A Christmas gift: Community Scenario Pack #50 now available

December 19, 2024 · Posted in Command · Comment 

Following the release of the new Build 1527 update for Command, which includes the new v509 databases, Brandon Johnson has now also updated the famous Community Scenario Pack (CSP), the Command community’s curated anthology of user-created scenarios. The new update, out just in time for the Christmas celebrations, contains 15 new scenarios:

* Assault on Al Tanf, 2024: Located in Syria on the Iraqi border and within miles of the Jordanian border, the U.S. garrison at al-Tanf has, since 2016, served as a launching point for counter-ISIS operations and training for Syrian opposition factions fighting the jihadist group. Iranian and Iran-backed forces are deployed in close proximity to the al-Tanf desert outpost, which sits on the strategically significant Baghdad-Damascus highway. U.S. forces in al-Tanf established a 55-km de-confliction zone, beyond which lie an array of forces described as either “pro-regime” or “Iran-backed” that have set up checkpoints in the area. Several incidents in recent months underscore al-Tanf’s potential as a flashpoint between U.S. and Iranian and/or Iran-backed forces.

* Caravan, 1982: Since the start of the Iraqi invasion, the northern Persian Gulf has been the site of an intense naval war between the Iranian and Iraqi navies. Most of the fighting has been centered around Iraqi attempts to stop the flow of vital material to the port of Bandar-e Emam Khomeyni. The Iranian navy and air force have devoted significant forces to protect the convoys. Slightly over a year ago, the Iraqi navy first deployed a new weapon in their battle against the convoys, the French Exocet anti-ship missile. A few hours ago, Unit 114 of the Directorate of Technical Equipment detected another Iranian convoy departing from Bushehr.

* Dead from EABOve, 2027: Approximately 2 hours ago, following an earlier announcement by PRC of a blockade of Taiwan, US initiated hostilities with China after interdicting a PLAN SAG attempting to transit the Bashi Channel out to the West Pacific.The Chinese have taken the first blow, now they are ready to return the favor. US bases in the Philippines, Palau and Guam will be in their crosshairs.
You will be required to hold off the numerically superior PLA forces and do so while being subjected to heavy bombardment from PLARF elements.
For your forces to survive, they will be required to disperse, and to refuel and rearm at austere locations. Capturing PRC bases in the South China Sea for follow on operations is also a nice option.
This is a complex 2-day scenario, happening just after the author’s other scenarios “Tighten the Straitjacket” and before “Penetrating the Blockade”.

* Khrushchev’s War, Day 1 – France Enters the Fray, 1957: This scenario assumes World War III began in late April of 1957. During most of April in 1957, the Soviets sortied a large number of ships and submarines, claiming they were conducting a series of military exercises.
In the early morning hours of April 25, the Soviets initiated a large and well-coordinated attack on NATO forces.
NATO forces already at sea have been organized into task groups and ordered to hunt down Soviet ships and submarines.  It is critical that NATO remain in control of the sea lanes.  As commander of a French task group centered around the cruiser De Grasse, your mission will be to secure the waters south and southeast of Sardinia.

* Khrushchev’s War, Day 1 – Poseidon’s Play, 1957: You are in command of the Greek submarine Poseidon.  She is actually an old American submarine, the Lapon, recently recommissioned and on loan to the Greek government.  However, as her captain, you are sure Poseidon loves her new country as much as she loves the country where she was born.
Today, she will have a chance to prove that love.  As the only Greek vessel in the southern waters of the Mediterranean, Poseidon has an opportunity to intercept a Soviet convoy on its way to the Egyptian city of Marsa Matruh.  The Egyptians appear to have allied with the Soviets, although they have not yet officially declared war.

* Khrushchev’s War, Day 1 – The Battle of Elefsina, 1957: In the early morning hours of April 25, 1957, you receive a flash priority message.  There is credible intelligence that a massive Soviet attack against NATO is about to begin.
As the commanding officer of the 114th Combat Wing of the Hellenic Air Force and its three squadrons of F-86E Sabres, your mission will be to help protect Greece from the Soviets and their allies.

* Khrushchev’s War, Day 2 – Head ‘Em off at the Sunda Strait, 1957: It is the second day of the war. Shocking news has arrived from Europe.  The Soviet Union has launched massive attacks against European air bases and other military targets.  There are reports that the American carrier Forrestal and the British carrier Bulwark have both been sunk.
You are in command of a British naval squadron in the Far East.  Some elements of the Soviet navy have been operating in your area of responsibility.  It will be your task to destroy these ships and submarines.

* Khrushchev’s War, Day 4 – Birmingham Goes Hunting, 1957: It is the fourth day of the war. Intelligence suggests the Soviets have sortied additional submarines and surface groups to threaten shipping in the Atlantic.  You have been placed in charge of one of the task forces assigned to deal with this threat.

* Khrushchev’s War, Day 30 – South Dakota Says Goodbye, 1957: It is the end of the first month of the War of 1957. NATO has received reliable intelligence that a large surface group has left Soviet waters.  It appears to be designed to attack NATO shipping trying to cross the Atlantic.
Most NATO ships are already engaged in other theaters of the war.  No carriers and few submarines are available to intercept the battle group.
You are in command of a battle group of available vessels assembled to intercept and destroy the Soviet battle group.  It is a curious collection of ships for the late 1950s, being centered on two World War II-era battleships, South Dakota and California.  Both vessels had been reactivated shortly before hostilities erupted in Europe with the idea of using them as test platforms for new technologies.  However, once the Soviet attacks started, these plans were put on hold.

* Korean Campaign (Operation Dragon Fire), 2018: It is the Spring of 2018, and it appears that Kim Jong-un is finally going to make good on his constant threats to launch an attack into South Korea.

* Operation Ardent Shield, 2030: The world’s worst fear just materialised. Open conflict has erupted between the world’s two superpowers over the South China Sea.
Singapore, as a neutral country but finding many of its fundamental interests in line with upholding the principles of UNCLOS and with keeping the US presence strong in the Pacific, has decided that it will allow US military assets to continue to refuel and resupply in the country, and for limited US military operations to be conducted from the country so long as no direct strikes on Chinese mainland territories are staged from Singapore.

* Operation Sallyport, 2029: In mid-2029, China commenced an intervention under the pretense of restoring order in Papua New Guinea. For Australia and its allies, the stakes were high, as the stability of the South Pacific, regional security, and the influence of Western alliances in the Indo-Pacific hung in the balance. The ensuing operation would determine the future of Papua New Guinea and reshape the power dynamics of the region.

* Ouadi Doum, 1986: In response to Libyan aggression in Chad, President Mitterrand has deployed French forces to Africa.
France is determined to prevent Libya from destabilizing its former colonies, and is concerned about the ability of al-Gaddafi’s government to stage long-range bomber attacks out of the Ouadi Doum airfield.

* Sapphire, 1977: On June 27, 1977, the former French colony of Afars and Issas gained its independence as the country of Djibouti. At first, the FLCS (Front for the Liberation of the Somali Coast), a guerrilla organization fighting against French colonial rule, celebrated this victory and was partially absorbed into the new country’s government.
But days after the declaration of independence, a splinter group formed calling for the integration of Djibouti into ‘Greater Somalia’. After gathering support, the group launched their insurgency against the Djibouti government and French forces stationed in the country.
Somali leader Siad Barre had primarily been focused on absorbing the Ogaden region controlled by Ethiopia, but started shifting his focus to the newly independent nation.
Somali forces that had been thought to have been preparing for an invasion of Ethiopia quickly deployed to the border with Djibouti. The French have started sending a large number of reinforcements to Djibouti, but due to the limited infrastructure and short time frame, this has been difficult.
The first units from metropolitan France arrived a short time ago, joining a number of units airlifted in from French territories in the Indian Ocean. French intelligence has assessed that there is a high likelihood that Somalia will launch an invasion in the coming days or hours, before most of the reinforcements can be brought in.

* Soviet Endgame – Seize Giebelstadt3, 1981: At the opening of the Third World War, the Soviet Union launched a continent-wide effort to sweep into NATO countries in a war of conquest.
This scenario focuses on one small aspect of the overall war. As a part of the effort to secure central Germany, the Soviet airborne forces, the VDV are tasked with taking the NATO airfield at Giebelstadt, just south of Würzburg.

The new community scenario pack is, as always, available for download at the Command Team site, and also on the Steam workshop.

The CSP now proudly counts 618 scenarios in its stable!

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Promises kept: Command-PE v2.4.1 and the new sim manual now available

December 11, 2024 · Posted in Command PE · Comment 

Last September, at the most recent (and most awesome) Command User Event held at Quantico, we showed off the then-imminent-to-release v2.4 major release to Command PE. We also stated that a “hotfix” update was scheduled for release by the end of the year, and that the much-anticipated CPE Simulation Manual would also be made available to current PE license holders in the same timeframe, even in early draft form.

As the year is now drawing to a close, we are happy to fulfill our promises:

* Command-PE v2.4.1 is now available for download to all current users of CPE. Intended originally as merely a hotfix release containing all the tweaks and fixes since the original 2.4 release, it has morphed into a substantial update in its own right.
Its biggest new features are the new “pin-cushion view” option for displaying aerospace units at their true altitudes (this got a lot of attention also at I/ITSEC last week), the tabular & machine-parsible “butchers bill” (list of losses & expenditures) and the option for repeatable-loop movement style on mining missions (ie. you can now define in advance the specific pattern to follow when laying mines, as well as related settings such as interval).
The new update also contains a whole slew of improvements and tweaks to the simulation engine, as well as the latest v509 release of the DB3000 and CWDB databases.

* The first version of the CPE Sim Manual that we deem share-worthy is now available. This document acts as the central point of reference for the overall design and internal simulation mechanics of CPE (and CMO) both for the Command dev team as well as professional customers (this is distinct and separate from the existing CPE & CMO user manuals, which deliberately focus on the user interface and gameplay options).
The sim manual is still in very early draft form, with numerous placeholders, unfilled or unfinished sections; even so, every single user who has glimpsed at it so far has found it extremely eye-opening, useful and illuminating. So we believe the same will hold true for any of our customers who wish to gain a deeper understanding of how Command’s simulation engine works. The sim manual is not generally available for download, but can be provided to active CPE license holders upon request.

The CPE dev team is already hard at work, developing a new set of features (and especially a pair of big whammies) that will define the next milestone of CPE some time within 2025. Stay tuned!

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Command wins the 2024 TIGA award for “Educational, Serious or Simulation Game”

November 29, 2024 · Posted in Command, Command PE · Comment 

The complete winners list: https://tiga.org/awards/2024-winners

As a reminder, CMO previously won the 2019 Charles S. Roberts award for “Best Modern Era Computer Wargame”, and CMANO before it was “Wargame Of The Year 2013” and MS&T Magazine 2017 Finalist.

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No regrets: Command v1.07 now available

October 24, 2024 · Posted in Command · Comment 

Well, this certainly took a while.

Following the gargantuan releases of “Tiny”/”War Planner”/v1.05 and the more recent “Number of the beast”/v1.06, we had a lot of technical debt to own to and a lot of catching up to do. It was not unexpected that the rapid introduction of so many new groundbreaking features would bring about a bunch of new problems and issues, which needed to be addressed. There was simply too much baggage to keep hauling with us on the way forward.

The new major CMO release, version 1.07, is therefore very much a “service pack” (raise your hand if you recognize the term without googling it). The primary emphasis has been on identifying and fixing the various issues accumulated over the last couple of years, ideally in order of severity/priority. Performance, particularly on the simulation engine, has also been substantially improved. If you are a Command long-timer, you should notice (most if not all of) your past pain-points gone; and many scenarios whose scale/complexity previously placed them out of your hardware’s reach should now be perfectly playable. If you are a more recent player (welcome!), you get a nicer experience out of the box.

This is not to say the new release is bereft of new mechanics to explore and simulated toys to play with, though. A quick summary of the new additions:

* A new map mode of showing aerospace units at their true altitude (instead of only as ground-tracks on the planet surface), sometimes called “pin-cushion view” (disabled by default). This mode makes it easier to visualize the vertical placement of aerospace units, and can be particularly helpful when vertical positions play a crucial role in sensor & weapon interactions – think satellites, ballistic missiles and ABMs, even the altitude differences in air-to-air or surface-to-air engagements. Phil Gatcomb has already made a sneak-peek video for this, check it out.

* A new HTML-rendering backend, using Microsoft’s new WebView2 rendering engine. You should notice improved HTML rendering on the DB-viewer and other UI elements that use HTML sources. This also allows richer custom UI elements at the beginning of a scenario (e.g. to define custom options for the scenario, difficulty settings etc.)

* A new wrinkle on air-to-air refueling: Aircraft fuel on-load rate restrictions (requires v508+ DBs). When large tankers such as KC-135s or KC-46s refuel tactical aircraft, the bottleneck on fuel transfer is usually not the tanker’s offload capacity (which is huge; these booms are designed to fill-up B-52s and other monsters), but the intake rate of the receiver aircraft. This is now properly modelled.

* Indicators for aircraft contrails and ship/submarine wakes can now be displayed on the map, under a unit’s datablock. This makes it easier for the player to be more aware that his units may be visually detected at significantly longer ranges because of these factors. These indicators can be disabled on the “Map Settings” menu if they clutter the map unacceptably.
(Clarification: Contrails and wakes have been part of the simulation engine since Command’s original 2013 release. This change adds visual indicators for them.)

* Various “quality of life” improvements across the UI and particularly on the mission editor and various strike-planner windows.

* The latest releases of the DB3000 and CWDB databases, with the completion of a major year-long milestone: The China national review (see this overview for more details). The Command database is now arguably one of the most comprehensive open-source compilations of information on modern Chinese military platforms.

The full release notes are available HERE.

We want to thank both our internal beta testers who helped make this a solid release, as well as our public user community who contributed feedback on the public beta. You are part of this.

As always, there is no rest for the wicked and certainly not for the Command dev team. CPE v2.4, a big update to the Command-PE series has also been released this week, and CMO itself is already tweaked and improved for the next public update. Stay tuned as the dev team assembles and prepares some new amazing features for 2025 that will undoubtedly take the Command series to the next level in modern-era wargaming.

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“This is truly awesome!”*: Command PE v2.4 now available

October 22, 2024 · Posted in Command PE · Comment 

* Actual quote from early-bird pro user

It has taken a while, but the wait is most definitely worth it. CPE v2.4, the next major update for Command Professional Edition, is now available for download to all professional users.

The headline feature of the new release is most definitely the addition of Real-Time Multiplayer (RTMP), a brand-new capability to Command. (As a reminder, CPE has offered WEGO-style multiplayer since version 1.15). The new system offers several key features and advantages:

– Real-time execution and UI update means participating players can view progress updates and issue orders dynamically as the scenario unfolds, instead of having to wait for the next “checkpoint in time” as in WEGO.

– Up to 16 players can participate in a single MP session.

– Multiple players can play under the same or opposing side. The importance of this feature (which is not available in WEGO) is hard to overstate: One of the challenges of CPE is that, for any non-trivial scenario, the single payer may wear “too many hats” (from theater commander all the way down to mission planner & weaponeer). RTMP allows players to organize their assets to players, effectively demolishing this limitation.

– Multiple umpires and observers. Umpires have unlimited hand-of-God powers (can edit the scenario at any point in time) and can witness the action from any side’s point-of-view, in addition to being able to see everything (no fog-of-war). Observers have the umpire’s omniscience but none of the editing abilities.

– Time progression is either real-time or accelerated.

– The scenario state can be rewound/reverted to any previous point in time, and resume from there.

– Players can arbitrarily leave and rejoin an ongoing session at any point.

The RTMP feature was until now available only to select early-bird customers in a dedicated development branch based on CPE 2.0, and was demonstrated at the recent CUE. Now, it uses the baseline development path and is available as a license option.
(Contact Matrix Pro Sims for pricing information on a RTMP license)

CPE v2.4 also benefits from the massive “get well” development work over the last year, like its commercial counterpart CMO v1.07. Other significant features of the new release include:

  • Significant improvements in stability and performance, in addition to a large and diverse array of gameplay and simulation fixes.
  • Further progress on the ATO compliance process. As part of this, various security vulnerabilities have been identified and removed or mitigated. CPE is now included on the USAF Evaluated Products List (EPL), which clears it for deployment on USAF protected systems and networks.
  • Significant improvements to UI for heterogenous/mixed groups, greatly facilitating Manned-Unmanned Teaming (MUM-T) operations.
  • A new non-lethal weapon type: Laser Dazzlers. Although subject to the same atmospheric-absorption effects, these are distinct from high-energy laser (HEL) weapons and have different effects.
  • A new HTML-rendering backend, using Microsoft’s new WebView2 rendering engine. You should notice improved HTML rendering on the DB-viewer and other UI elements that use HTML sources. This also allows richer custom UI elements at the beginning of a scenario (e.g. to define custom options for the scenario, difficulty settings etc.)
  • A new wrinkle on air-to-air refueling: Aircraft fuel on-load rate restriction (requires v508+ DBs). When large tankers such as KC-135s or KC-46s refuel tactical aircraft, the bottleneck on fuel transfer is usually not the tanker’s offload capacity, but the intake rate of the receiver aircraft. This is now properly modelled.
  • Indicators for aircraft contrails and ship/submarine wakes can now be displayed on the map, under unit datablocks. This makes it easier for the player to be more aware that his units may be visually detected at significantly longer ranges because of these factors. These indicators can be disabled on the “Map Settings” menu if they clutter the map unacceptably.
    (Clarification: Contrails and wakes have been part of the simulation engine since Command’s original 2013 release. This change adds visual indicators for them.)
  • Various “quality of life” improvements across the UI and particularly on the mission editor and various strike-planner windows.
  • The latest releases of the DB3000 and CWDB databases, with the completion of a major year-long milestone: The China national review (see this overview for more details). The Command database is now arguably one of the most comprehensive open-source compilations of information on modern Chinese military platforms.

The CPE dev team is already busy assembling the first hotfix update for this momentous release, as well as preparing for a new set of features that will define the next milestone of CPE some time within 2025. Stay tuned!

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