Gary Grigsby's War in the East - AAR(eview) - Setting the Stage

This is an AAR of an scenario of the game Gary Grigsby's War in the East. I have included some comments and screenshots as a supplement of a review that will be published next week.

This is an hex and turn-based wargame with complex inner workings that becomes surprisingly approachable thanks to a well-thought and intuitive interface. There is no way around to the massiveness of it though, and it is recommended elsewhere that you cut your teeth on scenarios smaller than the "big one" that covers the whole war. I followed that advice and I can speak of cutting teeth but also of breaking molars while trying to chew Russian Armies in vast expanses of territory. Emphasis on fighting the Russians and not the game, which is good news.

You may need to click the image to read the text. The scenario I chose is "Road to Leningrad"

Army Group North was the least powerful formation of Operation Barbarossa. With two infantry armies and one so-called "Panzer Group" (by this time emotions ran high in the Wehrmacht against dignifying tank formations, no matter how big, with the "Army" name), this formation had so many valuable strategic targets within its area of operations that the original Hitler's plan (Directive No.21,  18 December 1940) specifically instructed that, after dealing with Russian forces in Belarus, Army Group Center would pivot north leaving Moscow un-touched and support Army Group North until Leningrad is captured. This north-bound pivot of Army Group Center was later slashed in a new directive, but Army Group North was still left with strategic objectives including the Russian Baltic Fleet bases, a sizeable amount of Russian Air Force bases and the Bolshevic-boss-city Leningrad.

All the above objectives would be worth if I would be playing the big scenario covering the whole war. However, this is a small subset of the start of the war and the scenario designer has made his picks. In the screen below, the scenario objectives are labeled with flags. In the game the map can be zoomed in or out with the mouse wheel.

The game features four zoom levels that can switched with the mouse wheel. The level of detail and area covered by each zoom level is more than adequate to plan an operation. Note the grey-shaded hexagons: they mark areas not reachable for the current scenario. 

 This is a game that simulates the biggest military campaign in history. Being put at the helm of it may be shocking to the beginner and one of my concerns was how accessible would be to grasp your own order of battle. First thing I liked: color-coding by armies (every unit of the same army has a unique color in its icon), as this helps to visualize your troops deployment. Once you click a unit icon, a side bar appears (it will include also other units located in the same terrain hexagon) showing more details about that unit. The icons in the side bar can be right-clicked to deliver even more information about the unit. In the image below, I clicked on the 6th Panzer Division on the map, then on the side bar and once I saw the info screen for the division I clicked on a specific type of equipment. Bam! Information about any type of individual equipment. I told you, the level of detail of this game is deep.

Although not unique to this game, clickeable informational panels and windows are a great asset. In this animation, I went from visualizing a whole army group deployment through the armor details of a single type of tank in just three clicks. 

But don't panic, the deep level of detail of this game doesn't mean that you will have to think or manually address issues like the correct size of sprockets for the threads of your tanks. More on this later when we deal with supplies.

Coming back to the order of battle, the game also features a traditional informational window that allows you to see your armies in a single page. The text on these windows is also clickeable.

You may need to click this image to read the text. von Leeb's forces, ready for action.

I'm a very visual type of fellow, and I prefer to grasp the organization of my forces on the map. This game features a color-coded highlighting system that may take some time to get acquainted with. In the image below I clicked on the 11th Infantry Division (highlighted  purple in the map) and immediately all command-chain-wise related units were also highlighted. The 11th Infantry Division's boss is I Corps, which was highlighted orange. The 11th Infantry Division's sister formations (also under the command of I Corps) were highlighted yellow. Very convenient, but I have to admit this highlighting system took me some time to assimilate.

Who is your boss, schutzen?

Almost ready to move onto the Baltic States? Not so fast, commander! What's the enemy intel?

This is an area where the game surprised me good and bad. Fog of war is affected by the so-called "detection levels" of every specific unit. The higher the "detection level" the easier the unit will be detected. The "detection level" of a unit is computed by its distance to the enemy and covering terrain. Although it is not stated in the manual, I have the suspicion that the composition of the unit also affects its "detection level" because I usually can see more armored units than infantry units behind the fence of  the forward line of troops. Units with high "detection levels" are more likely to be plotted in the map compared with units with lower ones. I'm not so thrilled about the AI not being held to the same fog of war restrictions than me: according to the manual, the AI "knows" every hexagon in the map as having enemy troops or not with the only restriction being not knowing the enemy unit's arm or strength unless the enemy unit has a "detection level" that warrants such knowledge. This computer opponent design will surely raise some eyebrows and I'm anxious to see how it works overall.

Let's do some operational reconnaissance with our luxurious air assets. F5 is the key to switch your cursor into the aerial reconnaissance mode. Once the air reconnaissance mode is activated, one has to right click on the location/hexagon of interest. The game engine handles the specific aircrafts and squadrons from which your pilots will fly the mission and the enemy units spotted will be plotted in the map according to their "detection levels". In general, the beauty of the intel gathered lies in the eye of the officer as you will have to deduce what the AI is up to. In my experience, every time I spot an enemy headquarters unit by aerial reconnaissance makes me want a sound mod that says "bingo!" because the AI tends to keep its ducks in a row (i.e. a properly echeloned formation).

Click the image for an expanded view. The blue, white and red icon in the center of the screen represents an aerial recon mission. Note the Russian HQ units (brown icons): the farther they are from the front line, the more likely they are higher in rank.

Armed with dubious information it is time now to think of a plan that brings certain victory to our forces. Such is the life of the S2 and S3 officers, ain't it?

Let's talk a bit about operational art. For an army that had not a single paragraph in its military doctrine about operational art (as we know it today), it is somewhat ironic that the Wehrmacht cleaned up western Europe during 1939 and 1940 with sharp, clean and decisive ... Ummmm ... Master pieces of operational art (?!). At the onset of WWII, the German Army believed in one thing and one thing only: the battle of annihilation. Not that they didn't believe in it before, this belief comes from times as far as the times of Frederick the Great. Kurz und vives (short and lively), the warrior king used to say about his preferred way of waging wars. Germany could never afford to wage long wars and thus the need to destroy the enemy in a short and decisive battle. To achieve a battle of annihilation, Moltke was very influential with his belief in encirclement by troops moving fast towards the enemy's rear, supplemented with forward pressure by front line troops. The enemy would then be forced to fight a battle with a reversed front. To keep my game in tune with the historical counterpart, playing as the Germans I will try to keep a strong focus in the destruction of the enemy.

Invading Russia is like entering a funnel through its narrow extreme. At the line of departure you are squeezing your forces to enter the fight and some 80 miles later you are diluting your troop density beyond recognition. It is hard to encircle anything with one regiment every other 20 miles or so. But in this particular scenario I have the benefit of a closed flank (the Baltic Sea) and only one encircling pincer arm is needed. Based on the intel I could gather so far, south of the Dvina River-Riga line I am facing at least two Soviet Armies and I will try to destroy them before moving to where most of the Soviet forces are likely to be: defending Leningrad.

Click the image for an expanded view. Plan for the initial operations in Army Group North's sector.

It will be impossible to sustain an offensive at Leningrad without controlling the forests and establishing a good supply chain near Pskov. Gaining control of the city of Pskov will mark the first phase of the operation. I will spearhead with the 4th PzGrp moving in the general direction of Pskov. One of the two corps of 4th PzGrp will be pivoting northwest as to cut off the Soviets retreat from the regions south of the Dvina river-Riga line. 18th Army will keep pressing the Russians in the general direction of Riga and 16th Army will cover the 4th PzGrp's right flank Only God knows what the situation will be after we establish a foothold a Pskov, and only after that I am willing to formulate a plan for the follow up operations.

In the next installment, the start of the offensive.

Cheers,

Squad Battles Modern War Released, Me Wanting a Day Off

Monday, 0800. I've just installed Squad Battles Modern War. Want to stay, but gotta go to work. Is there a suckiest time of the day (early morning of a weekday) and day of the week (Monday) to release a great game? :)

Completely blown away by this game. Plenty of interesting scenarios. There is one scenario about the assault on Dahaneh. I've looked for any type of tactical narrative about that battle almost everywhere and now I'm wargaming it. It doesn't get any better.

Please click the image for a better view.

Gotta go, fellows. Looking forward for the evening. :)

Cheers,

Restrepo - A Documentary by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington

I saw this one during the weekend and definitively is one of the best documentaries about the war in Afghanistan. The firefight scenes are almost surreal. Highly recommended movie.

Cheers,

Harpoon 3 ANW - Fighting the Wrong Battle with the Wrong Warships - Part 3

This is a continuation from a previous entry and the battle narrative with the most anticlimactic end I ever told ... And not because of my lousy writing or command skills!

This is where we left previously: I detached a total of four warships from TF02 and TF01 and ordered them west to intercept the Argentine carrier Veiniticinco de Mayo and its escorts. The new task force (TF08) is composed of HMS Amazon, HMS Battleaxe, HMS Argyll (all purpose frigates) and HMS Glasgow (area air defense destroyer).

The modest task force (westmost blue concentric circles icon in the middle of the screen) is sailing west to meet the Argentine carrier group (yellow squarish icons in the west). The selected unit ( blue concentric inverted semicircle) is a flight of 3 Harriers investigating and air contact. Their CAP waypoints are the green "X"s. The area inside the orange lines is a "threat to aircraft" I placed to avoid my own aircraft flying too close to the Argentine ships.

Time is 0105 now. TF08 is sailing at flank speed towards the Argentine carrier. It will be at least two hours until TF08 gets withing weapons range. The Sea Harriers CAP mission downed at least 7 Argentine aircrafts. Things are looking good so far.

Task force formation for scared admirals: because of the high threat of Argentine aircraft and warships, TF08 sails in a tight formation where almost every single weapon system from every warship can support each other. The green outer circle represents a range of 10 nm. Warships of TF08 are represented by blue circular icons.

Time is now 0223. TF08 is getting close to the Argentine carrier. On the left panel, TF08's tight formation makes it very difficult to pinpoint the exact location of the Argentine warships. Sensors need to be more widely spread to pinpoint surface contacts effectively, but I am more concerned about mutual support right now. On the right panel, a hiatus in the CAP missions has left TF08 exposed to Argentine aircraft. The inverted yellow half-square in the right panel turned out to be a 2-aircraft flight of A-4s which was shot down at close range.

Time is now 0245. TF08 receives the first timid missile strike from the Argentines. In the bottom right panel, an Argentine anti-ship missile (red M icon) is about to be intercepted by one of ours. In the top right panel, note how I messed up the CAP missions and ended up with single aircrafts flying west. Thankfully, the Argentines have suffered tremendous air losses in the past two hours and the single Sea Harrier was brought back to safety.

After some maneuvering complications TF08 (blue concentric circular icons) fires its first anti-ship missile. Time is 0354. TF08 has issues tracking the Argentine warships, now located at an estimated range of less than 30 nm. Three single anti-surface missiles fail to guide. We need to close even more.

0439, ARA Hercules (Type 42 Destroyer, labeled as contact D044) fires a barrage of missiles. Although it was a  nerve-wrecking experience, TF08 manages to shoot down all of them. The Argentine carrier Veinticinco de Mayo is the northmost surface contact (yellow square). TF08 continues to fire salvos of 2-4 missiles onto the carrier, but no hits are confirmed.

0503. The Argentine escorts (two yellow squares plus the red romboid icons sailing southeast) leave the Veinticinco de Mayo (yellow square icon near the TF08) behind. The Veinticinco de Mayo is evidently damaged and immobile as we approach for the final kill.

0510. The Veinticinco de Mayo (red romboid icon near TF08) is within sight of TF08 and on fire. TF08 engages the carrier  with its good ole Bofors naval guns. 

And then Harpoon 3 crashed to desktop! No warning, not even a "this program has encountered a problem and needs to close" message. Just the sound of my voice calling expletives. Sudden death ...

The most interesting part of the battle was to come. I had my doubts about how much damage TF08 could do to the Argentine Navy, but I underestimated these four warships. I wonder how the rest of the battle would have unfolded. Was it a good idea to detach warships from the main body of the British force?

Lessons learned:
-Save, save and then save some more. It is my first crash in Harpoon 3, but it is better to be safe than sorry
-A close formation is good for mutual support (we defeated a lot of Argentine missile salvos and air attacks), but terrible for tracking enemy warships
-Air cover:  have a solid plan to avoid gaps in the patrols
-Once you know that an enemy warship is no longer combat-capable, move towards other threats. I focused too much on the Veinticinco de Mayo and I should have started to move onto the escorts as soon as I saw the Argentine carrier lagging behind them


Cheers,

Merry Christmas!

Hoping you have a wonderful Christmas, fellows!

Cheers,

Squad Battles Modern War Out Monday, Combat Mission Battle for Normandy Aiming for February 2011

Gee, I take a short trip and look what happens.

John Tiller's Squad Battles Modern War will be available next Monday. When Tiller said "aggressive publication schedule", he meant it. Credit card ready, bring it on!

Squad Battles Modern War

Battlefront has a name for it's next Combat Mission iteration: Combat Mission Battle for Normandy. Looking great. I've seen screenshots showing rivers ... and bridges. Yeah! Hoping for an early release of this one.

Family picture.

Cheers,

Old Games/Sims Woes

A new entry for the "Maneuver Warfare: a Wargamer's Notebook" is in the works. I wanted it to include some combat flight simulator experience of F-86 Sabres and Mig-15s dogfighting over Korea. So I went and dusted off my copy of Mig Alley and tried to install it on my Win7 computer. It never ran ... At a certain point even other games stopped working (the installer must have overwritten some DirectX files) ... Big pain.

Installing Mig Alley in my oldest XP computer made the trick. "Setup.exe" must be ran in Win98 compatibility mode and that's it. That will probably do the trick in the Win7, but I'm not going to take any more chances.

This is me flying a Mig-15.

Yours truly practicing the flying gaits in some remote area of South Korea.

Well, it looks ugly. It's a 11 years old simulator. You may wonder why I chose Mig Alley and not any of the other add-on/mods for IL2-1946 or Strike Fighters. I read that Korean War dogfighting is nowhere more authentic in terms of flight models than in Mig Alley, but I have no proof of anything. What's your experience with the before mentioned mods?

And speaking of flight models. I messed up with trimming, climbing and descending in the F-86 until 2 a.m. last night. The F-86 Sabre, with the trim in neutral, flights a beautiful straight and level 430-450 KIAS with the engine at 83%.

I better get into some serious dogfighting now. I've lost no less than 5 hours troubleshooting this thing.

Cheers,

Less is more? - US Army Wargames Big and Small

The print version of Training and Simulation Journal (TSJ) came packed with good reading.

There is a forum type discussion about an earlier feature about Jim Lunsford's Follow me, an easy-to-learn, low-budget tactical game that is being used in the U.S. Military Academy. In this issue of TSJ, Col. John Surdu explains that simple and cheap war games are useful, but complex and expensive war games (like Warsim and OneSAF) are not to be scorched because they are validated and verified. He writes: "do we understand where there might be negative learning because the combat effects [in simple war games] are incorrect?". James Sterrett (deputy lead of the simulations group at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, CGSC) responds: "[expensive and complex war games] can provide great execution-centric learning environments, but the overhead they require doesn't support the majority of the education executed at the CGSC". Jim Lunsford gets the final words of the discussion: "no matter how good the game may appear to be, the quality of training will always depend on the instructor's ability to shape learning".

Big budgets but big requirements. I wouldn't like to be in the shoes of the contractors who design these big US Army simulations. In a lighter note, Michael Peck wrote a review of Civilization V, a game that apparently has come back to its roots. From his review, quote of the day:

"It is the peculiar nature of popular video games and rock bands that they begin with one style, swell with excess until they are barely recognizable, and then return to their roots"

Food for thought.

Cheers,

Media Warfare: ProSIM announces the publication of "Media War"

Pat Proctor, the man who brought us hours of great tactical war gaming with ProSIM, has been busy writing.


From his blog:

Media Warfare: ProSIM announces the publication of "Media War"

In Operation Iraqi Freedom, insurgent and terrorist groups have developed the capability to use small, relatively insignificant tactical attacks, amplified through the megaphone of the media, to erode the will of the American public to prosecute the war. This capability has neutralized the overwhelming advantage the US military has in firepower in Iraq by bypassing it completely.

Available as an e-book from Amazon.

Looking forward to read your book, Pat.

Cheers,

Gary Grigsby's War in the East - Shaping Operations Against the AI, Intentional and Not

I was playing as the Germans in the "Road to Leningrad" scenario of Gary Grigsby's War in the East and after enjoying the breakthrough cakewalk (should we call it "breakthrough"?) things start to get interesting once I sink the threads of my panzers in the hugeness of the theater of operations.

Under my command, Army Group North, the least powerful of all German army groups at the onset of the Russo-German War. Our objective is to capture Leningrad. Army Group North is composed of two Armies (16th and 18th, infantry), and the 4th Panzer Group (4th PzGrp, armored). The schwerpunkt for the first part of this operation is the 4th PzGrp, which will conduct a deep penetration to capture the intermediate objective Pskov, some 230+ miles beyond the start line. Because Army Group North as a whole has very limited operational mobility (too much infantry), the 4th PzGrp will capture and pause at Pskov and this city will be the springboard for the final Army Group North's attack on Leningrad.

4th PzGrp cut through the Soviets like a knife, crossed the Daugava river and now is preparing to capture Pskov.

Click the image for a better view. With the infantry hundreds of miles behind, the 4th PzGrp approaches Pskov through the east (LVI Pz. Corps) and the south (XXXXI Pz. Corps).  I wanted to approach Pskov with XXXXI Pz. Corps moving west of the Velikaya river, but as seen here, but the 6thPzDiv (outlined fucsia) has bumped into two Soviet infantry divisions. 

Click the image for a better view. Annoyed at the perspective of conducting an corps-sized attack across a river, I instead move the XXXXI PzCorp (counters outlined fucsia and yellow) towards Pskov but east of the Velikaya river (black arrow was added with an image editing software).

Click the image for a better view. Following my XXXXI Pz Corps move north, the two Soviet infantry divisions moved out. Their move was not east because the Totenkopf Motorized Division (counter highlighted fucsia) has moved through that terrain (black arrow) and didn't find them. It is likely that at least one of the Soviet infantry divisions has moved to reinforce Pskov.

Pskov fell during the week of July 10, 1941 amid substantial loss of lives and equipment. It was not wise to attack the city from a single direction and across a river. But the war gamer here is happy to see the AI in this game reacting in this way to his moves. In other opportunities I've noticed also that the AI tends to retreat when there is a threat of encirclement. Besides of an interesting opponent, the AI in War in the East offers the solo player the possibility to conduct the so-called "decisive" and "shaping" operations.

Cheers,