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BALTIC SHIELD
CAMPAIGN OF LEARNING
ABOUT
Welcome to ‘Operation Baltic Shield’: a multi-part battle conducted within the tactical simulation package ‘Combat Mission: Professional Edition’ ("CM:Pro"). Together, these four missions constitute what we call a ‘Campaign of Learning’ (CoL); meaning a series of tactical problems for players to engage with, and obtain useful insights and educational outcomes. The fundamental aim here is to improve participants' understanding of 21st Century, peer-on-peer, urban combat, and the key factors therein.
We also hope this will be an enjoyable social experience, with a high degree of community discourse and feedback.
These missions are designed to be played multiple times, and novel or ambitious approaches are very welcome. As ever, we want you to Think, Fight, Learn, and Repeat!
How It Works...
The ‘Baltic Shield Project’ will run from Friday, May 3rd until Monday, June 10th (the start of the DSET 2024 conference), and consists of two phases. Phase 1 involves Fight Club members pitting their tactical abilities against the game AI, and each other, across the four missions. This will produce many enjoyable and instructive moments, and a large amount of game data. Fight Club’s objective in Phase 2 will be to experiment with this ‘dataset’ and explore to what extent we can derive useful information from it.
Our overall aim is to test (and hopefully demonstrate) how useful tactical insights can be derived from a block of crowdsourced data, and how we might use this to aid training and planning within NATO.
Of course, we’ll also derive a range of basic results data that can be used to build performance rankings and assign awards for a range of innovative or heroic actions on the streets of Narva.
Project Phases
Phase 1:
Players complete four sequential, linked missions based on a NATO defence of Narva against elite elements of the Donovian Army. Opponents can be Human or (when playing as NATO) AI, and both NATO and Donovia are playable factions (each with mission-specific briefing documents).
Players are encouraged to attempt each mission at least once and, ideally, multiple times.
The focus, as ever, is on learning and development. Updates, information, and general campaign chat will take place in a private channel on the Fight Club International Discord Server (to which all FC members have access).We will also be running AAR presentation and review sessions on the server, in the style of UK Fight Club’s “Combat Mission: Black Sea Sunday” weekly event. Players are invited to write-up and present AARs to the wider group, in order to pass-on learning and receive (friendly) feedback.
Overall winners, and recipients of specific awards, will be announced at DSET 2024 in June.
Phase 2:
By the end of May, player must send us their exported event log .csv files, replay files, and – ideally – a few screenshots, from your games.
Once we have the data, our first ‘surface level analysis’ will explore basic metrics such as individual player performance and other aspects such as most lethal weapon/platform, casualty ratios between sides, and – of course – player rankings.
The second round of analysis will look at drawing deeper insights from the data such as overall tactical trends, common/most effective schemes of maneuver, and terrain effects. We will also be testing the use of AI Large Language Models as reporting and analysis tools.
All results will be presented at DSET 2024 (Bristol, UK).
The Role of Discord
The Fight Club International Discord Server is the primary online forum for Baltic Shield community interaction and campaign support.
All Baltic Shield participants have access, and anybody not already set-up can find more information here.
