Russkies in Oklahoma!

[seabolt]

TURN 7

As an editorial aside, simulation has veered dangerously close to reality over the weekend. Depending on timing of events and veracity of reports, U.S. military aircraft might have even received fire from Russian Federation units. One can only hope that more humanistic voices prevail, and quickly. In the meantime, I suppose we'll carry on.

As for this fight, Epoletov either didn't read my last post or didn't care to dignify my surrender terms with a reply. Karma being what it is, this of course dicatated that he should have a pretty good turn, which he did, maybe his best of the game.

It started out looking good for me, with another Nona and two more Russian ammo carriers brewing up under CM fire. Though my A-10 had dropped its entire FAE and CM loads on its first run in a nice re-enactment of "Apocalypse Now," I had brought it back in to chew up the Acme paratroops with its megacannon. (Somehow the "giant beard trimmer" sound effect doesn't do this weapon justice.) I double-checked that it should fly due east, then veer right to leave the map early, at least four times. Of course, after firing it inexplicably kept flying due east straight into the Russian AA, giving me my own little case of the Warthog yips. Fortunately, no SAMs took aim, and there's only two cheap 40mm AA guns back there. (All of that wonderful instant-kill hardware does cost points.) A little suppression and my Apaches will be chewing up Nonas much more efficiently than the cluster rounds do.

Except that this turn they had to lead the effort to clean the riffraff off Mt Acme. This they did tolerably well, with a few Rangers closing in and lending support, but there's at least two more turns of work to be done. Two more paratroop units made it into the buildings, which transforms the trivial into the tedious.

This firefight led to an even more unpleasant discovery: One of my Apaches mysteriously came up lame. It was fine to end the last turn, took no artillery fire in the Russian phase, and was well away from any action during Epoletov's turn. And yet damage 1, no move, and 0:0:0 weapons. Does the game have a malfunction chance ala H2H? If so, I suppose that my helicopters rarely live long enough for me to notice it ...

I purchased some assault engineers to blow up the bridges to the "island" before moving on to take the VH at the Mom & Pop Store. Epoletov took care of their first benchmark quite nicely, and after fording the river I had them unloaded and lurking just west of the VH. An undetected HMG and scout unit destroyed the leading element, my first full-sized squad to be totaled. My follow on troops suffered no further casualties in destroying the offending Russians, but we'll have to see what sort of support was behind them.

And the firefight in the north finally developed. In his turn Epoletov z-fired what has to be at least a regular infantry company into my leading elements, before poking some rifle sections forward to have their heads handed to them. A lot of very experienced players would have done it the same way, but I can't help but think that I gained far more intelligence from the z-fire than it was worth to him. Five strokes of the R key and 95% of the effects were history. In reply, I chopped up another rifle section and advanced, losing a couple of Rangers who stumbled into a sniper in a stone building before destroying it.

My luck didn't hold out at turn's end, either. I had displaced some of my Paladins ... one of them right into the flight path of the Grach eyeballing my backfield this turn. Fortunately, the warbird targeted the ammo carrier rather than the gun, but that's one piece that won't be shooting infinite CM rounds any longer.

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