to port the Medal of Honor style of gameplay from WWII to Vietnam. This is a treatment where a the player follows a scripted story; it is not means of reproducing battles. Several of the open-ended FPS games do have Vietnam mods for them. Notable to me is the project in ARMA, a user-created mod called Vietnam: The Experience. Notable because I’ve played ARMA. Red Orchestra has also been modded and released as the product Rising Storm 2: Vietnam. I note this one because it is a current and popular game. Unlike ARMA (in any of its versions), Rising Storm 2 is meant only to be an on-line multiplayer game. There is no single player.

While the sandbox style of ARMA provides a fair basis for a Vietnam mod, the issue of command and communication probably cannot be properly addressed without changes in the way ARMA does things. In ARMA 2 and 3, we are dealing with approximations of current or near-future wars. It makes sense that the ability to track and chat with your fellow players is an approximation of the technology available on the modern battlefield. In a Vietnam setting, would the same level of omniscience detract from the simulation aspects? Would it ruin a game if we had a heads-up display of how many of the “lost platoon” were still alive at any given point? Or is it still a decent approximation of how, via radio communication, information on battlefield communications was already coming into the modern age?

I’ll make an analogy with CMANO and its use for air and sea battles shortly after the end of the Second World War. The interface can still work provided that it is used only to show the lesser amount of information available to, for example, the Korean War commander. In this way, the game’s UI still approximates the level of information and control that that a real commander might have, using radio and a team of controllers. However, unlike the in a modern battle, where the CMANO interface closely approximates the computer display which a commander might be watching, the graphical UI in the context of the Korean War is simply that – a convenient interface. It detracts, rather than adds, to immersion.

So is it possible to create an immersive “commander” interface using a first-person display? What if you modeled the existing communications and the limitations that the radio places upon them. What if you were able to approximate the information flowing to and from you, as the commander. One might imagine an experience similar to the Scourge of War series. In the Civil War, you are commanding a Division or even a Corps, and the interface is more RTS than FPS. But in a small unit action, the first person interface might make sense. A Captain or a Major might even, if necessary, pick up an M-16 and fire some shots. Given a choice between the command interfaces of Scourge of War versions ARMA, I think I’d prefer the latter. This assumes, of course, that an era-appropriate method of simulating the difficulties of command and communication can be inserted. Dispatches are no longer sent around by riders on horseback, but there was still a reliance on “running” orders that should not be ignored.

The other part of the battlefield that I just don’t think ARMA simulates correctly is close artillery support. In We Were Soldiers Once…, Moore attributes his victory to his ability to direct artillery fire and air support. Doing this right would be a major step in moving away from a “Shooter” and towards a simulator of small unit actions. Doing it right might even trump what is the norm for tacitical-level strategy games currently. Steel Panthers (and Squad Battles, too, for that matter) uses the system that exists in most World War II board game. There are spotter units on the board who, with line of sight to a target hex, can order in indirect fire. That fire comes with uncertainties in both timing and accuracy. Against a moving enemy, indirect fire is often ineffective. Contrast that to the descriptions in We Were Soldiers Once… of the use of Forward Air Controllers to bring support fire accurately and efficiently onto enemies with which the ground forces are directly engaged.

So while nothing out there is right on the money, it wouldn’t take that much to make an ARMA (or Rising Storm 2 perhaps*) into something that would allow the player to command small unit actions. Would that be a better interface than a traditional RTS (with which ARMA has some overlap, I might add)? Would it beat the traditional hex-and-counter implementation?

There must be a way to do this that is more fun than slogging it through, bullet by bullet, in a Steel Panthers scenario.

Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles or go on to the next article.

*The focus on ARMA, in part, are examples of custom scenario designs made for that engine. The continued relevance of Steel Panthers stems from the ability of users to create scenarios for an unlimited variety of situations. The key to a better future would be retaining that important aspect of the past.

I Can Always Find My Cuban Skies

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this analysis, an invasion of Cuba was never on the table. Not really. 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, sources suggest that the plan for “regime change” wasn’t mature enough to be implemented. The lack of an ability to replace Castro would have been a show-stopper when it came time to call Go/No-Go on an assault. We wanted to neutralize the threat from Cuba, not entire the quagmire of a new Cuban civil war.

Beyond that, we should now mix in whatever we think about what were the U.S. intentions during the crisis with information recently extracted from formerly-secret Russian archives, available to us now. Certainly, we amateur historians know things now that the politicians and planners didn’t know then (or even in 1998*). We know that the Russians had considerably more troops in Cuba than the U.S. realized at the time, meaning the invasion would have been considerably 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 particular submarine. While the captain and political officer were ready to launch, the deputy brigade commander demurred. In the end, no nuke was launched and the Russian sub surfaced and was able to flee the battle zone.

I was a little bit surprised not to find wargame simulations of the quarantine and the engagements that might well have broken out if the Soviet and American ships confronted each other directly. Perhaps there would have been no “fair” or interesting fights, at least at that time. What CMANO does have is a scenario 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another twist on this is that we now know that as Russia began moving towards a peaceful solution involving the removal of the missiles, it was Castro who pushed for open conflict. Have fended off the Bay of Pigs, he was happy to deal the U.S. another whooping. The Russians tried to explain to him that he would have very different results against the actual American Army and Marine 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.

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.

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 mo 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.

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.

They mostly come at night. Mostly.

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

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

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

Same Sand, Different Day

Tags

Bir Gifgafa, Command Ops, Divided Ground, Egypt, Israel, John Tiller, Middle East '67, Steel Panthers, Suez Crisis, WinSPMBT

This is 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.

While Bir Gifgafa seems to be the most modeled battle of the Suez Conflict, it isn’t necessarily the best from a player’s perspective. Several other battles present more interesting fodder for wargaming.

New Battle, New Game

Taking a look at a new gaming system, I tried John Tiller‘s Modern Campaigns, the Middle East ’67 product. This is one of the products that carried over the HPS Sims days, but with a twist; it has also been released for tablets and that is the version that I got.

The mobile versions of these games are not a straight port. In this example, ME ’67 for the PC offers 37 scenarios whereas the mobile version offers 17. Also, the PC version comes with editing tools, whereas the tablet would seem to be a what-you-see-is-what-you-get situation. However, the mobile versions are considerably lower priced to make up for it – $39.95 versus $2.99.

Armor to the rescue at Abu Agheila.

The engine is somewhere between the grand tactical games of the previous article and the full war. In fact, it is within the smaller end-of-the-scale of what is done with The Operational Art of War. By comparison with the TOAW scenario on the same subject, it is about twice the granularity.  Here hexes represent one mile (as compared to 2.5 km) and the time scale is 3 hour turns (as compared to 6); although such a comparison is less clear when you factor in TOAW‘s split turns. Unit sizes are generally the same (infantry in battalions), although ME ’67 appears more likely to have the occasional smaller scale units. I also noticed, in the options, the ability to split units (also an option in TOAW). I’ve never used it in playing either game, but in just a quick try, the TOAW units can be split (arbitrarily, not by company) whereas that doesn’t seem to be an option for the identical units in ME ’67.

Comparing and contrasting, ME ’67 is a more focused product, and it has some details to show for it. For example, the day/night cycle that I complained about in the TOAW version is now included. Two turns per 24 hours (at least in the scenarios I’ve tried so far) are night turns, which are distinguished by reduced visibility and no air support. The details of combat are more obvious in the reporting (the number of men/vehicle kills are highlighted with every attack), whereas TOAW is tracking squads, but I’d be surprised if the under-the-hood accounting is all that different. Also in both all units except artillery have an attack range of 1 hex. Finally, more in line with the grand-tactical games, ME ’67 makes the distinction between ranged fire and assault by deliberately conducting Divided Ground-style assaults.

One of the complaints I have about the Tiller games is that they tend to be fairly confined scenarios. Movement rates are small enough relative to the duration of the scenarios that your path to victory from the initial setup is rather focused. It is likely an AI thing: if a player could collect up all his troops and swing them around to the rear of the enemy position for an a-historical attack, the AI would probably react very wrongly to it. It also seems that often the “challenge” of the scenario is imposed by the turn limit. In the scenario shown above, this latter wasn’t the case.  I had enough time to do what I needed to do. The first observation applies though; there aren’t a lot of options outside of the historical battle – as Israeli, I split my forces and attack using both of the roads headed into the pass.

As a product, it does handle the 1956 war just a tad better than the TOAW version. I’m not sure that is does it $39.95 better. In fact, one of the attractions of this game is that it is on the tablet, and it is a break from the mouse-heavy play of everything else I have. That said, the touch-screen interface is a little quirky. Movement is a press-down until a unit is selected, at which point you can (by continuing to press) create a movement path. It is easy to do it wrong, and that can be annoying. Otherwise, it makes a pretty decent “casual” mobile game.

Last comment is that this is Middle East ’67. Although there are three scenarios for the 1956 conflict, the bulk of the scenarios are for later wars, and so I do plan to be coming back to this one.

Testing 1-2-3

Given the lopsided loss for the Command Ops scenario based on this war, I decided to run a test. Rather than mix the results of terrain, attack/defense, and unit capabilities all at once, I wanted to see a straight-up comparison of the unit capabilities, Israel versus Egypt.

I created a test map, with a large flat area so that line-of-sight would not be an issue. The forces (armor only, no resupply) deployed with the player assuming control near sun-up. Both sides have an objective at the center of the map, so that each side must move towards engagement and duke it out.

The map is mostly flat, though I added some hills and canyons for aesthetic purposes. My armor moved towards the objective (that white square with the blue arrow) in column, and met the enemy coming the other way.

Daylight and lack of terrain features meant that that I had knowlege of the locaton of the approaching enemy force throughout. About 2500 meters, my units began engaging. This was outside of the effective range of the Egyptians, and they did not return fire. This is much more in line with what I’d expect than my previous version of the scenario.

I also noticed another interesting and, to me, unexpected feature of the game. Once the shooting starts, the ongoing combat disrupts the line of sight and, correspondingly, intelligence about the enemy. The black-outline to the southwest of the lead enemy unit is showing that I previously spotted a unit there, but its current location is unknown. Off the scope of this screenshot, the entire tail of the enemy column was lost once the shooting started, even though it was well within range of sight before.

I am continuing to engage the enemy outside of their effective range. To gain further advantage, I’m disengaging part of my line to extend to my left. The red mark is the game’s representation of my friendly fire.

As I am able to bring my tanks into range, the battle continues as I would expect from playing the other games on the Bir Gifgafa encounter. As a note, I did not try to tweak the parameters to achieve my results. The Soviet data are from the Germany scenario I played earlier and the Israeli guns are using data for the German 75, upon which the French design was based.

I do appear to have flummoxed the AI. In the above screenshot, while I have deployed my units outside of the enemies range in a line, he appears to have trouble coming out of column and, even after several hours and many losses, has yet to close to his own engagement range. But that wasn’t what I am testing. I just want to see if the Israeli range advantage comes through in the modelling, and it does seem to.

I feel the need to press the attack, so I’m ordering my units to close the distance. This increases the damage I’m doing to the enemy (yellow crosses = destroyed Egyptian units), but I’m now taking return fire and own-side losses.

By mid-afternoon, perceiving I have the advantage, I begin to push forward to seize the objective and eliminate the enemy. Once again, I do see the expected behavior. Once I get into the 1500m range, the return fire from the Egyptians becomes effective.

One major difference in this scenario is the speed of the encounter. Whereas all the other models of this battle keep it within an hour or two, we see in this screenshot has it at about 2PM, having been engaged since 10AM. Obviously, there is nothing implausible about a slower pace. If the commanders do not push the engagement, things may well move slowly. In the end, the Egyptian commander surrendered to me right around sunset. And by surrender, I would assume the game means “conceded victory” by withdrawing, as opposed to turning over all his arms and men.

Riffing on Rafah

Another battle that has treatments from multiple games is the taking of the fortress at Rafah in the Gaza strip.

A 1956 U.S. Army map from just before the war shows Rafah, the 1948 Armistice Line, and the surrounding territory.

In the north, the opening move for the Israelis was seizing the fortress at Rafah. This separated the remaining Gaza forces from Egypt, allowing Israel both to strike West into the Sinai, and to isolate and destroy the remaining forces in Gaza. The fortress complex was defended by the 5th Infantry Brigade, a mix of Egyptian and Palestinian forces.

Although the initial phases of the operation were deep in the Sinai, arguably the entire raison d’être for the invasion was the occupation and pacification of the Gaza strip. Although, in the event, this battle was a complete Israeli victory (less than 10 casualties), it was nevertheless a critical battle in achieving Israeli success.

The battle for Rafah as portrayed in Divided Ground. The 2D view shows the full scope of the battle, with the Israeli’s striking simultaneously from 3 directions.

Divided Ground has this scenario, and it provides an excellent fit for this engine.

Without buying some more books on the subject, I have only hints at the actual timeline of the battle. It appears that the battle started during the night before, as Israeli engineering units infiltrated the enemy lines and cleared the mine fields. The main attack came after daybreak, and consisted of a rapid, mechanized assault on the Egyptian fortifications.

Comparing and contrasting two versions of this scenario is an illuminating exercise. The Divided Ground scenario (a modified version* of the default scenario, again by  Alan R. Arvold) is at the upper end of what is appropriate for this engine. The game duration is about 2 hours, beyond which simulating logistics becomes important in a scenario.

The killers awoke before dawn. The sun has yet to come up, and already my assault has made a hole in the Egyptian position.

The ME ’67 scenario runs eight turns, the two nights bookmarking the actual day of the battle. Approaching the Egyptian positions and even the initial assaults occur during the night turn, while the bulk of the fighting takes place throughout the day.

So which of these two takes comes closest to getting it right? And by right, do I mean which is more historical? More fun? More instructive?

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. I think many grand-tactical scale war games create scenarios “representative” of battles, rather than trying to nail down the details. Was the battle really fought in a two hour period, start to finish? I doubt it. But the pace of the actual assault may well have been that a two-hour time limit is appropriate.

Examining the two scenarios side-by-side, you can see they model the situation very similarly. The finer grain of the Divided Ground version allows for some additional details. For example, there is an armored car unit, represented as two “stands”, on the board. In the ME ’67 game, these perhaps wouldn’t show up as a separate company in the order of battle.

Divided Ground is more fun, and probably a better all-around way to deal with an engagement like this. While the length of the battle more more accurately captured at the operational level, the pace of the battle is probably not. Slowly moving armor through the Rafah fortresses does not strike me as how the battle should be portrayed. This should be an example of using mobile warfare to defeat fixed fortifications, and that doesn’t simulate well as rolls comparing attack and defense values. Furthermore, the much of the fun comes from the different equipment. Israel, unable to get her hands on state-of-the-art Western hardware, mixed and matched to create some unique weaponry. Doesn’t the player want to get hands on this equipment, actually interacting with range and firepower and lethality?

Of course, Divided Ground itself is quite an abstraction. Although I’m moving 3D tanks around the “board,” these are all representative of small units. Each “turn” I get two “shots” from my tank against the enemy, but that represents what? How many of my, say, 5 tanks are engaging with how many rounds? It may be a “better” way to play this battle, but is it in any way optimal?

As an aside, I do notice that I was completely unable to reproduce the historical result of minimal Israeli casualties. I lost a bunch of men and equipment in the approach, including having trucks destroyed with infantry on board. In the ME ’67 version, by contrast, claiming all the victory locations with minimal losses pretty much is necessary for victory.

Playing this in Divided Ground does make me wonder whether I should be buying the revamp, Campaign Series Middle East. After fighting not just the enemy, but software oddities and operating system glitches (one turn I watched an Arab truck just go back and forth between two hexes, until in ran out of movement), the improvements in the newer version start to look really appealing. However, as some of the online reviews pointed out, you are buying basically a modded up version of a 20-year-old game – in this case a 20-year-old game I’ve already paid for. As was said, it’s the kind of thing you’d expect to find for under $10 on Steam. Even at that price, it may be one of those games that you’d wait for the Steam sale. For $39.99?

Mini Me

To get involved with each vehicle and each shot of the main gun, a player needs to break out Steel Panthers.

The size of the Rafah battle, as portrayed in the previous two engines, exceeds what is appropriate for WinSPMBT. Instead, a scenario explores an engagement that occurred immediately after the victory at Rafah.  As the defenses at Rafah began to come apart, Moshe Dayan sent the light tanks (AMX-13s) along the coast to take al-Arish. At roughly the right edge of the the U.S. military map, above, the Israelis ran into prepared Egyptian defenses.

The resulting WinSPMBT scenario looks something like Rafah in miniature. The defensive positions are smaller and the attackers are fewer, and their aren’t 3+ axes of attack to manage.

Rushing the wire. I replayed this scenario half a dozen times, trying to figure out how to get close to the historical outcome.

Nevertheless, the shot-by-shot version of this fight gets a bit tedious, compared to the higher level simulations. It doesn’t help that I find this scenario (called “Road to el-Arish”) very difficult to play. Completely uncharacteristically for me, I tried the scenario something like six times in a row in an attempt to figure it out. Without success, I might add. What gets me is that, not only did Moshe Dayan crack this nut, again winning the battle with minimal losses, but the player is expected to get an overwhelming victory as well – the instructions say anything less than a 2:1 Israeli point victory should be considered a loss.

Since I don’t know what exactly the answer is, I can only speculate. But I think managing the line-of-sight from potential enemy positions is probably a key, and is something that isn’t easy when it to the ancient UI of WinSPMBT.

Return to the master post or go on to the next article.

*I’m actually not entirely sure which version of the scenario I’m playing, the stock or the revised one. See the notes (albeit for a new version than the Divided Ground one) for differences between the two.

Bir Gifgafa

Tags

Bir Gifgafa, Command Ops, Divided Ground, left-handed mouse, Steel Panthers, Suez Crisis, The Arab-Israeli Wars, The Star and The Crescent, WinSPMBT

This is part of 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.

In the last post I complained that, although the TOAW scenario gives a good overall picture of the encounters in the 1956 war, it does not convey the “feeling” of this fighting, and which would require gaming at a finer level.

Back near the beginning of this series, I dug out my Arab Israeli Wars (the board game) and set up scenario B-1. Apparently, I’m not alone as there are many games that look at that battle, several of them having been directly inspired by the Avalon Hill scenario. The board game is not designed for solitaire play, and this scenario in particular does not lend itself for playing without an opponent. Nevertheless, when I set it up and fiddled around with it for a little bit, it immediate began to look like an Israeli victory.

Being scenario B-as-in-Basic #1, you would think you’d find it a simple, well-balanced scenario suitable for new players learning the game. It does not appear to be this; my impressions of the scenario find it extremely tilted toward the Israelis. See this thread at Board Game Geek for a bit of discussion on the scenario. I suppose it may have another purpose. A section of the design notes begins with a story of an October, 1973 battle where 5 Israeli tanks are sent to engage 40 Syrian T-55s. After 45 minutes (a typical scenario length in this type of game), half of the Syrian tanks were destroyed and the remaining retreated, without a single Israeli loss. One wonders if part of the purpose of B-1 is simply to demonstrate the massive superiority of Israeli armored doctrine, even when “the numbers” suggest an advantage to the other side.

Divided Attention

The first computer version I played was for Divided Ground. As I mentioned in my previous look at Arab Israeli War scenario conversions, these scenarios contain extensive design notes. In those design notes, the author makes a comment that the purpose of his conversions are to implement the board game scenarios. If a player wants good Divided Ground scenarios, either versus the computer or to compete with an opponent, he says they should look to the scenarios supplied with the game. This conversion may be a good example of what he is talking about.

A turkey shoot. Despite the “light tank” designation, the superior gun (and doctrine) of the AMX-13 makes short work of the Egyptian T-34/85s.

The victory conditions, rewarding destruction of the enemy and the success or failure of traversing the board within the allotted time, are reproduced faithfully. But a problem in this conversion seems to be that the computer opponent doesn’t really understand them.

Assuming that the scenario is, in fact, winnable as the Arabs, the key would be to use terrain to ambush the approaching Israeli’s once they are in range. Using such a strategy, the computer version might make it possible for Arab units to remain hidden (via the fog of war feature) until they are close enough to neutralize the range advantage of the Israelis. Instead, the AI Arab player seemed to bunch up his units, leaving them in place to be destroyed at leisure from a distance. Even more glaring, the Arab player dealt with the exit conditions by stacking his units on the exit hexes, making them easy targets once good firing positions were determined.

As Inspired By

Scale Up/Scale Down

Divided Ground

Battlefield size: 8km x 4km
Game length: 1 hour 30 minutes
Unit: Platoon

Steel Panthers: MBT

Battlefield size: 5km x 2.5 km
Game length: 30-45 minutes
Unit: Single vehicle

The Star and the Crescent

Battlefield size: 28km x 19km
Game length: 2 hours
Unit: Single vehicle

 Command Ops 2

Battlefield size*: 40km x 12km
Game length: ~12 hours
Unit: Platoon

Moving on to the Steel Panthers version, we again encounter a scenario “inspired by” the Avalon Hill scenario, rather than being actually based off of it. The mix of tanks are about right, but there are far fewer (owing to the smaller scale). Here terrain doesn’t have the same feel. While the sand and rocky hills are still there, it doesn’t have the “hexside” ridges of the board game.

The inspiration does take one odd form. The map layout is with North to the left and a fairly narrow playing space West-to-East. On the top (that is, West) edge of the map is the Suez Canal, not used in the game. You might recall that the original scenario uses the Suez Canal mapboard to add extra playing space, but the canal features themselves are not playable. The battle took place quite a ways distant from the canal, and it is only in this scenario because the board game must create all of the battles using the same four mapboards.

One other oddity. The battalion commander has a jeep at his disposal. For some reason, when moved, the jeep makes horse noises. Fortunately for my sanity, the jeep got stuck in the sand within the first few minutes of play.

The scenario said to play from the Egyptian side. Maybe I should have paid attention.

The scenario played out much as the Divided Ground. Kills were made at long range with very little own-losses. In a similar way, the enemy bunched up around a couple of victory locations, where they were subsequently destroyed.

I Want to Love You, But…

The 2005 release from Shrapnel Games, The Star and The Crescent promises to be what we’re all looking for here. While primarily focused on later wars, it too has a Bir Gifgafa scenario for 1956. Immediately on start, we notice the increased use of realism in this version. Instead of randomly-generated desert or a reproduction of “Board D,” the scenario is played using a Soviet contour map of the battlefield. Unfortunately, it is a 1980s Soviet map of the battlefield so, for example, it has a airfield that didn’t exist in 1956. A hint of things to come.

The Star and the Crescent itself the fifth game released on that engine, which started with BCT: Brigade Combat Team or BCT: Commander (depending on the version) from 1998. While I didn’t collect ’em all, as they say, I do have several versions of this system. This game system is the one that finally drove me over the edge regarding left-handed mouse issues in gaming. Much of the Shrapnel line has long insisted on making the mouse buttons non-configurable. In this series it was particularly galling to me because the interface is so mouse-click intensive.

Amazingly, there is a particular combination of installations and patches that solves the problem. My computer has both The Star and the Crescent and Air Assault Task Force, installed together and both patched up to the latest post-release versions. Running with both, and then launching the TSatC executable (with the current patch) presents a native windows interface. Launching from the AATF executable presents a custom GUI that defiantly eschews integration with Windows. The mouse buttons are locked, as is the screen resolution. Several times in the past I’ve gotten stuck on that interface, unwilling to try to learn the actual game. Fortunately, this time around, I stumbled upon the workaround.

But once the game starts running, we find other problems. It is not a pretty game, by anyone’s definition. But that’s OK. Pretty isn’t necessarily what we’re after. The game was sold as a hard-core sim for hard-core wargamers, so it must be judged as such. The problem is, again, the user interface. At start, all units are halted and without orders. Trying to assign those order tumbles one into a nightmare-like cycle where orders are given, wait, no they weren’t, try again. There, got it. Nope. Try again.

The blue highlighted in green is the lead company of AMX-13s. The black squares to my NW are the enemy that I dispatched, while losing two of my own (gray squares). The blue squares back up the road to the NE are so far behind because of trouble getting orders. Note the ghost-of-the-future airfield to my South.

Suddenly one vehicle out the unit starts moving… but not the rest. Oops, wrong click – try again.

I suppose I should be spending more time with the written manual. But every time I read the manual, the prose regales me with how easy and intuitive the user interface is, rather than giving me the secret to overcoming its hurdles.

Ultimately, once all the units have the right orders – the desired formation, a path plotted in roughly the right direction, and not halted, subsequent orders become a little easier. It is simpler to modify existing orders than it is to create new ones.

A section from a 1959 US Military map of the Sinai hints at what we are up against. “Very Sharply Undulating” terrain. Another section, closer to the battlefield, describes “Sand Dunes 30 to 45 meters high.”

The simulation certainly does seem to be well done. Modeling looks to be at the level of individual shots from individual vehicles. The control, however, can be per vehicle or at the higher-level commands using formations. The friendly UI isn’t at the level where units can take their own initiative, but the game is best played giving orders at the company level and leaving the computer to execute them. The modeling of the map seems to be well done also. The terrain modeling appears to be at a finer detail than most games at this scale, leaving a battlefield peppered with undulations and providing complex fields of fire to navigate.

Pretty much done. The red Xs are killed enemies and the blue Xs are killed friendlies. My units (the blue armor symbol) are headed towards the end of that objective arrow.

Results were similar to the other three versions of this battle. The Israeli armor dominated the battlefield, dispatching the enemy with minimal friendly losses. Engagement distances were closer than the previous versions, something I attribute to the finer-grained modeling of the terrain. I do also notice the max-range for all tank guns is set at 1600, shorter than in the other games and closer than some of the kills in Steel Panthers.

In digging through the statistics, I came across another issue I have with the scenario. The scenario puts a 90mm gun on the AMX-13. This is an upgrade that the French were rolling out in the 1950s, but if the Israelis had any at the time of the Suez Conflict, it was only one or two. All the information I’ve seen says the light tanks of the 7th Armor Brigade mounted the 75mm gun, sharing it with the M50 Super Shermans.

But wait, there’s more! Just as I was headed into the endzone, one more company of enemy armor appeared. Shouldn’t be an issue.

One big plus I’ll give this to the system. Once I killed a couple of the tanks in the above screen shot, the game ended. As the program described, it had now become impossible for the enemy to achieve its objectives. It saves the player from the unpleasantness of having to run out the clock on a scenario he knows is over.

The single 1956 scenario in this package may not represent the gaming system’s best face, so I’ll give The Star and the Crescent/Air Assault Task Force another look in the future.

Roll Your Own

The final look at this battle was using the editing tools of Command Ops 2 to recreate the situation. For an engine of its complexity, the scenario tools are surprisingly simple to work with. The game’s creator says his intention was that you could produce an interesting scenario in minutes, allowing you (for example) to imagine what a hypothetical meeting engagement between two arbitrary forces would look like. The details can be increased from there. There is a huge latitude for control of the AI (enemy and friendly) by setting the victory locations and this is a method that is vastly simpler than the scripted AI of other products. Under pressure from the users, everything in the engine is editable, allowing us to move from the WWII, Western Front setting to 1956 Egypt.

The most difficult part of the game to create fresh are the maps. Getting them right takes some time and effort. When I first started with some map creation, I was having trouble getting a non-Northern Europe based terrain. I decided to forgo it for this iteration, and used instead a user-created map for the battle of El Guettar.

Adding vehicles for the Arab Israeli War was fairly straightforward.

This was by far and away the best interface experience for playing this battle. I set the unit size for the battle to correspond to the board game/Divided Ground. Commands can be given at any level from that unit on up, including simply commanding the entire force. The typical game length for Command Ops tends to be pretty long. The larger forces and multiple objectives require several distinct planning/execution phases and, at least for me, it takes quite some time to play through. However, a small scenario like this plays out very quickly.

Engaged. Once again, the AI has clumped up their armor, this time at a choke point behind a Tunisian crossing. Judicious use of victory point location placement is what drives the AI in this game.

The battle went mostly as I’d expect. It ended up being a significant loss (although as I was haphazard assigning victory points, calculations of win and loss are probably not meaningful). The kill ratio was somewhat lopsided in favor of the Egyptians, and the Israelis failed to take the bridge. I’m left with a few conclusions about the use of this engine for post-WWII scenarios.

• It is well suited to this time and place. The use of post-WWII equipment was not a stretch for the engine. However, this scenario does show where the limits of this system might be found.

The map seems to be on the larger size for a typical Command Ops battle,  which as I’ve said tend to be multi-day affairs. Take a look the table near the top of this article. Granted the map was oversized for this battle, but we can see that this size battlefield is more like the multiple-hour versions of the battle rather than a multiple-days version (which would pretty much cover the whole war). While this might be the size of an area for an extended operation for a airborne assault force (using primarily foot movement) against a fortified defense, things are different when it comes to more modern mobile warfare.

As mobile warfare, including helicopters, continues to advance and modeling requires taking into account the improvements in communication and sensors in the 1960s and beyond, I foresee hitting big holes in what Command Ops can portray. And yet, there may continue to be a niche. Cold War era conflicts like the Iran-Iraq War also were also throwbacks to World War II weapons and technologies, so the engine might be a match for some other, later battles.

• While creating the map may be the hardest part of the process, it may also be the most important when in comes to immersion and the fun factor. In this version of the scenario, failure to take the crossing seems almost meaningless. In the real battle, there was no bridge and there was no river. The opportunity for the player to connect with the historical circumstance is difficult unless the battlefield itself is actually recreated.
• Clearly the advantage in Israeli gunnery and tactics is not property modeled. I used data for the German 75mm tank projectile, which does slightly outperform the Soviet guns. But it wasn’t enough. A good bit of tweaking is almost certainly in order here.

Hopefully I’ll find the wherewithal to work some more with this concept before I’m done. With a little bit of work, I think I could see much better results. Furthermore, the 1956 Arab-Israeli War in general is even more suited to Command Ops than this particular scenario. The use of paradrops to seize objectives, which then are rescued by mechanized forces, is very much the type of battle this series was originally designed to play.

Return to the master post or go on to the next article.

*Regarding Battlefield Size and Duration. Since I set this up myself, it isn’t really representative. The map I used is much bigger that shown, but the roughly 40km x 12km rectangle is where all of the fighting will take place. Likewise the battle would never last for 12 hours of fighting. But I needed to set start and end times, so I just gave it most of the day.

Back to the Board

Tags

Divided Ground, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, Steel Panthers, Suez Crisis, The Arab-Israeli Wars, wargames, WinSPMBT

This is 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.

Before heading into the 1956 Arab Israeli War, I’ll return to the scenario I looked at earlier. As I mentioned a subsequent post, there are two games that have redone the old Avalon Hill Arab Israeli Wars scenarios as computer scenarios.

The Kalkiliah scenario, which I recently fiddled with on the board, has been recreated both for Divided Ground and for WinSPMBT.

Apples to Apples, Dust to Dust

First to the Divided Ground scenario. Player Alan R. Arvold recreated The Arab Israeli Wars board game scenarios in the computer version. Even more valuable, his work is accompanied by extensive design notes discussing the conversion.

Looking very different.

While I haven’t done a hex-by-hex myself, based on his notes it would seem the designer made a significant effort to recreate the board designs from the original game. Nevertheless, my first thought on loading the Divided Ground scenario is how different the map looks represented shown as a 3D view as opposed to the abstract symbols upon a flat map from the original game.

Pretty much the same situation. Arab disposition is speculative, as the computer version has units hidden by fog-of-war.

The other major difference is described in the design notes for this scenario. As I stated in my notes on the board game, the key to this scenario is the complexity of the victory condition rules. In a nutshell, the scenario depicts an Israeli raid which initially attacks the town in superior numbers. The attackers are facing a company of regular infantry and police (represented in Arab Israeli Wars by commando units and in Divided Ground by militia). They must quickly take the police fort near the village, and preferably do so before the Jordanians bring the remainder of their infantry, transported on vehicles, into the fray. Once the police fort is captured, the Israelis must withdraw without suffering losses. Should they fail to do so, a rescue force with armor is added to the board and the game length is extended.

The Divided Ground engine does not support the capture-and-withdraw victory condition, so (as is apparent in the first screenshot) the town and fortress hexes are simply designated as standard victory point locations. Second, the conditional availability of the Israeli reinforcements cannot be programmed, so the scenario was created just to last for the longer number of turns, with the Israeli armor always being available.

The final big change from the board game is that the “Fort” counter in Arab Israeli Wars does not have an equivalent in Divided Ground. The scenario was created with a “trench” representing the defensive position. As said about the board game, it is the fort and its particularly powerful defensive capabilities that makes this scenario what it is. Downgrading to just a minor defensive improvement leaves the capture of the fort, in my opinion, so easy as to negate the intent of the scenario.

Assuming you are playing this scenario to replicate the board game feel, one might imagine enforcing the withdrawal condition voluntarily, and then ignoring the computer’s tally of victory points. Likewise, you would have to ignore the arrival of your reinforcements in any case where the prerequisites for the extended game were not met.

In contrast, I played the scenario straight through by the computer rules, ignoring what I knew from the board scenario. As expected, it is weighted overwhelmingly towards Israeli victory (whereas I think the original leans heavily towards the Arabs). I was able to capture the victory locations before the Jordanian reinforcements arrived, and then deployed my halftracks to defend the town from recapture. When my own reinforcements arrived, I used them to mop up the Jordanian forces almost to the man. Which was fun in its own way.

Without the super-defensive value of the fort, I’m not sure I see the point in trying to play by the other board scenario rules.

Just a Nod

Scale

The Arab-Israeli Wars

Hex side: 250 meters
Turn length: 6 minutes

Steel Panthers: Main Battle Tank

Hex side: 50 meters
Turn length: 3 minutes

Recreating the toughness of the police fort is one thing that Steel Panthers was able to get right. Recreating the board game experience using this engine may not be a realistic goal given the difference in scale. The turn length is roughly 2-3 times and the map board at least double* when going from Steel Panthers to Arab Israeli Wars. It may have been feasible to, for example, model only the first half of the original scenario: A reduced unit count would have to take the police fort within the first half-hour or so, eliminating much of the reinforcements and the withdrawal condition. However, that’s not what was done.

Israeli paratroopers converging on the town. That fort will be one tough nut to crack.

A quick glance at the Steel Panther‘s scenario map indicates that, unlike the Divided Ground version, this was not an attempt to faithfully reproduce the Arab Israeli Wars map layout. More likely, it was based on the actual layout of the town and the surrounding terrain and roads.

Approximate size and location of the Steel Panthers game map, shown on a U.S. World War II -era map, with the bit that’s in the screenshot shown in black.

The construction of the scenario is that the full range of combatants are involved, but in the smaller time and space scale of Steel Panthers. The scenario starts with the Israeli paratroopers moving towards the town, but the Jordanian motorized units and then the Israeli armor are fairly quickly added to the mix.

Another interesting addition is that the Jordanians have a PzKpfw IV near the town (as an early reinforcement). Historically, the Jordanians did have some of these German WWII tanks, although not necessarily within 20 minutes of this particular fight.

The condensing of the scenario makes it another knife fight. As with the original board game version, the Israelis have superiority once they get all their equipment into the fight. For what it’s worth, I ended clearing the town completely, but gained only a marginal victory. I made some clearly stupid moves; exposing some halftracks to enemy anti-armor fire in one case and moving into artillery fire in two others.

As I’ve said in many of previous comparisons, the Steel Panthers version tends to be the most “fun” of the options. For this battle, moving individual units and trying to seize an actual building representing the police fortress gives me the best experience playing this battle. The interpretation of the battle is probably the least realistic of the three options, but I’m not sure that accuracy is a feature of any of these simulations.

Return to the master post or go on to the next article.

*While the hex scale is actually a factor of 5, the Steel Panthers scenarios often have a lot more hexes.

NATO versus Warsaw Pact, Vol. II, Part 2

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! 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, 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 is an instant loss, even before the player gets started hunting for the 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.

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 was all three defenders being FJ-3s.

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 of 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 smart. A bomb detonated over open sea has little effect except to take out one or two enemy planes.

But I Digress

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.

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 could be – in some cases puzzle-like in their solution. From the orders, one would assume a superiority in forces would be required to accomplish them. However, without some clever planning, the superiority may actually be with the enemy. 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 support 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.

 

NATO versus Warsaw Pact, Vol. II, Part 1

Tags

Cold War, Command Ops, Conquest of the Aegean, Fulda gap, Germany, Highway to the Reich, Red Devils Over Arnhem, Steel Panthers, The Operational Art of War, wargames, World War III

There were any number of triggers that could have started World War III, but didn’t.

In the mid-1950s, Western Germany was released from its occupation by the Western Powers, became an independent country (from the East), and joined NATO. The Korean War threatened to escalate beyond the borders of that peninsula. Throughout Soviet occupied Eastern Europe, independence movements hoped for Western intervention that might help them in facing down the Soviets.

Of course, Western leaders were well aware of the risks. While working to check Soviet aggressions, they still tried to tread softly so as not to launch a Third World War, probably nuclear, just when the world was struggling to recover from World War II.

The flashpoint of any confrontation between the two superpowers was between East and West Germany. Having crushed the Germans in their “Patriotic War”, the Russians believed that they had earned German spoils of war. They also believed that, were the promise of a democratically-driven reunification of Germany honored, they could win the political game and install a Socialist government in a combined East/West German vote.

Throughout the duration of the Cold War, the parameters of armed conflict remained the same. The forces of the Warsaw Pact had the advantage in numbers, but not in time. If the Soviets did not win World War III in a quick strike, they would be drawn into (at best) a conflict of attrition with little to gain at the end of it. The United States would be able to shift forces to Europe to bring the conflict back into balance, and in the long run, would bring to bear its massive industrial capacity that supplied the Soviets in the second world. If truly threatened, the West might respond with its nuclear capability.

Given the numerical superiority of the Soviet ground forces, the location and nature of the initial battles also remained constant. The West would have been foolish to assault a numerically superior force, so one imagines the opening of the war with NATO on defense. The heavily mechanized forces of the Soviet Union would need suitable terrain if they were to rapidly advance across Germany. Two likely avenues of advance presented themselves, the flat areas in Northern Germany (North German Plain) and the area of woods and farmlands near Frankfurt, called the Fulda Gap.

Fulda Gap

I start, as I so often do, with a TOAW scenario. In this case, the Fulda 55 scenario that shipped, again, as part of the original TOAW package.

At first glance, the scenario is pretty much a reprise of the Patton 45 scenario that I wrote about earlier. The size and scale are identical; 5km hexes and 1 turn per day. While the location, obviously, has moved, the terrain itself is similar; farm and forest land broken up by some cities and rivers. But at this scale, it’s mostly a large, rectangular map with scattered terrain features. The similarities should probably not surprise – both scenarios were designed by the same person, Doug Brevard.

As war breaks out, the Soviets easily dominate the skies and are on the attack with a huge force superiority. Playing, once again, as the U.S. (NATO has U.S. and West German forces, the latter using U.S. equipment), the play seems to be to strategically give ground while waiting for reinforcements. For the player who is really into the “study” of a hypothetical battle between Fulda and Frankfurt, the fine details of the terrain may add to the experience, but as a one-off the difference between Germany and Czechoslovakia are not game-changing. The “flavor” is the possession, by both sides, of both chemical and nuclear weapons and the possibility that the “high command” will bring those into play. Of course, given that, to the modern mind, any use of weapons of mass destruction is a loss for mankind, this too doesn’t seem a huge factor.

Playing through, the result was much as I expected. The game play was very much a repeat of the Patton 45 result.This time, the position of the rivers made my strategy work a little smoother. I blew all the bridges, defended the river crossing, and waited for reinforcements to arrive. At that point, I had air superiority and was able to isolated and eliminate the enemy.

The tide is about to turn

I’ve said it before, I’ve nothing against an easy scenario. But also as I talked about before, it was the lack of unique features that made this one fall flat. At this scale and time frame, I don’t see much game play difference substituting M46s for Panzer Vs.

Regarding that air superiority, I did throw together a IL-2 scenario and, even accounting for my own incompetence behind the stick, I don’t see how the Western forces could gain air superiority fielding F89s and F94s against MiG 19s.

Again, a present-day map of the area depicted in the scenario show the landscape has a little more character than what you might get from the game.

Tank Tactics

Also, as before, it’s the Steel Panthers scenarios that provide the fun.

First, at this level, there is a unique feel to the time period. It is definitely different than World War II, matching Soviet and U.S. Technology of the 1950s. It is also not Korea. The Communists, here, have access not to surplus, but the best technology that they can field (arguably superior to what the U.S. is fielding). A very different feel than the numerically superior but technologically inferior Koreans and Chinese.

The most obvious to me was the vulnerability of armor to infantry at close range.

I think I messed up. I quickly advanced into this village to grab a good defensive position and, instead, ended up getting my armor into a knife fight with the Soviets. Just look at that mess.

In this scenario, I made what was probably a major mistake from the get go. It was a meeting engagement so I moved my (roughly a) company-sized mechanized infantry unit, with one platoon of tanks in the lead, into the village (pictured) to try to establish a good defensive position. I was a bit surprised by, and quickly suffered heavy losses from, the superior capabilities of the Soviet tanks and the effectiveness of the RPG teams. Having pretty much lost all my armor, I was forced on the defensive, where my own bazookas took out all the Soviet armor. The battle resulted in a draw.

As a note of comparative interest, the equipment is very different when comparing the TOAW scenario to the Steel Panthers scenario. Most obviously, the German mechanized infantry in TOAW are outfitted with M59 APCs and Saracen armored cars, not the halftracks and M8s of Steel Panthers.

It’s Medium, but is it happy?

One of the more innovative and intriguing games of the last decade is the Command Ops engine from Panther Games. The system made its debut in 2002 with Airborne Assault: Red Devils Over Arnhem. The game, as indicated by the title, allowed the player to assume command of the British airborne forces (The Red Devils) in the fight to take and hold the Rhine bridge at Arnhem during operation Market Garden. The scale was operational, but much finer grained than the typical hex-and-counter operational game, although still not down in the well-trodden weeds of tactical combat simulation.

Amid much consternation, the game moved from Airborne Assault publisher Battlefront to Matrix Games where it was enhanced and re-released as Highway to the Reich (HTTR) in 2003. While purchasers of the original game were angered about having to rebuy the game they already owned, the new title was both improved and expanded. Playable forces now included American, British, and German ranging the entire length of the contested route and multiple river crossing that characterized that battle, and included both paratroop and armored forces.

Under the Matrix banner, Panther continued releasing follow-ons in the series. 2006 saw the availability of Conquest of the Aegean, looking at some neglected battles. In particular the game modeled the German airborne assault on Crete and conquest of Greece. In 2010, Panther returned to the tried and true, releasing Command Ops: Battles from the Bulge (BFTB). With the amount of improvements that had gone into the engine, they re-released their original two games as expansions to BFTB.

The system broke new ground with regards to AI, particularly for the player’s own side. Commands could be given at the highest level, leaving the AI to plan and execute using available forces. The game could be played either with such minimal, top-level interaction or commands could be issued at the company level (the individual icons) for a more traditional interaction. An innovative “fog of war” system, which allows the player no information about enemy units not spotted also added to the unique feel. Finally, rather than a hex-and-counter system, the game uses an extremely fine grid and clock to approximate continuous time and movement. With that, the units are represented by square icons, but their actual battlefield footprint is simulated.

Another notable feature of BTFB was that it was released with virtually every aspect of the game open to the user. Previous version had limitations which restricted modding or user-made scenarios to similar locations and/or forces as the released game. In BFTB, users could add any map, any set of forces, and any timeframe. The limitation of its modelling capability was only the scale and the scope of tactics within the game. User-made scenarios appeared across the spectrum of the War in Europe, notably adding modelling of the Eastern Front.

Livin’ in the 50s

One obvious route for expansion for user-mods is into the early years of the Cold War. The U.S./Russian or NATO/Warsaw Pact forces are largely upgraded versions of what used in the Second World War. Particularly as this game’s events, in both BFTB and HTTR, occur late in the war and, for the British and American forces, already represent end-of-war development. For the Soviet side, the Eastern Front mods have been created. It should be a fairly straightforward exercise to meld the two together, eliminate the Germans, and create a U.S. versus Russia, or some combination of their client forces.

As I said, the limitations on modding are that straying outside what the core engine can do means that the modelling could well fall apart. Obviously recreating recent battlefields would be a problem – helicopters, drones, and real-time satellite imagery weren’t part of the World War II battlefield. Another area, though, that has been a problem for the system is mechanized operations. The original game was designed for paratrooper battles and all three iterations focus on major airborne battles. Initially, this meant that neglecting the finer points of mounted infantry wasn’t an issue.

I’ll expound briefly. In a more traditional operational game, motorized or mechanized infantry can account for the transports simply as modifications to the movement factor (and maybe combat as well, depending on what’s modeled). No need to think in detail about the transition from mounted movement to deployed combat, except possibly to model the reduced effectiveness during transition. Where are all those trucks when the infantry is dug in and defending a position? Somewhere else in the hex, one would imagine. It isn’t that important. In a tactical game, the transports are included explicitly. You dismount your soldiers, and then actively must move the transports to where you want them. Want to use transports again? You’d have to move them back. But this series has a problem. The individual position of the troops are modeled, but not explicit. So where are those trucks? It became a very tricky simulation problem within the engine.

In any case, one would expect to be able to find battles worth modeling (either real or imagined) in the first-or-second post-WWII decades that are close enough in tactics to be doable.

While there was and continues to be expressions of interest in both Cold War Europe and the Korean War, concrete effort has been a bit thin on the the ground. The one exception is a BTFB scenario with mid-1950s “estabs” (the available order of battles for included forces) for both the U.S. and Soviets.

This is Belgium, not Germany

The scenario’s designer used the Onhaye map. In the context of the original Bulge game, this is a hypothetical scenario that imagines the Germans have advanced so far as to establish a bridgehead across the Meuse River, and the allies must push them back. In a 1955 scenario, one might imagine a similar struggle over river crossings taking place in Germany or Czechoslovakia. Similar battles happened in my TOAW game, above, although the Meuse is a considerably bigger obstacle than the Fulda.

Without digging into the details with the scenario editor, the point of this scenario seems to be roughly-equal forces fighting over the center of the map, with plenty of time to duke it out. The upgraded equipment isn’t terribly noticeable, although it probably shouldn’t be at this scale.

This is a game that really combines the big picture with the details. Terrain, timing, distance – these things are all critical. It’s not like the higher operational scale where the difference between a “clear hex” and a “rough hex” are the combat and movement factors. This makes it great for fighting specific historical battles where the significance of these features are known. Of course, a tactical level game could be the same way. The difference is, this game won’t tally up the score after 45 minutes. Being able to rest your troops over the day/night cycle, keeping appropriate reserves – these are the factors you need to be thinking about. An attack may be planned and executed over several days, if that’s what it takes to get all your forces into position and ready.

Defending the Meuse, or Fulda, or some River, in any case. It’s just after midnight, and the Russkies have squeezed into a gap in my lines with 15 T-54s. This is going to be a long, unpleasant night.

This is both a boon and a curse when trying to play a pure hypothetical engagement. Yes, the level of detail will let you look at true what ifs, with some sense that the emergent details have meaning. On the other hand, without an actual historical account to guide you, where do you start with a battle location. Game maps are on the order of a couple hundred square kilometers. But why would the U.S. forces decide to face off the Soviets in this particular map square?

The questions become important because, with the required detail of these maps, it is quite an investment to realistically model your selected battlefields. Conversely, with the modeled terrain being such an important factor, fighting on “generic” terrain is going to be less than satisfying.

Overall this level of play is a more satisfying experience than the next level up Operational Game (the Fulda 55 scenario in the first part of the article). I’m not sure I’ll want to dig too deeply into this mid 50s timeframe, but I may find another excuse to come back to this game and its editors. While the NATO/Warsaw Pact technology is probably quickly racing ahead of the engine’s bailiwick, there may be some scope going forward for the 2nd and 3rd world conflicts, such as the Middle East.

Continue on to Part 2 of 2 here.

 

 

 

Ancien Régime

Tags

Command Ops, Conquest of the Aegean, Dien Bien Phu, French Indochina, Highway to the Reich, John Tiller, Squad Battles, Steel Panthers, The Operational Art of War, Vietnam, wargames

It’s been said before that any wargame being newly released has to improve upon the available scenarios for the existing “sandbox” games. The holy trilogy for the Cold War era is likely The Operation Art of War (TOAW) for (you guessed it) Operation Scale land ops, Steel Panthers MBT (for tactical), and Harpoon for Sea/Air.

I would further argue that Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations has surpassed Harpoon, so we’re left with the two old war horses TOAW and SP. Of course, there are far better systems out there, both for World War II (which were the original targets for those games) and for other eras, but little that is moddable and has the actual range of user-made scenarios to cover the scope of battles of battles included in those two classics.

The time when these types of sandbox games were being made, selling well, and being well supported by a user base (via scenario creation) seems to be a thing of the past. Expand the scope of your vision beyond the Cold War and you’ll find that most of the games of this type are not only many years behind us, but not really up to current standards (I’m thinking of something like Age of Rifles).

Part of the issue is that current games dwell on details, particularly in terms of graphics and map features, that tie them to particular battles. This might be a design/marketing issue (such as with the HPS/Tiller games where user-created maps are simply not allowed), a technical issue (in Graviteam tactics, the detailed maps may simply be beyond modding) or a simple technical hurdle (Command Ops provides the ability to create new maps, but there is a huge amount of work involved).

One added advantage of these sandbox games is that they will cover wars/battles for which no dedicated game might ever be made. This next set of battles cover the struggle of the French to maintain their hold over Vietnam, post Second World War. For most of us in America, the story of the French in Indochina is merely a prologue to our own war in Vietnam. This neglects nearly a decade of fighting, incidentally using the same technology as the Korean War.

Battle of Vĩnh Yên

For tactical sandbox games, the trap is that high fidelity information is rarely known about a particular battle. The maps and troop dispositions can be put together, but a tactical scenario involves approximately 1 hour. So is what you’re playing a simulation of an actual hour of combat? Or is it an abstraction of a larger battle, but played out on a reduced scale?

The battle of Vĩnh Yên took place over several days. A brigade of Foreign Legion troops (the 9th), consisting of two Groupement Mobile (mobile groups, or GM), defended the town of Vĩnh Yên. North Vietnamese General Võ Nguyên Giáp commanded on the order of 50,000 soldiers, equipped by the Chinese. At the outset of 1951, Giáp planed to deliver a decisive blow to the French army and chose the village, some 30 miles north of Hanoi, as a target. He would seek to overwhelm the French force of about 6,000 defenders with 2 divisions totaling approximately 20,000.

The first phase of the battle commenced on January 13th with a diversionary assault on an outpost north of the town. As one of the GMs  (GM3) was dispatched to deal with the attack, they were ambushed by the remaining Việt Minh. While the French successfully withdrew under the cover of air and artillery support, they suffered significant losses and the Việt Minh took possession of key hills in front of Vĩnh Yên.

The next day, the French counter-attacked. Thy linked their second Groupement Mobile (GM1) with GM3, opened access to the town, and ultimately retook the hills occupied by the Việt Minh. A third Groupement Mobile (GM2) was ordered from Hanoi to aid in the defense, bringing the defenders total to around 9000.

The third phase, taking place on the 16th into the 17th, saw the Việt Minh’s fresh division assaulting the French position on the hills with massed human wave assaults. These were initially repelled by the dug-in French defenders with overwhelming artillery and air support, including the use of napalm. However, the attackers reformed and continued their attacks through the day of the 16th, into the night, and again on the morning of the 17th. As the French ran low on ammunition, they were forced to give up ground. By the next morning, the French committed the last of their reserves to hold their position on the left end of their line (Hill 210) and continued air support drove off the communists and inflicting over 8000 casualties (killed, captured and wounded).

The battle, as modeled in Steel Panthers, is a compressed and downsized approximation of that third phase of the battle. As the French, we have two platoons of infantry holding the key hills north of the town. Two additional platoons have entered the map on trucks, with the support of one platoon of light tanks. There is also air and the support of one artillery battery. The battle lasts for approximately 48 minutes and we are exposed to an attack by enemy infantry with superior numbers backed by artillery.

Each Groupement Mobile typically consisted of two or three infantry regiments, a light tank squadron, artillery, and perhaps other support (engineers, for example) totaling around 3000 men. For any significant portion of the battle, therefore, it would seem that representing the engagement as a platoon-sized confrontation would be greatly under-estimating the available forces.

The Communists are assaulting my positions using human wave tactics. Things are looking bad and are about to get far worse.

The scenario seems to be combining several of the key elements of the battle; the human wave attacks, the artillery and air strikes, and the reinforcements by GM2, all in one 45 minute summary of a 24+ battle.

I’ve read long ago, perhaps in the Designer Notes for one of the old Avalon Hill games such as Panzer Blitz or Squad Leader, why a tactical level battle typically runs under an hour. Beyond that, the fuel, ammunition and other supplies of an active unit will run low, and the simulation needs to add to it considerations of resupply and reinforcement. So the key to modelling with these scenarios is to pick the right section of ground and timeframe to capture the action.

This can be particularly difficult in these lesser-covered conflicts, where a blow-by-blow description of a tactical battle is not available. It is also difficult to capture the right kind of scenario in an asymmetrical warfare or counter-insurgency campaign. This particular battle was notable in that the Việt Minh came out in the open and fought a traditional battle, allowing the French to use their technological superiority. A similar scenario probably would not exist of a “meeting engagement” of platoon-sized forces, but with a similar mix of armor, artillery, air.

A sketch from a Vietnamese site provides a better perspective on the battlefield.

In the end, this scenario does what it can to represent the battles of that time and place. For my own performance, I ended up fighting it to a draw. I made a big mistake in overestimating the number of turns I had. My plan consisted of bringing my tank platoon cross-country to immediately relieve Hill 101 while bringing the trucks carrying infantry around the dirt road (202) to reinforce Hill 210 from the rear. The trucks were about to arrive as the scenario ended.

Battle of Nghĩa Lộ

The Operational Art of War address a similar situation in its scenario for the Battle of Nghĩa Lộ. General Giáp again, in the fall of 1951, saw an opportunity to capitalize on the successes of his guerilla tactics by using larger forces and more conventional tactics. The valley surrounding Nghĩa Lộ was an strategic location to overwhelm the French defenses with numeric superiority.

The Việt Minh attacked with a full division against a handful of French outposts. The French quickly reinforced with 3 battalions of paratroopers. The battle continued for a week, but the combination of elite troops and superior support again won the day for the French.

The Nghĩa Lộ scenario that shipped with the original TOAW release comes at the other end of the simulation spectrum from the Steel Panthers scenario, above. The scale is that each counter represents a company (approximately 10X the scale of Steel Panthers) and turns last a full day (nearly 500X the time scale of Steel Panthers). Like the Czechoslovakian battle, this is a small scale for this engine. More so, in fact, with smaller units (company versus regiment), hex scale (2.5 km to 5 km), and map size (the battle was restricted to the immediate vicinity of the town).

Thus, my earlier criticisms still apply. The style of game play seems unsuited to this scale of modeling, especially as applied to the asymmetrical warfare we see here. This seems to be born out by the results – Wikipedia cites the actual casualties as a fairly low percentage of forces engaged. 300 KIA for the Việt Minh and 60 KIA for the French. The historical Việt Minh slipped away into the mountains when the battle turned against them. In game, they dug in and fought to the last, with massive casualties on both sides.

My paratroopers have arrived. After relieving the pressure on the town itself, I try isolating and defeating the numerically-superior enemy piecemeal.

The scenario stretches over two weeks (twice as long as the actual engagement). After an initial Việt Minh assault on the French outposts, the French begin to parachute in reinforcements. The screenshot, above, shows my strategy. Initial drops came in near Nghĩa Lộ and I used the reinforcements to force the attackers away from the town to the south. Further reinforcements I dropped north and west of the enemy positions, and used them to encircle and destroy the enemy formations. At all times, I was outnumbered and outclassed on the battlefield, so my approach was to achieve local superiority to defeat the enemy and then move on to the next area.

TOAW combat victories can be achieved by occupying the six hexes surrounding an enemy (more, obviously, if the enemy has multiple contiguous hexes) and then attacking when they have no opportunity to retreat. Depending on the scale of the battle, it is often effective to let the isolation from resupply reduce the enemy before the assault. This is what the Soviets in the Second World War called Cauldrons (or Kettles). This seems to be an unlikely depiction of a company-sized engagement in French Indochina.

In the end, I isolated the enemy into two such cauldrons along the SW to NE line in the upper left quadrant of my screenshot. Throughout, the game told me I was on track to achieve an overwhelming victory. Near the end of the game, the Việt Minh began receiving extensive reinforcements to the southeast and were overwhelming my defenders there. It became a race to see if I could eliminate the pockets so as to free up my forces in time to rescue my own isolated forces. The combination cost me heavily in casualties, and the prediction was that I was now going to “draw.” Nevertheless, the final screen declared victory for the French.

I also find it notable that the two scales, TOAW versus Steel Panthers, don’t ever meet. For any combat resolution on the TOAW map, it simulates probably several hours of combat (multiple games in SP) and, even with only two counters involved, a company-on-company attack, at the upper end of SP scenarios. In fact, given TOAW‘s mechanics, one would rarely initiate an attack with only a single company against a similarly-sized defender.

Take 2

Perhaps recognizing issues with the original Nghĩa Lộ scenario, TOAW III includes a newer version of the same battle. The most obvious difference is the turn length, which has been reduced to six hour turns, introducing a day/night cycle. The game length has also been shortened to a week, corresponding to the recorded dates of the battle.

The map was also redone. On the screen capture below, we can see something that occurs with user-made scenarios. Knowing the mechanics of the games, maps are made to get the desired results in gameplay and not necessarily to visually portray the area being mapped. The combination of multiple rivers coming together in the vicinity of Nghĩa Lộ combined with irrigation structures creates a number of islands near the town. The effect of this is modeled with an impossibly-angular series of interconnected minor rivers.

After the arrival of my paratrooper reinforcements, I attempt to isolate the attackers in the southeastern corner of the operation.

The revised scenario played very differently than the original. With six hour turns, the wait for reinforcements seems terribly long. During this time, the enemy captured most of the road (where the objective points are, see below screenshot), eliminated the defenders from the town proper, and cleared out the center of the valley. Even when my initial para-drops began, I was unable to do anything except try to stay clear of the enemy.

Once all three of the paratrooper battalions arrived, I was able to concentrate my forces, obtain local superiority, and began taking back ground. In the end, I achieved a major victory, having forced all of the enemy out of the valley and into the mountains.

Final victory. I think the commies may have been repairing bridges during their brief occupation.

The balance of the forces is also obviously redone, although I didn’t look at the details. The French forces seem much weaker in the open, but tougher in prepared defenses. Several of my outposts remained intact through until the end of the scenario, despite enemy assault. While the casualties are not directly observable in the screens, the rate seems to be closer (though still higher) than the historic casualty rates for this battle.

Once again, despite the narrowing of the focus, I am struck that the operational scale of this game doesn’t touch the tactical scale of Steel Panthers. Even if the troop concentrations worked out, going from a six hour battle to a one-or-more 1 hour battles would require a simulation of supply, rest, and reinforcement that isn’t accounted for in most tactical engines and is abstracted in the TOAW mechanics. Also, this being an all-infantry battle, it probably wouldn’t be the most fun scenario for a game that has a tank reference right there in the name.

One game that does try to model the details between these two levels the the Command Ops engine from Panther Games. While units are, as with this scenario, represented down to the company level, the lower level of detail is modeled. Time is a pausable continuous time, meaning a much more detailed calculations of what happens when. Also, the details of the deployments of the companies are represented – as opposed to simply placing them in a hex.

In Command Ops, supply is modeled much more explicitly. In TOAW, supply is important, but it mostly involves controlling hexes between the supply source and the units to prevent unit combat factors from degrading. In Command Ops, the flow of materiel is accounted for so as to show up in the ammunition numbers of the resupplied units. I have read no information on the supply operations of this particular battle, but with a geographically-isolated fight taking place over the course of a week, I imagine it was critical.

The Command Ops engine was original designed for paratrooper operations (Highway to the Reich, Conquest of the Aegean), and would probably make an excellent engine for this particular scenario.

Despite my satisfaction with earning a victory in this scenario, I wonder if it was partially an artifact of the programmed opponent not being tuned quite right. There were several occasions during the battle that I was very sure that I was about to be wiped out in the next turn, but I was allowed to withdraw my forces and concentrate them. At the end of the game, there is an enemy company in good order, dug in on the eastern edge of my screenshot. Unopposed by my forces, that unit could have grabbed several victory locations and there would be nothing I could have done about it. It makes me wonder if a French victory would have been feasible against a human opponent.

The Battle of Hòa Bình

Following the victories earlier in the year, the French commander Jean de Lattre de Tassigny wished to repeat his earlier successes. By forcing the Việt Minh to fight on their terms, the French were able to use their superior technology, logistics, and fire support to defeat the Việt Minh in open battle.

To force the situation, the city of Hòa Bình was targeted. It sat on key road and river transportation routes through Indochina and had been taken and used as a major logistics and communication hub by the Việt Minh. By disrupting their supply lines, the French would force the Việt Minh into open battle at the place of their choosing.

Of course, the French would also create logistical problems for themselves. To keep Hòa Bình in supply, the French were forced to upgrade and garrison the road leading to the city. Supply via the Da (Black) River was also used. Although a considerably longer route, it was easier to secure. Outposts were created along the river to protect those convoys.

In December of 1951, General Giáp began attacking these outposts in an attempt to overwhelm the French. One such battle, at Tu Vu, is included in the Steel Panthers scenario list. In that battle, the garrison of a river outpost came under the assault of a numerically-superior Việt Minh force.

The Việt Minh attack came at night, to nullify the French control of the air. Starting around 9:30 PM, the French positions came under enemy mortar fire and shortly after 10PM the waves of infantry assaults began through the French wire and minefields.

On my southern wing, the Viet Minh have just breached my minefields and are headed for my entrenched positions.

The outpost straddled a tributary to the Black River, meaning the two positions needed to be defended separately. The defenders consisted to two companies of Moroccan infantry. The northern wing also had a platoon of tanks.

On my northern wing, I have tanks. But can they come into play before it is too late?

In contrast my other scenarios, this one seems sized about correctly in terms of units. The French seem to be lacking historical artillery support, which in the real battle was directed onto the minefields.

The Steel Panthers scenario lasts around an hour, and seems represent only the initial assault on the French positions. I ended up with a draw. In getting there, I used little in the way of strategy. My units were initially in entrenched positions and dug in, and so I figured moving would only hurt me. Some enemy scouts had slipped in behind my lines (probably initial placement?) and I lost a victory location to that. I do wish I had tried to get those points back before the scenario ended. It may also have helped to give ground a little earlier, so as to bring my second line of defenses into play. Although deliberately letting the enemy advance seems like a bad idea. I do note that this scenario is included in the HPS/John Tiller product Dien Bien Phu. That scenario, according to the notes, lasts for 2 hours and also appears to be intended to last until the French withdrawal from the their southern outpost. It would be interesting to play the two scenarios side-by-side, although not interesting enough to drop $40-$50 on the product. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to return to the Squad Battles series in another war.

In the real battle, the southern defenders were forced to withdraw across a narrow footbridge to the the northern strong point after some three hours of attack. The wire and minefields had been neutralized by a carpet of dead enemy attackers, and the defenders had run out of ammunition to shoot them with. Two hours later, the overwhelmed defenders of the northern outpost withdrew through the river onto an island, where they prepared themselves for a final stand that never came.

The battlefield as it appears today (via Google Map).

The greater battle for Hòa Bình continued until the following February, with the results from Tu Vu writ large. The French suffered high losses while inflicting far greater losses onto the communists. While the French were ultimately able to maintain control of the ground, the cost of that victories proved too dear. The French withdrew from the area before a final attack from the Việt Minh came.