Operation Market Time

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fitzpatv
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Joined: Wed Mar 20, 2019 11:29 am

Operation Market Time

Post by fitzpatv »

This is another Vietnam War scenario and is very different to Down Town. You are in charge of a selection of light US and South Vietnamese warships tasked to prevent the North Vietnamese supplying their land forces by sea. You have a Neptune patrol plane in support and some Huey helicopters and Bronco attack planes on call.

It is basically quite an easy scenario, with the few Vietnamese armed junks and escorting patrol craft having little real chance of getting through. Unfortunately, it has a couple of annoying bugs.

First, you get a series of contacts with civilian junks which bloody-mindedly violate the US exclusion zone. Fair enough, but in real-life, such vessels would be boarded and searched. There is no mechanism to do this in the game and you are left shadowing the boats, just in case, while getting repeated spam messages about them.

Secondly, while your Neptune aircraft is useful for recon and can be used to (fairly safely) attack enemy patrol boats, it insists on going RTB once out of ammunition. You have to continually give it things to do to avoid losing it. Its primary mission is recon and the game should allow it to do this without ammo.

A third gripe happened when a patrol boat went after one of my lighter PCF patrol craft. I didn't want to fight it without support and told the PCF to run away and lure it onto a heavier Coastguard cutter armed with 5" guns. I could only do this by detaching it from its patrol mission, which was rather artificial and contrived (even telling it to fire only in self-defence didn't stop it approaching the Vietnamese vessel). Worked in the end, though.

This scenario has the virtue of being different and showcasing some of the smaller, less glamourous warships in the world's navies. Coming directly after Down Town, it also illustrated the big range of difficulty in Command scenarios.
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Gunner98
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RE: Operation Market Time

Post by Gunner98 »

fitzpatv

Regarding your three issues:

1. Not sure of a solution, the scenario designer can do some things but generally once they are identified as neutral you can trust they will stay that way - unless the designer specifically does an event to switch them.

2. By hitting the 'U' key then plotting a course should correct this problem. You should also go the Doctrine & ROE and set the Weapon State RTB to 'No'

3. This sounds like the PCF was auto-evading and getting caught up in a bit of a loop or was engaging opportunity targets which also might be dragging it back into the fight. I think the best way to handle this one is to hit 'U' to detach from the patrol, go to the doctrine tab, set both to No, then give it a course to where you want to lure the bad guy to. Once that is over just re-assign it to the mission and it will resume its duties.

IIRC this quite an old scenario and some of these settings did not exist when it was built, so the author wouldn't be able to set it up to take advantage of them. Playing around with the Doctrine and WRA is a very powerful tool, it may seem a bit micro at the start but you can change a lot of behaviour through this dialog for your entire side, a group or an individual unit.

Cheers.


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fitzpatv
Posts: 345
Joined: Wed Mar 20, 2019 11:29 am

RE: Operation Market Time

Post by fitzpatv »

Thanks for the advice. I'll try to look into the Doctrine settings in more detail. All part of the learning curve, I guess.
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