SCENARIO: 2p-net "Capture The Flag US Tanks" on map 1
PLAYERS:
BLUE: Bernard Cousin (FR)
RED: Matt (Rattler) Ohlmer (DE)
OBSERVERS: James Furnival, John Monahan, Alex Ingles, Mike, Bono (not
all present all the time)
REPLAYS: Not yet ready (waiting for John Monahan to distribute, will
announce once theyre out)
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CONTENTS:
1. Background: TacOps Tourney 2001 recap
2. Setup and Planning
3. How it went
4. Lessons learned
5. Issues
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1. BACKGROUND, TT 2001 RECAP
TT 2001 was a tourney organized by myself (like 1999 and 2003) and
was set up as a pure fun and pretzel tourney that had not much
resemblance with any serious military tasks.
Basically, the layout was that two players with equal 10.000
lethality value OOBs would race against each other, whoever reached
opposite map edge first or had penetrated furthest within the given
time limit was declared winner.
Tourney started out with 12 players on SEP 1, 2001 and was played in
KO system by PBM on TacOps version 3: Winners would proceed to next
round, losers were out. Every map was only to be played once, next
map and side were chosen by dice randomly by the referee (Wolfgang
Drotleff).
Maps that were played out were:
1) map 9
2) map 11
3) map 15
4) map 100
5) map 650
6) map 888 (***
first round map ***)
Detailed rules and player roster with OOBs here:
http://www.eventfoto.com/privat/mil/tourney2001/tt2001rules.html
http://www.eventfoto.com/privat/mil/tourney2001/oobs.html
Some screenshots of some games final positions also have made it
through the years, see here (there was no replay feature present in
TacOps v3, so we used those):
http://www.eventfoto.com/privat/mil/tourney2001/round2screenshots/index.htm
After round three and one player having dropped out only two players
were left standing, Bernard Cousin from France and myself (Rattler)
from Germany.
While scenario and map for the final and decisive game were clear
(Map 15, Bernie BLUE, myself RED; I still have the setup present
together with v3.1.1 on my machine) we somehow never could agree on a
date to play the final game out and with the apparation of v4 guess
had lost too much interest in playing v3 games, so the years went by
and the tourney was never decided (berny had offered a few times over
the years to concede the tourney win to me, but as organizer I could
not accept that and hoped that one day we would still play it out).
Now, yesterday JAN 5th, we both coincided in meeting on IRC for a
netgame I had proposed and thought it worthwile to slug it out and
decide the tourney once and for all.
To keep things more or less according to the original tourney rules
we decided on a standard TacOps delivered "Capture the flag US TANKS"
game on map1, as it would also see the opponents racing towards each
other with the idea of crossing the map and winner could be evaluated
according to the tourney rules. Of cause, the OOBs were not the ones
we had chosen but the scenario quite balanced, so Bernnie threw a
coin to decide his side and cought BLUE, myself was left with RED.
We decided on 5 min for setup and then to play it out in 1 min auto
turns with me hosting.
2. SETUP and PLANNING
5 min setup is not much, so I had to hurry. I split my forces into 4 parts:
- Flag on EAST map edge behind the town, defended by a coy of tanks
- 1 BN- taking south route, split in platoons and spaced around 150 mtrs
- 2 BNs- taking north route, split in platoons and spaced around 150 mtrs
- 1 coy of each BN as mobile reserves vic 1203 (turned out to be only
around 2 coys actually, as I took the forces platoonwise from the
other BNs)
My initial idea was to race with strong forces in the north to deny
enemy the woods vic 0705 as OP so that I could move unobserved in the
center, while securing the ridge vic 0701 defensively with the BN-.
Once I would have reached my strategic goal of denying the eastern
wood edge in the north (0705) by bringing forces within 1000 mtrs to
it I would reorganize according to game turnout and recon results and
attempt a decisive crossing of the valley into enemy half of map.
RED in this scenario is well equipped with arty, so I planned to
provoke fires by moving single low value vehicles and recon air and
use my arty to decimate enemy in key locations.
120 minutes is a long time, so I gave myself 90 minutes for the prep,
and then 30 minutes rush to enemy flag.
3. HOW IT WENT
The game overall was bugged by a lot of tech mishaps:
Bernie as well as some of the observers got dropped off several times
and regularily every 5 turns which took a long time to repair as as
Mac user I have to restart the whole machine to establish net
connection after a net dropout in 2-players host mode. You cannot
situpdate a joining player in 2-p net mode nor adjust default 15 secs
orders exchange delay times, so there was no way around this until
after turn 29 John Monahan took over the game to host us in
multiplayer to facilitate the frequent restarts (Bernie was fine then
for a while with the new 45 secs delay time)
Towards game middle Bernie then ran into a serious TacOps bug that
crashed his game every tie he wanted to address the arty indirect
fire window.
Apart from this the game was a lot of fun:
In turn 1 enemy flag was revealed to be at the bottom of the west map
edge in the corner.
Forces advanced unopposed until turn 4. In turn 5 my air recon came
in on enemy, I saw he had split equally into a BN+ north and a BN+
south, as I could account for all units of his OOB this meant flag
was undefended. It also revealed he had not split up his units which
I hoed with the 1 min auto turns would give me some advantage in
distribution. also, I got some 5 tanks in the 2nd airstrike, nice
game start...
At this turn, expecting his flyboys, I had stopped my whole
formations and set ranges to 400 to not give too much away to his
recon efforts, but enemy air didnt turn up until later. This turned
out to cost me somewhat as my forces were delayed by 600 mtrs and
came to the central valley too late to take key positions unopposed.
In turn 7 enemy air appeared in the south and took out my lead BTR
but without decisive recon information to enemy as my units were well
spread in the line formation march.
In turn 9 I botched, my units in the south had SOPs to stop when
spotting enemy and I had forgotten to give moving orders again, so
they were stalled all in a bunch around 2 k behind the ridge. Any
enemy air strike in this moment would have wrecked havoc and, had he
known, enemy could have taken the crucial ridge right then (he had
only 500 mtrs travel to it according to my calculations and nothing
that could prevent him as I had nothing on high ground).
I confirmed my suspicions in turn 10 with a recon air south and
corrected imidiately, luckily this recon revealed that bernie was
going to set out defensive in the south and not take the hill with
major forces. This finding and first contact in the north gave me a
first clue to his game plan which seemed to be more defensive than I
had thought (and hoped for: defender has a high advantage as you run
your forces into prepared positions and cannot advance w/o lots of
casualities).
Turn 11 saw a lot of enemy air strikes, but none without too much
effect, and when nothing much happened in the southern hills in turn
12 I got more confident that my mistake had gone unobserved and
unexploited.
I decided to prepare the strategically decisive assault on the
northern woods and moved my units into position over the next turns.
Turn 15 had my southern units in their defensive positions (replays
show he would still have slaughtered me had he tried to advance, but
now it would have cost him and my reserves probably would have
finished off any assault direction flag). I shelled the northern
woods with smoke to make it difficult for enemy vehicles firing to
retreat into saftey before they caught return fire (moving in smoke =
half speed, supressed = again half speed). Again, in the heat of
battle I botched, my tanks were still set to 400 mtrs range and
several times did not engage targets until I realized and corrected.
In turn 16 I draw some blood in the south and wiped a tank Pln, in
hindsight probably made Bernie go more defensive there instead of
slaughtering me and having revealed by air recon that I had no
significant forces to stop him as he never moved to exploit this
finding.
I took me up to turn 25 to position my forces for the assault in the
north; I had pulled some rear units into positions where they could
rush for the woods on command, prepped 4 airstrikes both for recon
and supression turn 27 and had all arty ready for turn 28.
The plan worked well: both to airstrikes, return fires and arty more
than a coy of enemy vehicles fell in the north and I could see they
retreated into the tree lines, so I smoke the whole thing to slow
them in coming back. This time my units used to advance into better
firing ranges, still, due to flanking shots from the town valley I
also lost around 2 coys until in turn 35 had the woods scecured by
positioning around a coy of tanks within 1000 mtrs to it (this would
make sure enemy could not go to the tree line anymore without coming
under surprise fire, bernie tried two times, lost the units in
question and then thought better of it and never appeared there
anymore: Strategical goal reached...:-> ).
(Shortly before John Monahan had taking over hosting and ran the game
for us, so we had a few flawless rounds until about turn 60).
Once this assured I focused on the south and tried to prepare for an
enemy breakthrough there by wearing him down: The next 25 turns saw
me moving the reserve BN into overwatch positions to the hill crest
woods and provoking enemy fires with inf scouts that I ferried around
and had mount the crest. Once enemy revealed units they would come
under arty and return fire from me and slowly but surely got weaker
and retreated into the woods.
Once I was convinced that Bernie had bitten on the diversion in the
south I made my final plan: I would retreat and concentrate all my
southern units and the reserves (incl the flag defenders) vic 0903
under smoke cover on northern woods (this would secure Bernie could
not spot my movements as I could see there were no vehicles in the
treelines due to my first goal reached). Once there, after careful
air recon, arty prepping and provoking fires with my BTRs from north
and center I would cross into the valley at 075035 around 0825 and
make it with a few units to either high ground or direction south end
of the northern woods to outrun him to the undefended flag. I could
mass around 45 tanks and estimated defenders to be too weak and
distributed to prevent me from doing so.
This was when the sh.t hit the fan: Bernies TacOps crashed various
times fatally (he was basically left without being able to control
his arty as opening arty window by whatever method crashed his
TacOps), and when we could not get the game going again by 0815 we
started a discussion on whether to continue next day.
By then we had played 6 hours RL in a tough and fast paced game and
it was 0200 in the morning for both of us.
Probably because of all of those factors together Bernie said he had
not enough forces to win the game (he obviously had not realized my
south was completely undefended after my retreat) and conceded the
win to me.
I accepted and FOW was turned off for both of us, showing that it
probably would not have been so easy for me to cross as I had
thought, all would have depended on whether berny would have realized
my idea as when we stopped I still needed around 9 min 20 secs
preparation before attempting to cross, some rear units were still on
the way to their AAs. OTOH my arty was prepared and ready (I had
conserved salvos and all howitzers were at 100% ammo), it was 46
tanks versus 25 (Bernie had 56, but those were not in position to
defend a crossing at the time we stopped), and I am convinced I could
have pulled it off.
Once through there would have nothing been there to stop me to race
to his flag, and even a counterattack (rushing to mine) would not
have made it in time as his travel time was 6 min longer than mine.
Overall an exciting game, maybe I won with a bit of luck considering
the mistakes I had made (had Bernie played more aggressive in the
south he would have made it much harder for me if not slaughtered me).
4. LESSONS LEARNED
- net games are fun
- tech mishaps reduce the fun to a point where only veterans will
endure, I am sure any newbies would have quit much earlier and never
have tried another one after what happened to us
- Capture the Flag is a fun scenario allright, like announced in the
"about the scenario", if youre into beer+pretzels give it a try once.
- arty wins... :->
5. ISSUES
Some things to think about:
- Major should somehow make it possible to adjust orders exchange
delay time from the default 15 secs to longer times also in 2p-net
mode as it already is possible in multiplayer mode. The constant
dropping off of bernie and alex due to expired orders exchange time
was a PITA
- Once a player dropped off I would really like to see a joining via
situpdate from the host in 1p-net games (as is possible in
multiplayer), as it takes out the nerve costing delays of restarting
(Mac) the machine and having the players go one turn back to the last
autosave...
Overall, great game and great fun after all, I would have loved to
see how the outcome had been had we played it out but am content with
winning,.. :->
Thanks to John for his patience and willingness to host, to the
observers for sticking with us despite the mishaps, and of cause to
Bernie who proved to be a worthy opponent and tourney finalist in all
aspects. Thanks again!
Rattler
