Black Gold Blitz, the Command LIVE scenario I authored, is now released. It’s available on Matrix and Steam.
When I first got Command, being led to it by Baloogan’s videos, or even when I first started writing at Baloogan Campaign, I would never have thought that I’d end up making an official DLC scenario. But here it is, and here I am.
One of the most inventive uses of Command to tell an unconventional story is Yooper’s “Hired Goons” interactive Let’s Play. Inspired by the old game Strike Commander , it involves thread participants voting on everything from procurement (which as of this post is the main topic of the thread as the team replenishes its losses) to strategy to tactical plans.
The traditional settings of wargames are tossed aside in favor of a somewhat tasteless and darkly humorous near-future where PMCs wielding a hodgepodge of everything but the kitchen sink are the main force of combat. The Hired Goons are one such group. So far they’ve done a frankly amazing job, all things considered. As of now, the Goons are reconstituting their force after a bitterly fought campaign in the Bering area where they suffered heavy losses, including most of their air-to-air fighters. Much discussion/argument will undoubtedly ensue over what to get.
The recordings of the streamed Hired Goons missions, along with plot videos, can be viewed here.
In light of my post on my fake countries, I might as well share some more real fake countries, and no, that is not an oxymoron. Here’s the second volume of my OPFOR manual collection. Alongside the Circle Trigon/Krasnovian/Donovian manuals in the first post (visible here), this contains several Commonwealth OPFORs.
“Musorian” soldiers in the field.
The added manuals in the collection are:
Volume 2, with both the old American manuals and newer additions, can be accessed here.
The creation of fictional nations for the sake of training exercises is not a new thing. For my Command exercise scenarios, I have gone one step further from simple “REDFOR” and made several fictional countries, with interesting results.
Suffolkistan
From: SEAL Submarine Exercise.
Suffolkistan is a fictional designation for the real area of Suffolk County, Long Island. It borders the friendly Kingdom of Nassau. The name was purely geographic.
Pomerancovy
From: Better Bullets.
In real exercises, the opponent is frequently known as “Orange”, and I wanted a pun on it, similar to “Red-Land”, aka Krasnovia. Unfortunately, my bungled machine-translated Czech produced an adjective related to “Orange, the fruit” rather than “orange, the color”. Oh well. Romanes they go the house.
Cabotia
From: One Ship, One Country.
Cabotia is a fairly involved country in my other fiction. While in there, it’s something odd and unusual, in the scenario it’s a basic OPFOR state. To be honest, at that point Cabotia was a basic, generic nation at the time, and I hadn’t come up with its idiosyncrasies when I made that scenario.
(Such idiosyncrasies include an army with 8,000 generals in it, but that’s another story).
Turkic Republic
From: Not yet.
The Turkic Republic is an amalgam of Central Asian states meant to represent a post-Soviet OPFOR. The weirdest part is that even though I haven’t actually used the Turkic Republic in a scenario yet, it’s oddly detailed. While these OPFOR punching bags can be anything the situation calls for, the country used in a semi-realistic fashion is an interesting example of technological progress. They start off in the early 1990s, with late-USSR surplus gear, as a peer opponent. As technology moves on, they become a second-rate opponent with the same equipment.
Along with Cabotia, the Turkic Republic has also been developed as a “real” country, being a dictatorial ex-Soviet state whose birth can be traced by a decision to fold many of the Central Asian SSRs into one while the USSR still existed. Depending on my mood, it’s either:
And there it comes full circle. For can one not think of viable training scenarios for all three? A conventional conflict against the first, the handling of a dubious ally in the second, and a peacekeeping or other intervention in the third?
Andrew Gordon’s The Rules Of The Game used to be my favorite history book of all time. Now, I view as history let down by bias.
The large volume is still a magisterial history of the Battle of Jutland and the development of the Royal Navy in the 1800s. It covers the battle itself, and then, at the moment where the most modern and powerful battleships sail rigidly towards the German fleet, shifts to the 19th Century to explain why the Royal Navy went from Nelsonic initiative to peacetime rigidity. Afterwards, it returns to the battle, then wraps up with an afterword and analysis.
So, what went wrong?
Well, the first and largest issue is that Gordon is making giant sweeping claims off a sample size of one. Even the Royal Navy at its age-of-sail height was still run by humans, and even it in World War I was capable of tactical victory. If it had been consistently outfought, that would have been something different. But most of its large engagements, including arguably Jutland itself, fell into the category, familiar to the Western Allied land effort in World War II, of “through rustiness, missed an opportunity to win more decisively, but still won.” And this is without mentioning the strategic context, which is the next issue.
Gordon, to be fair, acknowledges that the Royal Navy did everything asked of it strategically. It blockaded Germany. Gordon also acknowledges that the British public had unrealistic expectations of Nelsonic victory that their fleet couldn’t necessarily live up to. But he still fixates on the tactical level more than it deserves. This leads to some of the more controversial and bizarre opinions, like praising David Beatty for his dash while acknowledging that he was caught off guard, botched his deployment, and failed to coordinate effectively. (Gordon is one of the few naval historians to have a positive opinion of Beatty).
Is The Rules of The Game a bad book? Definitely not. But as I grew older and saw more sources, my opinion on it turned from a youthful view of “this is how it was” to “take this with a grain of salt, detailed as it is”. As even the most detailed works of history should be viewed.
Sometimes, Command scen builders like to experiment. No stranger to pushing the limits, Gunner98 tried an extremely-long, Lua-filled epic called “Northern Fury 12.6-The Longest Battle“.
It was trying out the game in a new way. Not in the sense of pushing the limits of conventional difficulty per se-this was not the wargaming equivalent of the Kaiser Knuckle General, a boss so hard it took twenty years for proof of an unassisted win to emerge. No, it was telling a big story and trying to move beyond the tactical snapshots that even big scenarios essentially are.
In my correspondence with Gunner, he considered it ‘overambitious’, beyond both the attention of a normal player and his own Lua skill (at the time). But he didn’t consider it a complete failure, in fact it was a valuable learning tool. In his own words…
The one key thing the scenario has allowed me to do is a proper assessment of forces needed for the task, and it has allowed my to tie the story of Northern Fury, Caribbean Fury, Mediterranean Fury and a probably never to be built ‘Southern Fury’.
The reviews and AARs have been halting but useful, largely from a story sense, but also from the aspect of the game itself – how to play all those MPA Sqns, how best to set up the Oscar Ambush etc. And it has helped teach me Lua a bit more.
As you probably know, I like to use the scenarios to tell a story so it has helped me tie the whole thing together.
So what do I think? I played just a bit of it.
As for Northern Fury as a whole, I felt a weird analogy-the North African campaign of World War II. Like Northern Fury, that campaign featured a herculean air/naval war. And like Northern Fury, for logistical and terrain reasons, the ground forces involved are extremely small in proportion to the massive (possibly too massive) battles on the European mainland. It’s still not exact, and I don’t know if Gunner agrees, but I did see the parallel.
Now the “___ Fury” series is moving to the Indian Ocean. Hormuz is getting attacked, and the US has a lot on its plate even without that issue. I do think the ‘stress test’ of The Longest Battle, even if a little too overambitious, has nonetheless been extremely helpful and useful.