Goodbye 2024…Hello 2025

Late Morning, Wednesday, January 1, 2025, Miami, Florida

Well, another year has ended, and here I am, starting 2025 in my hometown of Miami, 1,616 miles from where I lived – Madison, New Hampshire – at the start of 2024. Instead of waking up to a chilly New England morning with a mix of light rain and snow, I rose two hours ago to a sunny and warm day in the subtropical zone of the Southeastern United States.

If you had asked me a year ago if I planned to move back to Florida, I would have shaken my head, looked at you incredulously, and said, “Why would I do that? I just got here!”

Granted, I was a bit unhappy about the circumstances behind my move from the Tampa Bay area and more than a little homesick. After all, I’d lived in Florida for most of my life, and I am not fond of cold weather – a trait I shared with my late mother. Plus, Madison is a small town in the still very rural state of New Hampshire – not precisely the environment I need to thrive.

Nevertheless, despite my misgivings about my new surroundings and – more importantly – my fellow tenant, I wanted to adapt and grow to love what I thought would be my new permanent home.

Well, that didn’t happen. Ten months and two days after arriving at the house on Huttwil Drive, I was Miami-bound in a Budget rental truck with most of my belongings packed in moving boxes, a footlocker, and an antique trunk I inherited from my grandparents (my mom’s parents). I didn’t plan on leaving New Hampshire so soon, but if you are a regular visitor to this space, you know well why I had to do so.

So, here I am, back in Miami – albeit in a different neighborhood from the one I left almost nine years ago for the West Coast of Florida – nursing a headache caused by a bad cold and hoping that 2025 will be much better than star-crossed 2024.

Ending 2024 with a ‘Decisive Victory’ in Sea Power

Like my mother before me, I am not a fan of New Year’s Eve festivities. I don’t hate the holiday, but it’s not my favorite. How I celebrate it depends on my environment. For instance, last year – in Madison – I mostly ignored it. My housemate, Stuart, had a nice wall-mounted Samsung widescreen TV in the living room, but he didn’t subscribe to Spectrum’s cable TV, so there was no watching the “ball drop in Times Square” ritual at midnight to usher in 2024.

I have a cold, so after I published yesterday’s review of Kiri Sings Gershwin I decided to do a complete playthrough of Desert Spear, a mod created by player Brother Munro in Sea Power: Naval Combat in the Missile Age, a new simulation developed by Triassic Games and published in early November by MicroProse.

Set – supposedly – on the first day of Operation Desert Storm, Desert Spear is a moderately easy mission (it has a two-star difficulty rating) in which you command a carrier battle group centered on an unnamed Nimitz-class aircraft carrier (the mission briefing tells you it’s the USS Carl Vinson, but the in-game warship doesn’t have the Vinson’s pennant number or name on the hull) in the Persian Gulf.

Your mission has several key objectives:

• Achieve air superiority over the northern Persian Gulf and the Kuwait/southern Iraq region centered on Basra by destroying Iraqi aircraft in the air
• Suppress enemy air defenses by destroying Iraqi radar and surface-to-air (SAM) sites in your area of operations
• Protect your carrier group from Iraqi air attacks
• Destroy enemy Silkworm anti-ship missiles before they can be launched
• Destroy the small but potentially dangerous Iraqi navy
• Destroy an Iraqi airbase near Basra, using  (a) carrier-borne strike planes (A-6E Intruders and/or A-7E Corsairs), (b) Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles from the two Iowa-class battleships (BBs) in your carrier battlegroup,(c)  a flight of five B-52H bombers, or (d) the BBs’ 16-inch guns

You must meet all of these objectives to complete the mission.

I have tried to play Desert Spear a few times before yesterday. It’s a long scenario with multiple objectives, and it could benefit from the addition of the Save/Load Game functionality that Sea Power, in its Early Access form, sorely lacks.

(Desert Spear also could use some fact-checking; the mod is allegedly set at the start of the first Gulf War, but the in-game date places it on January 26, 1990, eight months before Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait and almost a year before Desert Storm began. I thus treat the mod as an alternative scenario for this and other reasons I’ll mention in a future review of Desert Spear.)

In previous attempts, I had to stop the scenario early due to its length. The first attempt last month resulted in the loss of three F-14A Tomcats to Iraqi MiG-25P Foxbat interceptors, while two enemy planes were downed. This was my initial encounter with fighter-to-fighter aerial combat, and several errors occurred due to inexperience. Consequently, I did not complete Desert Spear after these events and ceased the attempt before addressing other mission tasks.

Over time, I learned from my mistakes and spent more time in the mod. I figured out how to handle the Foxbats, though I had to accept losing at least one Tomcat to enemy missiles. Once, I achieved a 5:0 kill/loss ratio but quit early due to fatigue and unable to save. Each time I played Desert Spear, I ticked off more objectives from the list, even if I quit before finishing the scenario.

Since I’m not a big fan of New Year’s Eve parties and don’t usually watch football games, I spent most of the last night of 2024 engrossed in Desert Spear. Although I wasn’t feeling my best due to a cold I am still fighting, I was determined to see the mission through to the end.

I can’t write a detailed after-action report now. Suffice it to say that I don’t know how many hours I spent on the mission – one of the nice things about “commanding” in computer games is that you can pause the action to get your bearings and make adjustments to your ships and planes, a luxury that real admirals or generals don’t have in actual combat. I can tell you, though, that I finished Desert Spear only 40 minutes before I left my room to watch the New Year’s ushering on TV in the Florida room, and that I was tired…but glad to successfully complete the mission.

I did quite well. I lost only three Tomcats and two A-7E Corsairs while taking out the entire enemy force in the game. I wish I’d done better with the Corsairs; it was my second time using them in Sea Power, and SEAD missions are risky due to low-level attacks on defended sites. Despite high losses, the Corsairs paved the way for the A-6E strike that destroyed the Iraqi airbase near Basra.

I also learned to use TLAMs on Iowa-class battleships to destroy enemy Silkworm sites, avoiding the need for manned planes to attack those targets.

In the end, overcoming the challenges of Desert Spear turned out to be a rewarding experience that made my New Year’s Eve quite enjoyable. Despite not feeling my best, the sense of accomplishment from my decisive victory in the Sea Power mod was a perfect way to bid farewell to 2024. Here’s to a happy and prosperous 2025 for everyone!