Monthly Archives: February 2016
Civ5 AAR: Empires of the Smoky Skies, Part I
Going back to the Civ5 well again ~
By Brant Guillory, GrogDude
Click images to enlarge
For this scenario, I’m headed off to an ahistorical scenario. The Empires of the Smoky Skies is the ‘steampunk’ scenario with the Civilization 5 Gods + Kings expansion. There are five nations, all suitably decked out in their best Victorian-industrial chic. The military units are also tweaked to bring in airships and landships, although destroyers and battleships are not renamed.
Empires of the Smoky Skies
As noted, this is one of the built-in scenarios that comes with the Gods + Kings expansion pack.
Empires of the Smoky Skies
There’s some background on the scenario.
Tracer Rounds – Another “Resurgence” of Military Wargaming?
The military wants to ‘get back’ to wargaming. Are they serious this time? ~
There’s been a recent trend in the media covering some developments in the military that I hope or at least slightly heartening. I’ve started to see multiple articles here and there on well-respected online sites about the reinvigoration of wargaming in the military. 
I’ve written before about the way the professionals use wargaming and how it differs from hobby games and what is commercially realistic. That said, there is certainly some crossover between the two given that so many professionals are also hot scammers, or have been taught by them. (As an editor note, voice recognition just picked up “hobby gamers” as “hot scammers”; maybe Google knows something we don’t?)
There have been articles from the Marines, the Navy, think tanks, and high ranking DoD officials about ways in which the military can start using wargaming again. Part of this is being driven by budget constraints. My hope is that at least part of this trend is being driven by explorations of uncertainty in our future conflicts. This type of exploratory wargaming drove US naval innovations in aviation in the inter-war years, and has also been credited with the development of German blitzkrieg tactics around the same time. So the track record exists of using wargaming as a forward-looking tool for examining doctrine and concepts. It’s already known as a tool for training, even if a misunderstood one on a regular basis. Again, I’ve talked about the uses of wargaming in a previous column, so I won’t rehash too much here, just go read the earlier article.
