Operational Art of War II Scenarios

I prefer this to the original 1939 to 1955 set because WWII does not hold a lot of interest and the engine has been smoothed out a little. Computer turns appear to run faster and good units tend to be able to move and fight more in a turn. The computer opponent seems to be a little brighter. My Habre (Chad) computer plays a lot better defence (switching fronts, covering the rear) than the Israelis in the volume I Palestine ’48 scenario and my objective and order setting is of the blind faith school. On the down side it still takes a while for the game to load and there are not a lot of scenarios out there. These may build with time but there are not that many actions that are big enough to suit the system and some of those have already been adapted for Operational Art of War I. The obvious attraction of both games is to play virtual board games against the computer with no set up space or time. Looking at all the home designed scenarios on the web many have been designed from board games. The system is a good deal cheaper than Aide de Camp and can be played by 2 humans but there is no way to turn off the game combat system and use the base CRTs so you cannot exactly replicate games with this program.

I took the hood off and had a go with the scenario design engine and have converted some board games. The manual is not as useless as it might be and there are some design hints on thegamers.net. Putting in the map is a chore but not hard – say 3 hours work for a single map, more detail more time. Order of battles come from the original game counters with the help of Command Decision OOBs, cribs from existing scenarios and a chunk of guessing. These are easier for small level units as they do not contain much variety. A company of tanks is likely to be just tanks but make a unit a tank brigade and there will be all sorts of support stuff to throw in there. The game requires every vehicle and squad to be listed for every game unit, since nothing is going to be book strength this takes some invention/research. Luckily whole groups of units can be pasted and adapted to fill out an army from a few base types. The basic OOB takes about as long as the map and then has to be placed on the map and orders set for both sides. The real time consuming part is setting up default paths of attack or defence for every formation and running the game to see what will happen. The computer can be set to play itself and is likely to show up the big problems in the first few turns. When some sort of order has been crafted the computer can be tested against a human. This involves sitting and trying it out (obviously) and I for one am not that good a player to really beat out the computer options. Unlike a board game just getting the forces right will not ensure a historic game as both sides must have computer settings for a player to play against. These consist of objectives and orders both of which can be changed by events in the game although the more changes the harder it will be to monitor them. There is no "break" mode to test routines, the game has to be run although there is some control in testing through setting events to 100% success to ensure that they will fire – or find out why they don’t. Every unit, formation and army has a supply and effectiveness rating that can be adapted to for balance as well as orders and equipment. I have been leaving equipment and messing with the orders and effectiveness. Still despite a critical (planned) shortage of anything on wheels and some pretty poor troops my FAN paramilitaries in Chad conduct a rapid mobile defence. If I tone this down something else may go out of line.

This all takes time and the bottom line is that to be really tested a scenario has to be released. A problem is that he who sets the computer movement tracks has a good idea of the general way things will go. The best picture will only be gained by playing without knowing the hidden options although any player can open up the scenario design and take a peek. I have been putting up my scenarios after basic testing and am willing to go back to them to address any feedback. Some designers put a good deal more effort than this before releasing scenarios, the only way to tell is to play them.

These are all for the 1.02 patch but will probably work with other versions. They will not, however, run with Operational Art of War (I)