Waiting for the Guns

Waiting for my artillery to unlimber before advancing at Aughrim

As wargamers, we are often guilty of taking actions with our pixeltruppen that no real general in his right mind would ever do. Casualties in wargames often exceed even the worst defeats real armies suffered, even when you win the game!

Planning for Hunting Bears

It's been a very busy few weeks this month! Today is the first day since returning from Origins that have had the time and energy to blog. When I can, I'll blog some about the fantastic time I had at Origins. Today, though, I want to apply some of what I learned at Origins, specifically from the wonderful Staff Wargaming sessions run by Dr. James Sterrett and Mark Graves (USA Retired).

Specifically, I'm going to apply the planning approach we used during these sessions to the first US campaign scenario from Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm. I'm partial to doing this with Flashpoint Campaigns because it's really perfect for this sort of planning. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting Jim Snyder and Rob Crandall of On Target Simulations at Origins and discussing the game with them as well as using it during the Staff Wargaming sessions. I'm going to run through the process of terrain analysis using OCOKA, develop several potential enemy Courses of Action (COAs) and then plan my defense based on those COAs. To begin with, lets get an overview of the battlefield.

An overview of the battlefield in Google Earth. The Soviets will be advancing from east of Buchholz toward the western edge of the map on the route to Bremen. Note that the game map stops on an east-west line just south of Schierhorn-Tostedt.

The Importance of Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB)

One of my major failings as a virtual commander is that I'm so eager to get maneuvering and comes to grips with the enemy that I often fail to sufficiently plan and prepare for the engagement. In my younger days of primarily playing RTS style games this was fine. As I graduated to playing more serious conflict simulations though the cost of this recklessness was more and more lost games and failed scenarios.  The more I gravitated toward simulations actually used for training people responsible for fighting real wars, the more obvious it became that a "jump in and charge" approach wouldn't work.

Over the past few years I've tried to learn through reading and observation.  Recently, I've been fortunate enough not just to benefit from the experience of fellow bloggers, but to read Bil Hardenberger's excellent Battle Drill blog.  Bil has done a series of posts recently about recon, which culminated in a guest post from his friend Lieutenant Colonel Scott Coulsen, a serving armor officer in the US Army.  I should also mention the excellent advice of LTC Mark Gibson, also a serving officer in the Royal Australian Armored Corps.

Perhaps the most important thing I've learned from reading what these gentlemen have written is the importance of taking the time before the engagement to prepare by closely examining the terrain and developing an idea of the various courses of action that the enemy might use to reach his objectives.  Then, develop plans to discover and validate which plan he is executing, and only then develop a plan to counter his moves.  Unlike my standard approach of charging in, guns blazing, this means taking plenty of time up front to think things through, and then conducting thorough reconnaissance aimed at developing as full a picture of the enemy's movements and positions as possible prior to committing one's main effort.

Units from KG von Bassler conduct recon and screening for 14 Panzer near Taganrog

New Command Beta Build

Command Modern Air Naval Operations has a new beta build out with an impressive features list. Combined with the Matrix holiday sale pricing, it might be a good time to grab this if you've been holding off.
I'll definitely be firing this up this weekend, along with the latest version of Flashpoint Campaigns Red Storm, which has a new West German campaign available.

Edit: As Tim points out below, Command is not on the Matrix Holiday Sale list.  Which is too bad on their part, and bad on my part for assuming it was!  It's still a great game and the new features are very welcome. Unfortunately it isn't any more affordable.

Spelk's excellent Command AAR

If you're at all interested in how Command plays, don't miss the excellent AAR Spelk has put together for the first tutorial mission.  This scenario will probably be your first interaction with the simulation, and Spelk does a great job amplifying on the instructions from the tutorial to make your first play through easier and more sensible.

More Command

Some more Command screenshots.  I'm just getting started really learning this, but am getting an itch to try some scenario creation.  This AAR really illustrates the capabilities of the engine.  I think this just might interest me in creating some linked "story scenarios" using Command and CMSF, and maybe Arma II.

Firing TLAMs against some land targets.

Tutorial mission 3.  Engaging a hostile missile boat, using my helo to observe while keeping my DDGs emissions silent.

Sub hunting.

More sub hunting, up close.  An ASW helo hovers over the localized sub, while the torpedo it dropped earlier hunts.  To the north is a sonobouy.

Naval gunfire sinks the damaged hostile missile boat. Yes, those are the individual rounds in flight.

Norwegian missile boats and an FFG versus incoming Soviet ships.

While not yet perfect, Command is what I always wanted Harpoon to be but never was.  I think this is what the guys at Warfaresims.com were after, and they've done a great job.  I think this is going to be a great sandbox naval warfare sim, playable for hundreds of hours like Arma II and the Combat Mission games.

Command - Modern Naval/Air Operations

I've spent the evening playing Command: Modern Air/Naval Operations, and even though I've only played the first tutorial scenario, I'm pretty pleased with the game thus far.  I didn't run into any obvious bugs; though I did notice some odd mission behavior by the planes assigned to a SEAD patrol mission.  This may well have been due to my own lack of understanding of how the game works as anything else.

I was so engrossed in playing I forgot to grab any screenshots, but I will tomorrow.  Until then, here's a quick snap of the map at the beginning of the Basic Air Operations Tutorial:

If you've played Harpoon on the PC, you'll find this easy to pick up.  The UI is much cleaner but conceptually many things are the same.  I felt right at home in the Mission Editor, for example.

I think I'm going to have a lot of fun with this.