Paul Vebber
Posts: 11430
Joined: 3/29/2000
From: Portsmouth RI
Status: offline
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[QUOTE]Sorry, but it seems to me from those posts that Paul is of the belief that sending my SC out on shake down cruises and setting my training % for my C47s in the rear and... are all "operational" level decisions. While trying to point my air assets as the most priority enemy TF I have been tracking for two days is too "tactical" for UV. Thus it is not in the game.[/QUOTE]
No, you quote quite clearly that I said "there can be disagreement" on what constitutes operational level decision making. I or any other person has there own ideas about what is encompassed by "operational warfare". I can post a list of 99 items and get 99 responses as to which are "operational" and which "tactical" and which an operational level commander should be allowed to influence and which he should not. And which are the province of operational art, and which not. And in what various situations any given list applies.
Unless you want a game that "plays itself" and informs afterward if you win, your "list" is pretty ridiculous.
1,2,3,4. Yes, deciding the organization of groups of transports and assigning them to support your operational plans is something you have to do. The AI can't read your mind and know what you want to do with them. If you group transports logically and keep your plans simple and direct, then you barge hubs take care of a lot it, and otherwise it means managing maybe 6 or 8 logistics convoys on 3 or 4 main routes. You can make it hard on yourself by not planning well and having scads of transport convoys running around, but that's your choice. IF enemy carriers runs amok in your SLOCs then you are lucky you have transports to reorganize...
5,6,7,8. Again, if you make an operational plan, and follow it, you only have to mess with these things sporatically. Yes it would be nice to be able to "automate" the cycles of these things in WitP where there are so many more units. But in my "battle rhythm" of cycling through my squadrons to check their status, its a matter of a couple mouse clicks to change these things. The key once again is to have a PLAN for these things. You can fret over each individual squadron, trying to optimize it, but if you "play the game like an operational commander" then you come up with a set of "standard operating procedures" and stick with them and establish a "battle rhythm" that supports it, it becomes second nature and adds a minute or two to cycling through your squadrons checking status. You can fall into the trap some operational commanders fall into and try to squeeze every ounce of efficiency out of your squadrons, but you don't have to.
9. No, if you don't want to you can leave them to their business without interference. PUt the Mine sweepers in an MIW TF and teh SCs into an ASW TF and they do just fine.
10. OR let them auto refuel and leave them alone. You make the call - AI can;t read you mind to figure when your mission is important enough to risk running out of fuel. Plan well so its not an issue.
11. Sure a "keep flying the mission until x supply is transferred" would be nice, but I generally only have a couple places I have to supply by air, so again, establish a 'battle rhythm' and it takes a couple mouse clicks on that squadron when you check it out.
12. Ability to establish "cycles" would be nice but again its a question of establishing a "plan" and sticking too it. Sure "automated planning" would be nice, but the what is the tradeoff between what you spend valuable programming resources on to save the player a few mouse clicks?
13. Again - once you establish the SOP for this, they remember it until you change it.
14. How does the AI read your mind about that? :rolleyes: Make plan that doesn't require LRCAP, or you have to overrule the tactical commander and direct his CAP to support your OPLAN.
15,16,17 Again you have a OPERATIONAL PLAN don't you, or do just task every squadron based on what feels good at the moment? ONce you set these for a given operation, nobody makes you mess with them.
18,19,22. LOL, right the AI should move your ground troops and TFs for you? And decide if they are supposed to attack or defend or whatnot? That is part of operational planning too...and not much of a game if you just sit back and watch. And how do you communicate to the computer what you want to do?
20. IF you organize them into a task force and hit "load troops" you just click on the units to load and they figure it out quite nicely, even pressing additional unassigned ships into service if need be.
21. This is called "designating operational fires" and is the meat of an operational plan. And you can organize your plan so the squadrons of a specific type have a given mission and can assign multiple squadrons of a given type to the same mission. IF you play multiple day turns they will keep trying to do it. Or you can wing it ad hoc and get overwhlemed trying to figure out at "the moment of execution" what all your squadrons should be doing.
All those things are part of planning and executing an Operational plan. Many of these things are cyclical, and you don;t seem to understand that while the decision of what to do may be tactical but the CYCLE used is operational. LIe I said I would like to see the ability to automate these cycles - but frankly most UV scens are small enough that the time it takes to assimilate the status info on each squadron and "check the status of the plan" makes the mouse clicks to change something a minor nuisence at worst and at best required info I have to communicate to the game SOMEHOW to inform it of a shift between phases in a plan.
Its easy to confuse a tactical decision, with the operational level SEQUENCING of tactical decisions. YEs each decision may be tactical, but the SOP or cycle established for making that tactical decision is an OPERATIONAL one.
I seems the idea of a "battle rhythem" may be new to some. Establishing a battel rhythem means establishing a standard sequence for executing game tasks. It will likely take writing it down for a while until it becomes second nature, but if you approach the game by writing down your objectives, then the broad mission you want to accomplish to achieve those objctives, and then the "SOPs" or cycles for simplying the "tactical decision making" or the triggers for making changes to the "tactical configuration" of your units you begin to see that the application of "Operational art" is not strictly done at the operatioal level of war. Good operational art is providing good guidance for tactcial decisionmaking to your subordinates.
The game is an exellent "case study" in executing "operational art" and the one thing that is the biggest mistake in applying operational art is to think that you as the operational commander are the best positioned to make "the key tactical decision" - THAT should be made by those closest to the enemy. That is probably the hardest lesson to learn in the "real world" and the mistake most commonly "lesson re-learned".
And the reason for that is that you don't RELIABLY get the information you need to make those decisions as an operational commander. IF fyou have really "Tracked a TF for two days" then it will be pretty rare in the game for your suborinates to go off and do something silly, and when they do its typically becasue the situation isn't as cut and dried as the "icon view" of the game board makes it out to be.
So one can either complain about why playing the game haphazardly without any real operational planning or establishing a "battle rhythm" leads to a desire to "take tactical control" (that in teh real world would likely mean failure) at the last minute to attack a target of opportunity. If that is your "plan", then you will most likely lose whether you had tactical control or not.
Again you don't have a good gauge for the relative level of confidence the tactical commander has regarding the contacts exact wherabouts. You may have been "tracking it for two days" but that may mean a search plane making contact every 5 or 6 hours updating its position.
Even giving orders every 12 hours you would have no way of knowing that a given task force would be engagable by the time the order gets there. Airbases and ports don't move, ships do, so in the context of 1 or multiple day turns, telling a TF to "attack that contact you might have held 12 or 18 hours ago and I don't really know if you still hold it or not but think I know better than you that its the most important" sounds about as silly as it would be to the TF commander who would promptly reply with a "message garbled please resend". And if you haven't tried it, to really capture the time delays involved in the real campaign try playing on 3 day turns...
OR one can create and refine an operational plan, and establish a supporting battle rhythm and attempt to minimize the number of situations where the "stupid AI" can muck it up...and sympathize with your real world counterpart when they do...and realize that when that tantalizing group of targets shows up on the map, you really don't have a lot fo idea about the "track quality" just that someone, in the past 24 hours happened to report in that they saw them.
We will keep looking for ways to make the game more satisfying for those that do the latter, hopefully reducing some of the "AI stupidity" but are not going to change the fundamental design decision that the game is about operationally setting up the conditions to make tactical victories more probable, not about "knee jerking" to attack what appears most desireable at the moment.
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Gameyness??? - 
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"Battle Rhythm" in a COMPUTER game is NOT good - 
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