---Most CMO scenarios ask you to solve a targeting problem. Find the enemy, range him, saturate his defences before he saturates yours. The skill being tested is
allocation: sensors, weapons, timing. You win by shooting better.
This one asks a different question. The best score in Baltic Sentinel goes to the player who never fires a shot.
That is not a gimmick or a pacifist statement. It is what the mission actually is a merchant hull is dragging her anchor across three power interconnectors.
You have the legal authority to stop her, and the Baltic Fleet is standing over the incident specifically to make using that authority expensive. Board her and
you succeed — and you hand Moscow a boarding on the high seas to point at. The scoring is built on that hinge: the single largest award goes to stopping the
drag before the first cable parts, and a separate bonus goes to finishing the six hours without an allied round leaving a tube.
Hoburg Bank, south-east of Gotland. 14 October 2026, 0430Z.
At 0341Z the bulk carrier M/V SOLVEIG ARROW Comoros flag, 45,000 dwt, hull laid down in 1999, last port Ust-Luga switched off her AIS twelve miles north of the NordBalt corridor. She has been making 3.2 knots on a heading of 068 ever since, with no engine fault and no distress call. At that draught, on that bottom, 3.2 knots is what a ship makes when something is in the mud behind her.
Twenty-two miles north-west, the Norwegian cable ship NCS ENDEAVOUR is working with her ROV in the water. She is unarmed and entirely dependent on you.
You command CTF-401: two Visby corvettes, a Sachsen, a Braunschweig, an OPV, a Gotland-class boat nobody has declared, and a handful of aircraft. You hold the legal instrument to board. Rules of engagement SIERRA: no first use of force.
The Baltic Fleet is closer to the incident than you are, and it contests any attempt to use that instrument. Stopping the ship is the mission. It is also the act that hands Moscow its pretext. The scenario does not resolve that tension for you that is the whole point of it.
WHAT IT IS
- 6 hours of scenario time, 67 units, three sides (NATO / Baltic Fleet / civilian traffic).
- DB3000 v515, CMO build 1825.15.
- CMO complexity 2/5 no carrier ops, no strike packages to build, no deep logistics. Difficulty 4/5 — the hard part is deciding, not clicking.
- Two special actions: boarding party from HSwMS CARLSKRONA, and a jamming option against the Orlan launched off the intelligence ship.
- Scoring rewards restraint (max optimal scoring 2050). The largest single award goes to stopping the drag before any cable parts. There is a bonus for finishing without firing an allied round, and it survives being shot at only a round you fire cancels it.
WHAT'S IN THE PACKAGE
An intelligence dossier written as a commander's annex rather than a readme: situation, assessed enemy disposition with explicit confidence levels, friendly forces, ROE, execution, and how you will be scored. Twenty pages, with charts drawn from real GSHHS coastlines and the actual cable routes across the bank.
Also a test plan, design notes, and a self-test script that checks the scenario built correctly before you save it.
A WARNING THAT IS NOT A BUG
If the posture flips and you are still inside the S-400 engagement envelope from Gvardeysk, the 40N6 rounds reach your AEW orbit, your MPA and your CAP station. In one playthrough they killed the Argus, the Poseidon and both airborne Gripens inside twenty minutes, and a Kalibr salvo then accounted for four of the five surface units. That is the correct answer to going hostile inside someone's engagement zone. It is deliberate, and the scoring is built around it.
GROUNDING
The scenario leans on things that actually happened: Operation Baltic Sentry, the Estlink-2 and C-Lion1 cable incidents, and the pattern of ageing hulls under flags of convenience walking an anchor across the seabed. The fusion cell that produces the enemy picture is fictional; the sensors feeding it are not.
Everything in the scenario is fiction. Any resemblance to real operations serves plausibility, not intelligence.
DOWNLOADS
CTF-401-Baltic-Sentinel, 2026.scen Mission pack (rev 2026-09-27)Feedback welcome, particularly on the balance of the armed branch and on whether the boarding window feels too tight. If the Baltic Fleet AI does something I did not anticipate, I would like to hear about it as it's my first contribution ever.
— totobimbo
