Orders
Handbook · chapter 2
You never move a tank. You tell a man what you want, in your own words or in a short structured form, and he turns it into one of a fixed list of things a tank can do. This chapter is that list, the grid references you will use to point at the ground, the ways an order can be refused, and the two things a crew will do without being told.
Grid references
The sheet is gridded in kilometre squares, and every place on it is named by figures. Four figures, such as 4765, name a kilometre square and mean its centre. Six figures, such as 473645, name a hundred-metre square inside it and mean its centre. When you click the map the game writes six figures on the compose line for you, so you rarely have to work them out.
Your commanders speak in four figures. What a commander reports is where he believes a thing to be, to the kilometre, and that is as precise as he can be from a moving turret with a pair of binoculars. When you need a tank on a particular hundred metres of ground, give it six figures yourself.
Speaking and structured
There are two ways to give an order and a commander treats them the same.
You can speak. Address a commander by his callsign and say what you want: Three, get up on that ridge and cover the road. He reads it as the man he is, and if it is unclear a cautious man asks and an aggressive one guesses. This is the way the game is meant to be played, and it is the subject of the chapter on the radio.
Or you can be brief. A tank number, a verb, and a grid: 3 move 4764 fast. The structured grammar covers everything a tank can do, and the app’s help lists it. A line with no callsign is read as a structured order to the tank it names, 3 move 4764 fast to tank three and 1 halt to your own; put radio in front of it to send it to the whole platoon.
Tank one is different. Your own crew are a foot away, on the intercom, and there is nobody between you and the gun. An order to tank one is taken exactly as given, with no interpretation at all.
What a tank can do
A commander turns whatever you said into one intent. The simulation executes intents; it does not read English, and there is no order that is not one of these.
| You want him to | The intent |
|---|---|
| Go somewhere | Move to a point, or along waypoints, at cautious, normal or fast speed, keeping his front toward a bearing if you give one |
| Stop | Halt, facing a bearing if you name one |
| Get behind something | Seek hull-down against a bearing: his driver looks nearby for ground that hides the hull, and reports back if there is none |
| Shoot at a thing | Engage a contact his own crew have seen, with a preferred shell. He cannot engage something he only knows from a report; an engage order on a reported contact becomes a few rounds of the shell you asked for on its plotted grid |
| Shoot at a place | Fire at point: rounds of a named shell on a map square, which is how you deal with a reported gun nobody can see |
| Hide something | Fire smoke: white phosphorus on a point, making a cloud |
| Stop shooting | Hold fire, except inside a range you may allow |
| Wait for the enemy | Overwatch: halt and engage whatever appears inside a sector, armour first or infantry first |
| Get out, carefully | Withdraw to a point, keeping the gun toward the last threat |
| Stay with someone | Follow another tank at a set distance |
| Close the hatches | Button up, or unbutton |
| Leave the tank | Bail out |
Speed matters more than it looks. A fast tank is easier to see, harder to shoot from, and more likely to throw a track on a turn. Cautious is slow, but the driver can pick his ground.
What he will not do
An order that cannot be carried out is rejected, and he tells you why. A move with a thrown track. Engaging a contact his tank has never held. A point off the edge of the sheet. Firing a shell type he has none of left. The rejection comes over the net like any other report, so you will hear it, though not at once.
There is a second kind of refusal that is not in the rules of orders at all. A commander who has stopped trusting you, and is frightened enough, may decline a risky order as a matter of temperament. That is in the chapter on the men. The point here is that a rejection with a reason is a fact about the tank; a refusal without one is a fact about the man.
A cautious man will not go into a wadi. Do not tell him to. Tell him where you want him and let him find the way round.
Without an order
Two things happen whether you ask for them or not, and both are what real crews did.
The bow gunner fires at infantry close in front of him on his own initiative, inside his arc, unless you have ordered hold fire. He does not wait to be told there are men in the ditch.
A tank with no fire order of its own engages armour or guns its crew have seen, nearest armour first, unless you have ordered hold fire. Crews did not wait to be told to shoot at a tank that was shooting at them, and yours will not either. If you want a tank to hold its fire while the enemy closes, so that the whole platoon opens together, you must say so, and you must remember that you said so.
What an order costs
Every order goes out on one net, and one station transmits at a time. Every order is also read by a man with an opinion of you, and what happens to his crew in the periods after he follows it moves that opinion. Neither is a reason not to give orders. Both are reasons to give the ones you mean.