In less than five minutes, the first two rounds of the war game were over. When Dio, who was the referee, announced the course of the battle and the losses on both sides, the grim face of Mustegan finally changed.

Weiss ignored the stares from the other side, instead keeping his head down, preoccupied with the changes on the sand table.

As he expected, Mustegan played the red side, making quick decisions and making good use of each turn, but not recklessly revealing his main attack. Therefore, in the second round of the first day of the battle, he "flew on both wings" and sent ground troops to launch a tentative attack on the left and right flanks of the defenders at the same time, only to be severely attacked by the defending ground forces and the mobile fleet acting as mobile artillery, losing 4,000 troops, and there was no exchange of fire between the flying ships of both sides - it may be that the red fleet did not move, or it may be that the position of the activity is not high enough.

In the first round of the second day of the battle, Weiss made a bold decision: to concentrate the main force of the flying fleet on the right flank of the battle line, and made a detailed instruction that "if you encounter enemy flying ships on the right flank of the battle line, regardless of the strength of the enemy, decisively attack, if you do not encounter enemy flying ships, cross your own battle line and advance 50 miles, bombard the enemy's defensive positions, artillery positions, roads and bridges, and baggage vehicles along the road, and then turn back".

For Weiss's statement, Dio was not only surprised, but also revealed a trace of depression.

After listening to the combat deployment of both sides, the referee returned to the middle position and wrote in his notebook for two or three minutes before announcing the progress of the battle: in this round, the red side lost one battleship, one armored ship, two cruisers, and another battleship, an armored ship, and three cruisers were damaged and needed repairs, and the losses of the ground forces included three artillery regiments and a baggage regiment, with a loss of more than 8,000 troops, while the blue side had a battleship and an armored ship that needed to be repaired, and some positions were damaged. The loss of troops was only 2,000 people.

Before Dio could finish speaking, Mustegan's face turned red, and he stared at Dio for a few seconds, then looked down at the sand table for a long time, and finally raised his head and turned his gaze to Weiss.

At this time, Weiss deliberately provoked: "What? Want to throw in the towel? Start again? ”

Mustegan glared and said, "Don't be too complacent, the battle has just begun!" ”

Weiss clasped his hands in front of his chest and said unhurriedly: "The morale of your army has been seriously shaken, and the overall combat capability has decreased quite a bit. After that, I just need to hold on with all my might, you will definitely lose, why do you have to fight the trapped beasts? ”

Seeing the hesitation in Musdegen's eyes, Weiss knew that his words had succeeded in shaking his opponent's confidence. If Mustegan is not calm enough, then not only in this game of wargames, but in every game played tonight, his mentality could be negatively affected.

After a moment, Mustegan suddenly sneered, and he turned to Dio and said, "All right! I'll admit that, as you say, this is truly an extraordinary fellow! I basically lost this game, but I won't give up because the word 'surrender' is not in the Moosdegen dictionary. ”

It's a high-sounding statement, but Weiss knows that his real intention is to use this endgame to figure out his own tactical routine.

Weiss can also use this endgame to test the opponent's usual strategy, he carefully but not conservatively controls the situation, and gradually drags the opponent into a war of attrition by avoiding the real and the imaginary, and finally wins the battle at the cost of less than half of the historical casualties.

Dio resets the chessboard and restores the wargame to the historical state it was in before the battle was launched, and Weiss and Mustegan come to the door in unison, using the cold wind outside to speed up the cooldown of their skills.

Mustegan raised his head and said: "Actually, I didn't underestimate you, at the beginning, I just had a little bit of luck, and I thought that the usual opening strategy was enough to deal with you, but I didn't expect ......"

"Habitual thinking is the easiest thing for the other party to figure out." Wei Si responded, "I think a really powerful commander must know how to figure out the other party's mind and make deployments based on the situation, without any fixed routines." ”

"You're right, but here's the problem...... If it were the first time that two commanders, who had never fought each other and knew little about each other, met on the battlefield, shouldn't they adopt the tactics they knew best and were most sure of? Mustegan asked rhetorically.

"This absolute situation is almost impossible to happen at the campaign level." "To use a simple analogy, if we were to go to war with the Norman Empire, would we know nothing about the Norman generals who could be the commanders of the campaigns?" If the answer is yes, then our intelligence services are completely incompetent, and we ourselves are incompetent. ”

Mustegan snorted inexplicably.

"Alright, commanders, it's time to get back to your battlefield." Dio said inside.

When the two returned to the sand table, Dio said: "In this game, do you switch roles, or do you flip coins again to choose sides?" ”

Mustegan looked at Weiss, who shrugged, "I don't care. ”

The former then said: "Then according to the convention, swap roles!" ”

Weiss said he had no objections.

Dior pulled up the curtain and motioned for both sides to begin adjusting their pre-battle deployments.

Judging by the wargames on the sand table, the red side representing the Norman Empire appears to be a little sparse. In fact, at the time of the outbreak of the war that engulfed most of the planet, the total population of the entire area controlled by the Norman Empire was only 55% of that of the Ulster Free Federation, and the limit of the mobilized army was less than 40% of the combined Ulster-Wessex army. In military historians, a common view is that the Norman army at the beginning of the war, two divisions could fight three or even four divisions of the Union army, and it was easy to fight more with less against the Wessex army, which was known for its elite, in field conditions.

Starting from the red side, Weiss felt that the core of victory was to concentrate forces and give full play to advantages, rather than simply sticking to the idea of quick victory. Therefore, he deployed two-thirds of his ground forces on the right flank of the front in echelons, deployed suspicious troops on the center and left flank, and deployed an elite Marine Corps at the tactical support point of the second line of the center, thus creating a "rotating gate". If the other side adopts a sticking strategy, he will gradually pry open the turtle shell from the right flank. If the opponent is playing a defensive counterattack, the opponent is induced to break through from the middle and left flank, and use the tactical support point to contain the opponent, and the main force uses the three-dimensional tactics of ground push and airborne strategy to achieve flank and rear outflanking.

It's that simple!

Losing a game first, and losing completely, Mustegan still carried some psychological burden. After the first four days and eight rounds of fighting, the red side knocked open the first line of the left flank of the blue defense line at a heavy cost of losing more than 30,000 people, and two elite, fully equipped infantry divisions poured in from the breach of the defensive line, and the main force of the flying fleet also broke into the opponent's defense area at the same time, suppressing the blue artillery on the flank of the breach in the defense line and in the rear.

In the first round of the fifth day of the campaign, the crucial decisive battle was staged on the right flank of the red side and the left flank of the blue side. Recuperate, the Blue Flying Fleet arrives at the front line and forms an aggressive double-line diagonal battle queue high in the sky. At this time, the capital ships of the red and blue sides were 4 to 5, the cruisers were 6 to 9, and the cruisers were 12 to 17, and the blue flying force was superior as a whole, and had the largest tonnage and the strongest firepower in this battle, the battleship "Liberty". Therefore, if it is a hard-to-go aerial duel, Red has little chance of winning.

Just when Mustegan thought he had put his opponent in a dilemma, Weiss calmly told the referee that his fleet had set up a one-line half-moon arc above the breach of the defensive line, with the center of the arc pointing to the center of the enemy fleet, and that each ship was instructed to withdraw from the battle alone only when the damage reached the limit. At the same time, four heavy anti-aircraft artillery battalions of the field troops followed the second wave of troops into the blue defense zone and set up anti-aircraft positions on the spot.

Not only that, Weiss also asked Dio to command the air battle on the spot. That is, the commander himself went to war with the flying fleet. If the flagship is damaged in battle, the war game will be declared a failure due to the death of the commander.

Dio relayed Weiss's request to Mustegan and asked if he would also join the field air combat command. If so, the on-the-spot deduction of the air battle with Weiss will be conducted face-to-face, and if not, the referee will "automatically command" the BLU fleet according to the general rules.

Mustegan thought about it for a moment and chose "no".

Since air battles are almost not limited by terrain, the influence of weather conditions is also reduced to a basically negligible level in wargames, and only need to be carried out in blank areas for on-site air battles.

The two-line diagonal battle formation chosen by Mustagan is one in which the capital ships are lined up in a diagonal line above (usually the extreme area of the ship's ceiling), while the faster light ships are lowered in a diagonal line behind their flanks. This formation is not only conducive to the capital ship to give full play to the firepower and range advantages of heavy artillery, but also to protect the light ship in the early stage of the battle. When the fleets of the two sides gradually approached and the battle entered the white-hot stage, the light ships entered the battle in the form of frontal assault or flanking guerrilla. Although it is difficult for their guns to directly penetrate the armor of enemy capital ships, they can disable them by attacking the propulsion units in the rear of enemy ships. In the historic Battle of Gödlink, the Norman Flying Fleet lost their new capital ship, the Admiral Novis.

The one-line half-moon arc battle formation chosen by Weiss was to put all the flying ships into battle from the beginning, and make up for the lack of numbers with the investment in firepower. In the process of on-site deduction and command, he made the four battleships put on a "coquettish position" at an angle of 30 degrees, and let the armored ships on both wings take the initiative to press forward, maximizing the firepower output of the fleet.

According to the rules for the conversion of battle losses in wargames, Dio buried himself in the calculation for a long time, and came to a conclusion that he couldn't even believe, so he carefully calculated it again, and the result was still the same, so he had to announce the result of the battle with a puzzled face: the red side lost 2 battleships, seriously damaged 2, and lost 70% of the light ships; The blue side lost 2 battleships and 3 seriously damaged, and the light ships lost 60%.

All the battleships on both sides have been damaged or heavily damaged, and there will be no more behemoths dominating the skies over the battlefield in a short time, and the few light ships left on both sides are no longer enough to crush the ground forces. If you are not careful, you may be damaged and destroyed by the opponent's anti-aircraft artillery unit.