Stickers and Patches

Stickers arrived yesterday. All of you who ordered patches and stickers should get them in the mail this week. Be sure to post up your sewing and stickering projects so we see what you did with them! 

Early Bird Discount Extended 24 Hours

Early Registration ends midnight Tuesday. We forgot the craziness that is post Thanksgiving consumerism and we did not want to not interfere with anybody's Cyber Monday binge buying. So instead of the original Monday night deadline we have extended it 24 hours.

Uniformity, Immersion and Safety: a Bit About Rules

One of the things many of you have noticed first off about CWG events is the restrictions on equipment. It also causes some confusion and consternation despite our best efforts.

Uniforms have limited colors and patterns for, well, uniformity. "Looking uniform" is what makes an army look, feel and act like a cohesive unit. It also helps tactically to avoid shooting at friendlies, or even your own squad. (Yup, I've been shot in the back by my own squad because on a hot day I took off my Woodland blouse and was wearing an ACU undershirt. We got off line and someone saw tan and fired.)

Other equipment has no strict requirements, and that gets a little fuzzy. You cannot wear armor or webgear that changes the uniformity of your overall look. That can be interpreted as meaning that your webgear: 

• Must match your uniform in color and pattern. 
• Can be pretty much anything else as long as it does not stand out.

Both answers are right. Sorry it's not a simple and strict answer. But in the end it means there are actually fewer equipment requirements than you might expect from us.

Other equipment is required — or prohibited — not just to be pedantic or annoying, and not or for our interpretation of what it's like to be in a third world army. They are there for good operational reasons, for game play and balance reasons, and very often for well-considered safety reasons.

Lets take body armor as an example. Aside from uniformity, why don't we allow any mounting of pouches to your armor? Consider you are running around on an unexpectedly hot day with armor full of pouches with all your stuff. If you want to ditch your armor to be a little cooler, you simply cannot. So you keep wearing it and get overheated. Combat ineffective rapidly turns into heatstroke.

And when we talk safety, by far the biggest issue we encounter are heat casualties. We don't need more hot people, so we require you to wear webgear over armor so it becomes optional and you can stay cool, put on rain gear or warmth layers, and so on. We've seen all these things actually happen, and have dealt with the problems they result in.

Most every rule or bit of equipment is like this. There's some reason of safety, operational effectiveness, or game balance behind them all. And these took a lot to work out. Experience from many events, other training, soldiering -- and sometimes lots of arguing amongst ourselves as to the right answer.

I'd love to ask you to trust that we always have the best interests of you, your squad and the event at heart, but you can also just keep on asking us what the point is, or to clarify what we really mean.

Uniform and Gear Colors

Lots of questions around the web about gear colors.

Will try to clear it up some:

You gear cannot cover a large portion of your exposed body with the opposing side's color/pattern- enough to change the overall appearance of your color/pattern See the pic - those guys are doing it wrong! 

It should not stand out against your uniform color/pattern such that it impacts your ability to conceal yourself - this makes not only you but your unit easier to locate.

It needs to be a subdued color or pattern and not a commercial-only or bright pattern. 

Operations and Logistics

Let's start talking about some of the things that really differentiate CWG events, and how working with them can help you be successful — and improve the immersion of your squad – throughout the event.

So far we've been talking a lot about the guns, uniforms, load bearing gear, and packs you'll be carrying in the field. But there's one piece of gear that's almost unique to CWG events, and is so important you'll spend a lot of time figuring out how to get and move them around. Ammo cans.

Like many MilSim events these days, we issue ammunition. But after you load the mags on your body, the rest has to be carried in realistic-sized ammo containers. That little spare bag of 750 BBs is going to sit in a steel ammo can until you stick them in magazines. You cannot carry many of those on a pack, and probably won't want to carry even one of them with you all the time.

We also issue different weights of pellets. But you don't get to simply choose which one you shoot. Instead, different guns get different ammo. The Ardean 7.62 rifles will be issued heavier pellets, so can slightly out-range the lighter-weight pellets in the Kitoy M16s and M4s. While rifles use dark pellets so you have to actually aim the gun with sights, machine guns all use "tracer" (white and glow-in-the-dark) heavy pellets, so have better range and can be driven onto the target more realistically.

What this means is you cannot switch ammo around or steal enemy ammo (by rules, as well as the annoyance of re-hopping each time) and have to resupply your squad with the proper ammunition for each of their weapons. This takes time, weight, volume and people to move, cache and distribute. Just like a real army has to do.

This is the sort of thing we mean when we talk about how our war gaming events are a bit different from conventional milsim. You have to pay attention to these operational details to be successful.

You can easily loose battles by not being resupplied right, or miss them entirely while you run around resupplying when you should be patrolling, or defending. The battlefield isn't going to be safe, so you won't be able to send one guy off with a pack for more ammo, as he might get ambushed. The few vehicle drivers know this, so won't just happily send you supplies without an armed escort. You will need to plan for all movement very carefully.

Don't think it's just BBs. Everything is like this, really. If you want a reload for your rocket launcher -- and it can be reloaded in the field at all, single shot weapons are single shot! -- then you have to carry something as large as a rocket reload with you all the way from the resupply depot at the Casualty Collection Point. If you run out of medical supplies, need more water, or simply need to get your people resurrected from the CCP you need to take the time to arrange that, so you remain combat effective.

And don't forget that everyone else has the same problems, so if you watch the enemy carefully, you'll see them withdraw when they get low on ammo, or split their force to send soldiers back for more supplies. Thinking how you can take advantage of that — or sharing with HQ so everyone and use the info — is how you can defeat the enemy. Intelligence, information, planning, coordinating and logistics win wars much more than simply shooting well, or shooting more.

If you want to carry around the little bag of BBs in the photos, you have to carry it in the steel ammo can we will provide. For 7.62 rifles and all machine guns, 750 pellets go into a .30 caliber ammo can, and for 5.56 rifles 2,500 fit in the much larger .50 caliber can.

You also cannot carry around spare 40 mm projectiles, but you can carry all the complete, loaded 40 mm shells you want. And you can only carry 4 or 6 mags on your load bearing gear, but can move and carry as many loaded rifle magazines (loose in your pack or in bandoliers) as you want.