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Decisive Action began life as a training tool for
the US Army's Command and General Staff College, where officers learn to be
colonels and generals. Now, with some interface and graphics upgrades, Jim
Lunsford and HPS have unleashed it upon an unsuspecting public. Decisive
Action is superb at what it tries to do, but it's not a title for the
casual gamer. The learning curve is more like a learning cliff, but the
payoff is well worth the effort if you are interested in the topic. What exactly does Decisive Action try to do? It presents modern
warfare from the perspective of a division or corps commander in scenarios
lasting up to 40 hours (20 game-turns). It focuses on planning and
decision-making: on the business of orchestrating the actions of your
battalions and brigades into a coherent and devastating symphony. Decisive
Action is not about micromanagement or fast clicking. It is about
planning ahead and making the best use of limited assets. Many aspects of the
simulation are abstract, but this serves to highlight the focus on planning. Decisive Action ships with nine scenarios, set in
Kansas, Germany, NTC, and Kuwait, all of which can be played as Red or Blue
in either solitaire (against the AI), hotseat, or PBEM. The AI puts up a
reasonable fight in the offense, and will crush a poorly conceived battle
plan. PBEM runs fairly smoothly once you realize that the Blue player has to
start the game, though note there is no password protection on the files, so
unscrupulous players could get an advantage by peeking at their opponent's
deployment. In addition, it contains a fully featured map and scenario
editor. Two new maps have already appeared and word on the web-board is that
fans are busily concocting more maps and scenarios, so the number of
available scenarios ought to grow. Moreover, HPS and Jim Lunsford have been
quick to respond with assistance when trouble arises, and open to suggestions
(witness the inclusion of hotkeys in the 1.01 patch, which was requested by
numerous users), which suggests that Decisive Action will get
excellent developer and publisher support. Decisive Action has two learning curves: the
interface, and the game itself. While daunting at first, the interface can
soon be learned, and the 1.01 patch adds hotkeys to streamline the most-used
functions in addition to swatting a few bugs. Furthermore, each interface
function is carefully explained in the 47-page manual (included on the CD in
MS Word format). The much tougher learning curve is learning to play effectively. In
some respects, this is a good thing! DA has deep gameplay that will
tax your strategic ability for a long time. Unfortunately, DA sorely
lacks introductory materials or scenarios that can get a new player up to speed
on the most basic aspects of coordinating the forces provided. That's the
worst part of the learning curve: you've figured out what all the buttons do,
but have no idea what to do next. HPS included four military manuals to help
with this, but for an easier read, try Vincent Taijeron's Primer and a trip
through the DA web-board for hints. Eventually -- sooner if you are already familiar with military
operations, later if you are not -- you'll have grasped the basics of how DA
fits together. At that point the real fun starts, because you're still facing
tough decisions about how to employ your forces every turn in order to
accomplish your mission. DA shines once you get to this level of
competence with the game. If it were easier to arrive at this point, DA would
be much more accessible to a much wider audience.
How does the planning become complex? Start with the intelligence
picture. You'll know about the enemy units you are in contact with. You might
have a UAV or two to fly around and spot enemy units as well. Much of your
intelligence, however, comes from "Named Areas of Interest", or
NAIs. In real life, commanders and their intelligence staffs designate these
to focus their intelligence-gathering efforts, and it works the same way in Decisive
Action. An enemy unit whose footprint crosses into an NAI is spotted.
Unfortunately, you don't have many NAIs and they don't cover a large area.
Therefore, you have to think carefully about where to put them, analyzing the
terrain, your objectives and planning, and likely enemy actions to figure out
how to get the best use of the NAIs (in military jargon, "Intelligence
Preparation of the Battlefield" - and the US Army manual on the topic on
the DA CD). As a further complication, the NAI you put on the map this turn
doesn't become active until next turn, forcing you to plan ahead. Similarly,
you have TAIs (Targeting Areas of Interest), which direct your intelligence
assets to provide target data. Artillery and air strikes directed against
targets in a TAI are doubled in effectiveness, but, as with an NAI, the TAI
requires a turn to become active, it doesn't cover much area, and you haven't
got many of them. Get your intelligence lined up, and acting in concert with
your artillery and airpower, and the enemy is going to have a bad day.
The enemy, of course, has no intention of letting you do this easily.
Units may not drive where you expect. Artillery can be set to
"counterfire", so that it pounds on enemy artillery batteries in
range. Air defence units will try to knock down your airstrikes and
helicopters, which you can counter to some degree by setting some of your
artillery to SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defences). However, you will
probably only have a couple of units of artillery. If you set them all to
counterfire and SEAD, none of them will be engaging the enemy's main force.
If an enemy offensive cracks a hole in your front line, the tank and
mechanized units will rampage through your rear, eating artillery, grounded
helicopter, and logistics units for breakfast. To get effective air support,
you need to knock down the air defences with SEAD or directed artillery
strikes. To keep enemy artillery at bay, you need counterfire. To suppress
and attrit enemy front-line formations, to help your own front-line units
survive, you need direct support or interdiction fires. There isn't enough to
go around, so you have to make difficult decisions on your priorities.
Things aren't simpler for the ground units. Every unit in the game has
a "footprint" – the area that the unit takes up. When enemy units'
footprints overlap, they are in direct contact and exchange direct fires. The
footprint varies by the unit's size (battalion or brigade?), the scale of
losses it has suffered, or its mission. Units assigned to an attack take up
the smallest space, while units on a security mission are spread out over a
wide area, with consequent reductions in their combat power and ability to
hold ground. You can pack as many units as you like into one spot, but an
interdiction barrage will affect every unit that has a footprint in the
targeted spot. As a result, packing lots of units into one area can be very
painful. Moreover, packing units together causes traffic jams, slowing their
rate of movement. On the other hand, single units may not suffice to
overwhelm an enemy defence in the time available. Unit strength is a function
both of its "Relative Combat Power" (RCP), which is an abstraction
of its nominal capability, its percentage of losses, and its unit type. Unit
type means that an artillery unit with an RCP of 45 will be powerful in
indirect fire, but will probably get hammered in a direct-fire engagement by
a small front-line recon unit with an RCP of 5. Since DA executes both
players' moves simultaneously, you'll also need to think ahead about your
movements, trying to anticipate where the enemy is going to be. As everywhere
else, a coherent plan based on good intelligence and a good anticipation of
the future shape of the battle is key.
DA also keeps track of fatigue, morale, and supply
state. Fatigue and morale may recover a bit if the unit is out of combat and
able to communicate with its headquarters. Destroy the headquarters, and
morale recovery slows to a crawl or even drops. Supply comes to the unit on
truck convoys that are vital and easily destroyed. The truck convoys route through
rear area service units, which are also vulnerable to attack. Destroy the
enemy's logistics, and the enemy force will be in real trouble. Normally,
resupply is handed by the computer, but you can choose to step in and direct
the convoys yourself if need be. Unfortunately, occasionally it is necessary:
the supply convoys aren't very clever at finding a path around enemy units or
rivers. In addition, proactive resupply on your part can increase the
effectiveness of some units, such as attack helicopters.
All of these aspects come together to make a remarkably complete
whole. No one aspect of the game is terribly detailed, but Jim Lunsford put a
lot of thought into ensuring that they would interact in complex and
realistic ways. DA isn't really like anything else on the market.
While closest to TOAW2 in the scale of actions it covers, it is
closest to TacOps in feel: a thin sauce of graphics and sound covering
a rich, chewy, complex, and satisfying dish of gameplay and simulation. Yes,
there are annoyances, such as the difficulty of selecting units that are
stacked up, and the occasional failures of the logistics AI to navigate
around rivers and enemy units. Yes, it's a hard game to learn. The payoff,
though, is that Decisive Action has a lot to teach about modern
warfare, and in the process, has an enormous depth of gameplay to offer you.
Training tool or game? It's both, and if you have an interest in modern
warfare, you'll love it. For realistic division/corps level modern wargames, Decisive
Action is the state of the art. |
