Learning the complexities of close air support

After getting LOMAC Flaming Cliffs 2.0 (FC2.0), I have been reading quite a bit about close air support (CAS) with the A-10. Close air support is one of the most complicated air operations and until we get the highly anticipated DCS A-10, we will have to settle for the rather simplistic system in FC2.0.


I was looking around for other simulators where you can have some of the complexities of CAS missions, in particular the interaction with forward controllers. It is rather odd that I found a very complex system of interacting with ground "controllers" in the fantasy game "Dragonester".

Once you are in the sky as a pilot (Dragon knight in this game), the main challenge is to interact with ground controllers (elves in this case). As in real life all is against you: your flying also needs attention, the elves have a very limited view of the battle because of their short height ...
(please click the "read more" link below for the full article)

Scourge of War

I've got this one a couple of days ago. Spent some time trying to get a smooth game play in my aging computer. A lower tree density made the trick. So it goes guys, my virtual version of Pennsylvania will be a tad barren. Note to self: I have to upgrade my computer. All those simulators I am running at medium to high visual settings are not that hardware-intensive after all.

As it was with the old MadMinute Games, the canned scenarios are incredibly well designed. It's a joy to see all you have read in books come alive.

At least the command and control features of Take Command 2nd Mannasas are still there. Now you can also give detailed orders via courier.

Maximum draw distance is caped to 2,000 yards. No way to see the lay of the ground beyond that (other than moving your camera forward). Maybe this is moddable?

Tactical, 2-D map. Very neat period map, but it doesn't show tactically relevant terrain features. It would be cool to issue orders from it.

Disappointed so far with it.

For 4+ years of developing time, I was expecting this one to be revolutionary or evolutionary compared to Take Command 2nd Mannasas. It is neither.  Maybe it will grow in me, but I have a bad feeling about this game.

I will not review this game. But I am looking forward to see what professional reviewers have to say about this one.

Cheers,

LockOn Gets a DCS Facelift

There is no shortage of quality war simulations. Last Friday, Eagle Dynamics (the same guys behind DCS Black Shark) have released the Flaming Cliffs 2.0 add on. This add on brings LockOn and LockOn Flaming Cliffs users up to the DCS engine used by DCS Black Shark.

Since I'm a sucker for the A10, two screenshots of this aircraft below. Tail sign says MD (Maryland), just where I live now. :)

They say that now you can play head to head with other fans running DCS Black Shark. Is that cool or what?

Cheers,

The Red Pill Goes Nuclear!

Man, the team developing  The Red Pill has released a new game play story. A nuclear striker on the Kola peninsula! Getting better and better, guys. Looking forward for this simulaiton.

The white circles are the shock waves from the tactical nukes.

Please take a look at the full story here. Plenty of new screenshots!

Cheers,

VBS2 Lite JCOVE: Patrols

I don't know about other non-airborne units of the British Army, but every Parachute Battalion usually has a platoon or so of so-called "patrols".  The patrols platoon is a group of Paras taken from the regular rank (there is no lad that you can name "regular" in the Paras, but you get my drift ) and are specially trained in reconnaissance and intelligence gathering.

At least in Afghanistan, these guys frequently use the Land Rover Weapons Mount Installation Kit (WMIK), pictured above. This truck has a .50 cal in the rear ring-mount and a general purpose machine gun (GPMG) in the passenger side. I've seen these in Combat Mission Shock Force but usually kept them far from the main action. One thing is to command these things from the third person view in Combat Mission ... Yesterday I got a chance to get into a virtual firefight against insurgents with this thing and boy, how do these patrol guys dare to go looking for trouble with this un-armored vehicles? The .50 packs a lot of punch, but you all crew is exposed to enemy fire. My hat goes off to the brave souls that do this in real life!

Cheers,

Rise of Prussia Review

The eighteenth century is almost universally dubbed the "age of limited warfare". For a century that witnessed the first global conflict in record (the Seven Years War), that's indeed a funny nickname. During the Seven Years War, rulers from every cardinal point of Europe threw con gusto their armies into one battle after the other. Bloody battles where casualty rates could easily approach forty percent of a whole army. If there was anything limited during the Seven Years War, it was more the result of the individual armies’ small bag of tricks rather than an agreement to wage war in gentlemanly terms. Primitive logistics, lousy communications, poor road networks, a good share of amateur generalship, and relatively small armies resulted in a unique way of fighting wars that was in no way less hard on soldiers and horses. The day that didn’t bring battle, it did bring the endless march: these were tiny forces meandering in vast expanses of territory. Even a seasoned general could pursue the enemy for weeks without achieving anything but the exhaustion of its own army. Some generals developed a penchant for "clever marches" and in many circles of officer's corps there was a lingering idea that the way to win a war was to exhaust the enemy through maneuver, with battle being just a desperate measure. Capturing the crucial aspects of warfare during the Seven Years War in an enjoyable war game is no small feat, and AGEOD’s “Rise of Prussia” delivers the goods without breaking a sweat.


Readers are strongly encouraged to click on the images to see them expanded. Most images have suffered some quality degradation during the conversion to a jpg format. 

“Rise of Prussia” is a WEGO turn based war game focused in the operational level of warfare (or projets de campagne in eighteenth century's parlance). The player is presented with a artistic rendition of eighteenth century central Europe (just for simplicity I will call it a map in this review, but this thing is worth of printing and hanging in a wall). This map is divided in regions that have specific terrain features (woods, hills, clear, mountains, etc) that affect movement and combat. Generals, armies, corps, brigades and regiments are represented by markers that the player can click to learn the specific details of the unit. The attributes of each unit go from the obvious (strength, movement speed, ammunition), passing through the necessary (supplies, morale, cohesion) and ending in attributes that are ignored in most operational-level games (like individual generals having personal strengths like logistics, rallying, ability to evade detection and more). Rise of Prussia has a panoply of historically correct unit types for all combat arms and a portrait of what a man in the unit looks like is available after a few clicks. 

Before starting to move his forces around, the player should carefully inspect and organize them because this war game features a chain of command structure that will severely penalize a hastily organized force with a lousy leader. To order a unit to move its icon needs to be dragged onto a neighboring region. A path for the planned movement and a transparent marker of the unit at the destination will appear, along with a number indicating the number of days the move it will take. 

All orders issued, the player hits the next turn button and the map comes to life with all units, player's and opponent's, moving simultaneously according to their marching plans. Even the weather changes, with the not-unusual blizzard or rain-in-your-parade miseries throwing your plans out of schedule. Because each turn represents 15 days of action, the player not only needs to provide well-thought marching orders but also defensive or offensive stance and rules of engagement to his troops. This allows player's generals to take action while they are unsupervised by the player during the simultaneous turn resolution. These stances and rules of engagement come in different shades of gray, ranging from full offense (attack whatever comes into sight) to unashamed cowardice (run for the hills at first sight of the enemy). 

When opposing forces set feet (or hooves) into the same map region, the game engine calculates if a battle is to be fought. This calculation takes into account the terrain of the region, the stance, rules of engagement, size and type of the unit plus the forces leader's abilities to present or evade battle. Battles are resolved by the game engine automatically in a series of pulses that can span for several days. Battle resolution is presented to the player as a circular display showing the force ratios and the number of troops going down as the carnage progresses. A victor will emerge along with a battle report explaining the particulars. Rise of Prussia is the first of the series to include a detailed battle report that shows how every unit has performed. When all the battles and movements for the 15 days of the turn have been computed, the player can issue orders again.

We are cleaning up! A tactical battle being resolved. On the left side of the circular dial, we the Prussians.

It is impossible to ignore that during this struggle between Prussians and Austrians (plus the rest of the world) there was a commander of sorts fighting for one side. Commanding the Prussians, King Frederick the Great was one of those military leaders that is the stuff of legends. You may argue about his persona, psychological baggage, agenda and self marketing. But you have to agree that it takes some serious gonads to bully a bunch of bulls surrounding you at biting distance like Frederick did with the Austrians, Swedish, French and Russians. That's my excuse for first playing Rise of Prussia as the Prussians only, but be aware that you can play as the Austrians and their allies too. 

Playing as king Frederick, the first thing in order was to organize my forces accordingly and this where the fun starts. Choosing the right general for the right mission is crucial, but besides skills you have to watch for seniority (promoting a young rising star could result in a decline in the national morale). I was happy that I could promote von Schwerin but less than thrilled about promoting Wilhem von Preussen, who turned out to be good at nothing. When making this type of decisions, I got a sensation of being a commander in chief that no other counter-pushing war game ever gave me. I am not a big fan of the little portraits in the markers of each general (see next paragraph), but I have to confess that seeing a face there made me develop mild digital grudges against some of my generals. Commanding a nation or kingdom at war is all about the people fighting it, after all. von Schwerin got a full army for himself at Breslau, yet short in men and cavalry. Should I recruit more people, or just move some troops down to Breslau? These are the types of questions that the player is likely to face besides the ones about pure combat. 

The other issue that I had to deal early on is supplies. Fortunately, Rise of Prussia has a supply system that is deep enough to have an effect on the operations but no so convoluted that it requires a Ph.D. in logistics to understand it. The placement of supply depots and magazines in Rise of Prussia really defines how war is waged. A new addition to the engine is the possibility to build magazines using some of the supply trains, which really comes in handy while on campaign. All of these supply issues result in operations that are never too deep into enemy territory, just like it was in real life. 

Planning an operation in Rise of Prussia is just fantastic. You can plot march orders for a group of units and since you get an estimate of the amount of days each step will take, you can plan very complex operations and have a visual cue of how it will hopefully play out. The part I most enjoyed was ordering cavalry screens and deep reconnaissance missions (don't forget to issue the right stance to them!). The computer opponent is not scripted, competent and believable. This results in operations that are very fluid with marches and counter-marches very similar to the ones described in the history books. In my solo games, the Austrians were very aggressive and fond of exploiting weak spots, so I had to assume an offensive posture to keep them checked. I was really surprised of how much of the basic principles of modern operational art can be used to play Rise of Prussia. At certain point I had chapter 7 of the US Army Field Manual 3-0 (operations) in one of the monitors of my computer and Rise of Prussia in the other, trying to decide if von Schwerin's Army was to conduct a shaping or a decisive operation. 

The day of battle is also a treat: seeing the swing of that circular dial move back and forward when troops rout or arrive to the battlefield reminds me a bit of listening a soccer match on the radio when I was a kid. Battles tend to be pretty devastating, specially when one of the generals in command is in the low percentile of the martial IQ bell curve. When I started playing this game I tended to consider tactical battles like something more or less out of my control. I was thrilled to later find out in the manual that some restrictive terrain, like mountains or hills, will affect how troops deploy. So, you can have a small force blocking a mountain pass, with the enemy never being able to deploy more troops than yours because of the terrain!

A single click highlights the strategically important cities (blue are cities the player holds, light brown the ones the enemy does).

It is difficult to say anything negative about Rise of Prussia. But there some aspects of this game I wished were a bit different. Given the tremendous success that AGEOD had with previous games, I'd label the next points more like personal peeves rather than reasoned criticism. 

 (i) "The Ukraine is weak": real life military symbols are compact and informative, allowing you to grasp your military power with just a glance. In Rise of Prussia you have the so-called "troop display markers" (TDMs), which are true pieces of art but they fall a bit short to tell what's the unit's composition and strength. At the bottom of the TDMs there is a gauge with bullets representing four command points, and off course you can click on the marker to find out the composition and strength (by hitting the Ctrl key you eventually find out how many men and horses the unit has). But there is no way to see all this information all at once for more than one TDM. Also, I've seen TDMs representing a cavalry brigade that for all purposes looked no different than an infantry brigade. I would love TDMs that display both the amount of men/horses and the combat arms in an unit. 

(ii) "An army of one": the command structure and its effect on gameplay is on of the strongest features of Rise of Prussia. The game engine is a jewel of design on how it manages to represent complex military formations with exquisite precision without becoming a monster game with thousands of counters. It is rather silly that this design goodness is somehow eclipsed by a not-so-user-friendly way of assembling anything bigger than a brigade. It is easy to get lost while shuffling regiments from one Corps to another. The fact that single generals have TDMs that have the same size in pixels and overall appearance (except for the tiny damn green bullets) than the TDMs of a force under their command was sometimes confusing. At a certain game, I had a TDM near Koeniggratz. I thought it was a brigade but it was actually a single guy and his horse, a Prussian version of "Zorro" if you will. It was my fault, but at my age those little green bullets are hard to see.

(iii) "Where's Waldo?": as I said before the map and the TDMs are aesthetically great. Both appear to be rendered using the same dynamic range and with the map zoomed out the TDMs tend to be difficult to find when there is snow and mud on the ground. I usually activate any of the political map filter to circumvent that, but it would be great if the game had another way to increase the contrast between the TDMs and the map. None of the points above are game killers. I see Rise of Prussia as a solid simulation of warfare that somehow has outgrown AGEOD's original board-game-style interface and presentation. 

Command and control. The area shaded blue is King's Frederick command radius. Note how some of the TDM's portrait backgrounds are in red. Those are Corps under Frederick's Army. The icons on the right, on top of the map, show how many armies you have in the field.

In closing, although it doesn't feature any ground breaking gameplay additions to AGEOD's engine, Rise of Prussia is a solid war game that scores straight As in every subject and adds to a line of finely crafted products. The topic is great (the beginning of a military tradition of fighting strategically surrounded, an early example of coalition warfare), the audiovisual presentation is superb and the gameplay portrays eighteenth century warfare like no other computer war game out there.

Body count: this battle report has nothing but good news for the Prussians.

The new detailed battle report. Good to find out who was sleeping on the job.

We are Prussians, and we suck at siege warfare. Dear von Schwerin (the TDM with a blue background portrait) you better get your act together and storm that city because the enemy is approaching from everywhere. 

Excuse me, have you seen my Corps? I left it here, somewhere, before the blizzard.

Cheers,

Scourge of War to have activation-based DRM

As the launch of this American Civil War 3D tactical war game "Scourge of War" approaches, it  was revealed that the game will use an activation-based DRM system.

The developer, Norb Timpko (also known as "coder" at some discussion forums) has held an open discussion at his website about this very issue.

Better safe than sorry, Mr. Timpko! The intellectual property surrounding this war game has already been abused at least once.

Cheers,

Battlefront.com Under Cyber Attack!

Gah!


This morning I got this e-mail from Battlefront.com:


Battlefront Press Release 23 March 2010 --- We are proudly presenting new update client for all games from battlefront for FREE. You can download client here. Turn off your antivirus, as it could recognize it as spam or virus because of high encryption.


and after that a link to some exe file. Very fishy.
It turns out that the e-mail is not legit. The exe is almost certainly harmful and Battlefront is scrambling to fix the issue. If you receive a similar e-mail, trash it at once, please!


Cheers,

VBS2 Lite US Army: Distribution to Civilians is Legal According to One Source

There is quite a brouhaha regarding VBS2 Lite US Army. After the initial news about this simulation being available to civilians, some fans have indicated that the EULA contains very explicit language stating the contrary.

Bob Dalton, BCKS facilitator for the Official MilGaming Community of Practice (a joint partnership of BCKS, TCM Gaming and PEO STRI) explains in this thread at Military.com:

Regarding the VBS2 US Army Lite EULA: There was a question about the EULA and the fact that eveyone was told that there are no distribution restrictions and anyone can have a copy.

A question was posted about the conflict between the statement and the EULA at the official and restricted BCKS MilGaming Community of Practice on 9 Mar 2010.

Here is the unclassified reply that was posted the same day to that question by the Army Program Manager for VBS2 Lite at PEO STRI:

"Greetings from the VBS2 Program Manager (PM): We are in the process of changing the verbiage on the license agreement to reflect the actual ULA for VBS2 Lite. The new license agreement enables the Government to provide VBS2 Lite to anyone. VBS2 Lite is limited in that there is no SDK, it has no real time editor or AAR capability and players are limited to 12 or fewer linked in a game. We will post the new ULA as soon as we receive it from the vendor. For now we have multiple verbal and email confirmations of the agreement from the developer."

Need confirmation? This can be verified by anyone who is a member of the U.S. Army or the DA civilian workforce at the U.S. Army MilGaming Community of Practice at:

https://milgaming.bcks.army.mil

Cheers,

TacNuggets #2: My (AT) Gun is Bigger than Yours

It was about time for a second tactical snack!
(or for a new post, for that matter. I've been quite busy with other unhealthy distractions, like my day job)

Today, the sad story of how my borzois got trapped in a badly deployed defense line.

The game: Achtung Panzer Kharkov 1943
Topic: The use of AT guns in the defense.

Please click "read more" to see the full entry. Plenty of screen shots inside.