33LIMA

Two can play at that game... Back admiring the view of my LaGG and its surroundings, I got a sudden and violent shock, when a burst of fire from somewhere astern crashed into my aircraft and sent it wobbling. I broke hard, too hard, succeeding only in inducing a power stall which quickly became a spin. For a second before flicking around and nose-down, my suddenly-unresponsive LaGG seemed to hang in the sky, a nice, big static target. I waited to be hit again, unable to do anything but hope my spin would surprise the enemy as much as it had me, go through the spin recovery drill, and hope for the best. Roughly in that order. Amazing to behold, that's about how it worked. I recovered not far off the ground and wasted no time in opening up the throttle again and trading for speed most of the height I had left. Yes, I admit it. I fled, unashamedly. Looking behind, I was relieved to see that my assailant - for I assumed it was he - had fallen well behind. Hoping my two wingmen hadn't got too far away on the route home, I countermanded my 'return to base' command and ordered 'Cover me!'. If this was just the one pesky Messerschmitt, it was time to gang up on him and give him a darn good Soviet thrashing. If he wasn't alone, well, I'd need all the help I could get. It's probably illusory but somehow, it feels safer hugging the earth, if you're being hunted, so that's what I did. The 109 was probably far enough away for me to have turned into him, but I wasn't going to do that until my wingmen had rejoined, whether the German was on his own or not. I had planned to follow the river valley below me but I realised it led away from home, so I pulled up and turned right, to cut across the side of the valley. Not a clever move. The 109 started to cut across my turn. No point delaying it any longer. I turned into him. Time to fight. As I came around, the 109 flashed across my nose. What was he up to? I pulled after him, wary that this was some sort of fascist trick to rope a Soviet dope. ...to be continued!

Soviet swings, Luftwaffe roundabouts... My plan to sneak up on somebody and give them the chop got off to a reasonably good start, despite some 'known technical issues'. Since the modders brought it to a whole new level, I’ve been an enthusiastic fan of Il-2, regarding it as still far and away the best WW2 air combat simulation, overall. But as a non-headtrack user, I don’t much like its padlock system. I’m ok that it breaks lock when other sims might maintain it but I find it a bit too choosy about when it will pick up a target, in the first place. Even at 1600x900 screen resolution, it’s hard to distinguish friend from foe, when in real life, with decent eyesight, you should be able to tell a 109 from a pointy-winged LaGG. Nevertheless, I identified what I thought was a 109; but with the padlock reluctant to pick it up at the range in question, I took my left hand off the fully-open throttle and tracked him with the mouse, as I closed in. He was a 109 all right and while I don’t think he saw me coming at first, he was sensibly refusing to fly in a straight line in a combat zone. It may be a placebo effect, but I fancy the 4.12 AI is no longer as able as it used to be, to break at exactly the point you are about to shoot, as you close in out of sight, from unten hinten. Nevertheless, though I closed the range, I didn’t get in a shot and he saw me eventually. In the merry dance which followed, the 109 used the vertical quite effectively to evade my clutches. But every time he circled around menacingly above me, I seemed to be fast and agile enough, on the level, to evade his attempts at passes, while cutting corners and othewise catching him up, as the opportunity presented itself. Finally I managed to get close enough for a decent shot - but missed, when he suddenly pulled up hard into a sustained full-power climb. Up he went, and up I went, after him. Not having dived first to pick up speed, I could sense rather than see that we were both steadily bleeding off speed; but he seemed to have the edge. As my momentum fell away, I was desperately using what control authority I had left to edge my gunsight over and onto him. Just before I stalled out, I finally got the correct sight picture and let him have it with all weapons. It was just the briefest of bursts, then my LaGG began to fall away. I knew I’d hit him squarely but apart from some pieces flying, he seemed to be still in business. Although my stalling out prevented me seeing him go down – and my lack of Russian meant I didn’t recognise the congratulations that would have been offered on the radio – I was nevertheless reasonably confident that he was at least out of the fight - and, very probably, doomed. Having recovered from my spin, somewhat lower down, I picked up speed again and cleared my tail with a climbing turn, looking around as I did so. A couple of single-engined aeroplanes where whirling around, well spaced out and apparently with no particular purpose in mind. I cut in after one of these, only to realise that I was chasing one of my wingmen. Labels back on, I picked up on a blue one and chased after him, instead. This time, having a modest height advantage, the 109 pulled the old Il-2 trick of simply levelling off and flying away at full throttle. One of my flight-mates was also chasing the Messerschmitt but was even lower than I was. Our tail chase was entirely unproductive. Once the 109 had opened out the range enough to reduce the risk of him simply turning the tables, I gradually turned away and let him go. The other LaGG I ordered to return to formation, after allowing him to chase the German a little further off. The sky around the target area now seemed completely clear so I oriented myself with the map and turned for home. I wasn’t sure where my number three had gone but my priority now was to get everybody home. I should have circled and regrouped, then headed home as a flight. But instead - perhaps because I didn't want to hang around the combat area - I just ordered everybody back to base, independently. This produced two apparent radio acknowledgements, re-assuring me that both my flight-mates were evidently still in the Land of the Living. Whatever was burning on the ground behind me, it wasn't my own guys. So far, so not-too-bad. Now it remained to get the heck out of Dodge-ski and back to base, there to celebrate our successes - and survival - over a suitable quantity of vodka. Hopefully somebody might stand us a few drinks, otherwise, what the heck, we'd just buy a round or two ourselves. Now, all we needed was the continued co-operation of the Luftwaffe, who had so far been kind enough to provide us with some nice targets and then make their exits, without overstaying their welcome. Who could ask for more? ...to be continued!

Sounds good! It's just a pity that it's not possible (if I understand right) to import W:EE or W:ALB maps into Red Dragon (which I understand has many ALB units) so that we could fight the classic NATO-WARPAC battles with the latest game engine.

"Errr...anybody here speak English?" As I admired the view in autopilot, while looking out for our charges and waiting for my number three to catch up, I realised I'd already made my first mistake on this mission. Specifically, I had ensured that of all that radio chatter I was now beginning to hear, some of it possibly rather important, I understood precisely nothing. This was because, obsessed as I am with turning off (at least until I really needed them) all on screen aids, I had disabled the text display of radio messages. Flying for the VVS, the radio traffic was of course conducted in Russian. I know that by hand-editing Il-2's config.ini you can control the number of lines of such radio messages displayed so that your monitor isn't turned into a Kindle. But I had turned it off completely. And unlike the 'speedbar' display of heading, altitude and speed, you can't toggle radio traffic text on and off, in-game. I can get by with Luftwaffe missions, but flying VVS, my radio message repertiore is sadly and very severely limited. Say again, Tovaritch? This mission was evidently going to be somewhat more tricky than it otherwise might have been. Before long, my AI alter ego - the autopilot - had made the RV point with the bombers, which could be made out as three pairs of specks, up ahead of us. They turned out to be Pe-2s, all in a rather fetching pea green upper surface finish and bombed up like they meant business. RV completed successfully, I decided it was time to take over from the autopilot. There was still some way to go to the target, though, so I reckoned I had a little longer to admire the external view. Nothing to do with the fact that it's also a good way to scan the skies, especially in a LaGG, where that deep rear fuselage rather hinders the view rearward. Finally, I heard some Soviet R/T chatter that I recognised from my last foray in a VVS campaign (the exceptionally good 'Blinding Sun', must try that again soon in CUP). It was our bombers, announcing their attack runs. Sure enough, ahead and below, I could now see the bridgehead that must be our target area. Before long, the first bomb-burst appeared, a near miss on a bridge which, if nothing else, hopefully sent some of the fascist invaders off in search of a change of trousers. Soon after, a further explosion was to be seen further west. A miss, a hit on an unseen target...or one of our bombers biting the dust? I had no idea. There was plenty of R/T chatter but untranslated, I had no particular notion what it portended. What I did know, though, was that if something bad was going to happen - or indeed, had already started to happen - anytime about now would be about right. At this point in the proceedings, I decided that I needed a bit of extra help, bereft as I was of comprehensible radio comms. So I turned on labels. As I half-expected, some of them were blue. The Luftwaffe had arrived. I rolled over and joined the party, at the same time cutting my wingmen loose with an order to attack. By this time, tracer fire was flashing back and forward up ahead, so perhaps they were already engaged; or maybe it was the Pe-2s. Knowing Soviet tracer is green and German, orange, helped me spot the bad guys, so I killed the labels and started looking for somebody I could creep up on and shoot down. No need to make this any more complicated than it has to be, is my motto. ...to be continued!

Now THAT is what I'd call a Wargame:EE/ALB mod - a W:EE/ALB Realism mod in fact! So, so many wargames pay scant attention to such organisational realities, thereby also not doing a very good job at military role-playing - if you are a front line major, you command either an infantry company or a tank company/squadron, equipped as per your army's ToE; not just any old hotch-potch of kit you choose to 'buy'. Even tho years back, hardcopy 'army lists' like the one I have in front of me now - Tabletop Games WW2 set, which things I bought mainly for the unit orbats ToEs - made some efforts to force the player to oeprate a realistic 'army', with for example 'compulsory troops' you had to use up some of your points on. I'm still struggling with basic concepts like cards and decks. Let's say that in line with typical British Army doctrine - don't think I heard it called that at the time, but anyway - of the W:EE period, you are cast in the role, for a given mission, as a major. A squadron [company] commander, say in the 19/21 Royal Lancers (Prince of Wales's), as featured in the above mission. Based on the Nov. '75 org chart I now have in front of me, I have by default: Squadron HQ with 3 x MBT (one with dozer blade), 1 x FSC [Ferret Scout Car] - planned to replace the Ferret with 1 x FV432, with the intro of the CVR(T) series 4 x Tank Troops (platoons), each with 3 x MBT 1 x Admin troop, with 1xFV432 (Ambulance) - planned to replace the FV432 with 1 x Samaritan, with the CVR(T) intro 1 x Light Aid Detachment, with 1xARV, 1 x FV434, 1x FV432 - after CVR(T), FV432 replaced with 1 x Sampson Granted W:EE may need to employ stand-ins but this or something like it is going to be what I take onto the battlefield...or the mech infantry equivalent, if I'm an infanteer not a tankie. Now, my point is, that by about this time - as you may already know - the fashion in the British and other armies was to 'cross-attach' as I believe the US Army calls it, creating in effect MIXED companies. In the above example, I might find that the Brigade or Battlegroup Commander in his wisdom has ''swapped' one of my four tank troops for a mech infantry platoon with 4 x FV432, possibly one with a Rarden turret. I'm not sure we have a 'plain' 432 in W:EE so we might need a Spartan instead (Saracens, sadly no, not by this stage). So what I'm saying, by all means offer companies as the basic building block for tanks and infantry, but if possible allow the player to exchange tank for infantry platoons or vice-versa, so that he can create a tank-heavy 'mixed company', a balanced one, or an infantry-heavy one, according to his mission. In the British Army these 'mixed companies' were called Combat Teams; a force based on an Inf Bn or a Tk Regt was called a Battlegroup, where the same principle applies. If that's not possible, then fixed companies - either tank or infantry - would make a much better basic building block. He can then make attachments without the detachments, if you see what I mean, and at least create tank-heavy or infantry heavy 're-inforced companies'. In the Bruder gegen Bruder missions I have played so far, fun though they can be, the forces you're starting with are just silly little penny-packets that no commander who wanted anything other than a bloody nose, would commit to a fight on its own, unless he was utterly desperate. Even the two-platoon combo featured here is a bit light, to my mind something based on a company HQ is about the minumum in the sort of battles and battlefields featured in W:EE, unless you're doing something specialised like a patrol or a recce: Anyway sorry about the long semi-rant - more power to your modding elbows, this is very much of what W:EE/ALB needs, to notch it up to a whole new level as a realistic combat simulator! Better still if I can also pick a stronger force, if I want less of a click-fest challenge and more time to think tactics and deal with the Banzai Bruder! Edit - just realised there IS a 'plain' FV432 APC, in W:ALB if not also in W:EE; it's with the infantry, rather than a separate vehicle:

Flying a vanilla campaign in the classic WW2 sim's latest mod! You can say what you like about the newest addition to the Il-2 line, Battle of Stalingrad (BoS) - and many of us do just that! But one thing it has done for me, is stimulate my interest in its predecessor's original, Eastern Front campaigns. No mean achievement, that, for until relatively recently, I'd regarded Il-2 as mainly offering planes I didn't especially want to fly, in places I didn't especially want to fly them, to adapt another simmer's comment. At the moment, I have two installs of Il-2 1946 - one for Dark Blue World (DBW), the other for the new Community User Patch (CUP). Due to different files, units and other factors, it seems likely to take a while, before many campaigns that work in DBW or other versions of Il-2, also work in CUP, though some already do and the list is growing steadily. Both to check out the compatibility of some stock Il-2 campaigns with CUP and to indulge my new-found interest in the Eastern Front variety, over the last month or two I've been running, on and off, a standard Soviet fighter campaign, flying one of the aircraft available in BoS - the rather sleek but not especially high-performing LaGG-3. Like other aircraft before and after, this seems to have been a basically decent design which needed a more powerful engine to turn it into a competitive fighter - which it got, when its inline engine was replaced by a radial, creating the Lavochkin La-5. From this campaign's timeframe, though, the La-5 is about a year away. It's July 1941, just weeks into Operation Barbarossa, and I'm flying a LaGG-3, defending our dearly-beloved Union of Soviet Socialistic Republics against the fascist hordes of Nazi Germany. And an interesting challenge it's been, keeping my virtual neck intact, up against superior numbers of superior planes and - historically, anyway - superior aircrew. So far, courtesy it seems of some Soviet Socialistic miracle, I have not only survived, but knocked down some enemy aircraft. I'm on my fifth mission, no less...but wondering how much longer my good fortune can possibly continue. Here's the latest briefing. As you can see, it's a fairly straightforward escort job, with a hint that we might want to shoot up some stuff on the ground at some point, too. Maybe it's a difficulty setting I applied when I created the campaign, but the usual Il-2 red and blue front lines aren't shown on the map. But I'll be able to gauge the whereabouts of the enemy from the front-line target the bombers we're to escort will hit. Happily, the target's not too far off, so I can fly the mission in real time with no need to use 'warp'...which as just as well, as Il-2's never had that, relying on autopilot and time acceleration. The briefing doesn't tell me how many are in our flight, or the type and strength of the bombers. Nor do we get their or our altitudes. I put this down to a level of uncertainty, even confusion, in an air force with its back against the wall...or perhaps, against a Commisar with a small-calibre pistol and a willingness to employ it, in stiffening our resolve, should that become necessary. At the flight line, I find that there are in fact three of us on this hop. Having chosen a high enough rank to avoid the (to me) hateful chore of formation-flying - and to enjoy the extra challenge of flight leadership - I'm at the head of the queue. This being a stock mission, there's none of the newer formation takeoffs. Happily, the default Il-2 conga line is a short one, today. The current LaGG-3 I find is a nicely-rendered bird. More rounded contours in some places, inside and out, would be nice but I'm not complaining. Her authentic, subtly-weathered camouflage and national markings are convincingly-applied. There's no sign of the original opaque Il-2 markings, which looked like the over-thick waterslide transfers you used to get on plastic kits, guaranteed to blot out all but the crudest surface detail. And the cockpit, though clearly well behind the latest self-shadowed, finely-curved marvels, is still quite serviceable. One new feature the LaGG does enjoy are more rounded wheels, and very welcome they are, too. Soon, I was aloft and retracting the gear. After the crazily finnicky ground handling of BoS, takeoffs in '46 are...well, whether more realistic or not, more what I'm used to. Another, older improvement to Il-2 that the modders have wrought is the engine sounds. I absolutely loathed the dreadful external engine drone of the original sim. That's a distant memory now, so I can admire my bird in the external view without feeling that I need to turn down the sound. In fact, so much was I enjoying the external aspect of my LaGG sweeping over the Steppes, that I decided to let the autopilot fly, for a bit. There was now sign of the bombers and I thought, rightly as it turned out, that my alter ego would have a better idea than I, were they were and at what height we should be. My number three lagged (sic!) for a bit but my number two wasn't long in catching up. We perhaps tend to take for granted these days such Il-2 wonders as different planes having different individual numbers but even now, not all sims have this and it's still a fine thing to behold. Three of us had left our airfield. How many would return, and would I be amongst them? The answers would not be long in coming. ...to be continued!

Thanks Gunrunner, tho I do like and intend to play campaigns, that is EXACTLY the sort of thing that I think I'd like to see. The Warpac -v- NATO side is what I'm really interested in but with some ship action, Red Dragon might be a good alternative. In W:EE so far, things often happen a bit too fast. This might be fair enough to an extent...except that I'm still seeing enemy light units especially - who should really be much more circumspect - simply appear and instantly charge you, regardless of losses. In the second mission of Bruder Gegen Bruder, for example, some crazies in 2-3 BRDMs or something similar rushed us (heading, as if by magic, for the M577 command unit whose presense in sector Echo enabled me to claim it!), dashing straight across the fields of fire of two M42 SP twin 40mm guns whom I'd positioned in a hedge to overwatch the HQ. The 'Dusters' should have shredded the light armour but they only got some and the survivor(s) got my M577. The other factor is that, as you say, the AI does its battle drills (from Combat Appreciation by the commander(s) on the spot, to issuing even quick orders, to action) VERY fast...and can do that for multiple platoons simultaneously. Evidently, since they've built a 'brake' into Red Dragon, Eugen are learning and adapting, as they develop the series. It'd be good if they patched W:EE to bypass the unlocks and add the brake, and W:ALB to add the brake. In the meantime, I'll try adapting to the situation in W:EE and W:ALB, for example by keeping moves short and staying concentrated, maximising mutual support and interlocking fields of fire. And if that's possible now, pausing the action, if I want to admire the vehicles, take screenshots or just catch my breath! Regardless of such issues I'm still finding W:EE is a Cold War wargamer's delight! What I'd have given for something as good as this, 20 years ago!

I know I said I'd likely wait till I'd played some more W:EE and that I wasn't that interested in the more northern theatre, but Wargame:AirLand Battle is in a Steam sale for £2.99 so I'm installing it now! http://store.steampowered.com/app/222750/ No patience, some people, but another bargain is another bargain! PS installation of W:ALB completed, just spending some time in the visual armoury, admiring all the kit. As with W:EE the Chieftain turret is a bit crude, possibly a compromise to cover early and later, Stillbrew versions... ...the Canadian Leopard C1 looks good but doesn't have the angular, welded turret... ...and the Saladin armoured car has a Saracen radator in front! But such quibbles aside, the variety, as with W:EE, is most impressive and the rendering generally very good. The Soviet kit is a veritable recognition manual-full of classic Red Army hardware, from tanks to IFVs and everything in between. ...and now in W:ALB I can see them, and hopefully employ them, without having to do all the unlocking. Sweet!

Given that air combat didn't seriously start until around mid-1915, I don't think we much miss Bleriot monoplanes, Rumpler Tauben, Albatros B-types etc. I'd vote for LVG C VI (or other later-war German general-purpose 2-seater), Halberstand Cl II, AW FK8, Dorand AR and one other French multi-seater, like the Caudron R 11. Much the three biggest planeset gaps in FE/FE2 are a late-war German 2-seater, the FK 8 and a circa mid-1917 French 2-seater. Ground objects, there seem to be plenty of already. A greater variety of buildings for larger towns and cities would help, plus a better building for the isolated barn or farmhouse; those are the non-aircraft items where there would be the biggest benefit.

PS I just experienced the 'blank briefings' problem with another TFM campaign I have just installed - JG53 Ace of Spades. And deleting '_ru' from the filenames of all the .properties files solved it. These files are in the folder Il-2 Sturmovik 1946/Missions/Campaign/[country]/[campaign name]. The campaign which will probably feature in the next mission report, seems to be playing ok so far, despite my leaving the Mission Pro Combo that came with CUP, enabled. ...though I should have installed this additional skin, before flying the first, training mission in an He 51, rather than use the default Spanish Civil War skin... Edit: well, bang goes that idea...'bang' times six, in fact. The third mission of 'Ace of Spades' failed to load due to a missing He 111P, obviously because that Heinkel variant is included in the TFM mod the campaign's designed for, but isn't in CUP. I have no experience of the IL-2 Full Mission Builder but I opened the mission with the FMB and after a bit if fiddling around, replaced the P version with the H2 verion. The FMB also reported a missing Somua tank and two missing vehicles. I fixed the Somua easily as the tank was there in CUP, just under a slightly different file name. I also replaced the missing Fiat and fire trucks with suitable look-alikes. The good news was, the mission now loaded...it's twelve days in to the 1940 Blitzkreig in the West and we draw a long patrol, out to the tip of the German advance. The bad news is that all but one of my AI flight-mates - six in all - suddenly nosed down suddenly after take-off, and just went straight down, into the scenery. They all piled into virtually the same spot, in fact. Maybe it's the 4.12 AI doing something odd in a mission designed for a non-TD version of IL-2. Anyway, it looks like I'll have to wait till the author updates the campaign. Pity, not least as the 109s and the landscapes have never looked better.

I had a similar problem, but in the Spitfire Scramble campaign. the fix that worked for me is here: http://www.sas1946.com/main/index.php/topic,45262.48.html Don't recall having to do that for Flying Tigers but maybe one of the other solutions in that thread will help. Despite the Flying Tigers readme saying 'unload [=disable?] Pals Mission Pro (using JSGME)' when I look at the JSGME window, I see that I have it enabled, in the form #CUP_MissionProCombo-V4122. That and true color HD skins are the only JSGME mods I have enabled. Good luck!

Vielen dank, Johan, I just hope you like them! I just played a few minutes of W:EE mission #2 and wow, it's a whole new ball game. First I realised that I could unlock a really decent amount of stuff with my small tally of Command Stars from mission #1 - so maybe unlocking is not as much of a grind as I had feared (not to mention the 'grinding' is actually fun). The unlockable content included some BAOR stuff so naturally I grabbed Chieftain, Spartan and Scimitar. plus some more Bundeswehr stuff including infantry. And having kicked off the mission, I realised that clicking top left, I can order up and deploy many of these units, up to the points total displayed up there. It's a bit like the printed 'Army Lists' you could get for hardcopy wargame rules - within the units available to you, you can choose a force up to the total points allowed for the mission. Stuff is beginning to make sense, now. But having greedily maxed out my points, suddenly I realised I had a lot more platoons to control - from two to about eight. When our initially German force won our first objective, I suddenly found that the three Chieftains of the 9/12th Royal Lancers that I had to link up with, are now under my command - I can fight with Chieftains, already!!!! Woah, yeah! Of course, I went completely mad and acted like a little kid let loose in the proverbial chocolate factory, just throwing all this new kit about the map - Chieftains, Leopards, Scorpions, M113s, even a couple of M42 SP AA guns and more besides. Organised confusion, but somehow we crushed the enemy T-34s and T-55s and beat up their FOB - which looks somewhat better, blackened by a goodly dose of death and destruction, a NATO special delivery. Managing more than a couple of units at once is whole different ballgame...well, not different, but bigger. I'm going to need to calm down, organise my force and then push it forward in an organised manner. Maintain my balance, as Monty might have put it. Same drill as the previous mission, just scaled up a bit. Oooh, I think I'm gonna have some real old fun with W:EE! This is how I feel right now; having a Deutsche Wochenschau Moment, volume turned up, player set to loop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkCUvbkXGL0

Good to see the interest is there...well, here, as many others already seem to be fans of this series. I probably need to replay the first battle as the win cost be dearly...assuming lost tanks aren't recovered unless burned out (at least one was, though). Difficult missions plus losses being cumulative sounds a bit too steep a hill to climb. Unless you thrive on climbing steep hills. I don't like missions with 'excessive' challenge, where it becomes a CoD-style replay fest to find a way to get the unit which blocked you last time. Even if I win, I want a campaign which doesn't generate a loss rate that would have brought a real army to its knees...and end up like Pyrrhus, observing ruefully that another victory like the last one will be the end of us all. I like to bring my boys home....most of them anyway, even if they have to walk because their AFVs are all wrecks :) We'll see how this goes. If there's a difficulty setting or 'cheat' which dumbs down the (enemy) AI or reduces his numbers, I may try that. A mod to replace the dreadful FOB model would be great. Even painting those towers with transparent textures, and replacing the walls with barbed wire coils, would be good. Must Google 'W:EE' and 'mods'. I may try Airland Battle after this. I can live without the fast jets and don't really fancy the Scandanavian theatre, but 'most/all units unlocked from the get/go' is a big plus. In the meantime W:EE looks like it ticks most of my Cold War wargame boxes...provided I can progress. those who have played W:EE before, am I correct in thinking that even in the 'Solo/Skirmish' mode, you are restricted to the units you have unlocked? You'd think they'd let you have free rein there. If not, it's a pity if no-one has found a Skirmish mode unlock 'work-around'....

Alle menschen werden bruder...not As planned, I couninued a cautious advance, swinging my axis from north to east as we came around the far side of the industrial zone. My intention was to hook around to the river, staying north of the small town. The aim was the same - to locate and destroy enemy forces, by fire and movement. Initially, this went much as planned, the first victims being a cuuple of T-55s we caught and smashed in a treeline. Wasting no time, I resumed my methodical advance. Moving up and around the northern edge of the industrial zone, we were soon skirting the edge of the town of Grafhorst, with tension rising steadily. Where where they? As you can see in the screenshot below, W:EE's urban areas are small but beatifully formed. As with the equally-luscious rural areas, the level of detail and the quality of the textures really are top notch; they would not be out of place in a modern tanksim. Naturally, I had better things to do, than admire all of this visual bounty. Alternately moving the Hotchkiss and my three Leos - another one of which had been damaged in the last shoot-out, incidentally - I continued to work my way around the northern environs of the town. The 'click unit-click fire position' sequence makes tactical movement - bounding overwatch, call it what you will - a pleasure to execute in W:EE. It really is a rather good way of practicing this drill, so important in real life. Real armies used to employ little models and so-called sand tables for this sort of thing. W:EE's fantastic landscapes and simple mechanics make a great substitute, whether you play from a bird's eye view or for a greater challenge, get down into the weeds to get a tank's-eye view. Marvellous stuff and the experience of practicing this drill in (virtual) action, with such excellent units and terrain, is on its own enough to make W:EE a big winner, in my books. The area just north of the town turned out to be clear of enemies, but the ground to its south was to prove swarming with the beggars. The first indication of this was a T-34-85, spotted briefly between the buildings. I moved my Leopards into the town, to come up upon his left flank. We temporarily lost sight of the T-34 but on emerging from the town's southern buildings, the first thing my Leopards saw were some dismounted enemy infantry in a cornfield. These we duly engaged, with satisfactory results. At that point, our fortunes rapidly took another nose-dive. There were two, not one, T-34s in the treeline and nosing further out, we got into a close-range fire-fight with them. We killed them both but during the engagement, were caught in a crossfire from other enemy units - a T-55, if I recall right - hidden at the other end of the treeline. That engagement cost me another Leo knocked out and another, damaged. I pulled back my surviving tank, whom I was determined not to lose in a shoot-out with enemy firing from good cover. Instead, I pulled back and swung around towards the river. From there, I went south then turned north-west, to come at the enemy in the treeline from roughly the opposite direction. Once in position for an assault, I rather incautiously pushed in with my Hotchkiss and my last Leo at the same time, but on widely-spaced axes. I was relying on 'swarming' him from behind...even if two AFVs make a rather small swarm. At one point, I thought this was going to cost me at least the Hotchkiss, for he very quickly started taking tank fire! However, my Leo got the last bruder while he was thus preoccupied. It was a close run thing, but my last primary objective had now been achieved. I decided to call it quits there, rather than risk my last two AFVs mopping up the enemy HQ, which was a purely secondary, 'bonus' objective. No need to be greedy. The victory I had won would be sweet enough. ...and in conclusion... So...overall, what did I make of Wargame: European Escalation, then? Well, I absolutely loathe the unlocks; the fact that, of all that lovely kit, you can play with practically diddly squat, until you fight your way to it (which I believe you can do, by earning these Command Star thingies, via either single or multi-player). Yuk, yuk, yuk. They binned this with the follow-on Wargame:Airland Battle, thank goodness; but they really ought to patch W:EE similarly, putting consideration to customers over purely commercial considerations. The on-screen aids are in general, too numerous, too informative and too inflexible, in that it seems you can neither reduce nor toggle off/remove them. The AI has some rough edges, notably the occasional Banzai charges. Can AFVs or troops use smoke dischargers or grenades? Haven't seen that, yet. One of the worst aspects is the Forward Operating Bases. I haven't seen much of these so far. But they constitute forward supply bases which can help keep your units POL'ed (fuelled), 'bombed up' and therefore, fighting. Whether they should be so close to the Forward Edge of the Battle Area as to appear on W:EE's maps, is another matter. Worst of all, their appearance is ridiculous. This isn't Afghanistan or Vietnam. But the W:EE FOBs are walled, permanent-looking encampments. They're reminiscent of the permanent bases in Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis, with the addition of prominent towers at each corner, which look like a combination of a minaret from a mosque and a mobile phone mast. They are truly awful. If we must have such supply bases, they should be rendered as irregular, camouflaged supply dumps; stacks of oil drums and crates, all under camo nets, with some suitable field defences and maybe a few trucks visible. Some tents and an inconspicuous rod-style radio antenna or two, maybe. I'm not going to disgrace this mission report with a screenshot of a W:EE Forward Operating Base. In the context of this game, set where and when it is, they are beyond awful. From all of this, you might think I am, after all, rather lukewarm about W:EE. Not at all. I love it. I think it's great. I haven't played many PC wargames but thanks to its refusal to offer the player a chess game variant with every single unit able to be (or needing) micro-managed, I find W:EE much the best of any I've tried. My negatives are dwarfed by the things I love. The battlefields are a wargamer's wet dream. Likewise, the units, both in their extent and in their rendition. I wish there were fewer 'gamey' elements but what these features do, they do well, in terms of aiding playability. Above all, W:EE provides a great 'sandbox' to practice and carry out military-style exercises in miniature. The limited control over individual units is largely compensated for by appropriate AI and the resultant ability to play without micro-management is a not a curse, but a very considerable blessing. The other plus is that W:EE unit management is very easy to pick up - simplified, rather than simplistic. It helps, if you already have a smattering of small-unit tactics and some prior knowledge of Cold War weapon characteristics. Much as would help with any wargame, in any era. It's early days yet but on my experience so far, my verdict is simple. For the past, present or would-be future Cold War virtual warrior, Wargame: European Escalation is, in my modest but honest opinion, a dream come true.

Revenge of the Banzai Bruder? At about this time, things started to become a bit more complicated. First, I was presented with two more on-screen objectives, my last two as it turned out. They're on the screen below, the primary one higher up, descreasing in size as it fades (destroy an alpha sector bridgehead) and a secondary one in the centre (destroy an HQ at a checkpoint, wherever that is). I think the distinction is that primary goals are mandatory for mission success, sesondary ones are not, just earling extra victory points, Command Stars or whatever. don't ask me why the screen is darkened but it's in the 'satelite' view I think, well zoomed out at any rate. At this point, another complication appaeared. A pop-up top left of the screen offered me some more troops which I could deploy. Not the most warlike ones, unfortunately, a couple of Magirus Deutz 'Jupiter' 7-tonner suply trucks. Thanks, guys, that will come in really handy. True enough, my Leos' volleys had used up a fair bit of 105mm bit two supply trucks weren't the most welcome addition to my force, at that point. Could I have used them to pick up the un-horsed BGS troops? Probably not as the latter were non-playable. Impatiently, I just ordered the two trucks forward, to join us in the woods, from which I was about to move forward. I didn't know how to 'bomb up' from them and didn't pause to try. If we ran low on ammo, they would be close behind us...assuming they were carrying any. Resupply is apparently an important part of W:EE but I recckoned on fighting out this battle with the resources I'd started with. Accordingly, I leapfrogged my three remaining Leos, forward to the right-hand edge of the strip wood from which the now-defunct T-55s had emerged. Once there, I zoomed back out a bit and looked at the ground. The next move would be the Hotchkiss leapfrogging us. The question was, which way should our advance now develop - to the left, to the centre, or to the right? I considered each option in turn, in the approved manner, as I'd been trained many moons ago. On the left, relatively open, with a series of hedge or tree-rows which would provide respectable fire positions on the way. In the centre, some urban close cover in the form of small industrial development, good cover but too close, better bypassed than driven into with tanks. On the right, much more open country than on the left, with less cover and East Germany to the right across the river, in range of tank guns and ATGMs. Decision - swing left, use what cover there was to advance in bounds, watching both flanks, as well as ahead. This is where I started to lose the plot. I was well cheesed off by the loss of a Leo to the Banzai Brigade; and that with closer country looming ahead, the best re-inforcements HQ would send me was a couple of effing trucks. Stupidly, I failed to slip the Leos across from the right of the strip wood to its left hand side, before sending the Hotchkiss forward from that position. So when he very quickly spotted a T-34-85 next to the buildings and a BMP-1, no less, in open country, he was on his own; the Leos were well out of the picture. From that point on, the battle was...well, not lost, but I could feel control, and therefore the prospect of victory, slipping through my fingers. Cursing my laxity, I quickly pushed my three remaining Leos ahead. They leapfrogged the Hotchkiss, shot up the T-34, and laid into the BMP. The latter cut loose with a Sagger but from what I could see from its smoke trail, it went out of control just before reaching us, possibly because we hit the BMP (Saggers being first-generation ATGMs requiring a skillful gunner to 'fly' the missile all the way up to impact). The visual effect of the Sagger going haywire just before reaching us was rather nicely done. This wasn't too bad but the BMP wasn't alone. To the right were a couple of BTR-60 APCs and a UAZ 469 jeep. They kept our gunners busy for a little while but we soon made short work of them. The little '+10' tag you can see in the first pic below is rising up from a killed BTR, like the ghost leaving the body. I think this represents the points we earn from its destruction. Neat but I wish such 'gamey' displays were provided instead as post-mission stats. OK, I had been rattled, but I was still in business. Time to get back on top of the battle. I ordered the Hotchkiss SPz to leapfrog our concealed Leopards, and off he went. These light recce vehicles are definitely worth their weight in gold in W:EE, surprisingly survivable and most effective at spotting bad guys you might otherwise just bump into. I was still on course for my final objective. Whatever way this mission was going to end up, I wouldn't be long in finding out. ...to be continued!

Good result. I only had one SPz, must have missed the option to deploy an extra one.

Hide and seek with the bruder By now, I was geting into a steady rhythm with this. A sort of hunter-killer cycle. Push the recce Hotchkiss forward a bound. See what he spots. Then push the Leos up to a position from where the can shoot the identified targets, from cover. Trouble was, the targets the Hotchkiss now spotted from the strip wood were bigger and badder...specifically, a pair of T-55s. Decent armour, thicker than my Leos, and a good enough gun too, 100mm rather than the previous generation 85 of the T-34s. Not so easy, this time. I was aghast when the Hotchkiss suddenly started shooting at the enemy tanks with his 20mm pop gun. Hadn't I been careful enough in chosing his position, so he was further back in the woods? Too late now. I suppose I should have immediately pulled the Hotchkiss back, but instead, I chose to push my Leopards forward, to shoot the T-55s while they were otherwise occupied. Fortunately the Leos didn't have far to go. They charged forward, halted at the hedgerow I'd selected as their fire position, and laid into the T-55s. I got away with it. We clobbered the T-55s and somehow neither the Hotchkiss nor my Leos took any damage. In the pic imediately above, you can see a piece of text near the latter ('Combat Level 2') which I think indicates this unit has gained some 'experience points'. This display is a bit 'gamey'; I'd prefer this sort of stuff was notified at the end of each battle, rather than floating over the unit. Even a message top or bottom of screen would be less obtrusive. Maybe I'm only seeing this, because this first mission is a sort of training one, with various on-screen tips. I dunno. At this point, for a reason I can't remember now, I decided my Leos would now leapfrog my Hotchkiss, rather than the previous practice of the recce vehicle clearing ahead. For their next fire position, I chose the left-hand edge of the wood from which the T-55s had emerged, believing that area was now clear of the enemy. It was. But the woods to my left were not. My first inkling of this was bursts of automatic weapons fire from there, directed at my tanks, which cleverly pivoted left automatically, to face the threat. Whatever it was. In fact I already knew what it was, pretty well. It was the thing which had ended my previous try with this mission. By this time, I had deduced that the same enemies tended to appear in much the same place, each playithrough. There doesn't seem to be any variability. This didn't spoil the immersion or the fun for me, but it is a bit First Person Shooter-ish. As happened last time, we were being attacked by a BTR-60-equiped Motor Rifle platoon. And as before, the beggars were charging us, the dismounted infantry led by the BTRs which pushed ahead. All that was missing was cries of 'Banzai!' At least Japanese forces usually waited for cover of darkness and tried to infiltrate before making suicidal assaults. This was pretty poor AI. I hadn't detected or engaged the BTRs. They should have sat tight or even withdrawn, or at most, tried to infiltrate their dismounts into RPG range. But no, they just charged, out into the open, right at us. C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre. The first time this happened, I was caught by surprise. I let the Leos sit tight, killing the BTRs. This gave the charging dismounts just enough time to get close enough to unleash a spectacular little barrage of RPGs. Game over, near enough. This time, correctly but sadly anticipating the same inhuman tactics, I pulled the Leos back fairly quickly. They still managed to clobber the BTRs before moving but I lost my nearest Leo in return - a lucky hit from a 14.5mm MG or more likely a long-range RPG effort before he could open the range. In the pic below, incidentally, you can see the on-screen tip telling me that my losses and experience gains will carry over to the next mission. Anyway this time at least, we wiped out the Banzai Bruder. Our MGs and main guns mowed 'em down as they charged us. Serves 'em right. Absolutely no sympathy for any of them, charging tanks over open ground, like that. I appreciate that a desperate, direct charge is appropriate in some situations, like when you are caught at very close range in the kill zone of an ambush. That didn't apply here. The BTRs should have sat out the war, rather than charging us. Besides the destruction of these rather silly people, the other consolation for the loss of one of my precious Leopards was the announcement that we had achieved our current objective. Could have been worse. For the loss of one tank, we had gained a fair bit of ground and wreaked a goodly bit of havoc upon the enemy forces. The latter, fortunately, had not been concentrated, but instead, were deployed about the place in the proverbial penny packets. Perhaps the teachings of Heinz Guderian weren't much studied in the Socialist paradise of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, otherwise they might have thought, 'Klotzen, nicht klechern'. Anyway, we were still in business, while the other bruder's balance sheet was looking a bit shaky. No offence to the DDR by the way, I still treasure my Praktica BX-20. ...to be continued!

Any more bruder out there? My next objective was displayed to be reconnoitoring Bravo sector, just to our north. Time to get moving again! Baby steps, though. Baby Leopard steps, you might say...another fast dash as a platoon, just as far as the next hedgerow. This was accomplished without incident. At this point, I was spared the need to split my platoon for tactical movement by the arrival of a little recce vehicle, a French-designed Hotchkiss carrier, or SchutzenPanzewagen 11, which the Bundeswehr operated in quite large numbers in a variety of roles. The recce version which now joined us, I could see, was usefully one with a turret-mounted 20mm autocannon. He had starting orders of his own, for without any action on my part, he appeared at the bottom of the map and rattled north after us, up the central road. Roughly level with where my Leos had stopped, he halted and 'went firm' at the junction with a side road. Now, he was under my control. So I ordered him to leapfrog beyond, from his present slightly-exposed position. I sent him up to the better cover of a small stand of trees, next to a lateral track. From here, I expected that he would be able to observe the terrain over which my Leos would next be advancing. This move accomplished two things. Firstly, as another on-screen message told me, my recce objective was counted complete. Secondly, we had now acquired visual contact with the enemy. Sorry, yes I know, I know - 'DON'T USE THAT WORD, UNLESS YOU MEAN IT!!!' 'Contact' means 'contact with the enemy'! Not just a sighting. I should know better. OK...we had now got 'eyes on'. The new sighting, with whom we were not yet in actual contact, was another trio of hapless but not entirely helpless T-34s. Believe it or not, the East Germans did still have some of these museum pieces in service in the early-to-mid-1970s, apaprently. But they really should have kept them well away from any risk of bumping into modern MBTs. Intent on proving the truth of this observation, I made a simple plan for their rapid destruction. I would go left-flanking. Not too wide, as I didn't want to be caught in my own flank, by getting too close to that big wood over there. First hop was across a field to the side of a pair of houses. There we halted, but as expected, we were still out of sight of the enemy and unable either to shoot or be shot by him. Next move was along the axis of a track for easy orientation, steeling slightly left, for the cover of another hedgerow. Once there, we halted. Still no shooting. Time for my cubs to close for the kill, I decided.I selected yet another a fire position, this time ahead and right, towards the enemy tanks. My Leos responded rapidly. This move finally brought us into cannon-shot of the foe and the Leopards cut loose. Usually the AI seems quite good about adjusting their positions, when halting, to take advantage of the cover that is hopefully present at the spot you have chosen for your unit(s) to move to. Which is good as you have limited control over individual units. On this occasion, however, one of my tanks stopped a bit too far forward, ending up just on the enemy side of the hedgerow. The trick may be to try to bring your unit in nearly at right-angles to any linear cover that you want them to hug. We got the two nearest T-34s - the one beyond was still out of sight - but the foremost Leopard was damaged by return fire. To get at the third T-34, I took my Leopards back to the left. You can see that the nearest tank exhibits the slightly blackened look which is the first W:EE visual indication of damage. I then chose a new firing position back to the left. further north from our first one. And from there, we spotted and shot him. By about this time, as you can see from the on-screen message in the pic above, our next objective had become pushing further back the enemy breakthrough in Bravo sector. With this aim in mind, I turned again to my trusty Hotchkiss. Recce units like this in W:EE are not mere cannon fodder, to be sent ahead to reveal enemies by suicidally drawing fire. They have both extra spotting capabilities and more of what today tends to be called 'stealth' - the ability to move about less conspicuously than other units. I sent my Hotchkiss forward again and off he went, up the main road between the concealing hedges, past T-34s burnt out in the fields. Notice that in W:EE, you can see grass or crops where they have been flattened by the passage of vehicles! Whatever was up ahead, I was relying on my Hotchkiss once again spotting it, before it spotted us. ...to be continued!

Bruder gegen yet more bruder... My next move was a simple repeat of my first one. Click on my Leopard tank platoon, click on my next chosen fire position and off they go, through the tree line, down the edge of the plateau and across a field of ripening crops to the next hedgerow. The silly mistake I made here was to forget about a second pair of T-34s which had been reported at the start of the mission - presumably by the un-horsed BGS troops, up ahead - at the far, eastern end of the river bridge, over to my half-right. Perhaps because the BGS lost line of sight and my Leos didn't acquire it, they were by this time, no longer tagged or marked up on the min-map. This changed when my Leos reached the hedgerow. With no need for micro-management for me, they swung right and started shooting at the vintage East German panzers. You can see the situation in the semi-zoomed-out screenshot below. My Leos are shaded blue so I can see them in cover, beneath their blue label or tag. The green-labelled BGS are in the fields ahead of us. Over on the far side of that bridge are tagged in red the two T-34s. What you can't see are the 105mm tracers crashing into and around the T-34s and you can't of course hear the crash of the gunfire. But it's all happning, and quite impressively, in a suitably small-scale way. One of the T-34s survived our volleys for a few seconds, but it wasn't long before both were knocked out. We can't claim any credit for the killed BTR-60 wheeled APC sitting in front of the tanks; likely, this was a victim of the BundesGrenSchutze, before their own M113s went under. At this point, we were rewarded with an 'Objective complete' message. To the right of the bridge in the first screenshot below, you can also see W:EE's quite impressive rendition of the Inner German Border, complete with twin walls and watchtowers, with the ground in between presumably mined. I should probably have split my Leos into two pairs and moved them tactically, leapfrogging or caterpillaring them separately, in what the US Army calls 'bounding overwatch'. W:EE lets you split and recombine units for this and other purposes. But I'd got away with it. Leopard 1s are thin-skinned but were amongst the fastest Main Battle Tanks on the battlefield in their heyday, the post WW2 Germans having concluded that heavy armour was no longer much use, given the thickness (and thus the weight!) needed to make a difference against modern HEAT and kinetic energy projectiles. For now, I decided to stick with short, fast platoon dashes from cover to cover. So far, so good! ...to be continued! PS thanks for the tips, Swordsman!

Yes Swordsman that's just the sort of thing I'd want. To be able to start every campaign with a credible (say) company-sized, balanced all-arms force - say a tank or mech infantry company with a platoon or two of the other arm cross-attached. Plus a recce section, a Mortar Fire Controller and a Forward Observation Officer, also a section with manpad AA or a tracked system like Shilka, Gepard or Tracked Rapier. Maybe an ATGM section like FV438, BRDM-3 or M901 ITV. [in a similar vein, I remember hand-editing the Panzer Elite unit files so I could choose a platoon with all the same type of tanks, instead of the often rather silly mix of 'vanilla'.] With the option to swap to different base vehicles eg M60A1+M113, M1+M2, or British or Soviet equivalents. If I want to roll over a NATO defender who for that mission sd designed, happens only to have with Leo 1s or M60s with a force headed by T-80BVs rather than T-62s or export T-72s, let me. Better still let me have similar options for both sides, so I might face tough opposition with inferior forces, or light opposition with superior ones. But let me generally start off each campaign as the boss of a realistic, balanced Combat Team (as the British Army of the time called a company sized all-arms force). The sort of unlocks and restrictions I'm finding in W:EE may be fne for a competetive, multiplayer wargame. Still for all that, so far I'm finding W:EE more than good enough at what it does do well to grab and hold my interest, even though it'd be a whole lot better with a more open approach, better suited to the interests of single player gameplay. While the enemy AI seems to have some Banzai tendencies, it's not too bad and the basic approach (to command and control -vs- micomanagement) seems much superior to other PC wargames I have tried, however nicely rendered or accurately specified their units may appear. I mean, it was Rome Total War that taught me that the Ancients had developed a reliable system of instantly and accurately conveying unit orders across active battlefields which would be the envy of many a 21st Century army; and that the Greeks and Romans were wasting their time, training their armies to deploy and fight in organised lines or phalanxes, when they could do so equally well as separate mobs :) Anyway, coming shortly, Part the Next.

Cast to the Lions Leopards The way W:EE missions seem to work is that on-screen prompts give you a series of objectives, one at a time, as the mission develops. Sometimes you may also get a secondary objective. Objectives seem generally to relate to maked zones on the map, which become visible when you zoom out into a sort of satellite view. Complete the primary objectives, and you win. In doing do, you gain points, in the form of 'Command stars'. A win enables you to progress to the next mission. 'Command stars' enable you to unlock more or better units from those available to your side; sometimes, these can be obtained as reinforcements, which you can deploy during the mission you are playing. What you have available at any point in time seems to be called a 'deck' and you can have two of these, one for playing as NATO, one for playing as WARPAC. In single player, which side you play for may be determined by the campaign - eg in Bruder Geben Bruder, as far as I can see at this early stage in my W:EE endeavours, you can play only for West Germany/NATO. I'm still learning the command interface but it seems amongst the more straightforward ones I've seen, with its own quirks but fairly intuitive. Basically, at its simplest, you mouse click on a unit, then mouse click the spot you want it to move to (or a visible target that you want your unit to attack). That's basically it. Sensibly, units are platoons, except where you might have a single vehicle of a particular type. Also sensible, the unit AI looks after nearly everything else. Like formations, taking cover where you ordered it to halt, and engaging spotted enemies. This may not be what PC wargamers are used to, if they have played games where micromanaging your units is the norm - 'chess with different pieces and rules' as I've been calling that approach. But in my experience, W:EE provides a much more realistic simulation of the mechanics of military operations, beyond the tactics of individual tanks and infantrymen. So in my book, top marks for W:EE. It's got exactly the right approach for any simulation which puts the player in the role of the overall commander. As opposed to simulating a chess game variant. And yes I know chess is a sort of wargame, but a very highly stylised one. Of course, with the player largely unable to micro-manage, and the local stuff left to the AI, the latter needs to be that much better. Fortunately W:EE's AI, while it seems to have some quirks of its own, seems generally good enough to step up to this particular plate. Here's a case in point. My first objective is to destroy the T-34s who have harried the BGS and established themselves on West German territory. The T-34s are in dead ground, hidden from my Leo 1s who are on a sort of plateau. But the bad guys have evidently been spotted by the dismounted BGS and reported to me on the radio net. To destroy the enemy, I decide I will simply roll forward to a convient treeline on the northern edge of the plateau and shoot the WW2 vintage T-34s from there. I accomplish this simply by left clicking my Leo platoon, then right-clicking my chosen firing point or battle position. That's all I do. I can't control speed or set complicated paths. I can, however, cancel orders, order faster movement by roads, select targets, and break up units (eg for 'bounding overwatch') and then re-join them. But I don't need to do any of this for now. My Leos move rapidly over the interventing field in a decent inverted wedge formation, come into line as they reach the treeline and halt, in decent cover. As soon as they see the T-34s, they start shooting. The enemy initially turn and charge at us, perhaps to close the range or get into dead ground or better cover. Their 85mm guns, given a hit, will be dangerous for my fast but thinly-armoured Leos. But this avails them nothing. One T-34 is soon burning amidst our M113 wrecks while the other pulls back, his tag indicating that he has had enough and is routing. He doesn't get far before 105mm rounds whack into him. PanzerAusbildungsRegiment 19 should have stuck to its training role, rather than ending up confronting the Bundeswehr's modern Leos in their obsolete machines. As far as I know you can't turn off the unit tags. I find them slightly more prominent and/or informative than I'd like them to be but they are quite effective and not too conspicuous. Likewise I understand you can't turn off other on-screen aids, like the command interface on the right, which includes a useful mini-map. My prefence would be to have control over what was displayed, item by item. Anyway, so far, so good. The enemy AI had seemed a bit suicidal but my own side's had done a pretty good job of managing without needing the player unrealistically to micromanage. Just what the Wargame Doctor ordered. The unit models are nicely-done and have respectable animations, like turrets swinging and vehicles rocking on their suspension when firing. It's nice to zoom in and watch this but when an enemy is spotted you will probably find yourself zooming quickly out to assess the situation and direct units accordingly. If possible I would like to develop a play style which is mostly zoomed in and relies on the mini-map as far as possible but events - especially bad ones - can arrive and develop very fast in W:EE and this may or may not be feasible. I may resort to pausing the game at interavals, mostly to look around and take stock, if that's feasible; a bit like a turn-based approach. Somewhat slower-paced battles would help but so far it seems hectic enough and this is just a minor skirmish. Or a series of them, for there's plenty more to come. In the screenshot below, you can see that a message is ordering me to eliminate an enemy breakthrough in Charlie sector. My Leopards are temporarily shaded blue, which happens to units in foliage cover (WARPAC ones going red) so you can see them. I decide that my next move will be another short platoon dash, this time down off the edge of the plateau to fire positions in the next hedgerow, just short and right of the T-34 burning on the road. So far, so good. ...to be continued!

In the beginning, there was brother against brother To digress for a bit, if you took much of an interest in the Cold War - apart from maybe learning to stop worrying and love the bomb (with apologies to Dr Strangelove and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) - you may like me have read some of the literature it spawned, books like defector 'Victor Suvorov's' classic Inside the Soviet Army and David Isby's encyclopaedic Weapons and Tactics of the Soviet Army. If you were in the forces during that period, you may like me remember seeing your first picture of the T-72 or T-64 (accompanied in my case by a melodramatic remark about the fate of the person who got the photo to the West) or being warned against siting your platoon's trenches on a forward slope when the Soviets had a tank which could put a first round into a six-foot-square window from 3,000 metres. Or words to that effect. There were also books which portrayed the possible course of a World War Three in Europe. Tom Clancy did one I remember reading; but my favourite from this genre was First Clash by British tanker Kenneth Macksey, which was not a novel but a dramatisation written for Canadian forces for training purposes. This described a possible conflict between the M113-equipped and Leopard 1A4-supported 'Vandoos' (the Royal Vingt-deuxieme Regiment) and the expected Soviet armoured onslaught, in the sort of soldierly detail you don't get in other books. I think it was in John Connells New Maginot Line - a critique of the foibles of modern (mostly US) defence spending unmatched until Lewis Page's literary demolition job on the British equivalent in Lions, Donkeys and Dinosaurs - that the author recorded the difficulty NATO planers had, in constructing a believable scenario in which WW3 would actually start, thus providing the higher-level 'battle picture' that doubtless kicked off many a NATO Reforger-type exercise. W:EE actually makes a brave attempt here - each of its four stock campaigns takes some trouble to construct a casus belli to get things started. The first campaign is a case in point. It's called 'Bruder Gegen Bruder' and starts with a video compliantion from the period, which moves from real-life world events of the mid-1970s onto the fictional story of an East German border guard who kills two comrades in defecting to West Germany. His former employers request his extradition and are most unhappy when Bonn - then the capital of Bundesrepublik Deutschland, remember? - say 'Nein.' Unhappy, to extent that next thing you know, there's an East German incursion into Federal German territory and war is declared. The combination of voiceover, period photos and news clips is blended pretty seamlessly with map animations and game footage as you are led into the scenario. Likely or not as the fictional sequence of events portrayed might be, it's really rather neat that the developers have gone to the trouble. Not since the 'MPS News' segments from M1 Tank Platoon 2 have I seen such a laudible effort to get a single player campaign off to such a good start. Not often, anyway. It's a nice touch. You are drawn into the storyline till the point where an in-game camera sequence pulls back from one of the river bridges the East German forces have crossed, past their tanks and the knocked out West German BundesGrenSchutz (BGS, the border guard force) M113s, to the platoon of four Leopard 1s with which you are ordered to repell the enemy incursion. To anyone who was interested or immersed at all in military affairs of the period, it's like it's all coming back into focus; deja vu all over again :) Rather excellent. In the screenshot above, you can see, near the bottom, the blue tag indicating our Leopards, next to some commercial buildings and their car park. Left of top centre - tagged green, and thus not playble, though friendly - are two squads of BGS, escaped from their knocked-out APCs, which you can see burning on the road, top centre. Just to the right is the enemy, tagged red - and yes, they are in T-34/85s. This is 1975 and the National Volksarmee is - fortunately for us - still a way off getting T-72s. It seems the East German's own border forces in this sector are not the best equipped, though they've been more than enough for the M113 APCs they have met so far. But these obsolete tanks are not the worst we will come up against, on this, our first mission in defence of the West, perhaps the first shots of World War Three. ...to be continued!

Fighting a Cold War gone hot with Eugen Systems' classic PC wargame! Once upon a time, in a world before PCs... Although never a really serious player, back in the days before home PCs, I'd long been interested in wargames with miniatures - not the boardgame variety, as the model-making or collecting aspect was important to me, too. I still have the 1/300 scale metal WW2 AFVs and basic little rulebook I bought back in the 1970s. In the late 1980s I dabbled with the Cold War era and acquired a modest set of 1/300 and 1/285 miniatures from Davco, Heroics & Ross, Scotia and GHQ, basically a Soviet tank battalion with T-72s, a couple of Motor Rifle companies with BMPs, plus US and British tank/infantry company combat teams in sufficient strength to give them a fair fight, with a variety of Abrams, Bradleys, Chieftains and 432s etc. Even tiny 1/300 items like Ferret Scout Cars could look quite well when painted and were much more suitable for decent wargaming than larger models (I don't really see much attraction in skirmishes with quite large models, which seem to be having something of a resurgence of interest in the form of the 'Bolt Action' rules) For my own Cold War forays, I used an adapted version of the Wargame Research Group's 'Rules for All Arms Land Warfare from Platoon to Company Level' (June 1988) for 1925-1950 because they were the first I'd found which really tried to replicate the way armies actually operated, instead of providing (in effect) a chess game with different pieces and rules, usually underlaid with an obsessive attention to armour thickness and penetration and other theoretical weapon characteristics rather than real-world tactics and capabilities. It was like, suddenly, a set of rules had been written by real army officers, rather than by enthusiasts who can only get so much understanding of how armies really work by reading books. As I wanted to play solo, I adapted methods from the same publisher's solo wargames booklet, adding a system of drawing cards from a deck, as my force advanced, to generate realistic enemy units ahead of us. It worked quite while and while I never had enough space - and thus had to use too small a ground scale for my 1/300 units - the results could be quite pleasing, visually, played out on a grass-mat laid out with my home-made modular terrain system. In the pic below, a platoon of US Army M60A3s, sited to fire hull-down from a flank, burns as a Soviet T-72 platoon, backed up by a BMP-1, approaches a village defended now by mechanised infantry in M113 APCs and mortar carriers. In the different scenario below, a company of BMP-2s is closing in on a ridgeline objective, backed up by T-72s. BMP-1s and another pair of T-72s wait in a field in front of the village church. Below is what was likely an earlier pic in the same battle, with a T-72 platoon leading a company of BMP-2s which has yet to shake out from platoon columns into line formation for the assault. Ahead, MiG-27s flash low over smoke screens laid by supporting SO-122 SP guns, whose observation and support vehicles can be seen in the foreground. You'd think that I'd have jumped at the chance to play wargames on the PC. I have tried a few, notably the original Combat Mission and the more recent Theatre of War. But good though they could be in their way, to my mind they suffered from the same failing as some earlier paper wargame rules. They gave you a force equivalent to something like a company but allowed (or worse, effectively compelled) you the player to move around individual tanks, vehicles or soldiers. That's a chess game with different pieces and rules, not the way military operations work. If you're commanding a company-sized force, your 'pieces' are your platoons, be they tanks or infantry, certainly not individual soldiers, guns or vehicles. By and large, you deploy, move around and give your orders, not to individuals or individual vehicles, but to the commanders of each platoon. The latter carry them out, by and large using 'canned' tactics like battle drills and 'Standard Operating Procedures' or SOPs. If you're playing a wargame, in command of a force comprising maybe three or more platoons of one or more different troop types, it may be fun to pick out and send that high-morale, expert-rated fellow with the panzerfaust along that hedge to stalk that pesky Sherman. But while real-life company commanders do sometimes have to organise such things, it's not the approach a proper tactical simulation of platoon, company or battalion-level operations should take by default. Instead, your forces should come pre-organised into platoons. Barring rare exceptions, you should give your orders only to these platoons (in effect, to the platoon leaders). They should carry out your orders using standard tactics, with an absolute mimimum of player micro-management. This is the missing factor which those 1988 WRG WW2-era rules at last implemented. Having found this factor rather lacking in the PC wargames I had so far tried, and having meantime also found that simulations rather than wargames amply satisfied my interest in 'blowing [virtual] stuff up', I left it there. Until last week. On holiday in Spain's Costa del Sol, I wandered into a Game store in Malaga in search of a bargain and came across a copy of Wargame: European Escalation as a 'Super Oferta' for the princely sum of one Euro. Having an interest in both wargames and the Cold War era, I had been vaguely aware of Eugen Systems' sweet-looking 2012 PC wargame (and its 2014 development, Airland Battle), in part from watching videos like this one: For a price that wouldn't have bought me a platoon of 1/300 T-72s 25 years ago, you get hundreds of nicely-crafted AFVs and other units on a range of different maps (with a proper ground scale), set in the same era I had tried to wargame all those years ago. And with visuals aproaching that of a simulation. It was worth giving another PC wargame a try, I decided. That was a week ago. Safely back in the rather less sunny UK, this mission report describes how it worked out and what I've made of it, so far. And The Lord said, let there be pixels... Having decided to have a crack at Cold War wargaming in the computer age, I found that while my copy of W:EE came on a DVD, it was Steam-based. So installation involved downloads from that provider, which happily included some free DLC, in the form of several 'expansion pack' campaigns. The base sim provides four basic campaigns or 'operations' which constitute the main single player element. The nearest thing to a 'quick mission bulder' is a 'Skirmish' mode within single player, which enamles you to set up player -vs- AI battles. Excluding the expansion packs, the 4 campaigns comprise 22 missions, set during the period 1975 to 1985. The bad news is that if like me you thought the unlock system that came with a certain recent WW2 combat flight sim was not a good idea, W:EE will kind of put that into perspective. Yes, you can play as one of 8 different national armies, distributed between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Yes, you get a great selection of nicely-rendered playable units for each, from MBTs to IFVs to APCs and a range of support vehicles and helos. And yes, you get an impressive variety of moderately large and impressively-detailed maps, ranging over several parts of the potential World War Three European battlefield. But no, you can't actually play anything but a tiny segment of all this super content, until you have unlocked it, by playing and accumulating points. With my 1/300 miniatures, I could set up and fight a battle with any of the units I'd bought. But in creating a PC equivalent with vastly greater scope in about every respect conceivable, they decided to let you have access to almost none of this vast potential, a design decision which beggars belief...my belief, anyway. Perhaps it's somehow tied into anti-cheat measures for the W:EE muntiplayer component. But for now, all I can do is grit my teeth, swallow any sense I have of good and proper game design and begin the aptly-described 'grind' to unlock more of the things I really want to play with. Sensibly, it appears that Eugen Systems have dispensed with this concept for the follow-on wargame series - Wargame: Air Land Battle - which, as well as somewhat better graphics and fixed-wing air support, reportedly and thankfully bins the unlocks. If that's so, I would definitely consider investing in it, although the fixed-wing element can reportedly be a bit too lethal, when in a real WW3 the flyboys would on most days either have been grounded by the bad weather or attacking targets beyond the immediate battlefield...until their airfields were nuked, anyway. As for W:EE, I've tried to find some sort of cheat to unlock the content but no dice. Creating a 'private' multiplayer battle just for youself was said to enable you to get at unlocked units, possibly functioning much like a mission editor, but that didn't work for me. That would be some compensation; but at the minimum, what is really needed is for you to be able to begin any of the available SP campaigns from the get-go and to do so with a much less restricted set of available units. The alternative to playing campaigns and unlocking stuff is the aforementioned 'Skirmish' mode. This is ideal to practice, and lets you do so on any of the many maps available, like this one, for instance. These big, beautifully-rendered virtual environments are the sort of thing that would have massively exceeded my wildest dreams (not to mention my available space and my modelling abilities) as a dilletante 1/300 wargamer, back in the day. Maps galore and great warfighting terrain to boot, but as for the actual weaponry, even in this Skirmish mode, you still seem to be restricted to the kit you have unlocked at any point in time. So the darn unlock system is pretty pervasive. Anyhow, if you're now asking 'Apart from that Mrs Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?', well, that's coming next! ...to be continued!

Now it was time for Phases 3 and 4. My forces would swing through 90 degrees from south to west and hit the enemy positions over there, finishing up at an Iraqi-held ford over an irrigation channel running nearly north-south. Our Phase 3 objectives would be the 'Ishaar al Hamar hills' position and the position marked 'Sumer 1', just south (the latter has confusingly changed names, during the course of the mission!). The 'hills' position would be hit by a concentric attack from two M60 platoons. In the screenie above, you can see that on my right, the blocking platoon (3 red diamonds) has begun to move south-west from its Phase 2 fire position at the corner of the rectangular woods, while my strongest platoon (4 orange diamonds) is closing in from the east. Meanwhile, my third platoon has just started to move west from the key point it occupied in Phase 2, now headed for the Iraqi post at Sumer 1. By this time, as you can see from the 'message log', top right, the emeny has been asking for a cease fire. Which I naturally ignored. This time I led my right-hand platoon, coming down from the north-east. We had a tense time in the run-up to the main Iraqi position but when we got there, found that it, too, was no longer occupied. The position further south also fell without a fight, to my right-hand platoon. Phase 3 complete and not a shot fired! I quickly re-organised for Phase 4, the final drive to the irrigation channel ford, due west. My left-hand platoon I ordered to sit tight, to cover our open flank to the south and west. The other two platoons I sent due west, side-by-side towards the Phase 4 objective. Seemingly, it was now all there for the taking but there was still plenty of time for something, somewhere to go badly wrong! Once again leading my right-hand platoon, it wasn't long before I had my first contact. We spotted what appeared to be a solitary T-55 and thus certainly an enemy tank. He was completely still and though apparently intact, could have been abandoned. But I took no chances and halting as he re-appeared from behind a prominent rock or termite mound, I started firing into his flank. He was soon smoking. 'Where there's one enemy tank, there will be others', I thought, anxiously scanning left and right, waiting for the shooting to start. But all seemed still again. Nothing to be seen ahead, but the single T-55, now blazing steadily. With the platoon back in line formation, minimum spacing, we moved off again. Still the enemy was nowhere to be seen, apart from that solitary burning tank. As it turned out, the knocked-out T-55 was just the other side of the irrigation channel which marked our intended limit of exploitation to the west. He seemed to be the only defender. And that was indeed the case. My other platoon rolled up beside us, ending any doubt that our Phase 4 objective, the ford, was firmly in our hands. Six Iraqi flags have been cleared from the map and replaced by our Iranian ones! A clean sweep, you might say. By that time, more than the weak enemy opposition, I had become increasingly worried that SABOW would bring down the curtain before I had completed my little organised night tour of the batlefield and scooped up all the territorial gains I could make. I needn't have worried. If there's to be an Iraqi counterattack, it'll come in a future mission. The results screens appeared right on cue and confirmed what I knew already, that we had won. The 'minor' part of the 'victory' assessment may be because the stats showed that we had outnumbered the enemy and inflicted modest casualties; any way I'm glad that Graviteam have said they are going to make some adjustments to the scoring system, to give somewhat greater credit for territorial gains. While I would prefer to see, in the average SABOW campaign battle, more representation of unit command elements and their role and presence on the battlefield; infantry (and artillery) more often under the player's direct command; and better marking up (eg of orders and objectives/waypoints) on the tactical map, I really can't fault SABOW. There's still stuff I haven't worked out (like the significance of the 'Objectives changed!' messages you see from time to time) and features I haven't used but I now firmly agree with others who have already said that it's a superb tanksim. I'm finding the extra tactical or wargaming element adds a very immersive and complementary role for the player, presenting you with various kinds of tactical problems and situations to solve or otherwise respond to, which I am really relishing. Thanks partly to this and partly to the excellent implementation of the virtual tanking itself, even a relatively uneventful mission has plenty of interest and challenge. There's still plenty of opportunity for 'pure' tanksimming; and as with that other top-notch tanksim, Steel Beasts, you also get to play both a first class tanksim and an excellent platoon-company-battalion level tactical simulator. Not to be missed, in my book.

For Phase 2, my attention turned to the two small enemy positions to our south. My plan was now as follows. On my left, my five-tank platoon would ford the irrigation channel to its front and drive south, attacking the enemy at Babylon 3 (I have no idea why its name changed from the original map sceenshot, despite still being in Iraqi hands). In my centre, a second platoon would also drive south, attacking and clearing the Iraqi position, nearby to the west. Conscious that stronger Iraqi forces lay further west, my third platoon would move up and adopt a blocking position on my open right flank, where a small pond lay at the south-eastern corner of a large rectangular wood. Having given each platoon its orders, I jumped to the platoon leader's tank in my 5-tank platoon, anxious to supervise its risky crossing of the irrigation channel at the start of its move. In line formation, down we went, into what looked like a shallow channel with not-too-steep banks...I hoped. The SABOW AI drivers seem quite competent if sometimes a bit hesitant and this time, they generally got across fine, though one tank struggled to get up the bank on the way out, as did my own, perhaps because I took over the driving! One of the tanks seemed to hesitate on the near bank and I jumped to this and drove that over too, at one point sufficiently concerned to allow headlights to be turned on. As the last tank was climbing up the bank and out of the channel, I noticed that our five tanks were actually four, plus what appeared to be the dismounted crew of the fifth tank. Strange, but there was no time to ponder what was going on there. Off we went! Without the need for obstacle-crossing, the other two platoons had made good time. While one held the blocking position on my right, the other had soon moved ahead and occupied its objective, which was duly re-marked with the green-white-red Iranian flag and re-named accordingly, becomming Assyria 2. The only excitement that I recall in all of this was that the blocking platoon had a brief contact with some enemy infantry in the woods, whom it drove off to the north. It seemed possible that these men were refugees from our Phase 1 objective. I thought for a little while about mounting an operation to hunt down and destroy them but the contact quickly faded and I guessed that these Iraqis likley didn't amount to a serious threat to our positions, now behind us. So I decided that it was time to apply the master principle of war - selection and [as in this case] maintenance of the aim. I would proceed with Phase 2. My four-and-a-half-tank platoon had a more exciting time in taking its objective, so I was glad I'd stayed with that one. First, we had a slightly errie encounter with the wrecks of some of our own AFVs from a previous battle, as they came into the range of our IR spotlights. The next sighting was the enemy! I was playing as the gunner in the platoon leader's M60 when my TC called out an APC, slightly left. Laying the gun onto the direction indicated, I got a shock to find myself staring at the business end of what looked like a BMP-1, with many infantry scattered around him. He fired first - I think it was with his 76mm gun, rather than a Sagger ATGM - but the tracer seemed to flash past somewhere overhead. A narrow escape! I wasted no time in letting him have several APDS rounds, a wild overkill but he seemed to be on his own and I was taking no chances. In the pic below, my IR spotlight is briefly turned off for some reason; you can clearly see the difference that the IR illumination makes. With the BMP finally starting to smoke, what followed was more of a massacre than a battle. We simply stood off and machine-gunned the dismounted enemy infantry. There were so many of them that I was concerned that there might be more APCs or IFVs nearby but I never saw any. Some of the enemy went to ground, some of them crawled, some of them ran briefly. We poured co-ax fire into anything that moved, conscious of the RPG threat. The tracer effects in SABOW are rather good; they burn out at about 1100m as they should and they glow bright pink, which is just as I remember the 7.62 NATO variety. You have the option of letting tracers produce their own illumination, which you can see in the little pool of light on the ground under the nearest tracer in the screenie below. Beyond that, you can see some tracers ricochetting skywards, another well-done SABOW effect. Finally, we were done and both the southern enemy outposts were in our hands. The BMP burned and the enemy casualties lay still and scattered round, pay-back for the Iranian AFV hulks we could still see from a previous battle for this very ground, now back in the hands of its rightful owners, hopefully there to stay. Phase 2 complete! Two down, two to go...but would our good fortune continue to hold? ...to be contiued!