Author Archives: James - Page 119
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Megagame: Invasion from Mars 03
Dateline General Buck’s advanced HQ on West Continent, Cydonia The Martians have landed! They made a major landing with most of a GF division just outside OLYMPUS. My shuttle landing reinforcements for OLYMPUS diverted to ENSEMBLE as the nearest friendly location. A major assault on OLYMPUS took place with indiscriminate bombardment by the Martians, resulting in 4,000 civilian casualties, as well as wiping out my sea marine force (no reported survivors). A third sea marine force successfully assaulted KUTCHI and displaced the enemy logistics base there. They took some casualties on the way in and two transport flyers were damaged also (but repairable). On the North coast the enemy armoured division trapped south of DEANVILLE has been all but destroyed. The infantry component has dispersed into the woods and is no longer a fighting force. The tank brigade has been…
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Megagame: Invasion from Mars 02
Dateline General Buck's advanced HQ on West Continent, Cydonia Operation VALKYRIE has been a major success! A successful seaborne assault by 3rd Tank Brigade has taken DEANVILLE cutting off the line of retreat of an enemy armoured division (although at a cost of 3,000 civilian casualties and ejecting an enemy infantry brigade West along the coast). A simultaneous assault by the 1st & 2nd Tank Brigades from the front line to the North has reduced the enemy Division to less than half strength and prevented its escape. Additionally an Airborne assault has taken place landing a sea marine force in both OLYMPUS and ENSEMBLE, threatening the enemy Air Logistics Base to the South of OLYMPUS. The news is greeted with delight back home, and I have been awarded a medal. I also have four more RMP and reinforcements in the…
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Megagame: Invasion from Mars 01
This is one of Megagame Makers megagames, designed by Jim Wallman and played in Anerley Town Hall in south London. The Invasion from Mars website has the game rules and the map as well as some background info on the downloads page. I played the part of General Stanley Buck, a loyal and competent commander of the Democratic Republic of Cydonia's Army Group West (AGW) (in reality about Corps strength, three two brigade armoured divisions plus air and sea components with appropriate logistics support). (details of some typical units) At the game start AGW is already committed and has captured the Eastern end of the West Continent (link to map). This gives a firm jumping off point for the next phase of the offensive and the military balance shows that AGW slightly outnumbers the New Cydonia Colony (NCC) forces. In…
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Another side of the COIN
I ran my game of being an Afghan farmer "The Other Side of the COIN" at the Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group's (CLWG) annual conference yesterday afternoon. This was its second outing, you can see my onside report from the first run here. Since the last outing the game has developed further to address some of the comments that the players made then. In particular I had a set of individual objective cards to drive some behaviours and give the players something to focus on that was essentially different each time the game gets played (and also makes the farmers all slightly different from each other, there is a danger that they all do the same thing). The other advantage of the cards is that it stops a purely economic rationality setting in immediately and just converting to grow poppy (because the…
FiReControl’s Failure
The Public Accounts Committee have opined that the FiReControl project wasted £469 million pounds. A sobering report, all the more so if you were one of the people that worked on the project. How could things go so expensively wrong? I read the whole report from the PAC see if I could work out from their evidence how the failure occurred, and what I could learn from it. Largely I understand why it happened, and I can see some of the things that I was responsible for mentioned positively in the NAO & PAC reports. It just wasn't quite enough to make it work. Fortunately (for me) I wasn't involved in the procurement and so I don't believe that I was directly responsible for the problems that occurred (for example not having a decent contract with appropriate milestones), or managing the…