Tronsoft Games
Line of Departure
Command a rifle company through a Third World War river crossing, squad by squad, under jamming.
How to begin
Open the game and the menu lists 3 actions and the campaign. Choose one: the briefing on the right tells you what the company has been told to do and what is known about the ground. Set the opposition — Cadet, Veteran or Staff officer — and press Take command.
Start with Contact at Kreuzhof. It is a platoon attack on a dug-in outpost over 18 turns, and it teaches the one lesson everything else in the game is built on.
The seed box fixes the random stream. Two games played from the same seed with the same orders unfold identically, which is why a defect report should always quote it.
Controls
Mouse and touch
| Do this | To get this |
|---|---|
| Tap or click a counter | Select that unit. Tap again to cycle through a stack. |
| Drag the map | Pan. |
| Wheel or pinch | Zoom about the pointer, so the ground under your finger stays put. |
| An order button, then a hex | Give that order against that hex. |
Keyboard
| Key | Effect |
|---|---|
| ← → ↑ ↓ | Move the map cursor. The hex under it is described below the map. |
| Shift + ↑/↓ | The other two diagonals: a hex has six neighbours, not four. |
| Space or Enter | Select what is under the cursor, or complete an order waiting for a hex. |
| E | End the turn. |
| Esc | Cancel an order that is waiting for a hex. |
| + − | Zoom. |
Turn order
A turn is 2 minutes of real time and runs through 6 phases:
- command
- activation
- indirect
- supply
- recovery
- administrative
In the command phase your headquarters works out who it can still talk to and how many command points you have. In the activation phase you give orders. Each unit may move once and fire once in a turn, in either order — that is what makes fire and movement possible. Press End turn when you are done and the enemy takes its activations.
Then the queued indirect fire lands, supply is traced, suppression decays, positions are improved, and the objectives are scored.
The command net
Orders cost command points, and how many depends on whether the unit can hear you. The panel on the right shows every unit's link:
| Link | What it means | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Digital net | Within 9 hexes of a headquarters and unjammed. | 1 |
| Voice | Close enough to shout or use a short-range set. | 1 |
| Degraded net | In range but the jammers are working. | 2 |
| Runner | Out of contact. The order costs 3 and arrives next turn. | 3 |
Jamming takes 5 hexes off the digital net. Shoot the enemy headquarters and their company stops acting as a company. Lose yours and so does yours.
Movement
Select a unit and the hexes it can reach this turn are shaded. Terrain, slope and the weather all cost movement; a road along a hexside is cheap, a river crossed at a hexside is not. Vehicles cannot cross a river at all except by a bridge. Infantry can wade, at a heavy price, and arrive wet on a bank the enemy is watching.
Movement stops when the unit enters a hex an enemy watches, and stops dead if it is pinned on the way. That is opportunity fire, and it is why the posture you move in matters more than the route.
Postures
| Posture | Speed | Cover | Fire | Reaction | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Advance | 100% | +0.00 | -0.25 | 0.4 | Ground covered quickly and nobody shooting straight. |
| Fire and movement | 55% | +0.25 | -0.05 | 0.8 | One team down and firing while the other moves. Half the speed, twice the survival. |
| Assault | 80% | -0.25 | +0.15 | 0.3 | The last hundred metres. No cover and no going back. |
| Hold | 0% | +0.30 | +0.10 | 0.9 | |
| Overwatch | 0% | +0.20 | +0.25 | 1.3 | Holds its fire for a target worth shooting, and shoots first when it comes. |
| Dug in | 0% | +0.75 | +0.10 | 1.0 | |
| Withdraw | 110% | -0.15 | -0.50 | 0.2 | |
| Mounted | 100% | -0.10 | -0.80 | 0.2 | Riding in the back of a vehicle. Fast, blind and all in one place. |
Fire and movement is half speed and roughly twice the survival: one team goes to ground and shoots while the other moves. In the open, against anything that is still shooting, use it.
Combat and scoring
The important thing to understand is that fire seldom kills at this scale. A rifle section that engages a dug-in squad at 400 metres will most turns kill nobody. What it does is suppress: it drives the defenders' heads down so they shoot badly, or not at all.
Suppression is the bar across the top of a counter. At 45 the unit is pinned and cannot move. At 78 it is broken and will not fight. Suppression decays by 9 a turn if the unit is in command and by only 4 if it is not.
So the drill is always the same three parts:
- Find the position, with scouts if you have them — they see furthest and are hardest to see.
- Fix it with fire: the gun group, the heavy weapons, a mortar mission, smoke across the ground you must cross.
- Finish it with an assault from an adjacent hex, once the defenders are suppressed. Assault an unsuppressed position and you will be thrown back with losses.
Indirect fire
A mortar never sees its target. It fires at what somebody else can see, so you need an observer with a line of sight to the ground you want hit. The off-map battery takes 2 turns from the call to the first round and drifts if the observer goes down before then. Smoke is often worth more than high explosive: it blinds a stretch of ground for 3 turns and lets an attack cross ground that would otherwise be swept.
Supply
Ammunition runs out. A unit below 25% of its load fires at half effect; a unit that cannot trace a route back to a supply source loses another 45%. Bring the echelon forward and use Resupply, which also returns a share of the walking wounded to the ranks.
Scoring
Your standing is the objectives you hold, plus what you have inflicted, minus what you have lost. It is shown in the header and settled at the end:
| Result | Standing | |
|---|---|---|
| Decisive victory | 60 and above | The corridor is yours and the cost was bearable. The relief column will come through on schedule. |
| Victory | 35 and above | You hold what matters. Brigade will not ask what it cost until the morning. |
| Marginal victory | 15 and above | Ground gained, but a company's worth of men bought it. |
| Indecisive | -5 and above | Both sides are dug in where they started and both are burying men. |
| Defeat | -35 and above | You are off the objective and the road is open behind you. |
| Disaster | below -35 | The company has ceased to exist as a fighting formation. |
Each action also states a par, which is what a competent handling of that ground is worth. Beating par is a good day.
Winning
You win an action by finishing above the Marginal victory band: hold the ground the briefing named, and do not spend the company doing it. Casualties count against you at rather more than they count for you when inflicted, which is deliberate. A company that takes the bridge and ceases to exist has not taken the bridge for very long.
In the campaign, a win moves you to the next node and a loss moves you down a darker branch. Both continue; only the ending changes.
Losing
You lose by being driven off the objectives, by running the clock out short of them, or by having nothing left to fight with. Two things cause more lost actions than anything else:
- Assaulting a position that is still shooting. Check the suppression bar first. If it is not up, put more fire on it or wait a turn.
- Crossing open ground in Advance. It is faster and it will cost you a section. Use fire and movement, or lay smoke first.
A broken unit falls back on its own headquarters and can be rallied; a unit shot to pieces and out of contact will go to ground and take no further part.
Saving and restarting
The game saves automatically after every completed activation, yours and the enemy's, into your browser's local storage. Save in the header forces one immediately. Resume saved action on the menu picks it up exactly — the random stream position is stored with it, so the game continues rather than diverging.
The save is cleared when an action ends. Fight it again on the after-action screen restarts the same action with the same settings; change the seed on the menu first if you want different weather in the dice.
If your browser refuses storage — private browsing, or opening the game from a file rather than through the portal — the game says so once at the menu and then plays normally. You simply cannot resume it later.