Much of the developmental work being done to the draft OCS v3.0 rules in the last few months has been devoted to polishing the air rules to give a better representation of operational air warfare. Chief among the issues being addressed is the "binary nature" of CAP (if it's there, you don't bomb, if it isn't, you do). This and a number of more minor concerns drove the work. What was an evolutionary effort to slowly correct flaws I perceived in v2.0i, might appear much more dramatic to those who only see the end points--of course, those who followed the work closely on the discussion list were driven to drink (or worse) long ago!.

My purpose here is to try to bring as much of this into chronological context as possible. In this I'm constrained by a number of things. I know what did or did not work before and why, but am sometimes hard pressed to recall exactly why I did what I did in earlier versions that turned out, in hindsight, to be a mistake at some level. I've been intimately involved with this stuff since I first started working on the OCS in 1988 (yup, it goes back that far) and some things are too obvious to me to mention (too close to know what you want to hear about). I've seen the thing go through many, many iterations that you never had to deal with, things that changed long before any printing was done. This is one reason why some became frightened seeing the multiple drafts the v3.0 rules went through on the web site: it was their first time seeing what, for me, is normal operating procedure. This multiple iteration problem causes me two concerns as I write for you now: am I remembering a rule no one ever saw? Or is a rule people did see the result of several other failed attempts they weren't privy to. My memory not being what it used to be, here goes.

Back When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth...

OCS v1.0 and v2.0 (without options) were pretty much the same when it came to the air rules, the differences between the two being limited to straight-line air movement, two-plane limits on movement, and the infamous Put Up or Shut Up rule. In the original game (and up to and including the present version), air did what it was supposed to: air forces interacted with each other and ground targets, basing mattered, and the emphasis of the air campaign was the enemy air force. Where v1.0 dropped the ball (resulting in those rule changes) was that players could buzz around interception zones (dumb), they could put together big wads of aircraft to steamroller everything in their path, and (importantly, as you'll see as the thread develops) there needed to be a mechanic for a mob of fighters to force another mob of fighters in an area to fight for its control of the air space.

Of these rules, straight-line air movement has pretty much survived intact since its inception in 1993. The two-plane movement mechanic expanded over time to a four plane stacking/moving limit (the increase allowed the bombers to have escorts). Regardless of what the limitation was/is, it is still enforced and necessary to keep a dozen plane steamroller stack from taking out everything in its path.

Put up or Shut Up was the mistake. It's purpose (to keep enemy CAP stacks from co-habitating) was viable, as was the fact that it made the difference between aircraft operating locally as one stack vs the same number of aircraft in multiple stacks unimportant (as it should be).

Effectively, it made a kind of pseudo-area movement effect for the CAP aircraft in a specific zone. Looked great on paper, too. In reality, it led to a few game mechanic gimmicks. For example, since the PUSU distance was greater than interception range, the player could build his "mega-wad" one hex out of the zone of the enemy (2-planes at a time, remember?), declare his PUSU and clear the area of fighters which never had a chance to engage the smaller build up packages (defeating the purpose of the 2-plane movement rule). Additionally, the inevitable build-up PUSU battle in any area the enemy chose to fight for led to massive, apocalyptic air battles in which one side or the other would be crushed. Not what I was after at all.

Additional items existed at that time (binary CAP, for example) but were not easy to notice under the pallor of the PUSU problems. It's glaring issues made it difficult to see what needed to be done.

...Enter the v2.0i Optionals

These were designed specifically to address the concerns I had over the way v1.0/v2.0 seemed to behave in play. I wanted to present these to you so that they would get played and I'd have lots of feedback to work with before making the jump to v3.0. They were and you did.

Not surprisingly, the very first item in the optionals was to put PUSU on the chopping block. In fact, I never heard of anybody who shed a tear over it, most players seemed to regard it with a healthy "good riddance!"

Stacking itself was added (to eliminate this business of building huge stacks a few counters at a time) and the movement limit was upped to 3 (which allowed some escort capability, just not much).

The Air to Air Table added the three Both Abort results which made it much more difficult for a good air unit to run through all the enemy air units with no regard to the number of combats it was in.

DG air units put in two noteworthy effects: flying long-range missions had an impact on bombing effectiveness, and bomb inside the interception zone of the enemy at reduced effectiveness was possible.

The new rules implemented a one-air-unit interception limitation. This was designed to allow an escorted raid to (possibly) fend off a potential interceptor and bomb at reduced effectiveness. Protected air units allowed some air units to avoid almost certain death when air base attacks were made, and Serious Interdiction made for interdiction with a bit more teeth.

So, did the air rules revision do what it was supposed to do? In some ways, yes, beyond a doubt; in others no. Like I mentioned earlier, no one ever complained about the loss of PUSU, the stacking rules worked well (but had a bit of clunkiness remaining given the 4-stack/3-move matter), the new table was excellent (but hidden within it was still an issue of mismatched air unit losses). Of the rest, DG air units, one-plane interception, and protected air units suffered from additional problems, while SI still wasn't used much.

The DG air unit stuff was fine in theory, but in practice I found that few players would use it as intended. They played the game as if the rule didn't exist--if they cleared out the CAP, they'd bomb--if not, they wouldn't. Just like before. Furthermore, limiting the interception to a single air unit was easily worked around by the fact that you could intercept each time the enemy stack moved a hex. Sure, you could throw only one fighter at his moving stack of three, but if it didn't do the job, the next one or the other after that would as the guy tried to get to his hex to bomb. Just didn't work. The binary nature of CAP was still there.

The range effects were nice, but a pain to play (as we found out in testing Sicily). They remain (in a slightly modified form) to this day, as an optional.

Protected air units turned out to be a band aid covering a larger problem (it was too easy to kill off air units at their bases). This, too, came to a head in Sicily where we found that the player could disperse enough to make his air force completely invulnerable. Looking at the issues at this point, it became clear that CAP was still binary and too perfect in its protection, a mess of CAP fighters scattered in an area could be impossible to take out making areas impossible to bomb, the air-to-air table still had an issue to deal with when it came to losses, evidence was piling that losses due to flak were too low, and something had to be done about losses of the aircraft at their bases.

...and then through the Looking Glass

As v3.0 evolved, more an more of these items came to the fore and I made every effort to deal with them as elegantly as possible. I also wanted to get the job done and done right this time without having to go back and jerk it around again in the future (I'd like to get some other work done!)

First on the block (dealing with the perfect CAP stuff) was to make fighters provide CAP from their air bases. This keeps the CAP from coming from a dozen nearby hexes such that you just can't take the thing down. To counter the increased "locality" of CAP, I expanded the interception range to 10. This put a nice premium on forward air bases, too, another feature that had been absent from the system (even with that DG for range business).

That worked for about a week...

Finally, I hit upon the actual problem with CAP: the matter of hex by hex interception potential. Here (finally) was the crux of the problem and why the one-plane intercept limit didn't seem to ever actually reduce anything. I changed it so that the guy doing interception (from the base, at or within 10 hexes, now called a "Patrol Zone") can only do so when the enemy stops air unit movement in his zone or attempts to fly right through it. Furthermore, if the player chooses to use his "interception" capability in this manner, regardless of how the fight goes, he has to become inactive at his base.

That all being true, I still needed to come up with a good mechanic that would address the situation of bombing in a Patrol Zone (with or without escorts) when the player chooses to not come out after a raid (good move if you have few fighters or the raid is heavily or well escorted). This turned out to be a matter of "just doing what it says". I have the player announce if any fighter in the stack is providing escort; if he volunteers one it can't add to the barrage. Stacks without an escort (but in a Patrol Zone) get a shift on the barrage table, those with escort do not. No muss, no fuss.

To keep the fighters on their air base from being overwhelmed easily by moving fighters, a +1 mod was given to those at their base in air-to-air fighting. This makes fighter sweeps less efficient and (arguably) less effective in use of resources than close escort.

The upshot of these rules is that CAP is no longer binary. A guy can fly into a Patrol Zone with an escorted strike and have a reasonable chance of sticking through the available intercept and still get a barrage off. Alternatively, the non-moving player might elect to not intercept explicitly, but rather let the shift do his job for him (on unescorted strikes--for escorted ones, he's usually better off in hitting them directly, if he has the fighters available to handle it). Keeping CAP tied to air bases (with the bigger zone) kept the emphasis on forward air bases. I watered down the rolls made when the base falls into enemy hands and made a die-roll modifier that applies if a geek garrison unit dies trying to defend the base; no longer do you feel you need to watch the base with a panzer division so as to fight off all comers. It also sped up play quite a bit.

I rolled the newer SI rules nobody bothered to use into the older Interdiction rules to make one kind of interdiction. I also tried to give it some healthy teeth so as to encourage players to use it.

While working on the issue of flak losses, I decided it was high time we stopped rolling for each plane separately. Since stacks were limited to 4 or less, I worked up a new table to handle all the planes in the raid with only one dice roll. With the extra losses, of course. Air-to-air losses were corrected at the same time. Here the issue wasn't that there were too many or too few, but rather how they were distributed. Given a common modifier of +2, losses between the two sides swayed dramatically in the favor of the better plane. "Wait!" you say, "isn't it supposed to?" To a degree, yes, but not as far as it was going here. Get a reasonable advantage over the other fighter and you could ensure that he got tons of losses and you got none at all. This was wrong, as even the worst fighter sometimes manages to clip a few of the best.

What fixed this was another die roll, for losses, at the moment one or both sides abort. The die roll for loss is, itself, a constant (regardless of aircraft type), but since the poor planes will get the larger portion of the aborts, they will be exposed to this "equal" roll more often--leading to higher overall losses. Likewise, the good aircraft will be exposed to it less frequently and will get less overall losses. So, why bother? The nature of the table and this extra roll make it so that no normal combat ever is completely free of loss and even in the worst imaginable case, the air losses never exceed 33%. Thus, losses vary (depending on air unit quality) from some small percentage to something that approaches 33%.

If all that sounds like a lot of work, it was, but the end result are rules that are nearly 1,000 words shorter, take far less time to play, and bring out the nature of the beast better than before. And that is what all this work was about!