TacOps for Combat Mission gamers, part 3 - A short guide to modern equipment for WW2 players.

(This section is under construction, check back regularily.)

If you want to get going in a TacOps battle, you need some basic knowledge about the units involved. Here is what a person familiar with WW2 equipment needs to know to play TacOps.

This guide also shows how TacOps represents these units. As you might have figured by the "Flaming Flaherty" report, gameplay can get quite hectic. Quickly recognizing units, especially enemy units, is important.

Tanks

Well, modern tanks for WW buffs is easy, tanks are basically the same as in WW2.

In TacOps games, you will usually find that both sides have comparable tanks. At least up to 2500m, everyone can kill everyone else.

Recognizing the tank symbols on a TacOps battlefield is also not an act of extreme mental abstraction:
Tank company approaching the rafinery on Map 14, NATO-style symbols
Same situation, but TacOps-style symbols (press F4)

Anti-tank assets

Anti-vehicle combat is decisive in TacOps, because infantry without vehicles cannot cross the larges spaces and are too vulnerable to artillery. The things that kill tanks and other AFVs in TacOps are:
  • Other tanks with their main gun - same as in combat Mission, except that in TacOps play you usually have equal tanks, at least below 2500m every tank can kill every other tank from the front. Watch for the umpire to play games with you, though, if desired there are plenty of thintin mobiles in TacOps, as well as the superheavy M1 variants, a fantasy "future opfor tank" and the most recent Leopards are night lightenedup to climb on trees, too.
  • ATGMs - anti tank guided missiles. Think of them of Combat Mission AT guns, but they can be loaded and unloaded and driven around quickly. Or they are mounted on vehicles, which makes them similar to thin tank destroyers in CMBO.
  • Infantry AT weapons. Basically like the Bazooka, but longer range and better hit probablity. You usually don't get them as seperate weapons in TacOps, they are integrated into squads. But they are also integrated into many non-infantry units, including otherwise weakly armed support vehicles but valuable suport vehicles. Don't try to roll over a bridging tank.
  • ICM artillery. Only bunched up tanks, it is very hard to hit single tanks with ICM.
  • Planes. Proper air defense can lower this risk by about 90%, but even then you'll get spotted.
  • Stupidity

    • Here is a red tank company advancing into unfriendly territory. From left to right:
  • tanks
  • infantry ATGM teams
  • infantry squads with 400m bazooka-class weapon
  • IFV (infantry fighting vehicle) with ATGM mounted
  • Apache helicopter with ATGMs
  • ATGM mounted on Volkswagen beetle, errr HMMVW
  • ATGM mounted on M113 APC
    		• TacOps-style symbols, also showing airplane. Stupidity is not shown, but one of the more important reasons of tank losses.

    I will give a more detailed description on weapons mounted on other AFVs than tanks later.

    Artillery

    Same as in WW2, but ICM ammunition kills AFVs. Otherwise even caliber is the same. 120mm mortars and 152-155mm howitzer are the main killers. Other common modules are Red 122mm and blue 81mm mortars (mounted on many vehicles). For a Combat Mission player it is important to remember that modern artillery is faster, and that the wide spaces in TacOps make it difficult to escape.

    But then there is on-map artillery. In TacOps, artillery guns and vehicles can fire indirect just as off-map modules do. In multiplayer games, you often find on-map artillery instead of off-map, because umpires want to give players the opportunity to screw up and lose the artillery to airplanes or counterbattery fire.

    Here is how to recognize on-map artillery units:
    Artillery defending a harbour. From bottom to top:
  • SP howitzer
  • tracked SP mortar
  • infantry mortar team
  • HMMVW mounting 81mm mortar (unarmored)
  • LAV wheeled armored vehicle mouting 81mm mortar
  • MLR (rocket artillery), mounted on truck
    		• TacOps-style symbols.

    In the usual TacOps game you will get much more artilley ammunition than in the typical Combat Mission game. You can often fire a 155mm module through most of the turns in the game.

    In Combat Mission artillery play is usually focused on getting the spotters into LOS without getting them killed, carefully selecting the right time for the very few barrages you can place, and then waiting for the delay to pass. This is not neccessary in TacOps, as anybody can spot, the delays are less and you have more ammunition.

    This doesn't make the TacOps artillery a no-brainer, though.

    In TacOps the scarce resource is the module, the battery. One battery can only fire at one place at a time. Selecting a new target outside of adjust range causes the initial delay to restart, even when you have a TRP. Without TRP you lose 6-7 minutes until you are at max precision again. On a big may the opponent may deliberately trick you into targetting some remote spot and then breaking his main body out of cover kilometers away.

    In addition, you usually have few ICM ammunition and deciding about the right moment to fire it is as complicated as for any scarce resource. You may also have spotter units (infantry or vehicles) which cut down the targetting delay, meaning you get into the same LOS game as in Combat Mission. As in Combat Mission, if you want smoke, you have to use an artillery module, except that since TacOps does not have direct fire for smoke, you cannot get smokescreens from direct-fire units.

    Scouts

    Single scout vehicles are generally not useful in TacOps. The high first-shot hit probablity and general lethality of all weapons involved means the opponent can probably kill it without it having seen anything. You should have at least a pair, with infantry loaded and SOPs set to flee and unload (!) on contact. That way you may end up with a useful look at the enemy.

    You cannot split squads, but you will usually get special recon infantry, which are two-man teams (may come with or without a sniper rifle).

    Unarmored vehicles die properly in TacOps. A CMBO-style jeep rush is not going to work.

    Here is how they look like:
    Typical recon units in TacOps about to clash.
    From left to right:
  • Helicopter
  • U.S. Bradley Cavalry Fighting Vehicle
  • HMMVW mounting 7.62 MG
  • Infantry scout team and infanry sniper team
  • Red UAV (unmanned areal vehicle)
  • Soviet-made 4-wheel scout car
    		• NATO-style symbols.

    Now, hold a minute. For a WW2 person, it is important to realize how different these units are. For the helicopter and the UAV it should be obvious, but consider the vehicles. The Hummer is wheeled and unarmored, its only weapon is a 7.62mm MG. The Bradley CFV on the other hand is a fully tracked, closed-top armored vehicle with 14.5mm-proof front plate. It is armed with dual newest-generation ATGM launcher, 25mm autocannon (very dangerous to infantry infantry), a coax machine gun and the crew has a rifle and a bazooka-class weapon ready ("crew has them" means this vehicle will fire these weapons on their own, as if the crew does it. You do not have to dismount the crew nor do you have to have extra infantry mounted). And the CFV carries a lot of ammunition. If you expose a too weak flank to approching vehicles of this kind they may very well shoot their way through.

    APCs and IFV

    I talked about most of this above.

    In modern armies, much of the infantry is no longer riding in APC which are armed with MGs only. Instead, starting with the Soviet BMP1, a class of "infantry fighting vehicles" -IFVs- were introduced. These vehicles are usually better armored (actually they are formed better, with more angled plates) to make their front proof against heavy MG fire and they carry guns and ATGMs which can be fired without dismounting.

    Here are typical APCs and IFVs in TacOps. The pictures look all the same, so I spare the bandwith here.

  • APC: Soviet-made BTR80. A wheeled APC with lots of room, armed with a 14.5mm heavy MG. This vehicle is extremly thin, sides and rear can be penetrated by 7.62mm fire. Handle with care.
  • IFV: Soviet-made BMP1. This was the first IFV. In addition to an early-generation ATGM, it mounts a normal 73mm gun shooting HEAT rounds. In reality this didn't turn out to be a good choice. Modern IFV have smaller-caliber autocannons, comparable to the Flak and 20mm guns in CMBO. You usually don't see BMP-1s in TacOps games, except when the umpire wants to model combat from a specific period.
  • IFV: Soviet-made BMP2. 30mm autocannon and better ATGM than BMP-1.
  • APC: US-made M113. Thin, vulnerable to heavy MG fire from front, .50cal armed.
  • IFV: M2 Bradly IFV and M3 Bradley CFV. 25mm autocannon, but better penetration than Soviet 30mm. The ATGM on the Bradley has shorter range than the one on the BMP-2, but the Bradley has a dual launcher. This helps a lot against one of the biggest problems of ATGM-armed units, which is slow and often dangerous reload.
  • Scout car: BRDM2. This is a scout car, but it has decent troop capacity and sometimes you get lots of these, so it is worth mentioning here.
    • There is one important "care and feeding" tip about TacOps APC and IFVs when you come from Combat Mission: TacOps APCs are much more vulnerable to .50cal and 14.5mm MG rounds than CM APCs, due to improved ammunition. Thin APCs like the Soviet BTR series are vulnerable even to 7.62 MG fire from the sides and rear.

    Combat Misson has a very noticable bump in the effectivity of .50cal MGs on one hand and the autocannons (20mm, 37mm Flak, Bofors) on the other. There is no such fundamental difference between TacOps .50cal, 14.5mm MGs and the Flak and autocannon guns. All of them have normal AT firing performance data you can inspect.

    Gaming around tanks and their enemies

    Here are some aspects of tank survival.

    Tanks can go through woods in TacOps. But that is very slow, especially since on the typical map you will have woods combined with more or less rough terrain. Think of TacOps woods as Combat Mission forests with paths of "scattered trees" crisscrossed through them. But Bazzoka-class weapons have about twice the range in TacOps, in fact visibility in TacOps woods is about the optimal range for Bazooka-class weapons :-)

    In typical TacOps games you have tanks with effectiv range of 3000-3500m and ATGMs with 3750 to 4000 meters. The hit probablity of a tank cannon gets worse with distance, the ATGM has optimal hit probability starting from 1000 meters or so depending on the model. The range games you can play with this should be obvious.

    On the other hand, the tank has a much better rate of fire and more ammunition. ATGM vehicles or IFVs gettinging into a prolonged engament with tanks inside both unit's effective range will lose in the end.