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Future War is over Fishing: Command:Modern Air / Naval Operations

Command:Modern Air Naval Ops is a very complicated mil-sim game that I periodically dip into but never quite invest in. I believe there is a commercial version sold to militaries. As the name suggests its only ships, subs and planes, no land units.

I tend to find the more complex scenarios over whelming, so I try and stick to smaller engagements where I control a handful of ships and perhaps a helo or two. In this way I don't have to worry about wing composition or getting fighter jet load outs correct. Instead I can play a simpler game where I tell my units where to go and whether they are weapons free or restricted and what active sensors are on or off.

 
 Quite a few of the scenarios in game are about fishing rights. It seems if you are a small scale naval engagement scenario designer its war for fish every day and a tuesday.  It is 2023 and I have to protect a small fleet of Indian fishing boats from the South African military for 24 hours. I've got two F39 Betwas - Indian Missile Frigates. They are pretty handy platforms, with helos (that I forgot to use) grizzly missiles, torpedos, etc.




My experience of the game is mostly moving my ships about, waiting for something to come into contact and then googling it to work out what it is. In this scenario the South Africans had one Lynx helo, one C47 recon plane, one S101 submarine and a F145 frigate.

As I had not played in a while I kept things simple, moving my two ships either side of the fishing fleet waiting for SA to make the first move. First they scouted me with the Lynx and C47. As my orders were engage only on enemy aggression weapons were held. A few hours later a sub appeared, but seemed to head off north, so I ignored it. Around the 12 mark a string of vampire missiles was fired at one of my ships. I'm not sure whether it was from the Lynx or an enemy frigate that appeared to the south. Either way my chaff and anti air missiles dealt with them. I had already switched on active sonar and my AA defenses once I had detected the sub, I was now glad I had.

Over the following 2 hours of game time (about 15 minutes real time with intermittent time compression) one of my frigates proceeded to sink/down everything in sight with its grizzly missiles. It notched the enemy ship, one lynx and the C47. As I had lost the helos in the interface I didn't manage to get the sub. One of my fishing boats decided to sail back north and was promptly torpedoed but that aside it was a successful mission. 

Command Modern Air Naval is the sort of game I always want to really get into but can never quite break through the learning barrier. Fortunately there are a lot more simple missions now than there were on release so I can kick around with a few simple toys rather than the full box.

Comments

  1. Tried to play but struggled to get it to work (Command: Northern Inferno) even with a print out of the tutorial it was tricky. Although it is a game I want to play....

    Cheers,

    Pete.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. look down the user made, or single missions lists and select something with a low complexity rating. Try get get soemthing with just ships. The air stuff is ludicrous, you have to tell your planes what altitude to fly at and all kinds of crap that the pilot would dictate. Scenarios with 2-5 ships are fairly easy, all you have to do is press F3 and click way points and then use the command menu to decide what weapons and sensors are active.

      Delete
    2. Thanks for that- will give it ago.

      Cheers,

      Pete.

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