Thread by @SandyofCthulhu

When I was at MicroProse, Sid Meier ran an after hours game that worked like this. We all stayed in our offices, which had terrific intercoms. Sid & a pal were the referees. The rest of us were officers in either NATO or the Warsaw Pact in a division- level action in the Fulda Gap.

Higher commanders had to use the com to tell their underlings what to do. The underlings actually did things, and the refs gave them results or information.
1/

So I would order my cavalry squadron LTC to check out a hill I saw on the map, and then Sid told the squadron what they saw, and the LTC would get back to me with something like, “There’s a whole regiment of T-80s! We’re taking heavy fire, 4 Bradleys KOed, pulling back!” Then I’d have to figure my next action.

Meanwhile the Soviet player with the tank regiment was alerted he’d been spotted by ground units.

You may ask, “what about air recon?” Well, the opening of the battle was about a thousand Scuds hitting our airfields (props to the Russian player for thinking of this).

We still had helicopters but they were busy elsewhere. Also the Scud strike at least meant the Pact didn’t have any more to hit our command posts.
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Most of us at MicroProse were pretty hip to modern warfare. We’d done Gunship, Red Storm Rising, F-15 Strike Eagle, F-19x and so forth. So you can imagine we got pretty involved.

I wasn’t our division commander - but I was on his staff, so we were in the same office. It helped to have two of us coordinating our efforts. When I asked for helo recon, he told me he was using our 8 UH-1Hs on something else, so I sent in the cav on my own initiative.

I then asked the commander for artillery on that hill. He called the corps (represented by Sid) and made his case. He got something like 20-30 MLRS targeting the Soviet tanks and Sid said they were wiped out. I don’t know what he told the Russian player.
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The next day the Russian officer bemoaned that he’d had his tanks charge over the hill, instead of immediately relocating. He didn’t expect such a rapid response from us.

Apparently one of the features of the game was that the Russian players’ information was always delayed by an extra minute, and if they had to call their army HQ it took 5 minutes. This was Sid’s way of representing the inferior Pact command structure. So the tank leader knew it took well over 3 minutes game time to target artillery (that was 45 minutes “real time”) and thought he’d be well out of the target area before we could respond.

The funny thing is, the Russian player (a designer) had actually written a whole game about how NATO combat control was better.
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Anyway it was super fun. Later on, Sid ran a game simulating a Civil War campaign in Northern Virginia in 1863. I was put in charge of the Union and managed to lose Lee’s army and he took Washington. I asked Sid what about Washington’s garrison and he said, “They’re all fat from eating oysters.” So yeah lost that one big-time. I was way too over-confident. Also the command-control thing wasn’t in my favor in that game.

Anyway, good times.
/end