Making choices -- Why I bought Twilight Struggle

As I noted a few days ago, at least 212 wargames or expansions were published in 2009 alone, a truly amazing number. Such a vast selection means that choices have to be made. Unlike the old days when Avalon Hill published one or two games a year that everybody learned to play, today's environment means a player has little hope of ever playing all the good games that are out there.

Given that I don't have an unlimited budget (and I spend more than I should anyway) I've tried to be more selective in recent years. Among my criteria are that a game is likely to be played (so it should be reasonably popular) and that the topic or theme appeal to me in a more than superficial way.

Many don't consider Twilight Struggle as a wargame, precisely, but it's definitely a history-based game. It's one of the top sellers and rated games on BoardGame Geek so I feel confident I'll get the chance to play it often. But the biggest attraction for me is that it's largely a personal history as well. As a Baby Boomer born almost exactly a decade after the end of World War II, the Cold War was the war I grew up in, went to school during and even served my initial military career in. Many of the Mid-War and Late-War cards reflect "current events" for me, not history!

In game terms, I was born in the last half of Turn 3, on the cusp of the changeover from Early War to Late War. So, while I didn't have personal memories of The Suez Crisis (card 28) or The Korean War (Card 11), they were very recent history and in some cases had personal meaning. My dad fought in Korea, for example.

Turns 4-7 represent the Mid-war period in the game, and 5-7 basically correspond to my years as a school kid. I was too young to understand the Cuban Missile Crisis (Card 40) but I was old enough to sense the fear in the air. The "Lone Gunman" (Card 62) struck with distressing regularity and the world was full of change with Flower Power (Card 50), South African Unrest (Card 53) and the ever-present Arms Race (Card 39). We wound down the Quagmire (Card 42 in Vietnam) while I was in high school, so I missed it, but it was foremost in everybody's minds. I knew people who served and naturally all my ROTC cadre in college were veterans. Nearly every single Mid-war card has personal significance. I remember watching "One Small Step ... " (Card 80) on TV and waiting in gas lines due to OPEC (Card 61). Oh, yeah, and I became a wargamer on Turn 6!

Turns 8, 9 and 10 represent the era when I played my small active role in the affair. During Turn 8 I was an ROTC student, and we studied the "Next War" actively. SPI started publishing games examining the tactics and strategy of a potential World War III. It was a time of conflicting emotions. I worried about Reagan's talk about "An Evil Empire" (Card 97) but I had to say he was right, and I generally thought that his play of Star Wars (Card 85) and Tear Down This Wall (Card 96) were good ones, even at the time. I didn't think the US had anything to apologise for in opposing Communism. Of course, every play wasn't a success, and events such as the Iranian Hostage Crisis (Card 82), Marine Barracks Bombing (Card 88) and Iran-Contra (Card 93) were reminders that we were definitely locked in a existential struggle.

During Turn 9 I completed my military education and I deployed to Germany, staying there halfway through Turn 10. It was a time of high tension, with Terrorism (Card 92) coming too close for comfort. One day my family and I returned home from the post exchange only to hear on the radio that just 15 minutes after we left a bomb planted by Red Army Faction terrorists had gone off within yards of where we had been. Of course, we had no idea that we were in the "Late War" period and that by the end of Turn 10 a combination of Glasnost (Card 90), John Paul Elected Pope (Card 68), Solidarity (Card 101) and Pershing II Deployed (Card 99). among others, would bring the "game to an end. I'm still amazed that things ended the way they did. I don't think many people foresaw that the Soviet system would fall without at least one "throw of the die" to use the military force it had built up at such great expense.

It still seems that the most likely end to the "game," even in hindsight, was DefCon 1.

Out of the box, Twilight Struggle

I've long intended to get this game. Besides being very well-regarded as a game, it also has a lot of personal interest for me as a Baby Boomer -- it's not just history to me!

Just about the time I was thinking of getting it, though, I heard about the Deluxe Edition GMT was planning, so I decided to hold out for that.

It arrived yesterday and naturally I haven't played it yet, but I thought I'd share a few out-of-the-box impressions.

First off, the box itself is impressively tough. It's one of GMT's "armored boxes," and it should last a looooong time.

Inside the box is a very nice, solid mapboard and a full-color, lavishly illustrated rule book with a 3-turn example of play.

The cards are first rate, the counters thick, euro-style affairs and four player aid cards. I think they intended on including two, but the first run came out too flimsy, so they included a second set on firmer cardstock, or so it appears, as two of the aids are lighter stock than the others. There are some baggies for the pieces and a couple of dice (one red, one blue in a nice touch.) Oh, and the box has an insert that will keep everything from rattling around.

Altogether a first-rate presentation. I'm looking forward to the first game.

Special conditions required for fleet warfare

Russian Cruiser Aurora

Looking at the broad sweep of history one constant is that there are few extensive eras of general peace. Armies are fighting somewhere just about all the time. It's hard to find a decade without major wars and battles, virtually impossible to find a peaceful century.

At least on land.

But major naval actions involving fleets are far less common than battles involving armies. And those eras when naval fleet actions occur are concentrated far more in time. It appears that there are special conditions required for there to be contending navies.

Naval fleet actions in history seem to be largely confined to two half-millennial periods of time, with those two eras separated by nearly a thousand years.

Now, I am not arguing that there were no navies at other times, and I'm not arguing that there were no naval battles at all. But outside the eras of contending navies naval fleet actions were very rare and isolated events, while during the eras of contending navies they formed an interrelated strategic narrative. And the two eras showed some remarkable parallels.

The natural state of affairs for most of history is what could be called open seas. Navigation is largely free, with what state control there is being confined to local waters. Military expeditions across the sea are episodic and generally unopposed due to a lack of capability to oppose them.

The first era of contending navies lasted from roughly 500 B.C. to 31 B.C. During this era the dominant form of warship was the oared ramming vessel. The era started with the maritime-Greek states led by Athens facing the powerful continental power Persia. Naval powers rose and fell over the ensuing five centuries but at the end of day Rome, the intellectual and cultural heir to Greece emerged with total naval supremacy. A supremacy that lasted for centuries before slowly evaporating into another era of free navigation and uncontrolled seas. But during the era of Roman naval hegemony military expeditions across the sea were not possible for non-Roman powers and the Roman state controlled navigation throughout the known world.

During the first era of contending navies, however, many states attempted to float fleets. Naval campaigns and battles were relatively common and there were even wars that were primarily naval affairs.

USS Olympia

The second era of contending navies started around 1450 and also lasted about 500 years, until the mid-20th Century. Naval battles again became relatively common and many powers attempted to create navies and exercise control over large parts of the ocean. Again an early leading naval power in that era, England, eventually saw its intellectual and cultural heir, the United States, emerge with naval supremacy.

Naval supremacy, once won, seems impossible to have wrested away, although it can be lost through decadence and neglect. While effective armies can be raised in short order, creating a strong navy requires enormous resources and time, and cannot be done against the opposition of a hegemonic naval power. At the height of its naval power the Royal Navy sought to be as strong as the next two potential rivals combined, a margin of superiority it calculated could not be overcome. The contemporary U.S. Navy is stronger than all the other navies of the world combined, and most of those other navies are its formal allies.

Ships from five nations

There's a bit of talk circulating about China's rising naval power, but the stark reality is that China is generations away from being able to challenge U.S. Naval power, and will only succeed if the U.S. leadership is negligent. The best the Chinese can hope for in the case of a war with the U.S. is to seize temporary control of its local waters. This is much less ambitious than what England faced in its challenges from the Dutch, Spanish, French and Germans or the U.S. faced from the Japanese or Soviets.

From a wargamer's perspective, what all this means is that we may be generations away from seeing fleet-on-fleet naval actions again. Indeed, there may never be that sort of warfare on Earth again, although whether something similar might happen in space is an open question.

Nearly all naval wargames are set in one of those two eras of contending navies. There are a few wargames placed in the era or classical oared warfare from roughly Salamis in 480 B.C. to Actium in 31 B.C.

Most other wargames are set in the era that began roughly with Lepanto or the Armada in the late 1400s and came to a close, as far as active combat went, in 1945, although the Cold War standoff between the West and the Soviets included a strong naval component.

It seems to me that in order to have fleet actions there need to be particular conditions present. There have to be technological means to exercise naval control. There must be an international system with several great powers with access to the sea, but no one superpower. And there has to be sufficient economic wealth, as navies are extremely expensive propositions.

Because those conditions occur rarely, naval warfare is a very unusual occurrence. While battles on land are spread throughout the last 50-plus centuries, battles at sea are concentrated in about 10 of those centuries, in two consecutive batches.

3rd Fleet musings

Back in the "old days" I was quite the "Cold Warrior" insofar as wargaming interests went.
I was eager consumer of NATO v. Warsaw Pact games from the get-go. Most of the miniatures gaming, for example, involved "modern" stuff and I had an extensive collection of modern 1:285 scale GHQ/CinC armor as well as a lot of 1:2400 modern naval. I've been playing Harpoon since the very first Adventure Games edition.

A lot of this was professional interest. I was a company-grade field artillery officer in the 1980s with a tour of duty in Germany and even stateside my National Guard unit's training was always geared towards the NATO contingency.

And one of my favorite game systems for naval warfare was the Fleet series from Victory Games. At one point I had all of them and unlike many of my collections these actually got played a lot. I played campaigns of all the Fleet games and I have to say that it was both enjoyable and informative. Enjoyable because the game was very good from a player's standpoint. While intricate, it wasn't too complicated and it was very skill-based. Informative because it did an excellent job of illustrating the factors affecting naval combat and showing how much technology and geography worked against the Soviets. It was hard for the USSR side to win many campaign games, although many of the non-campaign scenarios were pretty balanced. Once a campaign got going, though, geography worked inexorably against the Soviets. While they might score an occasional success, the Allied forces had both numbers and location on their side. Typically the Soviet subs were hunted down, their surface forces driven back on their bases and their bombers forces attrited.

The end of the Cold War was, of course, a very positive development, but it did pull the rug out from the modern warfare simulation market. This has its ironies. For example, while the U.S. military trained hard for force-on-force heavy combat all through the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, almost all its actual fighting was contingency-style light infantry combat. Since the Cold War ended, on the other hand, the U.S. has fought two armor-heavy wars. Yet there's relatively less interest.

3rd Fleet was the last and most sophisticated of the Fleet series, and it actually didn't see print until after the Berlin Wall came down. In a very short time much of the naval hardware depicted in the game was scrapped. Up until the 1990s numbers were considered critical, so all navies regularly kept ships in service long after their design life. There were some World War II veteran warships still serving in many navies. In 3rd Fleet the U.S. battleship New Jersey and Brazilian destroyer Marcilio Dias were built for World War II, and the older games in the series had many more. Nowadays the U.S. Navy has scrapped and mothballed a large number of relatively new ships. As a matter of fact, some ships that were almost new in 1990 such as the Spruance-class destroyers are already gone as cost-cutting takes priority now.

I kept 3rd Fleet as the best representative of the series and one I might, possibly get to play someday. It has a fair number of smaller scenarios and even its biggest battles are much less ambitious than its sister games. I ended up selling off the rest. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if I never do play it again. While its a good game, time really has passed it by and I don't know anyone I'd even suggest playing it with. It's a relic.

Red Storm Rising, a case of bad timing

Perhaps one of the worst cases of poor timing in wargames was the appearance of Red Storm Rising in 1989. While it was trying to capitalize on the earlier success of the Tom Clancy novel by the same name, and doing a pretty good job at depicting the sweeping scope of the battle recounted in the book, within a few months of its arrival on store shelves the Cold War ended.
Fortunately for everybody, it didn't end with the bang premised by the book, but peacefully.
Still, the end of the Cold War pretty much ended the reign of what had been one of the more popular genre of wargames -- "future history," particularly the NATO v. Warsaw Pact big show.
While there would still be some future history games published over the years, and at least one scenario imagined by several of them came true when the U.S. went Back to Iraq, they stopped being the major force they had been.
It's too bad, in the case of Red Storm Rising, because the game provided a reasonably accurate wargame that was playable in an evening. When linked with The Hunt For Red October you could play out the whole NATO v. Warsaw Pact Air-Land-Naval scenario in an afternoon.
There' still some residual interest in both games and they get played occasionally, according the BGG reports, but I think they'd have had more of a chance to build up a fan base if the wall hadn't come down so soon after they were published.

Test of Arms a review

Twenty Years ago GDW published Test of Arms, the second game (after Team Yankee) to use its First Battle modern tactical game system.
Although the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may obscure the fact for Americans, the reality is that the world as a whole is a much more peaceful place in the first decade of the 21st Century than it was in any decade of the 20th Century. The culminating years of the Cold War ended up being especially filled with small and large wars around the world. Of the 29 scenarios in Test of Arms depicting tactical battles from around the world, more than half took place in the dozen years before the publication of the game in 1988. This isn't a statistical analysis, of course, but it certainly illustrates that the designers had no shortage of material to choose from.
I wonder how many of those wars people even remember now. Sure, Vietnam, Korea, Iran-Iraq and the sundry Arab-Israeli and Indo-Pakistani wars probably ring a bell for most. But I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people couldn't place Ogaden, Grenada or the Longa River.
There's all here, and more. There's no attempt at presenting a comprehensive treatment of the various conflicts from 1947-1987, but rather an illustrative sampling.
The First Battle system is basic, 1980s-style wargaming. Half-inch cardboard counter maneuver across a field of hexagons using their attack factors to fire using a range factor that is compared to a defense factor for a combat ratio. A six-sided die roll on a combat result table produces a result: Destroyed of damaged for vehicles, Destroyed or Pinned for troops. The main difference in game terms is that pinned troops can recover while damage is permanent.
There are special rules for the various supporting aspects of modern combat such as aircraft, artillery, poison gas, command and cohesion, smoke and fortifications.
Like many GDW games the rules are the weakest part of the design, with many concepts inadequately explained or in conflict. Players will need to be flexible.
They also shouldn't be too hung up on winning, because many, if not most, of the scenarios are not well balanced.
Still, the game is of interest for the window it provides to an age of conflict that may otherwise be forgotten. Despite the occasional inadequacy of the rules, the game is very playable and the vast majority of scenarios have the virtue of being short and small. Most scenarios take place on a single small map, the ones that don't only use two maps. The largest force on one side is generally only a battalion, which in game terms comprises about 30-60 counters, and often a side will only have a company of 10-20 pieces in play.
There is one irritating aspect of the game's presentation that deserves mention. In an apparent attempt to keep the game cheaper different units are printed on the opposite sides of the counters. While this succeeds in keeping the counter mix about half the size it would otherwise be, it makes organizing the game's unit counters nearly impossible. A couple of S&T magazine games took this shortcut as well. While understandable, if regrettable in a magazine game, I don't see much excuse for it in a boxed game.

Tac Air personal reflections

For a long time I thought my only "wartime" service would end up being my active duty stint in the mid-1980s in West Germany during the Cold War, so Tac Air always held a special place in my collection. It was the one wargame that included a unit I served in. Or at least it was until 2003 and Iraq, but that's another story.

My unit was the 1st Battalion, 80th Field Artillery, a Lance-missile equipped artillery unit. In the game it looks like this:

The counter depicts the trailer-mounted configuration of the missile, which was almost never used. The missile couldn't be safely towed any distance while mounted this way. Normally the missile was carried on a specially modified tracked vehicle based on the M113 APC chassis.
Still, the game is correct to depict the counter as a wheeled unit because the vast majority of the battalion's vehicles were and there was no mobility advantage conferred by the tracked launcher because all its necessary supporting vehicles were wheeled.

We weren't allowed to take photos for security reasons during my time in Germany, but this photo taken at Fort Sill at the Artillery Museum in 2003 shows what the Lance launcher/transporter looked like in firing mode:

The game simplifies things somewhat by making the unit one counter because in reality the launchers operated individually spread over a wide area. Still, tracking individual vehicles is well outside the scope of the game.

Tac Air was very unusual in explicitly depicting a wide variety of supporting units in addition to the usual tank and infantry maneuver battalions usually seen in this level wargame.

That wasn't by accident, of course, because the game was designed by an Air Force officer and meant to show the interaction between air power and land combat.

When wargamers think of airpower they typically think of a few extra factors of close air support being tossed in to up the odds for their combats. While close air support is an Air Force mission, it's not particularly popular with them and for good reason. It's usually not an effective way to use airpower.

Frontline units are already doing their best to conceal themselves from nearby enemy ground units with time and opportunity to shoot at them. Those same efforts make it even harder for jets swooshing by at several hundred miles per hour to see and engage those units. In addition, those troops are usually in armored vehicles or foxholes and well-dispersed, severely reducing the effectiveness of whatever aerial weapons do get sent their way.

Using air units as artillery can be useful on occasion, but the Army's generally found it more useful to use actual artillery for the work of close support. It's more accurate, responsive and effective. When a little air support is needed, the Army can call on its own rotary-wing aerial force of attack helicopters. Compared to air force jets these are also more accurate, responsive and effective, although they are also vulnerable.

Where airpower shines is when it moves behind the lines and attacks the softer targets such as supply dumps, trucks, headquarters, artillery, EW facilities and the like. In order to give the air units something to attack these need to be on the map. To justify having them on the map, they needed to have work to do, and so Tac Air ends up being a rather comprehensive depiction of the entire spectrum of mid-1980s warfare. There are rules giving artillery, headquarters, EW, trucks, etc. stuff to do. Neat.

So the 1st Bn, 80th FA is in the game primarily to be a target, but it can get the chance to shoot to some small effect. There was a conventional warhead available for the missile, but the unit's primary task was to launch nuclear-tipped missiles, a task it can perform in the game. The game places strict limits on the number of nukes available, far below what was actually on hand. But the limits are not unreasonable given the political realities and the fact that setting off more than a few would change the entire character of the war and probably make the frontline fight shown in the game moot.

During Reforger 1984 the 1st-80th was part of the Blue Forces. This was as interesting exercise because it pitted the M-60/M113- equipped Blue Army against an Orange force that included the 3rd Brigade of the 3rd Mechanized Infantry, which had been the first brigade in Europe completely equipped with the new M-1 Abrams tank and M-2/3 Bradley fighting vehicles. I got a front-seat preview of what Saddam's army would face a few years later in Desert Storm. The Orange army literally kicked our Blue butts so thoroughly that the exercise had to be halted -- twice. In one day our battalion (which was rather obviously not normally a frontline unit) was overrun several times and ended up retreating 60 kilometers!

I also got a mouse's eye view of what being an Air Force target was like. I'll always remember the moment I looked up to see a direct, head-on view of a West German F-104 on a dive-bombing run on my platoon in a logistics staging are. Had it been an actual war, my 2nd Lieutenant's combat career would have come to an ignominous end amid the ignition of my own funeral pyre. The Lance was a solid-fuel ballistic missile that was powered by mixing two substances in the combustion chamber that created a controlled explosion (not burn) creating tremendous thrust. But one 20-mm aircraft cannon shell piercing the missile would create a very uncontrolled explosion that would have blasted the entire log site. We represented a very "soft" target indeed.

Tac Air was published in 1987 and appears to be current as of 1986, my last year with the 1-80 FA, so it definitely covered the time I could have seen combat. As folks old enough will remember, this was the very end of the Cold War and many of us were very afraid that the Soviet regime would not go quietly. It's huge a tribute to leaders on both sides and to good fortune that the walls fell down in peace, not war. Certainly we wouldn't have bet that way in 1986.

Tac Air is a great reminder of the tragedy that was averted.

Team Yankee

Novelty games are somewhat unusual in wargame circles, but an example of the type is GDW's Team Yankee which was published in 1987.

The game was timed to coincide with the appearance of Harold Coyle's novel of the same name narrating the adventures of a company team led by a Capt. Bannon during the first month of fighting during a Soviet invasion of West Germany circa 1987.

Unlike Tom Clancy's epic-scale novels from around the same time, Coyle's story was very much focused on the point of view of one character and events directly affecting him and his men, with minimal attention to the larger picture or outside events.

Likewise, Team Yankee, the game, is ruthlessly focused on Bannon's war, with just the first, introductory, scenario not explicitly linked to a fight from the book. The other seven scenarios are very faithful reproductions of firefights from various pages of the book, complete with page references.

The game includes most of the elements one might expect to see in a mid-1980s tactical armor wargame such as hexes, ranged fire, attack and defense factors, movement and combat phases, and an odds-based CRT.

Unlike many similar games Team Yankee didn't attempt to cover all the bases, contenting itself with sticking to the novel. It was, however, the inaugural game in GDW's "First Battle" series which eventually became GDW's standard for 20th Century tactical armored combat, replacing its more complicated Assault series games. Team Yankee's rulebook included illustrations of sample counters for many NATO and Warsaw Pact vesicles and weapons that didn't appear in the game.

Because the game hews so closely to the novel, however, it may now be of very limited interest to most wargamers. The novel was set during a very limited time frame for the U.S. Army, the middle of its transformation from the M-60/M-113 force of the 60s, 70s and 80s to the M-1/M-2/M-3 AirLand Battle force of the 90s and 21st Century. In the novel/game the tanks and cavalry scout vehicles have upgraded to the M-1/M-3 but the infantry is still riding around in M-113s. Even in 1987 this was becoming rare.

There was also a doctrinal shift under way. The term "team" in "Team Yankee" reflected the common doctrinal practice of cross-attaching tank and mech infantry units. Tank and mech battalions would trade one or two companies to form mixed battalion-sized "task forces." This task forces would likewise exchange tank and mech platoons between some of their companies to create mixed "teams." In the novel Bannon commands a tank company cross-attached into a mech battalion. One of his platoons is exchanged for a mech platoon creating the "tank heavy" Team Yankee (two tank platoons, one mech) and the "mech heavy" Team Bravo (two mech, one tank). The other two mech companies remain pure as Charley and Delta companies.

This entire practice was largely driven by the inadequacies of the M-113-equipped infantry and as the M-2 Bradley came online this started to fall into disuse because Bradley-equipped units were powerful enough to stand on their own. By the 1991 Gulf War it was already becoming common for tank and mech battalions to fight as complete units without cross-attaching.
As an aside, combining the two has come back into vogue in a more formal sense, with the new Combined Arms Battalions having two companies of each.

All-in-all the game succeeds in its goal of bringing the novel to life as a wargame, although with some notable flaws. First among those are the sloppy rules. For a game obviously meant to appeal to military enthusiasts who might not have wargame experience it leaves a lot of holes and prompted me to write a two-page letter with rules questions. For example, the game doesn't explicitly say whether a line of sight that passes exactly along a hexside shared between a blocking and non-blocking hex is blocked or not. There isn't a consensus in wargame rules on this, so even prior wargame experience doesn't help. (The answer was it is blocked).
This sort of sloppiness was endemic to GDW rules, but a serious flaw for a game that appeared in mass-market bookstores.

For players today the game is more of a curiosity than anything else -- a novelty game. If you're interested in the general topic of World War III NATO v. WP armored combat there are any number of better games on the topic. Better First Battle titles include Test of Arms and Sands of War. As the entire genre of World War III novels and games has fallen into obscurity with the end of the Cold War both Team Yankee the game and the novel it's based on have become artifacts of a bygone era.

Drive on Frankfurt

There were a few attempts over the years to imitate Strategy & Tactics and its wargame-in-every-issue format. One of those was Counterattack magazine, which had as its premier issue game Drive on Frankfurt, an interesting entry in the NATO v. Warsaw Pact World War III genre by Jon Southard, perhaps best known for his solitaire games Carrier and Tokyo Express.

The game is an operational level depiction of a potential Soviet attack through the Fulda gap toward the major West German city of Frankfurt-am-Main. Units are battalions and regiments, but operate as parts of brigades (NATO) or Divisions (Soviet) in an interactive turn sequence. Basically, players alternate activating formations, moving and fighting.

There are special rules for helicopters, electronic warfare and air strikes. There are rules for different artillery missions and different attack postures (hasty, deliberate and assault).

Perhaps the most interesting design twist is the game's handling of step reduction and losses. Units that take step losses have a chit drawn with new combat values. As an optional rule even some units that don't take a loss can get a new chit. Unlike most games where untried units may be of unknown strength, in this game it's units that have seen combat that may now be of unknown strength.

The most unfortunate aspect of the game is the graphic presentation of the map. Why the plain terrain is grey and cities are yellow is a mystery. It's not attractive and is no improvement functionally so there's no apparent reason for the off-beat color scheme.

Overall the game is a good presentation of that great 20th Century what-if, suppose the Cold War had ended with a bang instead of a whimper. The problem for contemporary gamers is how many of those might still be worth playing, otherwise the game is primarily just a historical artifact. Drive of Frankfurt falls into the artifact category. It's really only of interest as one theory about how such a war might have been fought, but it's otherwise not all that interesting a game. It's therefore of interest mostly to collectors.

For me there's a small additional interest because I was once stationed in Aschaffenburg, which is on the map, during the time frame of the game. My unit doesn't appear in this game, though, it's in Tac Air instead.