The campaign lasted from 30 March - 22 October, 1972, and incorporated several phases. The first phase consisted of North Vietnamese offensives, culminating in the capture of Quang Tri in I Corps, and nearly the capture of Hue, a move to sieze Kontum in II Corps, and an assault on the capital of Binh Long Province at An Loc. The second phase, during May, was a consolidation phase during which the US built up its forces and also launched Operation Linebacker. The third phase lasting, roughly, until the end of the campaign consisted of South Vietnamese counterattacks to sieze lost territory like Quang Tri.
This is the campaign I would like to model in the Vietnam theater.
I had been struggling for a while to find a suitable campaign scenario for historical Vietnam. I think this campaign offers several good reasons to be the a good Falcon scenario. First, it uses large numbers of NVA/NLF forces attacking over much of South Vietnam, so it will work well with the Falcon campaign engine (as opposed to smaller, localized operations like the siege of Khe San). Second, the whole campaign encompasses 6 months- a bit too long in my opinion- but can be broken into 3 distinct 2 month phases which are more manageable. Third, tying in with point two, each phase has fairly well-defined victory objectives that can be written into a .tri file for each phase; ie. first phase victory conditions are NVA capture of Quang Tri, Hue, and An Loc; third phase victory conditions are S. Vietnam forces capture Quang Tri, An Loc, etc. Finally, because Linebacker took place during this offensive, the air tasking for bombing missions "up north" are believable...as are CAS and interdiction missions "down south". Whatever the player does will be believable in the big scheme of the campaign.
My vision:
I have a bunch of materials that I have either bought or downloaded from the net. Wikipedia has a very good summary of the offensive (google Vietnam 1972 offensive- it's the first link). One of my sources has an OOB for both sides at the division level. This is suitable for this campaign I think. I don't think it is necessary to break down the ground OOB further than divisions- not that I have the info, but there are alot of irregular forces that participated in the war so I don't want to get hung up on Battalion details. Furthermore, my vision is to have a robust reinforcement system for both sides, basically using the same unit designations but broken out by division level- meaning 305 Division 1st Bde, 1st Battalion might show up at D+0, D+7 days, D+10 days, D+20 days and so on to simulate reinforcements from the north, the dispersed nature of forces so that when a Battalion is "killed" in the Falcon world there are actually significant forces that "melted into the jungle" at the point of contact and returned later, and so on. [I'm flexible on this idea if anyone has better ideas...] I have a fair air OOB consisting mostly of F-4s, B-52s, F-111s, F-5s, F-105s, and CV aircraft like A-4s, A-6s and such...alot of OV-10s and A-1s that, unfortunately, we don't have pits for yet in FF5. But there's alot of flyable planes in FF5 that will fit in without alot of work that will be player flyable.
This won't be a 10 mission, 3 day campaign. The player will play this as much for the experience of flying in the environment as to win the campaign. CAS missions should kill things; but no one strike is war-winning. There will be low clouds, rain and weather. There will be AAA and SAMs. The player should count on aborts and more mission planning than usual with respect to routes, terrain avoidance, SEAD, etc.
Work:
I already have the OOB in my head and translating it to pixels won't take more than a day or two. The hard part (as usual) is fixing the links and such. I have an idea that we can manipulate the river characteristics such that they aren't "area water" and units can pass freely over them.
The links along the major combat routes will need a thorough review.
I'd like to see us experiment with movement costs to slow ground movement down, but not eliminate it, to make the pace of combat more like jungle and siege warfare.
Alot of the tough work for this theater is already done. Alot of tweaking will be necessary.
Moving forward:
I'll try to post some scans of my sources tomorrow, if I can get to the scanner without being caught
I have to figure out what's up on the FF5 side- this needs to be FF5 compatible because there aren't any really good FF4 cockpits to go with the Vietnam planes. Let's face it, this is an F-4 Phantom theater; we need the FF5 Phantoms in this bad boy.I can put it together with ground units, air OOB, a very good set of notes, and maybe, maybe, when we figure out how to make FF5 compatible ground units, we can rebuild it quickly (2 days) at that time.
Comments welcome.
Toonces out!
