Ground combat in Central America
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First: this brief note is about the out-of-print conflict simulation "Central America" from Victory Games. If you're looking for actual combat histories for Central America, you're in the wrong place.
Read through the combat rules, and set up one of the examples for ground units in combat, without air, artillery or helicopter support. The CRT is a bit of bear, as the odds tables are written out to accommodate defender's terrain. Normally, this sort of thing is done with odds shift or die modifiers. Here, the columns do not correspond exactly to specific odds in each column. This allows shifts right or left at the same odds. It's an interesting system. The most difficult part of it is tracking the die roll across a rather wide table. It's hard to keep the eyes lined up on the correct row.
For what it's worth, I've read in on line forums that the rules to this game are too long. From the reading I've done so far, that hasn't been a problem for me. While it's true that the page length of the rules is a bit longer than most games (appr. 60 pages), many, possibly most pages have detailed examples of play. This is really helpful for learning: set up the same example and follow along on the map using the counters.
As a result of working through the single example of ground combat above, I'm comfortable with the CRT, step losses, retreating units and ZOCs, pursuit, and unit elimination.
If the examples for air combat, paratroopers, helicopter and insurgency support are as good, that's about 1/3 of the game mechanics mastered. (The other two thirds being movement and operations/supply, respectively. For the basic game.)
I'd love to have some Vassal screen shots, but Vassal doesn't seem to allow placing units in the module for this game.