dhuffjr

A CPX is a command post exercise. In TacOps terms it is an online multiplayer game. Larger more complex ones involve planning and more players. This game is intended to get new players into the CPX experience. TacOps against the AI if fun, against a human in PBEM play is a whole lot more fun. CPX play with friendly fog of war and multiple friendly players against human opponets is outstanding.

Hey Chris, MajorH is bunkered up for the holidays I think. There is not a scenerio yet . I've got the D series Marine oob worked out and plans to do the E and F series oob. Some small issues with squads etc to figure out. Ever made a map? One or two for Okinawa would be very nice .

The feature to load bombs 'on' infantry units is to simulate suicide bombers using the civilian 'infantry' units. Car bombs are possible too. Of course you can use them with engineers to simulate demolition charges as well. Units cannot fire on the entrenchment markers nor can the entrenchment markers be reduced. Units only fire on other units. Suppressive fire is also not currently modeled in the way you are desiring. It is however on the wish list. Suppression results from a unit being taken under fire. A unit that is fired on will either be killed (skull marker), suppressed (S marker), or nothing will happend. You should also be aware that a kill in TacOps in not always a kill. Sometimes it can be the soldier who goes to ground for the duration of the fight. Other times it is the soldier who is wounded and thus out of action, or the soldier who runs away. Vehicle kills are similar. A kill may not be a catastrophic explosion but the crew is 'killed' or damage is suffered sufficient to make it useless in game terms.

Posting here is a good place. There is a ladder on the SZO site that includes TacOps, it is lumped into the "Modern Military Simulations" category. Hope that helps.

quick tell him you have cargo varient HMMWVs in the convoys too! More new goodies :>) How bout a v5 teaser list?

Yes, you can change the combat speed, which sets the amount of delay between combat actions. I set mine to 0 because it can get very long for larger scenerios. Also under option menu is the option to select click sounds. This also acts to speed up combat for network play. For solitare I like the sounds because it helps me keep track of what is going on. The little skull boxes are indicating that a "kill" occured. The box with an "S" in it indicates suppression. Look under the reports menu at "situation report". I don't use it much but it might contain the information your looking for.

No new scenerios but if you are languishing in v3 then you will be in for some very nice surprises. Tons of new units and game features.

Hmmmmm...... I tried dropping an appropriately named .bmp file into the zphoto folder with no effect. Must not be that easy, I'd guess something in the unit database needs turned on for it to look there for the photo.

But sir, it is your game....and anyone....well okay...most of those who would be offended do not play wargames anyway. :cool:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Umpire AAR for December 27th CPX Map106c v101- A map I made depicting the Wake Island atoll (Peale, Wilkes, and Wake islands) Custom Scenario USMC this was played with WWII units Plan: Well there was no plan per-say. I had decided that a static defense would not be much fun for a player so I filled that roll. (more on that later) Blue was to be those who showed up. Ended up we had four Players from the get go and the division of forces worked well. The plan as it was for Bluefor to assault across designated beaches (we used Red One, Red Two, and Green Two. Players: Bonxa- USMC battalion Rattler- had control of a pack howitzer battalion and the off map artillery (ships providing fire support) JohnfMonahan- USMC battalion who later dropped and Cheo stood up as commander after observing for a while (not the usual course of action-more on that later) Bernard- USMC battalion Major H dropped in to observe and chat a bit How things went: There were some coordination problems with one player not able to see the place names via F6 nor having the overlays available. By using coordinates this was overcome. Initially players were commenting that contact was not made. I had set the Redfor engagement ranges to 333m to let them get close. One the landings were taking place or about to I started setting blocks of units to maximum engagement ranges. The battle quickly escalated. Combat times were a bit long once the LVTs started disembarking their marines and the number of units in combat increased. The forces assaulted three of the four objectives and in the end were moving towards the fourth objective. One thing I tried to replicate was the difference between captured and cleared/secured. As a historical example on Iwo Jima which was declared secured on the 26th of March over 2400 Japanese were captured or killed in April and May. The Pacific theatre featured many examples of bypassed soldiers fighting on. Cheo stepped in towards the end when JohnM had to leave. He had previously been observing so he had complete situational awareness. I added Red units in his area of operations to mix it up for him. This is not always a good choice but it worked in this game. Lessons learned: Logistically I should have planned better. I should have had some Redfor logpacks to sustain the artillery fires, or made other provisions for re-supply. I also did not plan for rations for myself or think of them during play and ended up feeling the effects an hour after the EndEx. Hint a bag of chips by the computer would be a good thing :>) The players used the LVTs more as modern APCs/IFVs than as they were historically. In the future I would include more Redfor AT assets to hinder this. The scale of TacOps was mentioned as a concern for a primarily infantry action but this could be compensated for by changing turn lengths during the game. I’ll have to get together with someone and do some online play testing to see how altering turn length affects infantry maneuver and game play. Smoke use by off map artillery (ships) was allowed as an oversight on my part. Right from the beginning players were requesting smoke. Historically smoke was not used in amphibious assaults as it obscured the landmarks that were used to guide in the landing craft/vehicles. I had set the visibility to under 1000m to simulate the dust and smoke caused by the pre-landing bombardment. I increased it during the game without the players noticing that I had done so. In the future for this type of game I will curtail smoke availability for off map support and only make it available via the umpire menu by player request…..with a sneaky umpire penalty applied :>). Off map artillery include MRLs with HE only. I had used them in my play-testing on the map to simulate a pre-landing bombardment quicker than waiting on artillery strikes (very quick response times). Discussion revealed the desirability to have them as tube artillery. Which I agree is probably better. I would keep them in mind for their ability to more closely simulate rocket fire from LCI’s carrying 4.5 inch rockets as used in the later actions in the Pacific. We used MRL battery instead of Battalion to minimize the footprint of fires. Discussion on the pack howitzers revealed their fires footprint was very small, much like the individual mortars are. I had broken them down to 1 howitzer and prime mover + ammo vehicle per LCM, with the LCM markers separate. In the future, joining the LCMs together to “guide” the player to fire the howitzers as a group of six may be preferred to result in a more effective “fires footprint”. In the end my controlling Red and the umpire duties probably was not the best idea and the players seemed to think my idea of the static defense being boring would not be the case. One thing I did was drop Redfor units in during the game via umpire controls. Players commented that I had warned them too much. I was worried about angering players versus increasing the challenge and surprise factors. Lesson learned-players want to be abused….. just not in ridiculous ways. This umpire function would add to the work and an active Red player would allow for more “tricks” that I did not have time to do and frankly forgot to do in the heat of the moment. I think umpire driven surprise can add to the interest of the experience. Even in the absence of a larger map where “planning” and “maneuver” have larger roles, I should have put a better brief together for the players. Including a bit on the historical actions/tactics as I don’t think all TacOps players are very well versed in them. We are a group used to TOW and Hellfire missiles and APDS rounds not LVTs and AT rifles. Rattler’s presence was a very good thing with this being my first attempt at multiplayer hosting. His expertise was much needed while I cut my teeth. Things overall went pretty good I think and while it can be stressful trying to do so much at one time I had a blast. An umpire checklist would be a good thing. A couple of times my actions or lack thereof cause player orders to be lost. Goes with a newbie umpire I guess. Players are pretty good about rolling with such things. Network connectivity was pretty good with only a couple of drops. The only crash of the game was with mine at the very end when we were in the debrief phase and I was trying to remove fog of war and show all units to the players. Another mistep was I forgot to tell people the scenerio for the game when they popped in on IRC. Major H asked and logged on as an observer. Another new player did not know to ask this and with my not telling him he could not get logged on and gave up. Contrary to my earlier statement on fun and leaving the learning to the school house, I had fun and learned a lot. Hopefully some or all of the players will add their impressions.

Neptune, Sorry about that. I saw you log onto IRC and then off real quick before anyone "said" anything to you and then later you popped back in and I thought you were going to join the game and you disappeared. I'll have to remember the scenerio is as important as the IP in the future. My bad. Keep an eye out winter seems to be CPX season. I have a day or two that might be open to another one in January. I'll have to see. Dennis Newbie umpire learning as he goes :confused:

Major H noticed a potential problem so All who plan on particpating download this map and use it so were all on the same page. Follow the link within his message.

1530 GMT Start time.

Welcome aboard.

The plan is to use the Wake Island Map (Map106c) and I will control the Japanese as it will primarily be a static defense (not much fun for a player I would guess). Players would control USMC units. I'm going to tweek the USMC oob file I have as well as the Japanese oob for the CPX. A surprise or two can be expected. Any interest? I can do anytime between 1500-0100 GMT as it stands now. Post your interest and prefered start time and we'll see what works out. IRC channels for CPX: MAIN: server schlepper.hanse.de port 7024 channel #tacops. Should this one be down, then ALTERNATIVE: server www.combatmission.com, port 6667, channel #tacops

Hello, Some have talked about doing that and I think there may be one map made for a cpx from satallite imagery, check TacOpsHQ site and look in the map room to be sure. Someone posted a map at the SZO site of Fallujah of the right dimensions but no one has done the map file for it that I know of. One of the problems with that IMHO is that the 100x100 pixel boxes will not line up perfectly with the image so you may think your are in an area with buildings and are actually in terrain coded clear. Best but IMHO would be to use the imagery and a 1:50000 map if available to make the map from. The imagery will be a better guide to what the terrain looks like versus a map.

Excellent. The M113 family will get their own pictures too instead of the generic M113 picture? Some of us at least appreciate the small things.

If you do then we can have corpsmen etc with no data base additions. Of course new units with the appropriate B/W photos are cool too. There are some great photos of corpsmen running to assistance out there.

Matt, I'd have to agree with you there. I don't know if there is an elegant solution to this though. If it created a subfolder they would at least be together but what about when you close the game and then open it back up for later turns (pbem). Then it would just have umpteen folders with game files in it. For PBEM I always save to a labeled folder. Usually with the password to the file because I am prone to forgeting it :>) Biggest hassle for me is when I'm gaming out an idea in two player mode or checking how something works and then want to watch a replay and I forgot to delete the saved game file folder first.

What many folks do to vary the solo games is modifiy the OOB with the change unit feature. You can easily switch out Javelins with Dragons and M1s with M60s, and Bradleys with M113s. And totally change your tactical situation. Makes taking on the red horde much more challenging Dennis

Question on when ICM was introduced in NATO and Warsaw Pact for artillery. Also how common was it at first, ie when did it become plentiful in the field. Thanks, Dennis

Lots of us do. Best value for a game you are going to find. I would second this. While there has to be a cap there are times when I would like just one or two more to be combined. You can change your screen resolution to make everything bigger, or change the icon style or even change the icon size. You can change the sounds to clicks and this greatly speeds up turn resolution. Try logistics report under the report menu. There is a page or shortcuts in the game manual pdf file you can print. I think this is on the wishlist already. Hope I helped with some of your questions. The Major chimes in often with new player questions. You will be hard pressed to find better support for any game. Dennis

As well as new features and units....lots of units. Dennis

This topic is one of my "pet" wish list items and I have to respectfully disagree with the Major. Of course if/when implemented and I run out of ammo I might change my toon . Reasons: Soviet SP arty direct support cannot IMHO be modeled very well as is. Same with a tank/mech force assault across open ground. IMHO the designation of fire zones should have some effect on the defender. Soviet tanks carried a fair amount of HE rounds for this purpose. Modern scenero of a "Thunder Run" type op or a Mogadishu type scenerio with a running convoy/column. You are approaching a terrain feature that looks like the perfect ambush location. The ability to suppress the potential units located there would be a plus. Just opinions. Dennis

The HQ markers are just that markers. Other than that they can move shoot like any other unit. They do not have a special game function. There are some units such as engineer, FO, FIST, LRASS to name a few that do have game funtions. Some CPX designers use HQ markers as part of objectives so it is important to correctly model how a unit would fight and manuevr the HQ units appropriately. As far as how much fire support/recce assets I would say that depends. Not much of an answer but it is how it is. In Afghanistan you had 12 man SF teams directing dozens aircraft overhead. The SBCT FM's give a good feel for recce assets at the brigade level and the direction the army is heading. Not sure if there are UA FM's out yet. As far as putting it all together your on the right track! There is a book used by the Canadian army detailing a clash in Germany for training that could be of use to you in this regard. The name escapes me at the moment. Others that might be useful are Thunder Run, an excellent description of urban combat in Iraq. Dennis