These were my experiences, but it always frustrated me that they were locked behind such a hostile-looking interface. I'll never forget the cat-and-mouse games they were playing in the streets in the early hours of the invasion, as Taiwan's real military personnel were racing to their garrisons to report for duty and Chinese gunships effectively shut down the roads into the city. Or there was my defense of Taiwan against a midnight surprise attack on Chinese New Year in the near future, as elite Chinese amphibious units swarmed into downtown Taipei and the only forces ready to oppose them were street cops pressed into front-line service.
I lay awake nights thinking about how my troops could break-out of the slaughter-pens they in which they were trapped. I spent almost a month playing a massive rendition of the Italian campaign in World War II, with sending in one doomed amphibious landing force after another, only to watch them shatter against the mountainous strongholds of the Axis. I came achingly close to capturing Paris with the German army in 1914, with three exhausted armies churning through the fields of and farms of northeastern France like a dissipating hurricane. The Operational Art of War III was the scene of some of the most nail-biting battles I've ever played. And if one doesn't exist, well, you can always build one yourself. But what the game can do is offer a really good scenario about any conflict you can imagine. The modularity of the system means that it can't exactly capture the specific nuances of, say, the Iran-Iraq War versus the Allied campaign in the Solomons during World War II. It takes an almost impossible task-creating a combat system that can cover any conventional conflict from the 1800s through to the near future, at almost any scale-and carries it off shockingly well. The Operational Art of War is part construction kit, part wargame.
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