Date:         Thu, 10 Mar 1994 10:53:37 -0800
From:         Ed Allen and Avi Rappoport <edandavi@WELL.SF.CA.US>
Subject:      COMP: Red Sky at Morning (SimCan)

In Red Sky at Morning, the player takes the a more strategic role than in
Harpoon.  You manage things mainly at theater level, setting a set of
submarine mission priorities for example for the Western Med and weight that
area vs others for priority of assignments.  Then your computerized staff
allocates subs from bases to particular missions as they are available. The
action is across as much as the whole world over weeks and possibly months
of time, that's why it hurts that it's isolated from land and diplomatic
effects. However good the combat model, when you are playing a whole
campaign, the factors that influence the campaign should be there. The
closest thing to micromanagement that you do is to organize the composition
of airstrikes by assigning squadrons and the mission of each squadron - air
superiority, bomb, etc. There is then a lag dependant on the size of the
strike and which country you are playing before it can take off.  You don't
observe the actual combat, you get a report that tells you that this ship,
sub or squadron of X number and type of planes attacked, what target was
attacked, and a damage assessment that is of varying accuracy, accurate for
your own losses, and often inaccurate for enemy forces, particularly at the
higher realism levels. You will often get reports that some particular ship
you are attacking was destroyed on several turns, but it's still there in
it's task force, your guys just made over-enthusiastic claims.  It's pretty
suspenseful as the comabt report part of the turn rols around and you watch
the reports of actions come in one after anothe with a short pause after
each announcement of an attack, before the damage assessment.

You can assemble and move task forces around a capital ship yourself,
smaller groups go out on staff assigned missions based on your priorities
just like subs.

You will not find yourself able to fake an enemy with tricks like the
Harpoon edge of SAM envelope aircraft dance to draw fire. Instead, the level
of outwitting the enemy is launching a fighter sweep instead of a bombing
mission to wipe out his CAP.

It has pretty free scenario generation, but you can easily wind up with
lopsided scenarios as far as the victory conditions go, while having a
fairly balanced military situation. If the military forces are near to being
balanced, then the side that is more dependent on commercial shipping will
lose as it takes VP hits turn after turn for sea areas the other guy
disputes control of, and thus abstractly sinks shipping. You should either
weight the odds in favor of the side more dependent on open sea lanes or
mentally subtract out the shipping loss VPs when comparing scores for win
and loss. This isn't so much a flaw as something to be careful of in
scenario design.  NATO really had a big strength advantage over the USSR,
but a harder mission of controlling, not jsut contesting the sea lanes.

With the lack of diplomatic third party effects, it models WWIII better than
say, Greece vs Turkey. Nobody would let Greece and Turkey destroy all
possibility of commercial shipping in the Eastern Med by mining it up to a
level where you have a high percentage chance of a ship being destroyed by
venturing into the region at all. In our test game of Spain vs Italy, it got
so that there was no point in sending a ship into the other side's sphere of
influence a few weeks into the campaign because the mine levels accumulated
so high. There is also a basic problem in that you can't just mine the
approaches to a port. The Mediterranean is divided into three or four sea
zones and you mine a zone.

The lack of land action effects hurts even in WWIII. NATO will not lose use
of German or Turkish bases to USSR ground overrun.

I know one of the people involved, Felix Hack, who did a lot of the
technical research for the weapons specs for the program. He says that the
mathematical models fo the combat interactions between ships, subs, planes,
missiles, and bases are very good and I believe him. They feel pretty good.
The things that bug me are outside of that relm.

Ed Allen