New Scenario for Beta Testing: The 4th of July

[Kitchens Sink]

Since every wargamer loves flinging some tactical nuclear weapons around, I constructed this scenario. It also has a lot of mobile land armor units (which CMANO may not have been designed for, but seems to work well). I have not played thru this in it's entirety yet, but thought I would get some initial feedback from the CMANO Community.

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The 4th of July:

It is the Summer of 1989, and the revolutionary wave of dissent that has been sweeping through the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact States has been brutally put down. Mass demonstrations have been met with the use of extreme force by the USSR military, resulting in greater than 5,000 civilian deaths.

An unknown KGB Lt. Colonel named Vladimir Putin (only 37 years old) has been swept into power by the Military/Intelligence establishment. NATO knows little or nothing about him. He has mobilized large numbers of troops and heavy equipment to quell any thought of further internal rebellion. Soviet military forces on the European Central Front has been reinforced, and NATO intelligence is seeing some disturbing movement of Soviet front-line tanks and troops in East Germany.

Because NATO has been decreasing troop deployment in Europe for the past 2 years, the only way to stop a Soviet invasion now would be the immediate use of tactical nuclear weapons against troop/armor concentrations, and other carefully selected targets. The Soviet Union would also be expected to employ tactical nukes. The risk of escalation into Strategic Nuclear War is obvious.

It is now July 4th, 1989, and the Soviet Union has decided the time is right to lay claim to all of Germany. As Col. Putin commented to his military advisors..."We will supply additional fireworks for America's 4th of July Celebrations this year"

[lowchi]

nice

will have a look this week.

thx!

[Kitchens Sink]

At first blush, it appears I have given NATO too many nukes to play with. It was much too easy to vaporize all of the Soviet 9th Division elements once they were detected. I wanted NATO armor and conventional aircraft to have to deal with at least some of them.

I'll make adjustments in Version 2, but I'll wait until I get some feedback from other players.

[Lawdog1700]

Played this through 1.5 times over the weekend.

Great scenario. It really shows the versatility of the Command engine, as this is one epic ground battle as opposed to our normal aquatic conflicts. As seems to be a trend in v 1.04, the game never crashed but ran pretty slow (this is a big scenario). In any case, I read the designer's comments before writing this and I disagree that NATO forces were given too many nukes. Two of mine malfunctioned and, while I was able to do significant damage to the 3 northernmost groups, I had to finish them off with Apache helicopters which was a lot of fun. The most southern group took basically no damage from my nuke strikes and I was forced to fight a major ground battle against it. When that failed to stop the advancing Soviet group, I was forced to carpet bomb them with 12 B-52Gs armed with 500lb. bombs (which did basically shatter their formation).

I was dismayed at how much air parity there was in this scenario. I was killing Soviet air power at about 1 to 1.5. By the end, I had lost every single Tornado and F-15 fighting the Soviet air force (though we did cause significant damage). This was due, in large part, to the excellent air defenses the Soviets had placed near the border. My HARMS were not able to attrit the SAMs enough to really make a difference.

In the end, my ground forces carried the day. I destroyed the airfield just to the south of Berlin with the combined fire of 3 towed 155mm batteries. My M-1 and Challenger units were able to take out most of the Soviet SAMs, but alas this was after my air power was all either gone or had expended munitions and were re-arming. I lost both of the German air bases about 3 hours into the war (but I was able to get all of the F-15s out before they were hit and then sent them to Fairfield).

Overall, really fun scenario. I had lots of strategic weapons but never got to use them, that is probably a good thing though.

[Tomcat84]

Sounds like something I have to play! No promises though, I always find myself running out of time! I still want to play Good night Irene too and there are others. Plus I have my own to build haha. I want 36 hour days! [:)]

[Kitchens Sink]

Interesting....

I moved my 4 100kt Lance missiles forward to put a large hurt on the northern/central armor groups once the SR-71 found them. I then used the 4 SRAM 200kt missiles available at Ramstein to take out most of the southernmost armor and Mech Infantry. I cleaned up things and took out a couple of "allowable" airbases with the 4 SRAM available at Fairford and sent in the NATO armor/Apache's to mop up the very few remaining enemy armored units. I still had 3 400kt Pershing 1A's moving up into range from France but did not need them. In my gameplay, NATO armor and conventional bombing aircraft didn't have much left to aim at. All of my nukes worked, which maybe was the difference.

I think the air war is tough, mostly because of the enemy jamming. One thing I don't like is a lot of the Soviet planes kept chasing the SR-71 trying to shoot it down, but they didn't ever fire because their missiles won't reach 90K ft....they just followed it around and went home when Bingo Fuel.

[Lawdog1700]

My experience was very different. When I achieved a hit with the nukes, it would usually blow a lot of units out of the center and it would leave a ring of units around that. It was like a big radioactive donut. I had to hit the central group with two, one SRAM center mass at each end and that got all but about 4 units there. That southernmost group was a problem because they were in "face stabbing" range before I got an available Lance in range and so I was unable to nuke them and I was unwilling to hit them with a nuke on German soil (well, I would have if the B-52s hadn't worked).

My SR-71 got shot down both games while flying at 90,000 feet, though it was by SAMs and not enemy aircraft.

[ghynson]

Where are my A-10s?

[Kitchens Sink]

Good point. I'll get rid of some of the F-16's and add some Warthogs in Version 2

[mikeCK]

Should I try to stop the Soviet advance without resorting to Nukes first? Then if I cannot, start dropping nukes? Or is it set up for the NATO player to use the nukes right from the start?