[chico20854]

Well, given the discussions about Iraq and Asia I thought I should update this thread.

Obviously, the characterization of our effort has been changed in the year and a quarter since it was written. I'd rather not re-open that discussion, instead I'd like to bring you up to date on where we are and what we're working towards.

At this point, we have completed orbats at brigade/division level for almost every army that is (1) in NATO or the Warsaw Pact (2) their allies, like Iran, North Korea, and Mongolia or (3) in combat against one of the previous two. We've described those units in Third World War wargaming terms and have revised the rules to take into account the special situations that the T2k scenario present. The unit list is 19 pages or so, three columns of 8-point type... so far. (And that's probably 2000 or more hours of work at this point). I've slowly been posting most of the orbats over the years; The tank-net NATO orbat is detailed enough that for many nations I haven't written up a seperate orbat, although the various vehicle guides will have complete orbats.

I've worked up maps of Manchuria and Korea suitable for Third World War use (some need more work but are playable as long as the Chinese 1997 counterattack doesn't get too out of hand). I'm in the midst of determining garrison locations and mobilization timelines for reserve units, based on RL 1989 information or extrapolating from the Soviet Vehicle Guide.

Considering the amount of effort that has been put forth in the last three and a half years, we're damn close to being able to start wargaming things. Hopefully sometime this spring we'll begin with October 1996 in both Germany and China and things will go from there until we get to the TDM. (We'll have to pause then and figure out where to go from there, as the Third World War rules say everything falls apart at that point, which is true but obviously not so far that there isn't a 2000 Summer Offensive; but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it...) Kato and I have discussed weekly sitrep maps using his mapping tools; given his situation and the amount of time he's had to devote here lately I'm not going to say he's agreed to do it but it may be a possibility.

The end result will be much as envisioned in November 2008... a new version of the US Army Vehicle Guide, Soviet Army Guide and NATO Vehicle Guide and several new works - a Warsaw Pact Vehicle Guide and a US Maritime Guide, covering the sea services (USMC, USN & USCG). Given the near-violent reaction to the portions of the Survivor's Guide to the USA posted here and the scope of the work, with multi-page descriptions of each state, I've stopped work on it to concentrate on other parts of the project. In addition, we have or will soon be creating enough material for three additional works - an Illustrated Guide to the Third World War that brings together many of the images & captions from my website and the various works we're working on, plus a lot more. It's a very incomplete draft right now but will be a lot of fun... I work on it when I'm getting burned out on orbats. The other two works are a CENTCOM Sourcebook (hence the recent thread about Iraq) and a Northeast Asian Sourcebook, concentrating on the war in Korea and China.

Unfortunately, this is all a huge amount of work still to be done. We all have busy lives (Flamingo is finishing up a MBA, my job has become especially hellish, Law is prepping for another deployment and Jason is really busy with his family) so it may be quite a while before you see any of these works. But there is definitely a method to our madness...

And, as always, if you see something you like in this for your campaign please feel free to use it. If you think it's crap, toss it out... we just want to turn out well researched, good looking and fun work.