From The Strategy Gamer
CMO offers a host of new and exciting features that I’ve been eager to tear into. Except life had other plans and I’ve had to sit on the sidelines since launch. Now though I’m getting back into it and am going to walk through a scenario I’ve had in mind for awhile. The Soviet invasion of Sweden.
I know, stop the music, the Soviet Invasion of Sweden? Yup!
Sweden was neutral in the Cold War. A big empty spot on the map between Norway and the Soviet Union. Sweden managed a pseudo neutrality in WW2 but provided Germany with a good deal of iron ore. So what would they do, what could they do, in a Cold War gone Hot?
Luckily a good poster elaborated.
This stuck with me for a long time. Could Sweden have defeated the Soviets? They could swing through Finland and come from the north but it’s a loooong way with mediocre infrastructure.
But why would they risk an angry porcupine of S-Tanks? Soviet doctrine intended to capture from Shetlands north to Iceland and use it to harass incoming units from the US such as REFORGER showed. Without locking down Norway the US now had an unsinkable aircraft carrier that could hit at the North Flank of the Soviet advance.
There is actually Soviet planning along these lines but it is from the 1950’s-1960’s. Stalin really didn’t care if his forces got nuked, things changed post Kruschev. As I don’t want scenario bloat, I’m going to just focus on Sweden.
Originally I wanted to focus on 1970 but I miss out on an iconic Swedish aircraft.
The Viggen.
On top of that I ran into an oddity of the CMO databases that proved frustrating. In a nutshell there is two databases. One for the Cold War, another for everything post Cold War. CMO uses database ID’s (DBID) to define if something is a pier or a missile battery.
Using the Import/Export Units function I can easily draw in a huge variety of Swedish installations. One problem though, they are all tied in to the DB3000 (Modern Database). So if I try to use the Cold War DB the DBID’s don’t match up.
I tried to get fancy and write a Python script to convert the installation files to a version with the proper DB3000 ID’s. It became an exercise in coding that I didn’t feel like getting into. (Note, let me know if you’re into Python…)
On the up side I just bumped it to 1990 and can easily use the DB3000 without any issues and still get a very wide variety of Cold War aircraft. Plus we get the Viggen at the peak.
We’re lucky as Sweden has a really great selection of installations available. Now this is just facilities, but it’s a great start.
With a couple of clicks I can load in all of the Swedish Air Wing bases. Note that I had to de-select some doubles and select the earlier option.
There! But we’ve got no planes. Or radar. Or surface units or…
Now things get a bit more interesting as I’ll have to research what was available and place it in likely positions. I’m using a Google Sheet to build my research. For starters I’m working off of a Rand research paper from 2005 that describes the state of the Swedish Air Force in 1990 very well.
This gives us a great start, and for the moment all I’m focusing on is building the force allocation. I may use some lua scripting to populate the air bases as the generic unit names that CMO creates are US centric. I’ll probably use a Swedish Name Generator to give the scenario some flair.
I’m testing out Github for some version control. It’s not really designed for something like this as I can’t see my changes in the actual code (which is OK) so I just have to comment my versions accordingly. Hopefully this will help once the scenario gets larger. It really works well on code…
I’m working on storing all of my lua externally so as to make it easier for future reference. As you can see on the above generic lua script all of my changes are tracked.
Once I’ve got some bones on the scenario we’ll take another look.
The post Command : Modern Operations – Birth of a Scenario Part 1 appeared first on The Strategy Gamer.
Original URL: http://thestrategygamer.com/2020/03/11/command-modern-operations-birth-of-a-scenario-part-1/