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. 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 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, that disrupts the line of sight and 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. Of 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 games 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 through at turn against, 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, basically a modded up version of a 20-year-old game. As was said, it’s the kind of thing you’d expect to find for under $10 on Steam, and may or may not wait for the sale even at that price. 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 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 a 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 finds 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
Turn 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 (owning to the smaller scale). There 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 focuses 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, with two lost vehicles (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, not gives 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 look 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 modelling 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 modelling 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 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 created using the editing tools of Command Ops 2 to recreate the situation. For of 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, which 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 base 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 an 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. Granted the map was oversized for this battle, but in the table near the top of this article 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 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 is 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 clearly 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 scenario 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 War 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 accompanies by extensive design notes discussing the conversion.

Looking very different.

While I, myself, haven’t done a hex-by-hex myself, from his notes 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 as in the perspective 3D as opposed to the abstract symbols of 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 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 Israeli raid is initially attacks the town in superior numbers, 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 for with armor is added, and the game length 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 hex are simply given 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 long length, with the Israeli armor always being available.

The final difference 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 it’s 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 value 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 were not met.

In contrast, I played the scenario straight through by the computer rules. 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 the 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 may not have been realistic, 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, once again, a very close in fight; another knife fight. As with the original board game version, the Israeli’s 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 any of these simulations is entirely accurate.

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

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 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’s usually better to expect a scenario to be a once-through affair.

One could make the counter argument that, as a 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. 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 play for focusing on the goal but ignoring defense. At the start of the scenario, there is already a flight of inbound Tu-4 “Bull” bombers, armed with nukes, headed for the base. With no defense, it is an instant loss, even before the start.

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 take out the incoming bombers and land my plane back on Crete.

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

The maps, complete with airbases, are all available. A little searching can spruce up the basic models with nice paint jobs. However, the one piece of the CMANO scenario I could not bring over: in the larger battle, I was using a mix of FJ-3 Furies and F2H-2 Banshees to defend the base. The latter, 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 to slowly, especially from the lower rear, and I’d find myself riddled with bullet. However, in every attempt I also lost either my 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 know 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, throughout, 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, the still tried to tread softly so as not to launch a Third World War, probably nuclear, 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 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 imagined 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 German. 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, its mostly a large, rectangular map with scatter terrain features. In fact, the scenario was 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, 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.

I did throw together a IL-2 scenario and, even accounting for my own incompitance behind the stick, I don’t see how this army 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 Steep 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, but still not down in the well-trodden weeds of tactical combat simulation. The game had some significant

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, 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 Agean, looking at some neglected battles. In particular, the German airborne assault on Crete and the conquest of Greece. In 2010, they 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 interact, 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 extreme fine grid and clock to approximate continuous time and movement. With that, the units are represented by square icons, but their actual battlefield footprint and simulated.

Another notable feature of Command Op: Battles from the Bulge was that is 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, 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 the paratrooper battles, and all three battle iterations focus on major airborne battles. Initially this meant 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 noticable, 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 of 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, but there is an argument that any new wargame that is 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 a wide range of battles.

The time when this type of sandbox games were made, sold well, and were well supported by a user base creating scenarios seems to be a thing of the past. Expand the scope beyond the cold war to all eras and you’ll find that most of the game (I’m thinking of something like Age of Rifles) are not only many years behind us, but not really up to current standards.

Part of the issue is that current games have details, particularly in graphics and maps, 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 techical 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 American, the story of the French in Vietnam is merely a prologue to our own war in Vietnam. This neglects nearly a decade of fighting 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. Or is it an abstraction of a larger battle, 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, he 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 Division totally 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. Linking their second Groupement Mobile (GM1) with GM3, opening the access to the town and ultimately retaking 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 last for approximately 48 minutes, and we are exposed to an attack with superior numbers by enemy infantry 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) totally 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 be 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 across 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 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 on the on board 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 and 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. 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 free up my forces, by eliminating the pockets, 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 paradrops began, I was unable to do anything except try to stay clear of the enemy.

Once all three of the paratrooper, I was able to concentrate my forces and 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 summary 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.

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 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 do 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 of their own. 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. 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. At 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. 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. Though 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 and 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 they were ultimately able to maintain control of the ground, the cost of that victory proved too dear. The French withdrew from the area before a final attack from the Việt Minh came.

’O Seoule mio

Tags

Cold War, IL-2, Korean War, Panzer Elite, Pink Floyd, Steel Panthers, wargames, WinSPMBT

Once again hoping to find some tactical goodness in the Korean war, I return to the period of the Inch’on landings.

Tank Country

The game Panzer Elite was released in 1999. It was a Tank command simulator covering battles between the Germans and the Americans from 1943 through the end of the war. At the time it came out, it pushed the limits of technology both graphically and in terms of the realism of the simulation. The player commands a platoon of tanks on a battlefield that includes armor, infantry, and artillery (both enemy and friendly).

In the 17 years it has been out, fans of the game have continued to play and modify the original release. Mods have enhanced the graphics and the realism, as well as expanded the scope of the original game to include the whole time period of the second world war as well as more of the major belligerents on the Western Front.

I picked up the game for the first time very recently. It sells on GOG for under $3 when on sale. The download includes the original “Special Edition” version that came out in 2001, as well as a number of user-made mods. In trying to quickly search for the “right” mod package to start with, I stumbled across a Korean War mod package.

As I’ve pointed out in earlier posts, the Korean War equipment was often the same as, or at least only minor upgrades from, World War II equipment. Thus, Korean War scenarios should be easily buildable using the Russian Front expansion mods, simply pitting the Americans against the Soviets.

A fine idea, but still not quite fully implemented as far as I can tell. The mod’s scenarios are the original Panzer Elite scenarios, except with the North Koreans swapped in for the Germans. I played the first Inch’on landing scenario, which was actually the same as the Anzio landing scenario with units correct for the period substituted in.

“…and the Inch’on bridgehead was held for the price of a few hundred ordinary lives.”

Playing the original and the Korean version side-by-side, it seems that not everything works in the Korean mod. In the original Anzio, my supporting infantry immediately take up positions whereas in Korea they seem to be frozen in place.

In contrast, when I create an “instant action” scenario, there does seem to be functioning infantry. Instant action is, in my mind, second best to well-designed hand-crafted scenarios – obviously for historical reasons- but also, it seems that the instant action game truly throws you instantly into the action. My first try started with the opposing forces in contact and firing on each other from the open.

The tools to create scenarios exist, although at first glance it looks daunting. Not the kind of thing where I could throw together a quick Korean village and have a shootout in a few clicks.

Unlike other options, the Panzer Elite mod does seem to include the major tank types. In playing the U.S. forces at Inch’on, I am equipped with the M26. The program is praised for its accurate simulation of armor, and I assume that extends to the Korean war era tanks as they are minor variations of those modeled already. The infantry seems largely useful as target practice. I’ve yet to see the use of bazookas or anti-tank rifles (although that doesn’t mean they are not there). I have seen infantry occupying buildings, so it is possible that with the right setup, AI infantry could be used to model an ambush on the player’s armor.

There seem to be some additional UI factors giving me problems that I don’t see on youtube videos of gameplay. The use of the mouse to select things doesn’t seem to work as it should. Pressing the right mouse button seems to work only occasionally, often taking back to the center of the screen. Even more occasionally, it gives unknown commands to my “wingmen” (the other tanks under my command in my platoon.) The map function has horrible graphics, perhaps even by 1999 standards, and also seems to suffer by a partially working mouse.

All in all, I think Panzer Elite shows some potential for this purpose, but potential that I’ll likely never exploit. Without an existing base of period scenarios, I’ve got quite a learning curve ahead of me. First fixing UI bugs, then learning the scenario editor – not to mention learning the UI itself. Like so many simulation programs, all the commands need to be learned afresh. While I do plan to explore a little more, I don’t expect to find what I’m searching for.

Seoul Searching

Needing a quick fix, I returned some more scenarios from WinSPMBT.

This one models the days before the assault on Seoul post Inch’on landing. The U.S Marines are closing in on the city, and the North Korean’s have launched an early morning counter attack just west of Seoul.

The Marines have set up an ambush for the North Korean counter attack. It is working.

I left the minmap in the screenshot to try to give some perspective on the location of the encounter. One thing I find particularly fascinating is to look at the Google Map of this area today. What used to be small villages is now a heavily industrialized urban area.

There is also a scenario modeling combat in the heart of Seoul’s urban area (circa 1950). It provides what I expect from U.S. Cold War operations. Massive superiority and virtually unlimited fire support versus an entrenched enemy with prepared positions and booby traps. Nothing else I’ve looked at came close to giving me what I was expecting.

I’m advancing on the North Korean’s positions, trying to keep my combined forces combined. Easier said than done.

WinSPMBT remains the most fun of any of my options at this point. It almost manages to strike a balance between historical fidelity, realistic modeling and ease-of-use. Almost, but better than the alternatives.

I… WANT… TO… FLY… JETS!

Finally, I returned to IL-2 and support of these same late-September operations from the air. Unfortunately, I’m just not much of a virtual pilot – more likely to put my jet into a spin as actually take down an enemy. That aside, the Jet Age mod provides a handful of pre-configured scenarios with exactly what I was looking for. The scenarios involve flying F9F Panthers off of a carrier for both air superiority and ground support missions.

I’ll keep at it.

How do you solve a problem like Korea?

Tags

Cold War, Korean War, Obong-ni Ridge, Steel Panthers, Theatre of War 3, wargames, WinSPMBT

In my previous post, I found that the Theatre of War 3: Korea package didn’t quite measure up. Yet it seemed close enough that perhaps there is a possibility of redemption. Many of my criticisms were a function of scenario design, and so I wanted to look into putting together a historical scenario and if that improves my opinion.

To help out, I go to a game that, despite its age, is still one of the best treatments of this level of tactical warfare available. I am speaking of Steel Panthers. In one of its current incarnations, Steel Panthers: Main Battle Tank, the second scenario is a potential test for for my ideas.

The battlefield focuses on a ridge between two low-lying areas of rice farming. The North Korean invaders had crossed the Naktong River, where the armies of the South were holding a defensive perimeter centered at the city of Pusan. The ridge at Obong-Ni was a natural defensive point and became the focus of intense fighting over the course of several battles in August and September of 1950. From a wargaming standpoint, these battles were an inflection point, where the U.S. marines began turning their desperate defensive position into an offensive to retake South Korea.

The particular focus of this scenario on the first hour of the North Korean counter-offensive on August 17th. The communists had overwhelming numbers as well as superiority across different weapon classes (advantages in artillery and armor as well). The advantage wasn’t to last. As the US was able to bring up both superior numbers and weapons, they were able to overwhelm the Korea positions and force them back across the river within a matter of days. In this brief snapshot of the battle, however, the U.S. Marines were attempting to turn back an assault with T-34s using bazookas and Recoilless Rifles. However, the U.S./UN had air superiority. The Marines advantage is that, while they are likely unable to stop the enemy tanks on their own, they can call in airstrike after airstrike.

Pixelated Soldiers of a Forgotten War

Amazingly, before this exercise, I’ve never played Steel Panthers. The game itself is old enough to drink, having been released by SSI in 1995 (see timeline here).

I think I initially didn’t get it because of the price. Later, it began to look dated and criticisms of the computer opponent and “gaminess” deterred me. Even when the price was “nothing,” there was some on-line arguing about the functionality of the game and whether it actually ran properly. Long story short, I never got the game until just now when I wanted a comparison scenario.

I’m playing with the free version, which has a limited resolution. The choice is either to have a very small window that graphically looks decent, but is kind of hard for me to see text and other details – or to run it in full screen mode where, to quote someone far more articulate than I am, it “looks like every element on the screen was printed with a boiled potato.” I haven’t done enough to really evaluate the AI, but I’ll assume from the on-line criticism it remains a weakness.
Nevertheless, in many ways Steel Panthers has yet to be surpassed for what it does. It provides a highly historical (see previous) treatment of small-unit action from World War II through to the present. It does so with a wealth of available scenarios, a battle generator, and editing tools that are limited only by the skills of the program’s fans. I won’t dwell too much on either the game system or this scenario, but I’m sure I’ll be back to it later.

I will mention a couple things that really stood out as I played this. The system seems to have struck a pretty good balance between simplicity and realism. The number of “attacks” per turn feels pretty decent, while “defensive fire” is completely automated (subject to user-defined parameters). It’s slow compared to the more-modern “real time” systems, but better than most out there. Second – smoke. The computer uses smoke to mask its movements both retreating and attacking. This is one of the few games I’ve seen it used properly. I also like the mechanic where sustained firing on a defending hex creates smoke, which then obscures future shots into and through the hex. I’m sure it has been done elsewhere, but it hit me as something I hadn’t seen before.

As to the details of this battle, I found an archived turn-by-turn description for your viewing pleasure.

Observation point, village center, and the northern point of the defensive ridge. The graphics look much better in windowed mode than distorted to fit a full screen at modern resolution

Tank Country

Initially, the UN troops found themselves facing North Korean armor with infantry, generally a distinct disadvantage. One of the reasons is that the American high command didn’t consider Korea to be “tank country,” and so neglected to deploy armor formations. The necessity of countering T 34/85 attacks made them rethink that position.

The first step in creating the battle was to recreate the battlefield. One of the reasons I chose this particular battle is there are multiple sources available to recreate the battle down to the level of detail necessary for the Theatre of War engine.

My first thought was to attempt to edit terrain in one of the existing maps. The game comes with a map editor, which appears to support tools for everything from creating a new map from scratch to editing an existing one. Unfortunately, there is no documentation so I simply tried everything. As far as I can tell, the basic terrain cannot be modified. Terrain height and type appear to be fixed on the provided maps, essentially limiting all scenarios to the nine provided maps. This also seems to apply to the trees, for which an extensive set of menu options exist, but all appear to do nothing.

What is editable are the roads, and what they call “statics,” basically buildings and trenches. Add to this that the each map is actually larger than the playing area, and there is some variation to be had. The terrain can be repositioned within the battlefield window and then the villages, roads, etc. moved to create a wide variety of setups.

So my next step was to find some terrain that seem to approximate the battlefield in question, and then reposition roads, trenches and buildings to get something semi-historic. The process was tedious, but not impossible.

The battlefield taken from a military map from the period. The ridge is the series of crests following the dot-dash line passing diagonally through the center of this picture.

A sketch of the battlefield showing troop positions and movements. Note that this map is rotated about 40 degrees from North-South so that the ridge is straight up-and-down on the map. Also, the arrows depict troop movements from after the scenario we are modeling.

Google map version of roughly the same terrain as in the first map is enlightening about the actual terrain. Ridges alternate with low-lying rice-farm valleys.

Steel Panthers scenario, initial positions, zoomed out to match the other views.

With all this material to work with, I thought I had done pretty well at reproducing it on my TOW3 map.

From the air, I felt I had the gist of the battle taken care of, if I ignore the mountain where the second ridge should be.

Once I zoomed into the ground level view, however, it was clear to me that while the map may look fine, the terrain I was working with was far from what I was trying to model.

Down in the trenches, that isn’t really much of a ridge, now is it?

What looked like a good-enough approximation of the historic ridge line was really just a patch of rough terrain that really did nothing to block sight lines. The entire battlefield has pretty good Line Of Sight from one end to the other, meaning that as soon as I start running, everyone starts shooting at everyone else.

The TOW3 scenarios I’ve played start out with opposing forces separated by those large mountains you see in the background. If everyone starts out on the same side of those mountains, there does not seem to be much to limit contact.

Still, this is a learning exercise so, aside from the lost effort of placing all those trenches, what else did I learn. Is there still hope?

The next step, having created my terrain, was the placement of the forces. I started with the American side, and was able to mostly recreate the forces defending the ridge, as provided by the Steel Panthers order of battle. I left out the reinforcements scheduled to arrive through the scenario and also limited the off-board artillery and air support to what fit into the TOW3 editors parameters. But having got things pretty close to how I wanted them, I moved on to set up the North Korean attack.

And found that any more than about 3 tanks and a couple of mortars maxed out the unit allowance.

I’ve seen video of large numbers of units on screen at any one time. So the unit limit is likely in the editor and not the game. The game comes with, in addition to the map editor, an “Editor” and a “Simple Editor” for creating scenarios. I’ve used the “Simple Editor” in this. The battle itself is saved in an XML file, so there seem to be ways around the limit if needed.

But again, still a learning exercise. So I decided to scale down the scenario to the first 20 minutes, and exclude everything that wasn’t either initially on the front lines (for the U.S.) or in the first wave (for the North Koreans).

Even with my best efforts, I still couldn’t populate the North Korean side with enough for their human-wave style attacks. The key challenge of this scenario, however, are the North Korean T-34s, so I focused on getting the tank and mortar count right.

Upon running the scenario, the terrain problems were immediately apparent. I had placed the North Korea infantry at the far edge of the map, intending them to provide indirect fire (as in the SP scenario). I did not build any defensive system for them, which meant they were immediately targeted and fairly quickly destroyed. Absent any ability to alter terrain, it may be possible to shield indirect fire units with a combination of trenches and buildings, which can be moved in the editor.

In the Steel Panther’s scenario, the infantry advanced to a point where smoke could be targeted, which then covered the final advance. In the TOW3 version, the advancing infantry was both fewer in number and without terrain cover, and was eliminated before closing. The armor, on the other hand, had similar feel in both games – pretty much immune to infantry. One different was the U.S. recoiless rifle. Not effective against tanks in SP but deadly in TOW3.

Overall, the inability to add off-board support except through “purchases” limits the ability to get the historical situation correct. U.S. superiority via artillery and in the air is a key component of any Cold War or Modern conflict. On board artillery is an option, although that exacerbates the until limitation issue. In my setup, I added two 155mm howitzers to substitute for the missing off-board options. It should have been two 155mm batteries.

Furthermore, the on-board artillery seems to have targeting problems. As nearly as I can figure, the problem is that artillery cannot fire indirect under several circumstances. If the guns are loaded with direct-fire ammunition (i.e. AP shells), they cannot target indirect fire until the loaded ammunition is discharged at a direct fire target. Secondly, if the guns can shoot at targets directly, it seems that they will not fire indirectly. Or maybe not. Whenever I think I have it figured out, I seem to quickly find holes in my explanations. I can say it is very difficult to target the enemy with indirect howitzer fire, although indirect mortar fire and off-board artillery fire will work in the same circumstances.

The manual is of limited use. There are a few bits and pieces of information, but not the kind of detail necessary to resolve the problems I have. The manual seems primary written to explain the intricacies of armor penetration modeling. I assume the details are because the models are, in fact, implemented in the game, although even that wasn’t entirely clear. While it is nice to know that your game has high-fidelity models, the actual effect on gameplay (the experience of playing) would seem to be minimal.

Other Battles, Other Shortcomings

Following my Obong-Ni Ridge scenario, I looked at some of the other Steel Panther scenarios created for this same time frame. That is, the beginning of the U.S. offensive in the fall of 1950. I have not yet tried to implement matching TOW3 scenarios.

A few parting thoughts.

The units and weapons available in TOW3 are “representative” rather than exhaustive. Meaning, creating a historically accurate battle will almost certainly involve some substitutions. In all of the SP scenarios that I’m looking at, the U.S. Marines are using the M26 Pershing. This vehicle was already out-of-date at the start of the Korean War, but as the Marines were caught with a shortage of armor (because Korea wasn’t really tank country), they were forced to use what was available. In TOW3, one can use the M4 (Sherman) or the M46 (Patton). Only.

One of the available SP scenarios is very similar to what the automated Mission Builder will create in TOW3. The U.S. is move a small, mixed armor and infantry force along a road with poor sight lines and a village. Along that road, the North Koreans have units set up for an ambush. The U.S. has no air or artillery to call in. If there were a bit more customization capability to the TOW3 Mission generator, a satisfying approximation could be created. However, if I want strictly limit the types of units, I’d probably need to create the mission in the editor. I have yet to do so.

Another one of the SP mission involves repelling and assault on the recently recaptured Kimpo airport. The Steel Panthers documentation is lacking, in this, case, but it would seem to be a night action. Visibility is restricted to 150 yards, meaning the large flat ground of the airport does not allow engagement at a distance. This is another shortcoming of the TOW3 engine in which the variations in weather conditions seem, to me, to impact only the lighting effects rather than actual game play.

The last scenario I tried in Steel Panthers was simulating an Island landing, securing the harbor in preparation for the main Inch’on landings. It served as an illustration of how much is missing from TOW3. The scenario uses landing craft to place the U.S. Marines on the board and massive naval artillery bombardment to prepare the ground. The available air assets exceed my ability to properly use them, and there are also spotter aircraft both off board and on board (a helicopter). On the North Korean side, there are a variety of defensive positions, bunkers, caves and other cover as well as terrain that prevents the Marines from engaging at a safe distance. The size of the battlefield and the numbers engaged also clearly exceed what I could do with TOW3.

While I wouldn’t expect TOW3 to do all these things, its inability to do most of them points to why I have to, despite giving TOW3 a second chance, once again withhold a mark of approval.