Wow, almost a month since my last post. You’d think that I actually have other stuff to do, or something.
Here’s what’s been going on in the wargame front:
- I’ve completed my training game in the CCC and am preparing to begin a “maneuver” battle with someone on my own team. While not a full-blown battle for victory points, this is a closer simulation to an actual scored battle while still done under the auspices of training. Should be a hoot… the guy who I will be playing against seems very friendly and helpful, going out of his way to answer my questions.
- I’ve all but lost a PBEM Age of Rifles game of the Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge. Again, the chap I’m playing against is very patient and helpful for a newcomer… though despite my side having odds in their favor, I have managed to get more or less beat to smithereens. We are going to go again with another scenario, so I can see if I’ve learned anything.
- Been playing through a Battle for Wesnoth campaign called “The Eastern Invasion”. I’ve played through a couple of the shorter campaigns, and I like the game enough to keep going. This campaign is a bit longer (17 scenarios) and, so far, a good bit harder. The developers seem to like forcing the player into two-front battles… the scenario I am currently on as well as the last few have all ended up with my forces caught in between two hostile forces. The way I play the game is that I only save at the beginning of a scenario (or if I need to stop playing at the moment), and play it through to the end. No save/restore garbage to modify the outcome of a battle… if I lose, I start the scenario over. This particular campaign has had me doing that a lot more than the previous two did. The two-front battles are kind of frustrating (especially one right after another!), but they do help me slow down and critically think about the terrain, the makeup of my own force and the enemy forces, and how best to negotiate the situation. In general, I’ve learned that it’s very difficult to make an offensive push in two different directions. :)
- Acquired the HPS title Fulda Gap ’85. This uses the same engine as Campaign 1776, but is set in a mid 1980s Cold-War-Turned-Hot WWIII situation. The Fulda Gap is apparently one of the two possible invasion points that NATO expected that a Warsaw Pact attack would use; the scenarios in this game are, thus, set in this area of Southern Germany. I finished reading the book Team Yankee by Harold Coyle, which is a combat narrative of a tank company in a similar NATO/Warsaw Pact WWIII conflict. Interesting stuff, being born in the mid 1970s, I spent most of my childhood in the 1980s and can recall the feeling of the USSR being the “Bad Guys” (though at that age, I had no idea what such a conflict would be like or how far-reaching it would be).
I am getting used to Fulda Gap 85, and I think I am going to start playing through one of the campaigns instead of just random scenarios here and there. I have found with Battle for Wesnoth that I seem to get more invested when playing through a campaign; where I can carry my units through and follow a storyline. I will attempt to keep track of my progress here, though perhaps not in as much detail as my narrative of Sons of Liberty and Bunker Hill (since I’ve got more games going on now).
Also, the image host I have been using seems to be having some problems at the moment. I may check into using another one as I continue to make entries, but for now it seems that all my previous screenshots are unavailable temporarily. Hopefully they’ll be back online soon.
That’s about it for now. Stay tuned for more.
