James Sterrett

Quite the AAR - glad you had fun! Keep in mind, regarding the issues in those AARs about umpires not understanding player intent, that all those AARs are from pre-Tacops V4 (before the Internet/LAN hookup ability), and thus TacOps ran only on the umpire's computer, with the players telling the umpire what orders to enter. Things are a bit easier now, though the Internet's hiccups are still a pain.

Tory - printing out the larger maps works better if it's on more than one page, in my opinion - I find the maps that are tens of km on a side get kinda cramped on a single page.

Note that in printing them, you may have some trouble getting them to print out across more than one page. In Windows, the basic freebie Paint program will do it, but for whatever reason, pricey programs often won't support multi-page printing. I'm not sure what the situation is with Macs.

Also, in TacOps, if units that are previously unspotted open fire, they almost always don't take return fire in the fire pulse that they reveal themselves. Thus you could have had tanks in overwatch, and the bad guys would still have gotten away - from the description, they were stationed to take one shot and then haul ass, so "in reality" you'd have very little time to return fire. If you think the woods are inhabited by bad guys, and you can afford to throw some arty HE into the woodline, that may suppress the bad guys and make their initial fire less effective.

PBEM - Play By E-Mail.

You *can* play on TacOps Map 001 in Steel Beasts. Go to: ftp://TacOps4:isupport@ftp.combatmission.com And look for "TacOps in Steel Beasts.zip" Note that trees were used for towns since Larry Hookins made this map before SB had buildings.

The map in the screenshot is Map 231, which does come on the CD but is not used in any of the pre-packaged scenarios. You can see the maps not used in the pre-packed scenarios (including 231) here: http://www.battlefront.com/resources/tacops/Maproom/index.html

There's a few things to be cautious of when doing this, all of which involve the AI. - If you change a unit into a completely different type of unit, the AI may use it wrong. For example: If you turn Tanks into IFVs or SP artillery, the AI will continue to treat them as tanks. So keep units that will be under AI control as the same class of unit as before. - If you add (using the "Add One Unit" menu item) units to the AI, they all wind up on the AI's "section 1". This is often the recce force, but not always. The point is: they may get used in very odd ways. Adding forces that exist on the "Optional Units" menu does *not* suffer from this problem: the AI knows how to use them.

The easiest way is to use the "change units and weapons" menu item: change all the M-1s and T-80Us into M-60s and T-62s, or whatever matchup you desire....

Keep an eye on the mailing list and offer to jopin for planning when the next CPX is announced....

I think Major H. has to field this one. I know we'd figured out some strange method of doing this in v3, but testing of it never got off the ground. You'll probably need each other's passwords, at a minimum. Something to try: - Save the current game as a .tac file. - Reload it as a two players on one computer game. - Edit the relevant side, reload it as a saved game for PBEM.

Warfare HQ (http://www.warfarehq.com/) runs a TacOps competition ladder that might answer to your desires.

The real answer will come form Major H... However, the order *may* make a significant difference. Blue's setting over-ride those of Red. Second, I think you're doing extra steps (it's been a while since I played a pbem, so there's room for error here): - Blue starts the scenario, deploys, and sends the orders file. Red starts the scenario, deploys, loads Blue's orders file, watches the turn results, and gives orders for turn 2. Red sends the Red orders for turn 1 & 2 to Blue. - Blue then starts TacOps, loads the savegame, loads in Red's turn 1 orders, watches the results, give orders for turn 2, watches results, and gives orders for turn 3; Blue then sends 2 & 3 to Red. And so on...

I'm not sure you suggested enough recon. If you've no idea of what or where the enemy force is, then you need to treat everything in front of you as potentially infested or watched. The bad guys may have arranged for small numbers of infantry groups to spot for arty to rain on you for the next 10k.... Use small groups - single vehicles - as your lead units, overwatch extensively, and proceed slowly, ready to whomp anything that turns up, or to run for cover if the skies open with ICM.

That's Bill Jenning's 3rd MBX; the AAR should be at: http://home.swbell.net/bjenning/aar3/main.html Bill did a heck of a lot of modelling not directly supported by TacOps. Edit: the site no longer seems to exist. [ January 28, 2003, 09:58 PM: Message edited by: James Sterrett ]

We ran the game 3 times today, getting in around 2 hours of gameplay over 6 hours of play time, including around 2 hours of playtime spent in setup. 99% of the time TacOps ran peftectly smoothly. We ran into three snags: 1) TacOps issued an error message "30" and required me (the umpire) to update all the players. 2) TacOps resets units that are split off, or have a mine plow, added, back to their default fire priorities (none). 3) An AVLB disappeared without a trace once; it was probably set up on water and sank. Because of the small number of players, I amalgamated the team-pairs; Redwolf pointed out that we could use a Hard target priority for Tracked Vehicles to force all players to distinguish between the race cars and the combat vehicles. This proceeded to fail several times because of players mis-setting their priorities! As the umpie, I produced a "TV broadcast" of the location of each racecar more or less every turn, complete with occasional bits of color commentary. Each team got 6 minelayers, 4 MICLIC, 6 VTT323, 6 T-55, 3 HOT Raketenpanzer, 1 bridging vehicle, 2 bulldozers, a smoke vehicle, and 4 MTLB APCs, to be deployed anywhere on the map. The racecars had to begin at their relevant starting mapedge. In the first game (Redwolf vs Gary Rost), Gary tried to block the main route of advance with mines early on, while going around it himself. However, his minelayer was killed first, so Redwolf got a decisive distance lead scooting down the road. When his car passed the last of Gary's minelayers I called the game. The second game saw Redwolf (Gold), Nick Moran (Blue), Goran Semb (Red) and Gary Rost (Green) squaring off. Nick tried a very northerly route from E - W, and found himself mired in the mud for a very long time; but his minelayer successfully blocked the main E-W road and stopped Gary and Goran for and equal amount of time. (Gary's racecar hit a mine and had to be repaired - twice!) Redwolf scooted around on the cross-country route Gary had tried in the first game, and wound up 15km ahead in short order. The other players formed an alliance to stop Redwolf. In his passage across the map, Redwolf eventually lost everything but his racecar - and Goran had deployed a huge minefield blocking every access to the western edge of the map. The alliance had just broken down, Gold appeared to be a lonely leader and loser, and matters looked wide open between Green, Blue, and Red when one of Red's APCs shot the Gold race car, handing a win to Gold (a punishment condition in the rules to convince players not to shoot the racecar!) The third game was very short; Gary vs Nick, going south to north. Each dealt with the opposition on their routes in very short order, Nick had a shorter path, Nick won. By this point, we agreed we'd milked the concept for about all it was worth, and called it a day. 8) Of these, the most satisfying, and closest to the ideal of what I'd envisaged, was the second game, with combats slugged out ahead of the racecars as players tried to cover, close, or open key routes; and the use of mine-clearing and bridge-crossing kit. I hope the players had fun with this off-the-wall scenario. 8)

Saturday has opened up, and thus I'm running a CPX. It's an unusual scenario: Road Rally. Some of the details (which map? 575 is an obvious choice. 8) ) have yet to be worked out. The 8 colors of TacOps are divided into 4 team-pairs (fewer if fewer players appear). One color of each teach gets a single civilian car (the rally car). The other color of each team gets an assortment of combat vehicles heavily weighted towards engineering operations. All the rally cars must begin on one mapedge. The winning team is the first one to get their rally car to the opposite mapegde. Combat teams may begin anywhere on the map. Combat teams are subject to full fog of war and are actively hostile to each other. Rally cars are always visible to all teams. Direct fire against rally cars is forbidden. Any team whose rally car is destroyed by direct fire immediately wins. Rally cars *can* be harmed by minefields, but the damage will always be altered (by the umpire) to a mobility kill. Combat teams will include recovery vehicles which can restore a car to full mobility in 10 minutes. No artillery, no airpower, no UAVs. Start time: 15.00 GMT on 25 January 2003. IRC channel: http://www.battlefront.com/, public channel #tacops

You'll have to convert it using a paint program of some sort. The basic ones (such as MS Paint) won't do it; the ones you pay for will. :/ The print maps you make only have gridlines and numbers if you put them on there yourself. If you have a good paint program, you probably can take several screenshots and cut/paste them together, though.

So it's clear, most players in this game had between 4 and 8 units. Usually in these, players are commanding one or two companies and those are broken into platoons. So it's on the scale of 3 to 8 units. Obviously, players are free to break things down further if they want, or keep everybody in big single markers too. And, yes, it all comes down to taste in the end. Lemon or orange?

Why time constraints? They are there for a variety of reasons. One is to keep the pressure on the players; but it's equally important to keep the game moving. The time-constraint angle you don't see in the replay is the orders-exchange time, which averaged about 60 seconds in this game. Thus there's a 60-second delay between the end of giving orders and the beginning or seeing the turn execute. It provides a fair degree of time for a player to ponder future maneuvers; players who have done so can typically orient very quickly to events on the screen. While it is possible to play without a time limit, the time some players will then take to tweak every turn's move to perfection approaches infinity. Proper recon is entirely possible within a one-minute orders phase. You just have to slow down your heart rate enough to do it. [And, as mentioned elsewhere, I am as guilty as the rest on this. I have repeatedly sworn to myself I would do proper recon, and then turned right around and sacrificed recon in the interests of speed - and, as a result, had my head chopped off.] Playing in segments over multiple days: This looks good on paper, but works very poorly in practice. The problem is assembling the same group for a second round.... People's schedules are like an intricate gearing system. It'll only mesh for a given set of gears once in a blue moon. Player unit sizes: In old-style CPXes, players usually commanded a battalion of companies. Players now normally command a company of platoons. If every player has a chunk of the recon, and the main force is kept back, then I believe everybody is kept engaged in the fight and nobody gets overwhelmed by detail work. Are instant-start games better? NO! Why was this an instant-start? Because the hole in my schedule to run the game opened up on Thursday, and I threw the game together as fast as I could. Optimally, there's about a 2 week lead time to a game. This gives plenty of time for teams to assemble, analyze the map and orders, ask questions of the umpire, decide on intial deployments, and make plans & overlays. There's no question, in my mind, but that this makes for a better game experience and better game play. If I'd had the option, it is how I would have run this one. On another hand [don't start counting them ], I don't like to hand players set plans. However realistic it might be for forces of these sizes to be handed detailed ops orders, it takes away from the players key angles of the fight that ought to rest in their control for a good game experience: how they fight the battle needs to be up to them to as great a degree as is possibly consonant with ensuring an effective scenario [gotta make sure the two forces are likely to come into contact, for example.]

And some comments from me (the umpire) I often find balancing attack vs defence troublesome, not least because predicting What Players Will Do is so troublesome. 8) I've seen defences I thought were too strong crumble into dust. Defences that require careful use of a few powerful assets usually get their teeth kicked in. Sometimes defences I fear are too weak - and the recent CPX was one of them! - kick the snot out of an attack. Attack forces I expect are powerful choose the one avenue the defence has defended in force, fail to conduct recon and fall into ambushes, [the attack in the most recent CPX did both of these] or spatter themselves piecemeal across the map [which you didn't! 8) ] Personally, I suspect that two things would have made a tremendous difference in the recent CPX: 1) If Blue kept its engineers safe it could still have crossed the river.... 2) Recon preceding the pell-mell rush! It does take precious minutes to get the recon out ahead and let it do its job; but you're also far better off spending the time, and taking lighter losses overall. When, at the outset of the game, you were telling your troops that there was no hurry, take your time, do it right -- I was very afraid for Red. 8) Recon is probably the task we are collectively worst at in these CPXes - myself certainly included - and it costs us dear. Every time I fail to do it right I swear I'll do it right the next time, and then, er, I don't. 8( http://www.battlefront.com/resources/tacops/HQ/text/CPX/cpxaars/cpxrecon.txt has the text of a discussion on recon that went through the list a few years ago (the commentary on what umpire will or won't allow is not relevant to v4 games 8) ) http://www.battlefront.com/resources/tacops/HQ/text/CPX/cpxaars/Bike%20Lake%20AAR.txt -- note, in particular, Gary Rost's comments on the recon his force didn't wind up doing (snipped out and placed below): "During the on line US side's AAR there were two specific comments made about the recon/counter-recon efforts. First was that there was no time to do a good recon and second the organization for the recon did not work. I would like to climb onto a small soapbox and reply to those comments. 1) There was no time to do a good recon. Yes there was. Map 213 looks huge. The idea of crossing 30km in 90 minutes seems like a hard thing to do. And what I am going to say next makes no sense the first time you read it so read it again carefully. By taking time to do it right, you decrease the time it takes to accomplish the mission. If the recon unit had been given time, the ATGM fire trap would have been sprung. Scouts would have died but the scouts would have pushed the BRDMs back giving the main force room to maneuver. The crossing time for the main body was way too early. Relax, wait, your time will come. Let the scouts do their job. 2) The scout recon organization did not work. Right. Having BFVs and adding tanks and engineers, what was created was a cavalry troop. Not possible with today's battalion scouts equipped with Hummers. But the organization did not work not because of the organization but because it was not given the time to do the job."

And a bit more from Steve: -------- Normally it has been thought that the attacker needed a 3 to 1 advantage in strength to conduct an attack. However, that's for armies that are technologically equal. The US has trained to conduct attacks at lesser odds, even at 1 to 1, but that is with US forces expected to hold a serious technological advantage, either in direct combat (thermals vs. non-thermals, for instance, or M1s vs non-improved ATGMs) or in intelligence and recon (UAVs, satellites, air recon, helos). Note that in Saturday's battle, the Red tanks with their ATGMs actually =outranged= our M1A1Ds. Even so, the Blue forces could have won on Saturday if we'd just coordinated better. If my engineers had followed Bvark's lead tanks to the south map edge, instead of going along the 010 northing line, we would have encountered the Red defenses with tanks and not engineer M113s. So even though I think the mission was not realistically stated, I'm not blaming that for our defeat. The Blue defeat was caused by lack of coordination between the various Blue elements, and that was =my= fault. I should have ensured that we all knew where Bvark was going and that we all followed him. Note that while the US has trained to win at even odds in the attack, I'm quite sure that the US tries to mass superior numbers at the point of attack, just like any other army.

Blue Commander's AAR, by Steve Osmanski, originally posted on the mailing list: ------- I was the Blue overall commander for Saturday's CPX. Blue was given: 3 companies of M1s 2 companies of M2 infantry 2 scout platoons of M3 1 platoon of M901 TOW 3 batteries of 155mm 1 platoon of engineers 2 MICLIC 3 combat engineer vehicles 3 M60 AVLB bridging vehicles 1 Vulcan ADA Our mission was to cross the entire map and exit at least a company of troops off the west edge =north= of the river. With all the bridges destroyed the bridging vehicles were our mission-essential assets. Initial force allocation: Bvark: 1 coy M1, 1 coy M2, 1 scout platoon Pkpowers: same as Bvark Henk: 1 coy M1, M901 platoon, all arty Me: The Vulcan and the engineers Given that our mission was to cover the whole map, and that we were told that Red had not been in the area long, and that the area had been heavily fought over before, I expected a meeting engagement and structured my plan accordingly. I assigned Henk (supported by 1 MICLIC, 1 CEV, and 1 AVLB) to run a decoy attack in the north, intending for him to draw the enemy north out of our way. The rest of our forces were assigned to make a run through the very hilly, wooded, close terrain in the far south, Bvark leading, then the engineers, then Pk. Our southern forces were intended to make a sudden break for daylight after I felt the enemy had been drawn to the north. I intended to penetrate as far west as possible, use the bridging tanks to cross the river and then exit the map. Initially, things went as I expected: the southern forces moved into position undetected (I think) while Henk made contact in the north with some Red recce BMPs. After some trouble with the AVLB (which James dealt with) Henk crossed the river in the north and promptly got most of his tanks wiped out by some very rapid and sharp-shooting infantry ATGMs. For the rest of the battle Henk acted as our artillery commander (as he had no real forces left). I then released the main attack. Initially we did well, although enemy MLRS and outposts did some damage. We moved into the broken hilly terrain in the south and our coordination fell apart since we couldn't see each other with FFOW active. As a result, I moved the engineers over a hill (thinking Bvark had already moved so) and Red ATGM-firing T55s wiped out the engineer M113s, although Pk's forces did destroy the enemy tanks. When the rest of the engineers (including the vital bridging tanks) were wiped out by enemy infantry and the second Red T55 company, I said we were defeated since we couldn't cross the rivers to complete the mission. Even the retaliatory destruction of the second Red T55 company by Bvark's returning forces couldn't make it possible for us to cross the rivers. At this point I quit the game, feeling that the battle was over and I didn't really want to see how else I could screw up. James added more forces and I have no idea what happened after. Lessons learned: Keep the mission-essential equipment protected. The loss of the bridging tanks spelled the loss of the scenario. I should have coordinated better with Bvark to keep that equipment safe. Decoy attacks need to survive longer so they draw more attention. I'm not sure how Henk could have done that with those heroic enemy ATGM teams facing him. If your decoys do survive, be patient and give the enemy time to react to the feint before launching the main attack. Loser's complaint: I feel that missions assigned in TacOps CPXs, especially offensive missions, are often unrealistic. In this case, an single reinforced battalion was assigned to attack on a front more than 6 kilometers wide through more than 20 kilometers of possible hostile terrain against an enemy unknown in strength or location. I feel this is a mission that would more likely be assigned to a higher echelon, brigade if not division. I believe a battalion in our situation would have been ordered to conduct a movement to contact, intended to find the enemy, define his strength, and then perhaps attack if the situation warranted. In more open desert terrain (like that at NTC) a battalion might be given a mission like ours. I don't think such orders would be given in such terrain as we faced. The Oz

It's over! A replay file can be downloaded: "030104 CPX Autosaves.zip" now available from ftp://TacOps4:isuport@ftp.combatmission.com Orders for Red: Your battalion is to prevent Blue forces from exiting the WEST edge of the map. Enemy forces are standard US Army units with M-1 and M-2s; the enemy forward edge is thought to be 24 Easting as of 0700. You have no airpower, but you do have one offmap rocket artllery unit with 2 shots of ICM. There is no resupply available. Orders for Blue: Your battalions are to exit at least a company of troops off the WEST edge of the map, north of the river. Enemy forces are primarily BTR mech infantry and T-55 tanks. the enemy forward edge is thought to be at 21 Easting. You have no airpower, offmap artillery, or resupply. ---------- Blue tried a feint in the north and a charge in the south; the charge in the south got bunched up crossing a swamp and shredded by arty, plus sniping from various Red defenders. When Blue concluded it had no hope left, Red was awarded a win, Blue was awarded reinforcements, and the game continued until a number of payers had to go home. [ January 04, 2003, 07:19 PM: Message edited by: James Sterrett ]

I'l hand out the IP over IRC. Note that ICQ is *not* IRC. You'll need a client program for IRC. For PCs, try mIRC: http://www.mirc.co.uk/ For Macs, search for IRCLE. When the installation finishes setup and asks you where to log into, tell it schlepper.hanse.de and port 7024 When you're signed into the server, join the channel "#tacops"