The US Army?

Yeah.. . 12 scenarios after about as many years is quite a feat. The fact that you have to buy the map editor from hps for another 30 bucks may have been a factor. Not a very smart move when you're not planning on providing much content yourself...

Odd, with all the attention to detail under the hood you'd think this would have been the goto land combat wargame of the last decade. If this wasn't, what was?

What I understood, is that we are playing the civy version. There is a military one and if you prove them that you belong to US DoD, you might have access to more.

Also you can contact their support and ask for more scenarios, as they might direct you to more.

I solve my window problem, so I will be able to experience the beast.

lol!...That looks a little more professional I'd say!

Not too impressed by POA2 so far honestly. The smaller scenarios I've looked at were on the simplistic side (three technicals attack an airfield... I hosed them with the .50s and that was that I guess). A lot of this (most?) could probably be simulated better in Combat Mission or Steel Beasts Pro PE nowdays.

It's also really slow going, even on today's computers. I feel for the guys that tried this 10 years ago.

I'll try it some more tomorrow.

Between the post of James McKenzie-Smith and Apocalypse31, I was reminded that VBS2 and VBS3 might do a better HC job that their commercial counterpart Arma 2 and 3. I'll have to visit that possibility too.

Possibly, but I doubt any improvements are worth the price of admission. ArmA3 is moving ahead in leaps and bounds right now. Not sure about VBS.

Honestly, considering the interface, control and simulation limitations one is willing to put up with for older titles like POA2 - it would only be fair to apply similar latitude to other titles. One tends to judge something more harshly when it is almost there but not quite than when it has very obvious shortcomings that most likely won't be addressed.

E.g., as I said, I haven't seen anything so far in POA2 that I didn't feel could be simulated more realistically and especially more fluidly in CMBS or SBproPE. There's something odd about simulating individual two round bursts of .50cal but to only use a terrain tile approximation of the fact that the target might be in a building. Or having to do your own fiddling to find LOS to the target. In ArmA3 or SBproPE, a courtyard wall is a courtyard wall. Hull down is hull down (CM still can't do that on its own due to engine limitations). You say 'move to contact' and the unit will, and then look for suitable cover on its own. In POA2, the technical and eight infantry (with an RPG, no less) hiding in the residential area was just a matter of rolling the die often enough. They were at a huge tactical advantage but it didn't play out, I assume because that tactical advantage was only approximated.

So far in my shortlist it's Steel Beasts Pro PE, Combat Mission Shock Force and (especially) Black Sea, Flashpoint: Red Storm, ArmA3, Battle Command (within its current limitations of no maneuver AI), CMANO (within the scope of its simulation). They all have their shortcomings but usually still manage to suspend my disbelief for the full duration of a game.

I already swallowed the cost of VBS2 and 3 a while ago, so it would be sad if I would not try. I have huge maps for VBS2.

I agree with you about the dynamic of failing close to the goal. It represents such a frustration that people will judge that action more severely and provides lengthy comments about it, hoping the developers to read the comments and adjust.

I will also try Arma3 in that perspective.

I saw the AAR in SimHQ for the first mission of CMBS, and I felt it was a corridor fight. The player did not have a choice. The comments from that player were that he did not even know he was fighting a recon unit. There is no choice for pitting force against force or force against weakness. I did not see surfaces and gaps, mission tactics; it was not even a main effort that the player could have chosen. It did not feel like MW to me.

Let me give you a classic example of a mission tactics: A senior commander wants to get his units across a bridge. And issue a mission order to a junior: your role is to find the nearest bridge and secure it. The junior get to the nearest bridge site to find out the bridge is destroyed. The junior does not wait, does not stop, does not cry on the horn, but keeps moving and find the nearest ford. Inform briefly the senior he found the ford and starts to secure it. He secures it by surveying the vicinity, visit a farm at 5km where enemy observers could be observing and neutralize them, he keeps reckoning and find a truck park that he destroys, find an artillery site 20 km away that he destroys. The tempo is kept high, communication to a minimum, no micromanagement from above, the ford is secured, and then the junior reports briefly to the senior.

In a game, you would have arrows, labels for primary objectives, secondary objectives, etc, etc and a corridor so you would not get lost. That would not be simulation of MW but pre-chewed baby food. I could understand that first missions orders could be obviously explained so the player would get the concept. Then the future missions as the player evolve in the game, would be like verbal orders. The players would have to exercise initiative and responsibility instead of accountability. The rules and the flexibility, adaptability are in the training the officers received, not physical limitations imposed by a developer to simulate an exercise at the shooting range.

So what would allow that dynamic?...VBS/Arma2,3 with big maps. SBproPE, maybe and I'll have to try again. Flashpoint: Red Storm, don't know it well enough, but what I have seen so far is encouraging. Battle Command I have to get into it to know, and I will .

PS: Battle Command seems to be a MP game instead of a single mission game. When I know it well enough, we could confront our perspectives.

I'm totally with you on that and it's exactly what I've been looking for as well. Hence my critique of a simplistic 'victory points' scoring. It creates a sort of 'touchdown'-mentality that is just wrong.

I'm not sure about CMBS. The smaller maps can indeed be rigid, but the larger ones are pretty flexible. I haven't played it much yet, but there's a 'Defense in Depth' scenario (Hold the Line) that played out very realistically, defense in depth being basically the flipside of MW, I'm sure there are matching MW scenario somewhere. IIRC, CMBS does a similar 'victory extrapolation' calculation to FP:RS, not requiring you to physically sit on every victory zone to claim it.

One thing I've found with the CM series is that the turn-based mode seems to (at least with me) enforce a sort of chess mentality of cautious, well-reasoned little steps. For CMBS now I switched to real-time (and pausing the game to give more complex orders) and I find myself reacting more sloppily but also more flexibly and dynamically. The overall gameplay experience feels more immediate to me that way and I'm more inclined to exploit an opportunity rather than consolidate, consolidate, consolidate. Sometimes it's how you play it, not what you play.

VBS 3 Personal Edition is free for current owners of VBS 2 PE.

Kramer,

Hahaha!...Nice try!

But I had to buy VBS2.

So the cost without an "S" for both was paid by me a while ago!...

I agree with you about the touch down mentality. It is widely understood by the public at large because every kid played and understood tactical team-games such as (in Europe) Rugby and (in the US) Football. In one hand, there is less to clarify by gaming companies. Besides, history books debate endlessly about attrition warfare, because this has been for the most part of our history our way of waging wars. MW is not new, but remains the exception: Leuctra in 371 BC, Cannae in 216 BC. In the American Civil war with Chattanooga, Vicksburg, the Jackson's valley campaign; Stormtroop tactics in 1918; WWII Blitzkrieg then the Yom Kippur War in 73. In the other hand, war of attrition is very costly to both sides.

Regarding CMBS, I am going to have to bite the bullet and buy CMBS to experience it. They might start to satisfy both Attritionist and Maneuverist.

What you describe in your approach is the Observe Orient Decide Act loop, which generate flexibility and fast adaptability. True it is how you play, and how you play is how you think or how you were trained to think, because Human beings don't do what they don't know, they just do what they know!.

I was looking at the AAR in the After Action Report of SimHQ, and watched some video of deployment with SBproPE in accelerated time, and it is how it is played:

D/L link: http://www.4shared.com/video/fD6xICX3ce/Post40678352.html

Direct Link: http://www.4shared.com/download/fD6xICX3ce/Post40678352.mp4?lgfp=3000

Look at how the reds and the blue moves. Because it is accelerated, it is easy to catch.

Much - if not all - of what you describe would be possible with SB Pro PE. I was under the impression though that you wanted to go beyond the realm of tactics and rather dabble at the operational level, something that SB Pro cannot deliver (at least not without relying on a large number of players (100+) in a multi-day session). If you were happy to segmentize your operation into vignette style individual missions, I suppose that SB Pro could make you happy. Heck, you can even link them to mission trees in an "Operations" state machine. It's not perfect yet, but it's a start.

I fully concur with the mentioned "touch-down" mentality. We added scoring to SB Pro PE's mission editor because many people simply expect this kind of feedback, but it's completely optional. Leave it, if you think that it is detrimental to the learning effect (I mean, in real life there is no "mission complete" message magically appearing in your view (and if it does, consider a case of schizophrenia or other form of hallucination). Sometimes you don't know if you "won", or what looked like a win turns out to be the seed of defeat in hindsight. Typically however you just know that you accomplished your goals by looking at the situation, so you can just as well quit all by yourself.

When we started the development of Steel Beasts we considered an "ultra-realism mode" where as a sentry post you might have to scan some landscape the entire night without anything of relevance happening. But that doesn't make for good entertainment value, and it's also not a very good learning experience. At best, it "builds character" (the universal codeword for anything that is decidedly un-fun, painful, or otherwise ungratifying).

In SB Pro you could very well seed the entire landscape with all kinds of enemy units that simply follow their own mission with no regard to the player's actions, and then simply let the player loose to find his way through all this. The problem with that approach is of course that there is non guarantee that they player can succeed at all (there's none in real combat either) and that it probably involves long stretches of the player sitting still and observing the area which CAN be suspenseful but usually is considered boring by most people.
Some o our users have been saying that SB Pro gives back whatever you invest into it. The more you look at what the mission editor can do, the more you'll find how flexible it is and that with a bit of creativity you can accomplish a lot more than what one might initially expect. That's not to say that SB Pro can do everything; there's no real first person shooter mode and in its current form low level infantry action is probably still lacking. There are clearly better solutions for that. But you can easily suspend yourself from crew positions in the vehicles at all and rather lead your forces from the map, or from the platoon leader's unbuttoned perspective at most. Of course this all is closer to the platoon and company level than to battalion/brigade level action (well, if you want the entirety of northern France in a single map and mission we're already at corps level; a fascinating area of its own, but your chosen example of securing a bridge or fording site certainly suggests something much smaller).

Steel Beasts is designed to support the reinforced company level as the maximum that a single player can handle with some adequacy under real-time conditions (fewer units are typically better however). Several players can handle a battalion scale scenario (see the current "Finland 2019" thread in the AAR forum) if they know what they are doing. With the classroom version of SB Pro and a decent LAN/WAN infrastructure brigade level exercises with 150 and more players have already been demonstrated to be practical. But that requires more manpower and a larger infrastructure than even an ambitious private enthusiast can probably organize.

Thank you Ssnake for this honest assessment.

But I feel I am limited by the existing maps size. Can I create new big maps and import them as I would see fit to let MW scenarios develop?

The bridge example was to illustrate a concept of Mission tactics and the latitude given to accelerate fluidity for the output of a mission, not to illustrate the scope of a regimental action.

Well, I am not a "Genius of War" so MW researched and pushed with 6 tank platoons under my responsibility should be enough to keep me busy to plan. Yet does the AI would understand what a mission tactics is? Flaechen & Luenkentaktik are? A scwherpunkt? An Angrieffsziel? A sense of timing? (Those terms are explained in the beginning of the thread). If I run a recon screen, what the AI does if they find a gap?

A recon screen is not a specialized recon force, but light fast vehicles temporarily attributed ahead of your main force to search for gaps in enemy lines. When found, the recon screen transmits the info to the main force and move forward through the gap while the main force intent is to follow. The object is a fast exploitation of the enemy's weakness at low cost since there is no breaching involved.

Because I don't want to have to script to a recon screen where the gap is, at what time it materializes and for how long. Then, where to go and at what speed, to disturb communication lines and destroy some mobile HQ 50 km behind enemy lines to dislocate the enemy's will to fight!

Are there enough air assets available for close air support on call? I know the artillery is there, but what about the air?

I don't want to be in a tank pushing arrows or manning a joystick. Besides, MW does not allow me to micromanage platoons, but to trust the training of their officers. I know it is a concept you understand, but does SBproPE understand it as it stands in its civilian version?

Does the Classroom version can allow me to push the limits so I can use SPproPE as a MW research lab without much human players involved?

I will assume that SBproPE, was somehow at least in its civilian version designed for Attritionist, is there a way for Maneuverist to use your game?...

Let me describe something I put together in Arma3 and see if it's something that would scratch your itch.

I used the ALiVE (Advanced Light Infantry Virtual Environment, I think?) mod. Using it, you can automatically populate the entire map with enemy forces (composed of whatever you want them to be - motorized, armored, light infantry, SOF, mix, of platoon, company, battalion size, etc.). IIRC you can even check a box to enable enemy convoys. The friendly AI forces (generated by the mod) and the enemy AI forces fight a battle of control over the entire map over towns, bases, and cities. Bigger towns are more important, and have more enemy defenders.

In the mission I made (in about an hour) I was controlling a mech company team. Two Arma3 Leopard 2A7 (or whatever the game calls them) tanks as my HQ section, then a platoon of Leopards and two platoons of motorized infantry in Pandurs. A company train, with a recovery vehicle, ambulance, ammo truck and fuel truck were also included. I had control over all of them through Arma3's High Command.

It played well. The scenario was to expand a battalion-sized beachhead. I commanded the mech company assigned to the AI-controlled light infantry battalion, so I'd react to any enemy armor encountered and provided direct fire support as needed. Getting a little bored with the slow infantry, I punched deep into the island and took some towns myself.

It was fun, but the lack of fine control over your High Command subordinate platoons could be frustrating - you can basically only give them way points and hope they get there. It works fine 80% of the time, but sometimes you want that fine control - or to tell the infantry to disembark. Usually they only do when they come under fire.

I've also made a company-sized Russian BMD airborne company insurgency (clearing hostile grid squares and looking for intel to generate leads to target enemy munitions caches) mission with the ALiVE mod, so it's very flexible once you know how to use it.

No. It's one of the distinct differences between the classroom version and the Personal Edition.
To be honest though, I have a hard time imagining a scenario that plays out in under three hours where you realistically NEED more than 22 x 22 square kilometers of terrain for a scenario that puts a reinforced company under the player's control (other than a road march, that is). There's plenty of adjacent space to simulate the actions of neighboring units, giving you a battle space that may be up to five times as large as what would normally be assigned to a company, even if you are not in the center of the enemy's attention in a high intensity combat situation.
Assuming a depth of the initial starting positions of three kilometers (again, ample for a company sized task force) that leaves 19km of depth for forward or retrograde movement if you move in a cardinal direction, and 26 km if you move diagonally.

Still not enough?
Rather than creating a square map, pick one that is longer than it is wide. As long as you stay within the 484km² limit, that's perfectly fine. There you have a 10 x 48km² playground.

Still not enough?
Go off-map. Just because the terrain beyond the mapped areas is not mapped it doesn't mean that there is none. You can easily push with your forces beyond the border of a map. It gets repeated 32,767 times in each direction, giving you a world size in excess of 520 trillion square kilometers, which is more than a million times the surface of the earth (including the oceans).
Admittedly, only a tiny portion of that is accessible under practical considerations (the limit of what the map screen's zoom scale and panning limit can still display). But it's more than what is shown in the map view, and it eliminates secure flanks - one of my pet peeves in most games as it is an almost irresistible incentive for the player to creep along the map edges simply because you need not worry about forces beyond the edge of the world. In SB Pro, there is no edge.


In and of itself, nothing.
Remember, SB Pro is designed as a training tool, and most instructors like to have control over what's happening in order to concentrate on the day's lesson rather than an a series of free-wheeling, unstructured free-for-all battles. The "AI" in Steel Beasts deals with the micromanagement of the units, not with any tactical decision. That is something that the mission designer must do.
Admittedly this makes it much easier to shape the scenario in a way that leaves the initiative to the player rather than the computer. So, maybe the player gets to probe for gaps in the computer's recon screen, and then to commit his attack force? Or you have two human-controlled parties fighting each other.
Given sufficient discipline to keep your ambitions in check, at least on a small scale you can script the enemy's behavior in a way to mimic these elements however. In theory that's also be possible for larger formations, but it quickly becomes impractical. However, there are examples. In our scenario "Heroes of Hohenfels" (HoH pt 1) the player is in control of a tank platoon reinforcing a mech company in a defense in depth against a regimental attack (BTR heavy) seeking to secure the flank of a division's attack in a different direction. The terrain sort of naturally splits the attacking regiment into two lanes of attack, one of which sends a BTR battalion into the kill sack of a tank company (the right neighbor). Open space, mine obstacles ... the BTR battalion doesn't stand a chance. If you look at it in the mission editor you will however see that the follow-on forces will reach a decision point to go left or right, and the condition is to reinforce success.
Consequently the player will have to defend against two BTR battalions with "just" the RAG in their support.
(Side note, the scenario has been proven to be winnable, but it's probably impossible without calling for at least some of the reserves, and here the timing of that decision is a key element).
I'd say that as far as scripting complexity is concerned, it probably represents the upper limit of what's still practical. But it does illustrate that the enemy is probing in strength, then making a decision based on the combat results, and the player must not only be good with his shooting and ammunition management and the timing of moving from one battle posiiton to another, he must also get the timing right to call up reserves, and to make a correct assessment of how many of these reserves he wants to claim from a limited pool.

Understood, but Steel Beasts could deliver that only if you are willing to put the player into the active role. Also, depending on how many units you are trying to squeeze through the gap that you discovered, you might learn a bit about the capacity of a road network.


There's rotary wing support, and you can call for a limited number of bomb strikes which however are abstracted (two 500lb bombs that appear out of the blue sky (you could rationalize it as a JDAM strike from maximum standoff range)). You get up to 15 of them. This is assumed to be the number of sorties that make it successfully through a possible air defense screen.
The question is how complex you want your missions to be, really. If you want air assets you also need to implement air defense, and to manage it. If you want large spaces, you need to deal with traffic management. You need to deal with supply management. At which point do you lose the audience in your attempt to illustrate a certain concept?
It's better to step back a bit and to say "Okay, this and this would normally be there, but we are ignoring it so we can concentrate on the following aspects: (...)"


In SB Pro, you don't have to. Stick with the external observer's position and the map view.


You want a mind-reading interface. I know of no game that could deliver it, at least not without severe abstractions. Maybe you should develop such a game. If you can pull it off, I'd buy it. Seriously, the day that robots can perform maneuver warfare in an effective manner, mankind is probably f*cked. In Steel Beasts you are the master of a zombie army. They do what you tell them, but not necessarily what you want them to do. They will NOT seize the initiative. That's what humans are for. Start, or join a virtual unit. Assemble with like-minded players and run your scenarios. In most Steel Beasts sessions, from what I hear, few players are keen to assume the role of the commanding officer. There's a career opportunity for you.


Steel Beasts is not intended to promote attrition warfare by design. Admittedly, it is what many people use it for because attrition is the Michael Bay way to deliver entertainment. But it doesn't HAVE to be like this. Steel Beasts is the kind of game that I always wanted to have, within the constraints of real life, and what technology allows for. I've been raised as an armor officer in the Bundeswehr with Auftragstaktik and in the traditions of maneuver warfare.
But as much as there is a trade, a craft behind it that can be honed with some repetition of similar tasks in similar situations, I have come to the conclusion that Auftragstaktik is primarily a matter of leadership values, of an army's (and a country's political) corporate culture. Do you have an atmosphere that rewards taking the initiative and tolerates occasional failure? Or do you have a "zero defects" mentality that permeates all levels of command? You can't have both, and given the choice, sub par leaders will always prefer control over freedom because they are mortified by the prospect of anything going wrong.
That aspect can never be covered by simulation. Arguably it's the more important aspect.
Be it as it may be, there is no true intelligence in "A.I.". I only know artificial stupidity. You can of course try and set up rules in an agent-based concept and the simply let them loose. That rarely results in a satisfying experience at the medium tactical level. It can work in first person shooters at the squad level, and it's starting to work again beyond the battalion level. But in between human brains are the by far superior tools for decision making, and the technology simply isn't there (or at least I haven't heard of it yet) that would allow computer-generated forces at the platoon and company level to make sensible decisions with foresight, under the constraints of an incomplete situational picture, and to stick to decisions with consequence. THAT part that you're dreaming about, it doesn't exist.

"attrition is the Michael Bay way to deliver entertainment"

Thanks for your elaborations, Ssnake. They pretty much mirror my own assessment. Despite some caveats, Steel Beasts Pro PE has been one of the most convincing command-'rides' so far. It simulates great detail and allows for nuanced control if you want, but the unit AI is 'smart' enough that you can stick to the map view and they usually won't to something colossally stupid (except maybe occasionally sink themselves in some pond, but I've seen real people do that too). If the scenario designer is adept at 'programming' the AI with the various available route conditions, it can get very fluid. But it's a lot of work.

Ssnake,

Great post, you make sense. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and it is not a T-72 coming at me!!!

I am in!

BTW, I like you last quote of the post

How can I buy the classroom version?

Please, PM me for details.

Sincerely,

Gunnyhighway,

You may want to check out BCT Commander from ProSim and LTC Pat Proctor . It's an older title for sure but may be what you are looking for. There is also a DEMO you can try out.

Combatsim.com Review:
http://www.combatsim.com/memb123/htm/2002/05/bct/

ProSim Product Page:
http://www.prosimco.com/patch.htm#manual

Agreed, and I am not adept at programing, so I have twice the amount of work cut out for me!....

But, I've got to do it!