Late Afternoon/Early Evening, Friday, July 21, 2023, Lithia, Florida
Well, Dear Reader, it’s still quite hot outside. According to my computer’s Weather app, the current temperature is 92°F/33°C under mostly sunny conditions. That heat advisory I mentioned earlier today is still in place – the heat index (at 5:32 PM EDT) is 100°F/37°C. That’s hellishly hot, even considering that Florida is the southernmost of the 48 contiguous states, aka “the Lower 48.”
According to the same app, the forecast for the evening hours calls for scattered rain showers within the next three hours. Pity that we didn’t get any precipitation – short of a thunderstorm, that is – earlier in the day. It might have cooled things off a bit.
An Unexpected Rest Day
As you know, today was a regular working day for me. Accordingly, I tried to get into a positive mindset so I could get down to the business of editing and revising once it became clear that I’m in no shape – mentally or emotionally – to write a witty, breezy, and emotional scene featuring Jim and Maddie in Reunion: Coda.
Unfortunately, my mind was too unsettled even for the less exciting (but more important) tasks of editing and revising existing material in the Reunion: Coda manuscript, so after staring at my computer screen for a while, I decided to just call it a day and back off from “serious writing” until tomorrow. (Yes, folks. I do plan to make up the lost time on the weekend.)
Unwinding with Regiments
I had to put my PC on airplane mode for several hours, and since I couldn’t use my Amazon Music app to provide ambient music while I edited or wrote, I wouldn’t have accomplished much today anyway. So instead of writing, I played one Skirmish mission on Regiments, which has been one of my favorite PC games since I bought it last August on Steam.
Because Bird’s Eye Games – the small European studio that developed Regiments for MicroProse – has added new features with its two free DLC expansions, there’s a new type of Skirmish: the Static Defense scenario.
As the nomenclature clearly implies, this is a straightforward mission: a player deploys tank and mechanized infantry platoons (plus other combat support units, including helicopter gunships and mobile surface-to-air missiles) to defend seven Objective Zones – OZs – in any of the various game locations available.
I chose – as I almost always do – the 1st Brigade of the U.S. 3rd Armored Division (the unit to which Elvis Presley was assigned during his time in the Army) and selected the Runway location, with Day and Cloudy 1 as my time of day/weather conditions settings.
My mission, as I mentioned earlier, was simple: defend a NATO airbase somewhere in 1989-era West Germany from a Warsaw Pact attacking force. In Iron Curtain, the current iteration of Regiments, Pact forces can be Soviet, East German, or Polish. And since the game designers like to make things interesting, Regiments randomizes the AI Red force so you, the player, don’t know which Pact army you’re fighting against until you see what equipment the enemy is using or what national insignia/unit markings you can spot on adversary vehicles.
Static Defense scenarios are simpler in concept than Mobile Defense ones in Regiments. There are fewer OZs to defend (eight in Mobile Defense, but only seven in Static Defense. Plus, you don’t have to worry about sending transportation units to evacuate troops from OZs in this scenario. Here, all you have to do is:
- Use Combat Engineer points in the pre-battle setup stage to place strongpoints, anti-tank positions, anti-aircraft positions, mortar positions, and even barbed wire obstacles. You only have 60 Engineering points, and each defensive measure costs a certain amount of points to deploy
- In this same phase, if you have enough Deployment Points available, you can place most or all of the platoons in your initial task force. The game, acting as Division HQ, will release three additional task forces to reinforce you
- Once the battle starts, you have anywhere between 20 to 60 minutes – depending on the time limit you choose during the Setup phase of a session of Regiments to prevent a Pact force from capturing your OZs. The enemy will not attack all at once, and because the game has a built-in fog of war feature that does not show your opponent force till it’s in visual range of your units, it’s not always predictable from where an attack will come
Now, even though I took the day off because my mind was still troubled, I still hoped I’d be able to work on the novel afterward, so I set the time limit to 30 minutes. (In real-life terms, this doesn’t mean the game session only lasted 30 minutes of real time. I pause the game sometimes to evaluate the battlefield situation and adjust my tactics accordingly.) I then placed the various platoons and defensive positions between the OZs and the forward edge of the battle area (FEBA). When I used up my Engineer Points (which are not replenishable) and quite a chunk of my Deployment Points – those get replenished over time as the game goes on so you can “buy” additional platoons when you call in your three additional task forces – to set up my defenses, I hit the Space bar…and the battle began.
Considering this was the first time I played the Static Defense scenario, I did all right. As in Mobile Defense battles, I inflicted more casualties on the Red force – it turned out to be a Polish unit that was on offense – than the enemy inflicted on me.
According to the after-action report at the end of the session, the Polish regiment lost 377 killed in action, 1,040 wounded, and 65 missing, plus 204 vehicles, 0 helicopters, and 2 aircraft. The American force, including my Blue unit, lost 72 killed, 171 wounded, and 9 missing, as well as 28 vehicles, 3 helicopters, and 0 aircraft.
I’m not going to claim that the battle was an easy one. The enemy destroyed two of my platoons outright and forced me to order tactical retreats that resulted in the (temporary) loss of OZ Charlie. Oz Bravo almost fell, too, but I managed to send a platoon of M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles to reinforce it before the Poles could occupy it. Also, losing three AH-1F Cobra gunships was a heavy blow that, had it come earlier in the battle, might have been hard to recover from.
Still, by the time the 30 minutes expired, the Pact forces did not permanently occupy any OZs, and they had suffered horrendous casualties. A Total Victory for NATO!
Back to the Business of Editing and Revising
If you’re a regular visitor to this space, you might recall that earlier this week (Tuesday night, I believe it was) I sent a couple of revisions for Reunion: A Story to Kindle Direct Publishing. It involved nothing major – readers who own the paperback don’t need to buy yet another edition unless they want to – and I did it to fix minor “cosmetic” issues (such as removing an extra space before an apostrophe mark and adding Book 1 of the Reunion Duology) to the title page (but not the cover).
Now, even though Amazon notified me that the new version of the Kindle went live late Tuesday night, and the changes were added to the print edition early yesterday morning, it takes a while for KDP to replace the existing version of Reunion with the revised version. I only started seeing the revisions on the browser (online) version of Kindle today, but not on my Kindle for PC app nor on my Amazon Fire HD tablet.
I estimate, based on past experience with revision uploads to KDP/Amazon, that the new version of Reunion will be “set” on Kindle tablets and e-readers either by Sunday or Monday, and print books ordered after July 26 will be printed with the latest fixes.
Well, I don’t have anything else to add, so I will close for now. Until next time, stay safe, stay healthy, and I’ll catch you on the less scorching side of things.
A Certain Point of View, Too 
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