Next War: Supplement #1

The advanced game air rules in the next war system allows players to achieve some satisfaction through the thrill of moving f-22s across the sky with zooming noises for air superiority or assigning a-10s to combat support and making little explosion noises. It doesn’t, however, really capture the operational aspects of aerial warfare. Generally speaking, strike and combat support missions, as represented in the game, would be composed of packages of mixed or even single aircraft rather than entire counters of the same type. That is, a particular strike package might actually be composed of two f-22s and two f-15s flying top cover/escort, while an f-16 wild weasel provides electronic warfare support for the four strike eagles tasked with dropping bombs. The next day’s mission, against the same target, might be composed of two f-16s flying escort, no wild weasel, and three f-16s dropping rockeyes. The point is that the current air system, while it models the effects through the mechanism of allocating a counter to conduct a strike, doesn’t really capture the essence of the operational air war. In addition, the player tends to know, or at least have a pretty good feel for, how much force is going to be applied for whatever purpose he envisions, whether it’s a strike against a port or a combat support mission. These rules are an alternate method of modeling that operational air war as well as streamlining the entire concept.