TANKSgiving 2013 – Getcher Tank On
Kicking off our annual TANKSgiving week celebration of all things armor, enjoy some tank pr0n…
11/25/13
Tag: Modern & Near Future
11/22/13
GARPA 32 – GrogHeads Advanced Research on Projects Advisory
Lloyd Sabin, Brant Guillory, and Jim Zabek, 22 November 2013
Winter is coming. As a blast of cold, icy air descends from the Arctic we here at Grogheads are doing our best to keep your blood hot for some new games and we’re leading off with GMT’s Fields of Fire, which sounds hot even when you read it through the cool glow of your monitor. Don’t miss some other great gaming goodness beyond the Read More link which includes some awesome terrain for sci-fi minis and some remakes of a couple of classic electronic games.
Tabletop Games
Fields of Fire II from GMT Games
Cleared p500 and in final development
Still available at the p500 price of $55, this sequel from GMT Games takes the highly-regarded Fields of Fire series into action with the USMC. You’ll lead a rifle company through a variety of solitaire scenarios ranging from the WWII PTO through the present day. A card-driven game with a terrain deck and action deck, Fields of Fire has been described by combat veterans as a pretty damned good representation of the kinds of decisions you need to make in combat. Check it out here and go place your order with GMT.
Millennium Wars Advanced: States of Conflict from MCS Group
Still on preorder, no timetable
The Millennium Wars games are an odd fish. Clearly a map-and-counters wargame that any grog should grok at first glance, but quite complex in the interplay of assets, missions, capabilities, and environmental constraints. A heavy focus on C4I puts the Millennium Wars series in the forefront of modern conflict simulation, and allows solid modeling of organizational cohesion as well as varied non-combat effects like cyberwarfare and political fallout. Still on preorder at $49.95, MWA is a package stuffed with a variety of conflicts to make you squirm your way through the difficult decisions faced on today’s battlefields.
Zeppeldrome
$4600 of $35000, project closes 15 December 2013
Steampunks! Yeah, you! Wanna race? Wanna race an airship? Wanna race and airship and fight dirty? C’mon, you know you do. Interchangeable boards, wacky characters, dirty tricks, and lemmings – it’s all here. Players have modular airships that allow you to mix and match capabilities. Racecourses change each game, and the deck of dirty tricks looks like a Mario race in the sky. Put on your brass goggles and silk scarf, float over to Kickstarter to check out a video of gameplay, and plunk down a couple of bucks for a rollicking ride through the sky.
11/21/13
Tropico 4 AAR – Last Isla St. Clara Part 1
I love playing Tropico 4. The easy salsa music contrasted with sharp, cynical political caricatures makes it a great way for me to kick back and have fun. I’ve managed to play the campaign from start to finish already, but today I wanted to share some of my enjoyment of the game in an AAR. Playing the game end to end forced me to solve problems sometimes with significant handicaps. The great thing about Tropico is how open-ended it is. There are often many ways to solve a particular problem. Today, I’m going to have some fun playing around and see how things go in the first mission of the campaign.
I begin by selecting my avatar. I choose a custom one. I purchased the Apocalypse DLC so I have access to some extra traits that don’t come with the base game. Of course I have to dress up in the hazmat suit. It’s a given. Nothing says, “I’m a petty third world dictator” like running around with a gas mask on. Before the player can get down to the business of gaming he needs to do more than pick out an avatar. The player also needs to select a background, rise to power, and three traits.
My background is that of Booze Baron which gives me double the prices for selling rum. However it comes at a cost – I lose 5% respect from the religious faction. My path to power is Elected as a Capitalist. This gives me bonuses to liberty, production, relations with the US and a bonus to the Capitalist faction. For the three traits I pick Patriot (which gives me a bonus with the Nationalist faction and native-born Tropicans), Scholarly (which gives me a bonus for worker training speed), and Survivalist (an add-on from the DLC which helps my citizens consume less food and gives me a bonus with the Environmentalist faction).
With that the game begins.
January 1950
Although the game comes with a tutorial even after you start playing the regular campaign periodically hints will pop up to help you along. Usually they’re good advice, but the game is open-ended enough that you don’t always need to take that advice. Here I am being shown what is in effect the game’s translation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: Food, religion, health care, homes, fun. If you prioritize your spending along those lines you’ll rarely go wrong. Tropico is also an economic simulator in addition to being a political sim. Wise investment can create a robust and growing economy. Poor investment will put you in a spiral of bankruptcy from which your small island nation cannot recover. Notably absent in that list of priorities is jobs. However, we’ll get to that. Continue reading
11/9/13
Interview with COL(R) Eric Walters, USMC
This month, we have a fantastic interview with retired USMC Colonel Eric Walters. Well-known in professional wargaming circles as a supporter for great integration of wargames into training, COL(R) Walters graciously gave us a few minutes of his week to answer some questions and tell some war stories.
Interview by Brant Guillory, 9 November 2013
Can you give us a little bit of your military background in the Marines? And don’t be afraid to get technical – our audience is pretty savvy on organizational details!
I first joined as a tank officer and served as both a tank platoon and an amphibious tractor platoon commander, subsequently serving as a company commander in a maintenance battalion. I switched my Military Occupational Specialty to serve as a Marine Air Group Task Force Intelligence Officer and I did that job the last 25 years of my career. In that job I was lucky enough to serve in a wide variety of positions at that tactical , joint task force, subunified and unified command, and national levels. Most recently I served as the Director of Intelligence for the largest humanitarian assistance/disaster relief operation in the world—the aftermath of the 26 Dec 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami—and as the senior intelligence officer for 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. One of my bosses at 3d MAW, Charlie Bolden, is presently serving as the Director of NASA, while my wartime commander, Jim “Tamer” Amos, is now Commandant of the Marine Corps. I guess they somehow succeeded in spite of me!
I did two “wargaming” tours in the military. One was as the intelligence officer for the II MEF Wargaming Center, basically designing Command Post eXercises (CPX) using computer wargames, manual wargames, and Tactical Exercises Without Troops (TEWTs) where only command posts went to the field to practice combat decisionmaking. The second was as the intelligence planner for the world’s largest CPX in Korea, ULCHI-FOCUS LENS; my job was writing the exercise scenario, designing the simulation-intelligence system interfaces, and executing intelligence control during the conduct of the exercise.
How did you pick up wargaming as hobby and how did you start to integrate wargaming into your assignments within the Marines?
In 1973 or so I was a young teenage model ship builder and went to a hobby store to purchase yet another 1:700 waterline series plastic kit of a WWII Japanese aircraft carrier when I spied a copy of Avalon Hill’s MIDWAY game. I bought that instead of the model kit and subsequently became obsessed with wargaming, never building another plastic model ship again. I used wargaming as a junior officer to teach Marines tactics and was lucky that the institution had its own manual games it employed in training. In the late 1980s we used a military miniatures game played on molded plastic terrain boards, TACWAR, to teach tactics from company to battalion level. We had a board game system called STEEL THRUST to exercise regimental and division staffs, played on paper maps. It took a lot of training and practice to use these wargame-based training devices well. Far more popular was the computer-assisted CPX supported by the Tactical Warfare Simulation Evaluation and Analysis System (TWSEAS) since it didn’t take a lot of customer unit familiarization training and overhead to use.
10/31/13
Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm – Part 4 of 5
Author: Al Sandrik
Scenario: 11 Bravo
During Part 3 bad weather continued to hamper my plans. Limited visibility meant that the Soviets could get up close and personal before I could engage them. Reinforcements arrived to help out, but a wing of Soviet Hinds was battering one of my Abrams tank companies. Would the Cobra’s arrival come in time to tip the scales in my favor?
Turn 6, 08:50-09:20: The Soviet Hinds circling northeast of Delta/2-32 Armored didn’t disappoint and hit their position about 08:55. As the unit was prepared three (3) Hinds went down within five (5) minutes with the remaining Hind observed headed southwest. Radio warnings were relayed to Bravo and Charlie Companies and within minutes that Hind indeed attacked Charlie Company, majorly pressing its attack. For at least fifteen (15) minutes that lone Hind engaged an Abrams Company before it to exploded into a ball of flames. 2-32Armored’s S-2/Battlefield Information Coordination Center (BICC) has analyzed the likelihood of continued Soviet attack helicopter activity to be low and accessed the Soviet battalion to be rendered combat inoperative due to losses and damage.
Elsewhere the Soviet assault continues to attempt to overrun Charlie/2-36 positions in Michelbach and while they are close to breaking Charlie Co had driven back every assault so far. Plan on them being eliminated within the hour, but they have bought time for Bravo/2-32 Armored to enfilade the Soviet assault’s southern flank (Figure 23).
