Tutorial: Death Valley Task Force Attack

Transcription

1 Tutorial: Death Valley Task Force Attack The release version of Armored Task Force ships with a 116 page printed manual which describes every facet of game play, including an exhaustive function reference, database reference, and tactics primer. We have included this short tutorial to help get you started playing. It is a nitty-gritty how-to on playing ATF. You can also find answers to your questions by selecting F1 during the game, or selecting Help Topics from the Help menu. This tutorial is by no means exhaustive. Most of the features are not even us ed in this tutorial. But it will give you enough knowledge to make you dangerous if you are the kind of person who prefers to learn by exploration rather than reading. For the rest of us, Chapter Three: How To of the User s Manual provides a much more exhaustive description of the features in ATF. Starting the Game When you execute Armored Task Force you are first greeted with the following menu. Select Begin a New Mission from the opening menu and you will then see the Begin Mission Dialog. For this tutorial, we are going to select Death Valley: Task Force Attack. It is a short mission with only a few friendly units. It s a good beginner scenario for learning the interface.

2 You will now be taken to the battlefield. The large window in the center of the screen is the OPORD (operations order). It will give you specific instructions on what you can expect to fight and where you can and can t put units at startup. You can ignore any of these restrictions you choose (they were only issued by a Colonel!) but observing these restrictions makes for a more realistic and more challenging gaming experience. When you are done reading this, click on the close button on the operations order window to close it. You can view it again at any time by selecting Order from the View menu. Positioning Your Units

3 The next step is to find your units and hierarchies. To do this, we are going to use the Overview Map. That is the black, white, and gray map in the upper right hand corner or the map. This map is a miniaturization of the complete battlefield. The purple square on this map shows the location of your current view on the main window. When you click on the Overview Map with the mouse, the view will move to the clicked location. Try it a few times. You ve probably also noticed by now that if you move the arrow to an edge of the main window, the map will scroll in that dir ection. Using the arrow keys on the keyboard will also scroll the map. Do you see the blue dots on the Overview Map? These represent your units. Click on them with the mouse. The view now contains the hierarchies you control for this scenario. These are not the actual vehicles in your force. These are the icons representing your platoons and companies. Armored Task Force is designed to allow you to control your force at any level you choose. For beginners, it is easiest to deal with just your hierarchies, rather than trying to control your units. But lets take a look at the how you view the actual units in your force, so that you can explorer for yourself later.

4 Click on the Show Vehicles button on the toolbar ( ). Your vehicles will now be represented as NATO symbols, while your hierarchies are now marked by multi-colored flags. Controlling individual units i s an advanced subject. We recommend that you become comfortable with controlling platoons and companies before you dive into this topic. If you do decide to control individual units, we also strongly recommend that you turn off platoons and companies (wh ich can be done by clicking on the Show Platoons and Show Companies buttons). Otherwise, it is very easy to accidentally click on platoon or company flags when attempting to grab units. HINT: You may find it tough to see the echelon markers (one dot for vehicles, three dots for platoons, one bar for companies) on your icons because of the direction arrows and turret direction arrows. These are indicators to tell you, at a glance, what direction your units and hierarchies are facing. If you don t want to see them, select Options from the View menu and then remove the check mark from the Direction Arrows and Turret Arrows boxes. Click OK and the arrows will be removed. For this tutorial, we are going to just control hierarchies. You can do so by clicking on the Show Vehicles button again. You can also turn on and off the display of vehicles, platoons, and companies by using the Echelon sub-menu of the View menu or selecting Options from the View menu. Now it s time to move your hierarchies into your zo ne of attack. Do you see the blue lines on the map? These are called maneuver graphics. These show the area on the ground, which you are allowed to operate in (just as with the OPORD, nothing will stop you from violating these boundaries.)

5 The big circle marked AP CAT is the launching point for your attack (AP stands for Attack Position). Scroll the screen to the left and upward by moving your mouse to the left and top of the main window. At the point the map stops scrolling, you will see an oval lab eled OBJ TEXAS. This is your final objective. This is all spelled out in the Operations Order. You did read it, right? We need to move all of our units into AP CAT and get them ready to attack. You can move a single hierarchy by clicking on it with the left-mouse button and, while holding down the button, moving it to where you want to go. You can also make a group of hierarchies by left -clicking on the map away from your hierarchy markers and dragging over them. When you release the button, all of th e units inside the big green box will be selected, with boxes around them. Do you see how some of the hierarchy -selection boxes are blue, and some yellow? The blue boxes mark companies, while the yellow boxes mark platoons. If you click away from hierarchies on the map, the currently selected group will be deselected. Now click on one of your companies. The blue box will a gain appear around the company. Also, all of the company s subordinate platoons will be selected with yellow boxes around them. You ve just created a group containing only the hierarchies and units from one company. If you click on any hierarchy marker i n a group and hold down the left -mouse button, you can move the whole group at once. Go ahead and move all of the hierarchies into and around AP CAT. So we go ahead and move the units from their boxes to AP CAT and the surrounding area. When we are done, it looks like this:

6 You will notice some things right away. Three elements are not inside the attack position: Our three artillery batteries (M109A6 Paladins), our scouts, and one of our tank heavy company teams. We have chosen to push our artillery hierarchies forward to the LD/LC (line of departure, line of contact) so that we can range targets deeper in our zone. We will show you how to actually fire our artillery once we find a target. We have the scouts out front because we are going to move them again. More about this in a minute. We have placed the third tank heavy company team outside the AP simply because there isn t enough room in there right now. After our next step, the hierarchies will be packed a little tighter, giving us room for all of them. If you look at the overview map in the top right corner, or if you remember how your units looked when you used Show Vehicles, they are not positioned very tactically. As a matter of fact, they are lined up in straight, north -south lines. Also, if you noticed, the dismounts in your companies were still dismounted. You can t attack like this. You are going to have to: Mount your dismounts Form your hierarchies into formations

7 These are essential steps whenever you are forming up hierarchies for an attack. Mounting your Dismounts First, those dismounts. Each square on the main map represents one kilo meter. There are about twenty kilometers between AP CAT and OBJ TEXAS. That s a long way to walk! We probably want to load up our dismounts on our M2A2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles so that they can ride to the objective. To do this, we will use the Mount function from either the Actions menu or the toolbar ( ). After we select the function, all of the hierarchies whic h have personnel carrying vehicles that can carry dismounts are marked with a gold X. Click on the hierarchy on which you w ant to mount dismounts. We are going to select a company because this, in turn mounts dismounts on all of the carriers in all of the subordinate platoons. It is simply faster than loading up each platoon individually. Blue circles appear around the locations of all of the mount units in the selected hierarchy. After you start the game, dismounts must be inside this circle t o mount on this vehicle. If they are not, the hierarchy will automatically send mount vehicles to the out-lying dismounts to pick them up. Before time is started for the first time, dismounts from the selected hierarchy are mounted instantaneously, regardless of their location on the map.

8 Gold X s now mark hierarchies that contain dismounts which can be loaded. Again, we are going to select the company. This will load all of the subordinate dismounts from all of the subordinate platoons as well. It is a good idea to mount a hierarchy s dismounts on the same hierarchy s mounts. This prevents dismounts from becoming separated from their parent platoons and companies. That could cause difficulties when it comes time to issue missions to hierarchies. Repeat this process until there are no dismounts left to mount. Select the Mount function again from the Actions menu or the toolbar to turn off the function Assigning Formations to Your Hierarchies Now its time to get your hierarchies in formation. See Assign Formations to Hierarchies, in Chapter 3: How To, for a complete explanation of what formations are most appropriate in each situation. For now, just trust that we are steering you in the right direction as to the appropriate selection for formations. We ll begin with our scouts. Right-click on the hierarchy marker for your scout platoon. A menu will appear. Select the Formations sub-menu. Now select Line. Assign the following paths to the remainder of your elements: Scouts Tank Heavy Company Teams Engineer Company Artillery Batteries Line Company Wedge Company Column Position Area

9 You will notice that, as you ass ign formations to your hierarchies, first that the subordinate platoons move into new positions in relation to their parent companies and, second, that red markers appear in the upper left -hand corner of your hierarchies. Put Eyes out Deep As we said before, we have the scouts out front because we are going to move them forward. When we look at the operations order, and go down to the section called Coordinating Instructions under Execution we see that the Prior to SEP97, the limit of advance for recon elements is PL STEVE. This applies only to brigade COLT's and Task Force Scouts. The limit of advance for all other elements prior to LD is PL ARNOLD, the LD/LC. This means that, according to the order, we can put our scouts as far forward as PL STEVE. And the deeper we put our scouts, the better idea we will have what we are rolling into. Grab the scouts and drag t hem to a position just before PL STEVE, just as you did when dragging your hierarchies into the Attack Position.

10 If you look at your scouts in the overview map, you will notice that they are still arrayed in an east -west line. This is because you have n ot given them a path to orient on. Paths are how you tell a unit where to go and what direction to point. We are going to talk, in depth about paths in a minute. For now, just do the following. 1. Click on the Show Path function ( ) on the toolbar. 2. Double-click on the scout hierarchy. You will see a yellow, upside - down triangle appear over the hierarchy marke r. 3. Left-click and drag from the hierarchy in the direction of the objective, OBJ TEXAS. Release the button. 4. Click on the Show Path function on the toolbar again.

11 Positioning Recon As you get more a confident with the interface in Armored Task Force, you will probably want to take a crack at controlling individual units. The first place you might want to do this is in the repositioning of recon elements. When emplacing scouts and other recon-type elements, you want to make sure they c an see. ATF provides a tool to let you see what your units can see called the LOS Fan. You can access this tool while emplacing your units. Here s how you do it: 1. Select Vehicles from the toolbar or the Echelon sub-menu of the View menu. We also recommend that you select Platoons and Companies in order to hide platoon and company markers. 2. Left-click on a scout unit and begin to drag it to a location where you think you have good observation of the objective. 3. Now, while still holding the left-mouse button, right-click. An LOS Fan appears telling you what the visibility is. A unit at this point has a direct Line of Sight (LOS) to whatever is covered by yellow lines. 4. Try to find places for your scouts with the best visibility. Move the unit and right-click in several locations until you find a position in which the yellow bars extend over your objective. 5. Release the left mouse button and the unit will be dropped in position. This method also works when moving holes and mines. Check out Move Objects Around the Map in Chapter 3: How To of the User s Manual for more information.

12 The direction arrow of the hierarchy (if you didn t turn them off) will now point in the direction of the objective. If you look at the ove rview map, you will see that the formation of the scouts is now oriented in a line roughly parallel to PL STEVE. Planning Paths You got a chance to orient your scouts formation earlier. Now we are actually going to plan paths for our hierarchies. A path is a user designated route that a unit or hierarchy is instructed to follow. The path is made up of nodes, through which the unit must pass, sequentially, in order to complete the designated path. Nodes are either go -nodes, which means that the unit or hierarchy will pass through them without stopping, or Stop -nodes, nodes at which the unit or hierarchy will stop when hit. For a more complete discussion of paths, go to Plan Paths For Hierarchies and Units in Chapter 3: How To

13 1. We are going to plan a path for our units. Select Show Path from the Edit menu or the toolbar and then double -click on the hierarchy marker for your forward - most tank heavy company team (for us, that was B / 2-8 CAV). A point-down, blue triangle (again, blue for company, yellow for platoon) will appear over the hierarchy marker. Left-click in the center of the triangle and drag as you did when moving this unit. A blue line will emanate from the point. Drop the line at the first point you want the hierarchy to go to. Repeat this process at the newly created node (the right side up triangle you just created). In this way, plan a path that follows the northern boundary of your zone. Continue the path all of the way to the objective. 2. Now we are going to copy this path and paste it to the other hierarchies in the attack position. Select Copy from the Edit menu or toolbar. Next, double-click on the map, anywhere away from your hierarcies. This makes the planned path disappear. Now left-click to the upper-left of your most forward maneuver hierarchy and, while holding down the left mouse button, drag the green box over all of the hierarchies in the attack position. Now, select Paste In Line from the Edit menu. The highlighted hierarchies will now follow exactly behind the lead hierarchy, in their individual formations. 3. End the Path Planning Mode by selecting Show Path again. We should be set to begin playing. There are other things you can do to make your units more survivable, but they are beyond the scope of this tutorial. Just to whet your appetite, you can put hierarchies in defilade and hold fire to make them less visible. You can go ahead and plan a path for your artillery hierarchies as well. Find out how to do all of these things in Chapter Three: How To If you ve already read ahead, you might ask, Why not go ahead and change all of the hierarchies stop -nodes to go-nodes? (For those who haven t read ahead, Why don t you set your hierarchies so that they begin moving when the mission starts? )

14 The answer is that, often, when you first start the clock running (as we will do in a second), you immediately de tect enemy units. If you put your individual recon units in a good spot (as discussed in the aside, Positioning Recon above), you might detect a lot of enemy. If you have already started your units moving. It will be harder to change what you want them to do. It is better to start movement after running the clock for a short time. Starting and Stopping Time So let s start the clock. You will want to start and stop time so often that we have put these functions on the toolbar. Here, the Stop function (to the right of the Start function) is grayed out because the clock has not been started yet. These functions are also avai lable from the Time menu. Hit the Start button. A message box will remind you that, if you start time now, you will not be able to move units around any more. Click Yes and the clock will start. Immediately hit the Stop button. Following the Action Here s the point where you may not be able to exactly follow this tutorial. If you set up all of your units exactly the way we set ours and the enemy picked the same battle plan to fight you he used for us (not likely), you just heard a loud explosion and maybe gunfire. For sake of argument, pretend you did. To find out what just happened, you have to check your spot reports. Select Last Spot Report from the Spot Reports sub-menu under the View menu or the toolbar ( ). The main map jumps to the location of the action. The status bar at the bottom of the screen reads: 5 / SCOUT / 2-8 CAV was destroyed by an enemy AT -5 Team.

15 The dark blue X s, indicate the smoking remains of two scout vehicles! The report tells us that Scout 5 was destroyed by a di smounted AT-5 Team, so it is probable that this yellow (unknown) dismount contact is the AT -5. Planning Fire Missions We want to plan artillery on this target (if for no other reason than to avenge the death of our comrade!) In the interest of brevity, we will select BBDPICM as the munition to shoot (this is Base Burn Dual Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions). It has a long range so there will be no guessing as to whether we can hit the target. Select this munition by choosing Fire Order from the Actions menu.

16 Now select Fire Mission from the Actions menu, select one of the artillery hierarchies (batteries, a hierarchy a nalogous in size to a company) and then left - click on the target. If you ever want to delete this target, repeat the same s teps, except right-click on the planned target and it will be deleted. The target will not be fired immediately. The artillery battery must first process the fire mission, lay on the target and load the rounds, and then fire them. You can see what time the rounds will impact by selecting FM Log from the Actions menu. You will have to briefly Start and then Stop the clock to see this information. The clock now reads about Day 0, 00:00:02, so the fire mission will impact in a two minutes, fourteen seconds. We are also going to engage one of the known targets, a BRDM -2 with ATGM, with the entire artillery battalion (all thre e batteries). First we have to, again, turn on the Fire Mission Planning Mode by selecting Fire Mission from the toolbar ( ) or the Actions menu. Next, we select all of the artillery batteries by clicking to the upper-left of the batteries and dragging the green select box over them. HINT: We will probably want to mass the fires of the entire battalion again, so it makes since to save this group. Press the shift key and a number key. You will hear a click. Now, every time you press the number key without the shift key, this group of hierarchies will again be selected.

17 We plan the mission by left -clicking on our target, in this case the BRDM -2 closest to the scout hierarchy. Start Units Moving Now that our fires are planned, we can start our units moving (don t move your artillery or hierarchy, or it won t shoot the mission!) Select Stop from the Orders menu. All of your hierarchies have a red stop sign next to them because they are stopped. Left-click on each hierarchy marker. The stop sign on all of the hierarchies disappear, which means they are beginning movement. (Understand that, even if the time is run ning, hierarchies do not begin moving immediately. The amount of time required depends on the type of vehicles in the hierarchy and may be as long as minutes. But most take only a few seconds to start moving.)

18 Now start the clock again by selecting Start from either the toolbar or the Time menu. The game might run a little too slow for you. You can speed up the action by choosing one of the selections under the Compression sub-menu of the Time menu. But keep an eye out! Sometimes you can be unpleasantly surprised by enemy contacts. If you are not ready to quickly hit the Stop button, you could loose a lot of units needle ssly Direct Fire Contact We ve made contact again! There is an enemy fire team in our path. Don t worry, your units will automatically engage when they can see him and are in range. If you are having trouble killing something you are shooting at, stop y our shooting units. Units are more accurate when stopped. (Some units or weapons will not fire at all while moving). We roll up our zone, destroying contacts with direct and indirect fire. Now, we are at PL STEVE and ready to begin the attack on the final objective. The enemy is probably sitting just behind PL STEVE with a wall of mines, wire, and tank ditches in front of him. Again, in the interest of brevity, we will illustrate a simple method to penetrate the enemy s defenses. As you become more practiced, you can expand upon this method. In the Tactics section of Chapter Six, there is a great article called Breaching 101 which goes into a lot more detail and provides a lot better method to take down an enemy defense. In short, don t try this at home.

19 Assign a Mission to a Hierarchy We are going to give the engineer company the Mission to breach any obstacles between PL STEVE and OBJ TEXAS. A Mission is a set of instructions that you give to a hierarchy which direct it to complete a complex action based on your guidance. Missions are designed to allow you to provide as little or as much guidance as you would like. Here s how you do it. 1. Stop the clock. 2. First, we are going to assign a path to the engineer company. This route will follow, as much as possible, natural contours in the terrain that will prevent our engineer from being observed and having direct fire placed on them. See the discussion above, Planning Paths, for detailed instructions on how to do this. 3. After ending Path Planning Mode, right - click on the engineer company and, from the resultant menu, select Engineer Company Breach from Missions submenu. 4. You will be presented with a window that instructs you to Click on the points which define the location of the main obstacle belt to be breached. Left-click on the top corner of where you believe the obstacles are and drag down to where you think they end. Click OK. 5. You will be presented with the Engineer Company Breach Mission TACSOP sheet. This is a Property Sheet which allows you to adjust the settings for how this hierarchy executes this mission. In the interest of simplicity, we are only going to change the Route To Release Point property by clicking on its tab and placing a check in Use Current Path. This causes the engineer company to, as much as possible, follow the path we set

20 for it. Click Execute when you are done. Now you are ready to start the clock, using Start from the Time menu or the toolbar. When the units hit the obstacle belt, they will automatically start breaching (unless they die first). Again, this is not the best tactic for breaching. Firing smoke before moving would be a good idea. Leading with a maneuver element to get eyes on the ene my in the objective is usually good too. But this will illustrate the basic concepts of using your units to breach. Be ready with your artillery, so that you can quickly suppress enemy on the objective as you begin your breach. (You did bring your arti llery up further, right?) You ve cut your breach (or, if you re like us, your engineers all died before they hit an obstacle). All that is left is to assault the objective. There is a Mission for maneuver companies, Assault, but we are going to leave that to you to experiment with later. We are simply going to plan a path to the objective and hope for the best. Just as we did when planning our initial paths, we are going to plan a path for our lead company, copy it, and then paste it to our trail comp any. When we plan the path, we are going to try to hug the north wall and make sure the route passes through the objective. See Planning Paths above for a more detailed description of this. Start the clock and track the movement of your companies to the objective. Try to suppress direct fire systems (T -80 s and BMP-2 s) with artillery to help out your companies as they assault the objective. As we get into close contact, we will probably want to Zoom In, which can be done using the toolbar button,. We ve gotten in a little trouble. Since our engineer company was unsuccessful dismantling the obstacle belt, our companies have become hung up in the

21 obstacles. There are some plow tanks in our hierarchies, and they are working hard to cut a breach. We are going to place our companies in a Company Line formation to meet the threat and stop the lead company until the trail company catches up. Complete the Mission Objectives We ve fought our way slowly forward and entered the objective. Why hasn t the mission ended? Remember the OPORD? We have to seize OBJ TEXAS. This means, generally, not just occupy it, but con trol it. You must destroy all of the enemy in the objective.

22 HINT: If you ever find yourself in a situation where you thi nk you have completed the mission, but it won t end select Quit Mission from the File menu. When prompted to save your game, do so. When prompted whether you wish to see the results, select yes. You will see the Results Dialog. This will list all of th e Mission Objectives for the mission. These are the no-nonsense tasks that must be accomplished for the scenario to end favorably. After this, it lists where you stand at achieving the objectives. After this, you can select Load a Saved Mission from the opening menu, load you saved game, and continue to fight to meet the unmet objectives. As we struggle through our batt le, at some point, we have no hierarchies remaining. This does not, however, mean that we are out of combat power.

23 Select Show Vehicles from the toolbar and you can begin to plan paths for, and fight individual units. If you are at this point, it is a g ood indication you are getting your butt kicked. Uh oh. Eventually, by maneuvering our individual units around the objective (we ended up maneuvering with one M1A2 tank and one scout HMMWV), we are able to destroy enough enemy vehicles to meet the scenari o s victory conditions, and we are greeted by this window. Congratulations! You just won! If you select yes to continue, the game will run for a few minutes and ask you the same question again. This feature allows you to really rub in your victory by w iping out every last enemy soldier! If you are done, select No. You will now be taken to the Results Dialog, which will roll up how you did. As discussed in the Hint above, this dialog will initially tell you how you did in completing the mission objectives. If you scroll down, it will then tell you how many vehicles you and the enemy had, both initially and at the end o f the battle. Clicking OK will take you to the Start Menu. That s all there is to it! You now know enough to be dangerous. The remainder of this manual shows you some ways to enhance your level of control over units and hierarchies and give them more detailed instructions and other Missions to complete. It also teaches you the concepts required to build your own defenses, not touched on here.