Third Herd PBEM - Beaten Like a Red-Headed Stepchild

[smithcorp]

Had a classic PBEM battle of Third Herd as NATO against Herman Hum as Red. NATO's role is to counter-attack advancing Red forces. I'd chosen this larger scenario as it had air assets and I wanted to play around with helos. I sure got my wish though, with Red's fixed wing and rotary wing aircraft smashing my forces as they probed forward.

I didn't look at the scenario from the red side, or play it through as blue before the PBEM, so I had no inkling beyond the briefing of what to expect.

I lost almost 70% of my forces and the scenario ended just as the weather turned dirty. This may have kept Red's bombers grounded but it was too late - I had nothing left to challenge Red with.

In a nutshell, this is what it looked like:



I am the little bloke on the right and Herman's the one with the longer reach.

Here's the summary screens. My performance was officially disastrous (note there's a spelling error - disasterous - in the debrief). Interestingly, the summary also said my forces were in 'reasonably good shape' - not sure I'd agree with that. We were in pieces and had barely laid a glove on Red. In fact for most of the game I didn't see an enemy counter and when I did it was briefly. I don't think my arty or ground forces inflicted any casualties. What damage I did do was via my attack helos. NATO has no effective anti-air in this scenario, so we had to sit there and take it, though some Bradleys did claim a few enemy helos.







And a picture of the map at game's end:




Here's a link to the video kindly compiled by Herman, with commentary from both of us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWpw5DCZKmc

Thanks for looking!

smith

[Alex1812]

Thanks guys! It looks very interesting

[pekische]

It is very nice AAR video!

Unfortunately you didn´t record the phases of thinking about issuing of orders too much. Despite this, it is an excellent video.

[smithcorp]

ORIGINAL: pekische

It is very nice AAR video!

Unfortunately you didn´t record the phases of thinking about issuing of orders too much. Despite this, it is an excellent video.

I've thought about this. One of the criticisms I got when I posted an AAR at SimHQ was that it was difficult to follow the movements and tactical intentions from the map screenshots. At that time I edited the static images to show arrows and circles indicating the units and actions I was describing in the text. When making the video AAR with Herman, I thought that a lack was the difficulty of showing tactical intent at the start and the orders during the game.

The ability to show orders intent in an understandable way presented some problems for me - because I record 'live' and the game kicks off pretty much as soon as you enter your password; video files quickly end up huge (approaching a GB or more per turn if I spend too much time talking); and Herman and I try to limit the need to edit the videos, I haven't hit on a way to do this. It would be great if the game included a drawing tool, but if I do more of these video AARs, I might have to do a screenshot, annotate that and talk about it as an introduction to tactical intent at the start, and then do the same at orders phase (as if I video myself mucking about with orders, the file will be 4 hours long!).

Thanks for the comments. I have to say I was a bit overwhelmed by the size of this scenario. I didn't have a clear enough idea of what I wanted to achieve at the start, so my play was almost totally reactive; and Red's air strikes and arty quickly snuffed out what little plan I had. Herman took the initiative quickly and held onto it, while my play was a shambles.

smith