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    On campaign - Atlantic Fleet
    33LIMA
    By 33LIMA,
    Sea-fights above and below the waves, in the Battle of the Atlantic!   This mission report tells the story of my last two missions - or more accurately, battles - in Atlantic Fleet's dynamic campaign. One is a U-Boat action, the other involves only surface ships, but otherwise they have not been chosen specially; they're just what came my way most recently. The campaign plays like a random battle generator, except that the encounters are those which result from the movements and dispositions you have made, of the ships available to you at that point in the war.   Like the Second World War itself, the Battle of the Atlantic started on the same day as the war in September 1939 and ran until its end, in May 1945. I never forget that what is essentially entertainment for me is based on the risks and sacrifices run and made by naval and merchant seamen, airmen and everyone else who went to sea, in those dark days. If nothing else, probably like many other players, playing such games increases my respect for those who served, and stimulates a desire to understand their experiences. I've just finished reading Roger Hill's excellent Destroyer Captain and am about to start The Sinking of the Kenbane Head by local author Sam McAughtry, written around the loss of that steamer in 1940, when 'pocket battleship' Admiral Scheer savaged convoy HX-84, sinking five merchantmen, which would have been even worse but for the heroic defence mounted by armed merchant cruiser Jervis Bay.   Though the real campaign was effectively won by mid-1943, with serious defeats being inflicted on the U-Boats, the latter fought on and surrendered only when so ordered at the very end, many coming into Lough Foyle and tieing up at the pier at Lisahallly, near the port of Londonderry which played an important part in the battle.     In my campaign, playing for the Kriegsmarine, I have got to February 1941 and have begun to take more interest in the planning and management of my ships. Your forces are pre-deployed and I had initially treated the campaign more like a random battle generator based on these initial deployments. But I have started to expand and actively manage my fleet, using 'renown' won in battle to add units from those available, sending fresh ships or subs out to the convoy routes and bringing back to base those needing repaired or 'bombed up'. My objective is to win the 'tonnage war' by sinking as much enemy merchant shipping as possible; getting it through would be my aim, were I playing for the Royal Navy. Sinking enemy warships helps to a degree, and while its tonnage doesn't count towards victory, it does earn 'renown', to obtain more ships, up to the limit allowed (30, I think).   Here's the campaign map, set to display my dispositions (white ship or sub icons) and reports of enemy warhips (blue ship icon). A turn is 3.5 days and though bombing raids and convoy atatcks can happen anytime, and do, it's not every turn that will generate a battle for the player. In each turn, you can manage your ships in each zone, by leaving them there or moving to an adjacent one. If the zone has a friendly port, you can dock the ships there, for refitting and re-arming ( don't yet know to what extent fuel and ammo loads are dealt with, but torpedo loads are definitely modelled and damage is cumulative, carried forward from turn to turn, with limited repairs possible at sea).     These zones are named for real sea areas. In the screenshot above, you can see that the active one contains my newly-commissioned Bismarck and Tirptz, accompanied by a destroyer, in the act of breaking out into the Atlantic (the U-Boats in the zone were already there but provide useful cover).   The red and blue dashed bar along the top of the campaign map illustrates my progess in the tonnage war. To win, I need to turn it all red, and keep it there, for an unspecified period. I'm quite enjoying the 'strategic' element of Atlantic Fleet, which has more than enough interest to make it engrossing, without so much detail or micro-management that there's a real risk of tedium.   France and Norway have fallen to Germany so I now have more, closer friendly ports to which I can return, when necessary. My forces already at sea include Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, operating successfully together against convoys as they did for a time in real life. But further south, I have recently lost a 'pocket battleship' which was hit by two unlucky 16-inch hits from HMS Rodney, before her superior speed could get her out of range.     Incidentally, this and other encounters have demonstrated to me that the 'Longer start range' option in Atlantic Fleet badly needs an increase. This doesn't so much affect historical battles, but on campaign, it can mean no escape for faster ships, RN battleships being unable to evade U-Boats which start rather close by, and aircraft carriers likewise very vulnerable to gun attack, in good weather and visibility.   Bismarck, Tirpitz and Beitzen have just previously had a night action while moving up the coast of Norway, with an RN cruiser and two destroyers, which they sunk with Beitzen getting a single 4-inch hit in return. I'm glad I decided to have a destroyer along, for Beitzen was able to keep the enemy illuminated by starshell, while the big battle wagons found the range and then pounded the enemy into oblivion. Having destroyed the RN patrol, they are now a move closer to the open waters of the Atlantic. The shot below was actually taken the move before the map pic above, after which I moved my force further west, to the next zone en route.       The next battle - U-boat convoy attack Atlantic Fleet's dynamic campaign (it has a 50-mission static one, too) generates battles based on your dispositions and movements, and my next one came when the campaign engine determined that a convoy had run into a zone with three U-Boats present, in the middle of the North Atlantic between Canada and Ireland.     You start after any pre-engagement moves have taken place, as seem here, with the U-Boats clustered around the target in some fashion. We can assume that one boat, or a Focke-Wulf Condor long-range recce aircraft, has spotted the convoy, and called in the nearby U-Boats. This isn't Silent Hunter, so you won't need patiently to hook around a convoy at extreme range, at full speed on the surface, then submerge ahead of its track and wait for them to come to you - that's already been set up for you.   For this action, it's daylight, and here is the tactical situation at the very start of the fight:     Ten ships a side per battle is the limit, which results in rather small convoys, here in two columns with three destroyers for escort. One of the latter really should be astern or on the other side. So far, we are undetected. The convoy is zig-zagging, but there are none of the asdic pings which would tell me the escorts have gone into active sub-hunting mode. I have rarely been detected before an attack, although periscopes can be spotted (and shelled!).   This is the external view from the position of U-109, a big Type IX boat in a good position on the starboard bows of the convoy. Once you have left the map, the lack of compass bearings means you don't have much sense of location or direction, except in relation to the other vessels involved, which would be nice to have; but my hope and assumption is that this is a fully-loaded convoy, headed east to the UK with valuable supplies whose loss will help win the war for Germany!     You can just about see my periscope wake, with the three escorts in view, to left, centre-left and right and the merchantment all behind. This may give me a good shot at a destroyer, but sinking freighters is what will win or lose the war, and unless sinking a lone escort enables a surface gun attack on the former, I will usually let escorts alone.   From here, my usual tactic is to go to full speed ('flank speed' as the USN and Atlantic Feet call it) and as my submerged U-Boat is much slower, immediately make any turn I reckon I need, to take me into a good firing position. After which, I will pick my targets. Atlantic Fleet has a 'sweet spot' range of about 1,000-2,300 yards which a torpedo will cover in a single turn, pretty well guaranteeing a hit (you can enable 'dud weapons'); what I like less is that there is a very high 1,000 yard minimum engagement distance!   And below is U-109 herself, running in at maximun revolutions, at periscope depth. As you can see, she is in mid-war configuration, still carying her deck gun but with an extended wintergarten mounting additional AA weapons (and what looks like a radar antenna or warning receiver on the conning tower, which methinks should be retracted, submerged).     The sub astern I just sent along in the convoy's wake, slightly to port, ready to catch them if they turn or reverse course. She's U-252, a smaller Type VII boat, and in early-to-mid-war configuration.     Slowly, we creep in, tightening the noose around our unsuspecting targets, but conscious that poor manouevres could easily put them beyond our slowly-developing clutches. One way or another, it won't be long, now!     ...to be continued!

    Combat Air Patrol 2 Video - March 2016
    MigBuster
    By MigBuster,
       

    Sept Iles and North Cape
    33LIMA
    By 33LIMA,
    Re-fighting two real-life battles in Atlantic Fleet!    One of my favourite features in Killerfish Games's PC port of its excellent WW2 naval wargame is the inclusion of thirty historical sea battles. This short mission report features two of these - one a victory for the Kreigsmarine (said to be its last), the other a defeat.   The victory is the Battle of Les Sept Iles ('the seven isles'). This was a night action, fought between light forces off the northern coast of Brittany, France, on 23 October 1943. The defeat is the better-known Battle of the North Cape on 26 December 1943, which resulted in the loss of the battlecruiser Scharnhorst.   Les Sept Iles My interest in this battle was picqued after reading an account of it in the excellent wartime memoir Destroyer Captain by Roger Hill. The book is an account of Hill's wartime service in that role. He commanded first HMS Ledbury, participating in the debacle of Arctic convoy PQ17, then, in the Mediterranean, playing a significant part in getting the damaged tanker Ohio into Malta, during the equally famous Pedestal convoy action. Hill certainly had an eventful war, finishing off Normandy on HMS Jervis. In between those commands, he was captain of HMS Grenville, and, in the Bay of Biscay, was on the receiving end of one of the first attacks by Hs 293 glider bombs; the book includes a dramatic picture of one of these heading for Grenville, and another of the bow of sloop Egret, sinking after a devastating hit.   By autumn 1942, Grenville was based in Plymouth and was a regular participant in Operation Tunnel. This was laid on as requred in an effort to intercept German blockade runners trying to sneak along close to the French coast during the hours of darkness. Hill hated the operation because it was usually undertaken with a mis-matched force which hadn't trained together and along the same lines every time, subject to regular radar tracking by the Germans. The naval staff refused any idea for a better-trained, more imaginative, less dangerously predictable approach...with sadly predictable consequences.   One such operation was laid on, on 22 October 1943, when intelligence reported a German blockade runner (the Munsterland) had slipped out of Brest to make a run up-channel. This time, the hastily-formed British sweep had a cruiser in the lead, HMS Charbydis, but she was an AA cruiser, with more but less powerful guns than on the two participating fleet destroyers, Grenville and Rocket. The rest of the force comprised four 'Hunt' class escort destroyers, slower than the others and thus unable to keep up in a fast action.   After the war, a friend of Hill's met a German destroyer captain in South Africa, who told him the blockade runner was used as bait for a trap. The radar contacts Charybdis picked up early on the 23rd weren't the blocakde runner and escort, but a division of big German 'Elbing' class torpedo boats (small destroyers, with lighter gun armament but six torpedo tubes apiece).  These launched their fish while still head-on, without turning broadside. Charybdis, in the lead, was stopped by one torpedo hit, then sunk by another, with heavy loss of life. Coming up behind her, Limbourne, one of the Hunts, had her bows blown off. Grenville likely only escaped because Hill, just astern of the cruiser and anticipating mines or torpedoes, had pre-planned a full-power turn to starboard in the event of a contact, which only just took him out of trouble. The Germans turned away and were gone before the British could make any effective counter-move, leaving them to pick up the few survivors and sink the wreck of Limbourne.   The Atlantic Fleet version of Sept Iles Here's the map for the battle. I decided to play for the Germans, though I was fairly sure that the element of surprise might not do me much good. In Atlantic Fleet, battles start well within gun range, which is a big disadvanatge if (for example) you are playing a German surface raider and find that you have come up against a convoy with a battleship escort, as I have found to my cost!     And here is the opening tactical situation. I was surprised to find that there are only two enemy ships, which turned out to be the AA cruiser Charybdis and the fleet destroyer Rocket. At this stage, they are just radar contacts. Also, the blockade runner was in the middle of my formation. Just to cap it all, my torpedo boats were in two lines, with the leading line rather in the way of the second one.     At this point, I found that I was unable to immitate the real German tactics. They could and this night, did, fire their torpedoes imediately they were within range, without turning broadside on, with the fish then turning onto the gyro course set. In Atlantic Fleet, you have less of an arc of fire for torpedoes, with none straight ahead or straight astern. So I was probably going to lose rather quickly most or all or of my advantage of surprise. To hell with it! I turned one boat and the blockade runner to starboard, towards the French coast, the others beginning full-speed turns to port, prior to cutting loose with torpedoes. Knowing I could be detected at any moment - if I hand't been, already - I started firing starshell, to illuminate the enemy.     The opposition were evidently caught unaware, steaming straight ahead, guns trained fore and aft. But the battle was now on!     ...to be continued!

    Atlantic Fleet - the CombatAce review
    33LIMA
    By 33LIMA,
    Killerfish Games's PC version of its iOS WW2 naval simulation/wargame takes the high seas by storm!     I started playing PC games on a system with a 14" screen and an early Pentium, and I'm not about to go back there, so I watched with interest but from afar, when I saw Fred 'Heinkill' Williams's affectionate and very favourable SimHQ review for the iOS-based Atlantic Fleet. Sometimes, though, dreams do come true, it seems, for a PC port has just arrived, after the developers completed the work and updated the graphics for the new platform.   Since the release of Fighting Steel and Destroyer Command in the late 1990s, it's been a bit of a famine for WW2 naval simmers, broken recently by the arrival of the rather good Victory at Sea. Well, now we also have Atlantic Fleet, so it's time to cast off, put to sea again and enjoy the feast that's followed that famine. And Atlantic Fleet is indeed a veritable multi-course meal of a feast, for anyone who remotely fancies tugging on his (or her) virtual seaboots and taking to the high seas to fight out some of the classic sea battles and campaigns of World War 2. Your mission is to preserve, or sever, the vital sea-lanes which kept Britain fighting against Nazi Germany, bringing vital supplies of food, weapons and raw marterials of all kinds to the British Isles...or not, if the Kriegsmarine has its way...     Atlantic Fleet iOS was the sequel to Pacific Fleet, and while our US cousins might regret it, I for one am very happy that Killerfish decided to get their PC feet wet with a port of the more recent, more modern game. I was brought up on a happy diet of Airfix 1/600 warships from the same theatre and the great little Eagle 1/1200 kits, released in themed sets like the Battle of Narvik, complete with accounts and maps of the relevant action. I soaked up films like Battle of the River Plate and Sink the Bismarck!, and later Ludovic Kennedy's excellent BBC TV documentaries on WW2 warships and battles - his later, excellent book Pursuit - the sinking of the Bismarck is on my desk as I type this. It was probably in the 1960s BBC documentary series The Valiant Years that I first heard Winston Churchill's famous observation that '...the only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril'. Of course, while he was talking about the submarine threat to the supplies that kept Britain alive and in the fight, for much of the war the Kriegsmarine's surface units were also part of the threat that so concerned the great British war leader. And the air power of both sides played an important role. One of the joys of Atlantic Fleet is that when you step back into those dark and dangerous days, you can re-fight the Battle of the Atlantic and its most famous historical actions on, above or below the waves.   Installation and features At time of writing, Atlantic Fleet is distributed via Steam - at a mere £6.99 Sterling. As we will see, for a game with high production values, engaging gameplay and an historical depth and coverage that would put many a full-price simulation in the shade, if not to shame, this is a very considerable bargain, to put it mildly.   I gather there are no plans to offer a different distribution channel and while I prefer the 'good old days' of standalone game installation, I have had no bother at all with any of the excellent Steam-based games I have purchased (Victory at Sea, Wargame: European Escalation and Wargame: AirLand Battle being the others) and would not consider passing up on a good game merely because of that.   I must start with Atlantic Fleet's high production values - these you will see from the moment the game loads. Here's the main menu screen. The ship seen here is the famous German battlecruiser Scharnhorst,* lost fighting against the odds at the Battle of the North Cape - which you can re-fight in Atlantic Fleet. Scharnhorst's brave showing prompted Admiral Fraser in Duke of York to say afterwards to his officers "Gentlemen, the battle against Scharnhorst has ended in victory for us. I hope that if any of you are ever called upon to lead a ship into action against an opponent many times superior, you will command your ship as gallantly as Scharnhorst was commanded today". Such is the world of steel ships and iron men that Atlantic Fleet re-creates for us. But I digress...can't help it, I feel the hand of history on my shoulder, as TCB once said.     *...and yes, before you start posting corrections, I know the ship above is actually a Hipper class heavy cruiser - Prinz Eugen, probably -  not Scharnhorst, but I couldn't resist the quote above and don't have a menu pic of Scharnhorst, to hand .   The point is, it looks great, it's animated, with camera pivoting around the ship, and there's a different ship each time. See, here's another menu shot, and this time, it's one of the big German destroyers, several variations of which appear in the game:     Atlantic Fleet is single-player only, so you will not find here any way to blow up anything other than an entirely virtual foe-man. You do, however, get a sombre but really effective musical theme to accompany the menu, and you can have music in-game, too.   Taking the menu options from the top, first there is 'Training Missions'. These missions are actually rather useful, and a good way of ensuring that it is the enemy who ends up like this, and not you:     And again yes, you heard right, you can drop the camera below the waves, to get this view, complete with rather scary grinding and booming ship sinking sounds;     As for those training missions, which will hopefully reduce the frequency with which your own ships feature in such scenes, here's what you get. Again it's nicely presented, with good artwork and a clean, crisp interface. I did mention the high production values, didn't I?     Here's the intro screen for the torpedo training mission. I really like Atlantic Fleet's artwork and the general design:     Load the mission and you get a little scenario, here a Royal Navy destroyer steaming alongside a hapless German merchantman. You click your way through a series of topic boxes, to learn the lesson. You can toggle the topic box on and off, for a better view. They each do a very good job of taking you through the relevant drill.     This is where you may first get to see the Atlantic Fleet mode of gameplay, and its most prominent feature is that it is turn-based, like a wargame. The sequence is: You move-You shoot-The enemy moves-The enemy shoots. We'll see how this works in more detail, later. Continuous gameplay would be better, and certainly more simulation-like, but it is what it is, and I soon got quite comfortable with it.   Jumping ahead to the last menu option, we come to 'Options/Help', and here's what you get:     As the menu title suggests, some of the things listed on the right of the screen above are options screens, others are help. The 'home' screen, above, lets you tweak various gameplay and difficulty options, as you can see. The 'Default controls' screen lets you re-map keyboard commands, like this...     ...while the 'Damage Report' is a help option and looks like this:     I find it all very well-presented and impressively thorough, very well up to the standards of PC sims and better than many I've seen, including the very best.   My main interest in a WW2 naval sim or game is the ability to re-fight historical or hypothetical battles, and it's that option we will look at next. Here, we will see how Atlantic Fleet's gameplay comes together, when the shells, torpedoes and bombs start flying.     ...to be continued!

    Coming Soon
    Erik
    By Erik,
    We're getting ready to transition over to our new website and what would that be without all the fanfare?                                        

    Steel Fury - 'Fury' the movie
    33LIMA
    By 33LIMA,
    Missions from the movie, in the tanksim!     Melodramatic tank movies are certainly better than no tank movies at all, especially if they make a decent effort at authenticity, amidst the melodrama. So let it be said of 'Fury'. I found it a tad contrived in places, from the awful, gratuitous prisoner shooting scene to the 'falling plate' Germans, whose erratic anti-tank gunners, plentiful but equally erratic panzerfaust operators and even a Tiger tank, fall to the guns of a few Shermans, crewed by our cynical, war-weary but nearly-all-conquering protagonists.     However,  'Fury' wasn't nearly as bad as I had feared, quite a decent war movie in its own right. And as far as tank movies go, 'Fury's now my joint favourite, up there with 'White Tiger', which substitutes a rather compelling weirdness for the melodrama and T-34/85s for the Shermans. Its protagonist had rather less luck with the Tiger in that movie, at one point resorting to an automatic pistol, after his crew failed to notice they'd plugged their main gun's muzzle with mud. Just when it seemed victory against the super-Tiger was within their grasp, too. Dasvidanya, tovaritch.     Anyway, thanks to prolific modder Lockie, Steel Fury now has a developing set of missions based on scenes from the movie - 'Fury', that is, not 'White Tiger'. There are two 'Fury' missions now available, both for the upcoming version 2.0 of the STA mod, which is in test, but available on application over on the STA forum. This mission report covers both of these missions; at time of writing (February 2016) a third one is in preparation. By way of a spoiler alert, if you haven't yet watched the movie but plan on doing so soon, you might want to do that, before reading how the missions play out!   'Fury' mission #1 - 'Ambush!' The mission puts you in the role of Brad Pitt's character, Staff Sergeant Don 'Wardaddy' Collier, who tells us early on 'I started this war killing Germans in Africa. Then France. Then Belgium. Now I'm killing Germans in Germany.' He must have missed out on the Battle of Kasserine, then. Things aren't that much better in Germany, it seems, because although the war's being won, your tank is the sole suvivor of your company. Your task now is simple enough - drive up the road to a camp, RV with a platoon of M4s, and then move with them to join forces with another tank platoon, before assaulting an enemy-held location.   The mission has one of Lockie's snazzy splash screens and when it loads, there's a video clip from the movie, showing 'Wardaddy's' Sherman arriving in the camp. This mission's production values are not to be sneezed at!   As in the movie, your tank is an M4A3 (76mm) HVSS, often known as the M4A3E8 or 'Easy Eight'. This was a common variant by 1945 and is distinguished from earlier Shermans by the one-piece 47 degree sloped hull front (no frontal protusions for the driver and co-driver hatches); T23 type turret with longer-barrelled 76mm gun, in place of the original 75mm; and different, horizontally-sprung suspension units with wider track. The SF-STA version is nicely-rendered; there's no 3d interior but the externals look great with lots of animations and external stowage, including the unditching beams carried on the left-hand hull side, just like the movie tank. Limitations in the sim mean the 'Fury' tank name is on the right-hand side of the hull, as per the first screenshot in this thread, rather than on the gun tube as in the movie; but the former is a more realistic place for WW2 tank names. The white tactical numbers on the turret RH side are a bit un-American, though, if not distinctly Soviet.     Approaching the camp for the rendez-vous with the other Shermans, you soon see that Lockie's scenery-building has spared neither effort nor livestock.       On the right as you pass into the camp is a firing range...     ...and on the left, a PoW cage, some of whose occupants are nervously standing with their hands still in the air. Evidently, these follows still believe all that Dr Goebbels has told them about the proclivities of the dreadful Amis...or perhaps they have just watched that scene in the the movie, too.     The PoWs' apparent anxiety is not surpising, perhaps, as the camp is full of GIs, all armed to the teeth, many of them prowling around purposefully, with their weapons in both hands. Moving on, and being careful not to run over any of these heavily-armed people, you can soon see the M4s you came here to join, parked up ahead.     As you reach the Shermans, you're reminded of your next move - changing on-screen messages and optional waypoint indicators keep you well informed, without reverting to your map. Now, it's time to tag along and link up next with Lt Parker's boys, before we put in the next attack.     Having seen the movie, something tells me that it's not going to be quite so simple!   ...to be continued!

Portal by DevFuse · Based on IP.Board Portal by IPS


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