No gaming this weekend as Henry is with his mother, so I spent yesterday writing up the campaign rules and drawing maps for our forthcoming Ogaden War campaign. I know I could use maps off the internet, but they usually have too much clutter or do not show the things I want. Drawing my own allows me to show only what I want; in this case the nodal points for campaign movement (i.e. selected towns and cities) and the air bases and airfields.
For me a map is the starting point of a campaign – once I have one I can start to plan, and I’ll spend a lot of time having an enjoyable ponder. Looking at this map, I can see there’s a real danger straight away; if Henry advances north from Bare and occupies Imi, and also takes Jijiga in the north, then the whole of the eastern Ogaden is isolated and will fall under his de facto control. I’m going to have to choose my battles carefully – in terms of ‘modern’ fighters, I’m heavily outnumbered, but my guys have all done the full fighter pilot training in the US. Henry’s pilots, on the other hand, have been trained by the Soviets, who seemed to concentrate on piloting with no combat training at all.
Here are our scaled-down forces:
Ethiopia: 3 x F-5E Tiger II, 4 x F-5A/B Freedom Fighter, 8 x F-86F Sabre, 4 x T-28D Trojan, 2 x Canberra bombers
Somalia: 7 x MiG-21 Fishbed, 8 x MiG-17 Fresco, 2 x Il-28 Beagle
Bloody Betancourt 