Strategic Air Campaign

[Felix]

G'day,

I'm thinking of putting an economic side into the next scenario I'm working on. I thought I'd create a number of units consisting of Civilian squads, which would be fixed in place by a garrison setting (backed up with a house rule). There would be a number of events for each unit, such as;

Event 100: Activated by unit destroyed: News only
Event 101: Activated by event 100: Supply1-: Value 2
Event 102: Activated by event 100: Replacements1: Value 97

Each side has about 30 or so 'industrial units', with an event sequence similar to the one above (values will differ from place to place).

I understand that this has been tried before, and I was wondering how successful it has been in the past. I wanted to create units, rather than have 'Force Occupy' triggers, as this will be set in the 1940s, and I thought players should have the option of using their heavy bombers to do a bit of bombing. Industrial units can also be destroyed by land attack of course.

I don't have enough event slots to loop these events though, so once a unit is destroyed, that's it, all replacements are lost. But I figure that if a city has been fought over, there's not too much coming out of it again anyway. Bombing might be a different story, but I figure the way round that is to make the industrial units quite tough; several full-on raids would be needed to destroy one.

What are your thoughts on all this? Do you think it would work well enough that players would want to use their valuable heavy bombers to blow up factories rather than fighting units??

[Raindem]

Felix, I use this both in Campaign for South Vietnam and Blitzkrieg, and I happen to believe it works. The trick is to extensively test the results to get the right "balance".

X number of sorties should sustain X number of casualties and cause X amount of damage. Since the TOEs of the air units are (or should be) pretty well fixed you adjust the variables by changing the strength of protective AA and the size of the target unit itself. Set up a target replacement rate if you want it to be able to "repair" itself.

By far, the X damage factor of the equation is the most difficult to acquire because the true effects of a strategic bombing campaign are never quite known. People still disagree as to the real effects of Allied air campaigns in WWII and Vietnam.

In general, make your potential damage levels fairly modest. The target side should, at worst, be severely inconvienenced by such a campaign, but not defeated by it. In Blitzkrieg, a players Supply can be reduced by 30% and replacements by 38% by bombing...potentially. For the attacking player, they should have to use enough force as to cause a detriment in other areas of the air campaign.

In short, make it (whether to bomb) a tough decision with non-spetacular results.

Hope this helps.

Curt

[Felix]

Thanks for that mate. I just wanted to know if it's worked in other games. Blitzkreig looks like a bloody good scenario, I'll have to download it and find someone to play against.

You're right about the devil being in the balance. But just knowing it can be done is half the battle. The bomber units in my scenario will be about 60 aircraft strong, so I intend to vary the number of civilian squads and medium SBML guns (added to decrease movement to 1) to achieve balance. I expect the closer cities to get a pasting, as they'll be within range of the medium bombers too. AA units will be added to the orbat, to give players a chance to defend their factories. My aim will be to get exactly what you describe '..a tough decision with non-spetacular results.'

Cheers.

[Mark Stevens]

Felix,

You may also want to take a look at the Europe Aflame scenario. That has fixed 'Civilian' industry units for the Germans in the major cities, which are in fact large dumps of troops and weapons. Timed Events gradually disband them, so the equipment enters the Replacement Pool, but in the meantime the Allied Player has the option to bomb them. As they're set to 1% proficiency, 99% of the equipment lost is actually destroyed, and the industry cannot function as ground combat units if the Allies reach them before they're scheduled to disband.

I too wanted to give the Allied player the option to wage a strategic bombing campaign instead of having every heavy bomber unit set to combat support.

You should be aware that soft equipment (rifle squads, trucks, etc.) will suffer far more from this than armoured equipment.

In a WWII scenario, flak units seem very ineffective against heavy bombers, whether in defending against strategic bombing as above, or even in defending bridges from air attack.

As Raindem says, you definitely need to run test after test after test with different proportions of bombers, supporting fighters, defending fighters and flak (keep notes) to ensure that the results are consistent with what you're trying to achieve. It's not just the losses to the industry: you need to take into account damage to the attacking bombers and fighters, and to the defending fighters.

Cheers,

[Felix]

Thanks for that Mark. Methinks I'll have my work cut out getting this right. I guess I'll be setting up a test scenario, with bombers, fighters, AA and industrial units/ships (there are some sea lines of communication involved too..... just to complicate things.)

So, I think it'll be another 8-12 months before this is ready to see the light of day.