Rattler Posted January 6, 2007 Share Posted January 6, 2007 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) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CONTENTS: 1. Background: TacOps Tourney 2001 recap 2. Setup and Planning 3. How it went 4. Lessons learned 5. Issues ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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