Retake the Snake! The Russo-Ukraine War at Sea
The land war in Ukraine is dragging on, with no sign of a cease-fire in sight. To restart the Ukrainian economy, it is imperative that you find a way to reopen the port of Odessa on the Black Sea. Currently, the Russian Navy is blocking access to the bulk freighters that could transport Ukrainian grain to markets in the Middle East and Africa. Commercial shipping companies will not take the risk of being hit by a Russian anti-ship missile. The challenge is to find a way to neutralize this anti-ship missile threat. You can try to destroy the Russian platforms that deliver these missiles with missiles supplied by Ukraine's NATO allies. You could also try and blind these radar guided missiles using powerful electromagnetic jammers mounted on old Soviet Mil-14 helicopters. You will also need to destroy the Russian special forces units that have retaken Snake Island. Finally, you have to find a way to stop Russian cruise missiles from destroying the grain storage facilities along Odessa's waterfront. This is a tall order because Russia has everything you lack: ships, modern combat aircraft, and submarines. Nevertheless, you have the tools you need to bring grain to countries on the edge of starvation. You just need to figure out how to use them. Good luck!
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Fascinating! I'm still trying to work out exactly what's going on, but I thought I would mention just that in a few places the word "characteristic" and the word "Kilo" are misspelled. Also, dumb question but I seem to have a bunch of cards that require me to have specific sorts of units, like helicopters, but I can't figure out where I get any helicopters.
Thanks for playing! You should start the game with one helicopter - a very old Mi-14 PL with electronic warfare equipment (possibly donated by Poland, and heavily modified for jamming missions.) Unfortunately, if the Russians shoot this helo down, you cannot get another.
For this one I felt a bit like a new commander, just out of Commander school and thrown into combat, forced to evaluate everything taught in textbooks, to pick out what matters on the battle field. The real challenge here is separating what you need to know from what you don't need to know. There are so many different sensors with so many different affects on so many different units it can be overwhelming, but once you reduce the list just to the elements which are relevant for this scenario, it slowly becomes comprehendible. Not easy mind you.. I took me a few play throughs to eke out a minor victory, and many restarts before I figured out all the bad ideas, and finally developed a fairly solid strategy. I was pleased to find the AI of some of the units seemingly intelligent - the migs seem to behave a bit like a swarm of bees.. I could lead them alone, and they seemed happy to protect their objective, but as soon as I tried to eliminate them, they became unpredictable, costing me a couple wins even as I started feeling experienced..
This was the first naval hex game of this collection that I committed to completing, I imagine some of the skills I picked up will be transferable to the other naval games, so looking forward to trying those out too.
Nice work!
Thanks for the feed back. Incredibly helpful as always.
You are right, there are a LOT of things to keep track of in this game. Visualizing sensor ranges and probabilities has been a constant challenge throughout the development process. The newest version of this game has a few tweaks that should help a bit. Enemy weapons cards now show up 100% of the time, so you can get a better sense of enemy capabilities. There is now also a box that gives you the detection probability for each hex. Just click on the hex, and you will see the probability of detection for each unit.
Hopefully, these changes reduce the learning curve a bit. At the end of the day, modern naval combat is complicated.
Thanks for playing.
Glad it's helpful! I'll add that the challenge of decoding the abbreviations and separating the signal from the noise was definitely a part of the appeal to playing this.. Here are the notes that helped me develop the intuition to arrive at a solution:
Thanks for making these games! I really don't play a lot of games these days, but there's something particularly unique about what you're creating here.. Probably it's the degree of depth, and the way in which the games pull their details from reality - so learning about the game is also learning about details from the world, which feels more worthwhile than just learning best strategies for beating a normal game.
I'll also say, these are the first Hex based games dealing with this scale (zoomed out to the level of nationstate) I've played .. I'd be curious to hear about games that inspire you that you'd recommend. Thanks!
Old school table top war games :)
If you are looking for a good computer game that accurately simulates modern naval combat, Harpoon is probably your best bet. There may be newer and better alternatives out there. Harpoon is a real time strategy game, which is probably the best way to really understand naval warfare. I do not really know of any turn-based, hex-based naval combat video games. This is sort of why we built this game engine. The great thing about Harpoon was the hyper realistic sensor models for things like radar, sonar, and electronic intelligence. We have tried to do a bit of that here, but in a turn based / hex based game engine.
Of course, there are lots of really good hex based/turn based modern naval warfare board games out there. One issue with board games is that you cannot really do a lot with sensors. This is where video games have the edge.
Trying to have the best of both worlds.