How simulate a strategical air war in COW?

[BigDuke66]

Did anyone find a way to simulate a strategical air war?

What I need is a way to tie the strategic airforce of one side to an air campaign and of course to see the consequences of this campaign.
The consequences should result in lowering the replacement rate but there should also be a way of raising the replacement rate after a while.
Has anyone found a way to do this somehow???

[Southern Dandy]

You should (emphasis on should) be able to do this using the event editor.

Curt Chambers designed a scenario from the old Avalon Hill boardgame of the same name, Blitzkrieg, in which the effects of a strategic air campaign against re-supply is handled through the event editor.

The essence of it is that the player chooses via theater option whether or not they wish to commit air units to the campaign. Doing so gives them a certain percentage chance to reduce opponent supply. If this campaign is successful, the side affected can then opt to pull fighter assets out of the fray to deal with the bombing campaign, thus re-establishing the supply level.

The scenario is available at www.tdg.nu for download if you wanted to check it out in more detail.

Not sure if this is close to what you're after or not...it's the closest example I can think of, at least...hope it helps!

[Raindem]

Strategic bombing in Blitzkrieg is very abstracted and probably wouldn't work in a simulation of an actual campaign. I plan to update the scenario in a few weeks and change the bombing campaign to the system I modeled in Campaign for South Vietnam.

Essentially, you set up a series of units representing your targets. These will have only Civilian groups and set to garrison. The number of civilian groups will depend on how much force you want the attacker to expend to destroy the target. You then use Unit Destroyed events to apply the effects (supply, replacements, shock, whatever). You'll need 2 events per target, delay and ranges as appropriate.

The variations on this are endless. You can add a second unit to the hex to simulate civilian casualties. You can set a delay on the effects and have them dissapear over time. You can set the target unit replacements to different levels depending on how fast you want the target to "repair damage". You can have the target unit reconstitute and loop the events. Or have it not reconstitute to simulate a permanently destroyed site. You can give the defender an option to improve his air defenses which add additional FLAK units to the target hexes. You can even link the replacement of certain equipment (i.e. Pz IV's) to a certain target not being destroyed (a "panzer factory").

For any bombing campaign you have to make several judgement calls. How much damage should be possible? How much was the enemy's morale really hurt? What was the overall effect on the campaign? For example, did it cause tangible damage or just cause the defender to focus his air defenses on protecting the targets? The latter can be resolved by withdrawing defender's air units in response to target destroyed. In Peter Szabo's Lebanon 82, the targets were SAM sites so the appropriate effect modeled there was to adjust Israeli air shock. So you'll have to do a lot of research on the campaign you're modeling.

Once you've answered these questions (or taken your best guess at the intangibles) and have a system in place you'll need to test it thoroughly by by conducting direct attacks to see if your force/loss ratio is about right. Then you'll have to do it again in a full blown playtest to see if your effects are right. Done properly, strategic bombing is a sub-game all to itself and significantly increases the design work involved in any scenario that utilizes it.

Anyway, hope this helps.

Curt

[BigDuke66]

Sounds like a lot of work but also like the best way to handle this problem.
Thanks guys.