New Scenario for testing: Operation Urgent Fury (1984)

[AdmiralSteve]

Increasing influence by the Soviets in Central America has brought the US to the realization that the security of the US is in a perilous position. Nicaragua has secretly agreed to a 50 year lease of 2000 acres to the Red Air Force to build an exclusive TU-22M bomber base.

The United States not wanting to engage in direct dialogue that could spark World War 3, has enlisted Honduras factions with an "Arms for Regional Security" ploy to deter the Soviets from the occupation in Nicaragua.

After two high level Soviet military leaders are assasinated in Nicaragua, the Soviets publically place all blame on Honduran rebels leading the US in believing that the operation was a complete success...

until 24 hours ago.

Scenario Designer Notes

My goal for this scenario was to make a good cat and mouse game, kind of a Kasparov vs. Karpov chess match. It was not designed to be a Tyson vs. Holyfield heavyweight fight. The player will actually loose points by weapons being fired by either side.

The Soviet side objective is to move the Yankee II submarine armed with ICBM's into range of Washington D.C. and fire their salvo onto the US Capital. The US is to locate the Yankee II class submarine and sink her with minimal weapons. Essentially, a search and destroy mission with minimal damage to the other Soviet ships.

The premise of the scenario is to win of course, yet it can be difficult to portray real world scenarios into Command. At the beginning of the scenario, the US side must only search and track the Yankee II submarine. Once weapons are fired by the Soviets can the US side release their own weapons. As mentioned before, the US side will loose points for weapons release so it is essential to remain at a standoff position until the order is given to sink the Yankee II submarine.

Ultimately, your position is to keep the Soviets from firing their weapons onto US vessels and onto Washington D.C. Thus the rule of the scenario is to keep your distance from contacts and do not draw fire as the US side will loose points for Soviet weapons release. How you do it is up to you. Just remember that even as you may sink the submarine, you may not have accomplished the mission and that may be the difference in a major failure and a major victory.

Be patient. It can be a long scenario. Wait for orders to attack.

[AdmiralSteve]

Just to give further info, this is a US/Soviet Union battle in the GIUK Gap.
I gave it a shot this afternoon/evening and lost with -18 points, major defeat. I got too close to the Kirov and lost three helo's and a P-3. I fired 6 Harpoons sinking 1 Soviet surface vessel and ended up sinking the Yankee II. Because of the lost A/C and the weapons fired by the US and the Soviets combined was the reason for the negative point score.

[Flankerk]

Played as US side and most things working, the missions remain active which I presume you wanted. One slight oddity the save name is Yom Kippur?
there isn't any weather so the default is a flat calm with subs being relatively easily detected.

I scored a disaster at -145 or so, however therein lies a problem!
I think I understand, the idea is that you don't open fire. The messages work well, but are on repeat, so you tend to keep being told that you can now fire on the Russians etc. The other issue is, the scoring is on repeat, so fair enough I open fire with a missile at a hostile DDG and I trigger a fail, the big problem with this, is it does the same for active sonobuoys. My negative score was almost entirely racked up on sonobuoys. Somehow that bit probably needs to be dropped as it works as a search tool too. In effect I randomly drop active buoys, and I know when a sub is close as I don't detect it, but get the weapon deployed scoring message.

Have to say I'm still not 100% sure on the scoring either. From my point of view I can't fire, my orders say so, and that's completely clear. I then get orders that I can fire, and I must destroy the enemy ships etc.. I do so and it scores each of those as a negative? That might balance out a lot better without the repeat buoys message though.

[AdmiralSteve]

the big problem with this, is it does the same for active sonobuoys. My negative score was almost entirely racked up on sonobuoys. Somehow that bit probably needs to be dropped as it works as a search tool too. In effect I randomly drop active buoys, and I know when a sub is close as I don't detect it, but get the weapon deployed scoring message.

Thanks for the reply. I didn't think that my negative score was because of the sonobuoys as I only scored -18 and I dropped a lot of them. I'm going to play it again and make sure that I have the correct file uploaded since the scenario name wasn't correctly listed. This scenario was done in Build 507. Was that the build that you used?

The premise of the scenario was to be more of a "hide and seek" rather than a "shoot now, ask questions later". I was attempting to keep the US side from drawing fire yet I may have not implied very well in the briefing to remain away from the Soviet surface vessels. The Soviet Union had exclusion zones around two of their vessels and if a US vessel or A/C got within the zone it would be considered hostile and fired upon.

I think in the real world if your looking only to inflict minimal damage and seek out one submarine, one does not shoot 1,000 weapons so I had intended to "punish" the player for blasting away. It's a tricky thing to do in this game. Shooting a weapon has a tendency to make people nervous and trigger happy. Putting an AI that can represent human emotions in Command might be a few years away so I did the best that I could.

Unfortunately the game has its limitations but in terms of it's scoring I think it's a rather unique feature that the dev's can possibly tweak to keep sonobuoys' from being scored as weapons since the scenario and event editors don't allow for individual weapons to be listed.

Thanks again for you very helpful input. It's greatly appreciated.

Steve

[Flankerk]

Would it work if you specified what the exclusion zone surrounding the Russian surface ships is, then the player would avoid triggering them?

[AdmiralSteve]

Absolutely but it seems that the problem that you had was that the sonobuoys counted as a weapon which they didn't when I ran the scenario. So if I can't replicate that problem but hear of more players having they same problem, then I'll have to scratch the weapons scoring aspect. I may just have a scoring system set up that scores negative points for damage to both sides.
Thanks again for your input.
Steve

[AdmiralSteve]

My negative score was almost entirely racked up on sonobuoys. Somehow that bit probably needs to be dropped as it works as a search tool too. In effect I randomly drop active buoys, and I know when a sub is close as I don't detect it, but get the weapon deployed scoring message.

I just began the game and the sonobuoys were not being scored against the US side. I may have uploaded an older version of the scenario onto the Matrix website but I'm go get it another crack over the next couple of days just to make sure.

[AdmiralSteve]

24 hours into it and I'm thinking that if the Soviet vessels pick up a sonobuoy then its scoring as a US weapons release so I'll look at changing that aspect of the scoring.