Uncommon Valor – Campaign for the South Pacific
http://www.matrixgames.com/games/story.asp?gid=216It’s a game released in 2002, by Matrix Games, of the Battle for the South Pacific. The map boundary goes from Truk in the north (where all Jap ships, planes, troops, and supplies come in), to Brisbane in the South West (where all the Aussie / UK ships, troops, planes, etc) to Noumea in the South East (where all the US stuff comes in).
The time frame covered in the grand campaign is from May 01, 1942 to December 31, 1943. So basically you start right before the historical battle for the Coral Sea.
Each turn is one day, and the game is an “operational level” game, meaning you decide which ships go into which Task Forces, and you tell those task forces where to go (along with various levels of reaction), you tell the airplane squadrons what type of mission to fly and at what altitude… and when you hit “end turn”, the computer carries out all tactical level combat. So you might tell your carrier to head north, because the day earlier your PBY’s sighted some Jap carriers, but then if those carriers are sighted to the east, your carriers will change direction and head toward them to attack, depending on if you set your CV tf to “react to enemy”.
Each hex above is “30 miles”, and if you look in the lower right, you can see how much of the “overall” map is shown. I messed up that map in the lower right playing around with it a couple months ago, so you see a lot of yellow dots on it. Game doesn’t have that mess that I have. Also, since I turned this into a jpeg, it took on a very grainy look. You can, if you want, turn off the hexes, but I like them on so I know just exactly where to park my carriers (out of range of enemy aircraft, in range of my aircraft)
The big thing is that this game forces you to take supplies into account. You can’t just park 1000 planes at Guadacanal, and have them fly every day. You are foced to transport supplies from your supply locations (Truk, Brisbane, Noumea) via task force (or transport aircraft) to your bases if you want to build anything, fly anything, use as a forward supply base… so choices for your subs are “attack combat ships” or the overall “wear down their transports”…. Because you only get so many transports. Ships require fuel, instead of supplies. No fuel, no chance of going anywhere…. so you have to make sure your ports not only with supplies, but with fuel also. And let me tell you, running out of fuel when you’re in range of enemy land based air sucks. Ships use fuel anytime they are at sea, so for PT boats, you’re range is really limited, other ships have good range… but eventually, you’re going to have to return to a port for fuel. Ships firing guns (or cv’s launching air missions) uses up ‘ammo’ on the ships, and when you run out of ammo, you have to return to a supplied port and restock. (Supplies are pretty generic, you just have to make sure the port has “supplies”, you don’t have to transport specific ammo, bombs, etc.).
With base building, you aren’t going to plop into Guadacanal and have an instant-superduper airport. Nope, when the Japs take Guadacanal at the start of the game, the base has nothing, so you have to transport engineer ground units and supplies to build the base up (takes time). You can build up three things on a base: Airport, Port (if on a coast), Fortifications. But some bases aren’t “capable” of having a “level 9” airport/port (level 0 = nothing, level 9 = as big as possible), so on pretty much all the bases, you can only build the stuff up to a certain level. For instance, in real life, the Wau airport was a airstrip cut out of the side of a mountain. Naturally, you ain’t gonna have La-Guardia airport sitting there, but you can build that tiny strip and have some fighters there.
The way any campaign game goes, however, is “6 months of the Japs running over the place”, followed by 3 months of “turning the tide”, followed by the US rolling up what the Japs had build.
Dracho and I just fired up a PBEM game for the heck of it, and see how it goes. We are fighting the “South from Rabaul” option, in which a lot of things are fantasized, basically The Battle of Midway didn’t happen so the Japs get those carriers lost at the Battle of Midwar, Jap pilot training is increased so the replacement pilots for Japan don’t suck so bad, Russia and Japan have peace treaty so the Japs get some of those troops. What that means is that I’ll (Japan) be able to do a lot “better” than the Japs did historically, but in the end, I’ll still get crushed by the US Land Based Air, what with there nasty P38’s, Hellcats, Corsairs. It just makes for a much more entertaining game. “Victory” comes down to “who has more victory points in the end”
The game is available for digital download from matrixgames for 20$. The interface is kinda clunky (as expected for a micromanagement type game of carrier war), and it takes a bit to “make your stuff do what you want”, but after you get over that hump (for me at least), I’ve enjoyed it.
Topic: test UV Map of AP v Dracho on the WW2 battle for South Pacific (Read 2795 times)