2023 Retrospective

2023 has been another relatively quiet year for me hobby-wise. I started the year with five goals

Have a good clear out of the random junk in the hobby cupboard.

This I achieved. I had a really good tidy-up in October, bought some new storage solutions, and offloaded some old bits and pieces.

The remaining objectives weren't met: I didn't play any non-FOW games, and didn't make any progress on my ALDG projects.

I played in three FOW tournaments during the year.

ValleyCon was 111pts Late War held in April. I painted a new army for it: a Soviet Rifle Regiment from Berlin: Soviet.

Rifle Regiment - Berlin: Soviet

Regiment HQ

Rifle Company (mid strength with panzerfaust and 1 x Maxim)

Storm Group (full strength with panzerfaust, Maxim and flamethrower)

82mm Mortar Company (6 x 82mm mortar)

120mm Mortar Company (3 x 120mm mortar)

Heavy Tank Killer Company (4 x 76mm gun)

Armoured Car Platoon (3 x BA-64, with 2 x PTRD)

M4 Sherman (76mm) Tank Company (5 x M4 Sherman (76mm)) 

IS-2 (Late) Guards Heavy Tank Company (4 x IS-2)

Unditiching Logs command card (IS-2)

Total Cost: 111 pts

The list was great. It was my first time playing Soviets in FOW since 1st Edition, and while you can argue that Careful troops aren't exactly the classic Soviet experience in FOW, it was still a nice change from Western lists. I won three games, drew two games, and finished tied for 4th place.

The second tournament was Panzerschreck, held in July. This year it was 140pt Late War doubles. I partnered with Bede again, running lists from Berlin: German. My half of the list was four 10.5cm FlaK39 railway cars, and a formation of Fallschirmjager from Fortress Europe. We tied for third out of 18, but lost the dice-off so finished in fourth place again.

The final event was Remember December. This was 60pts Mid War, book points, no Top Armour 2, and only one Support unit. I ran a British Rifle Company:

Rifle Company - North Africa

Company HQ

Rifle Platoon (full strenth)

Rifle Platoon (minimum strenth) 

Rifle Platoon (minimum strenth)

Mortar Platoon (4 x 3-inch mortars)

Anti-tank Platoon (3 x 6-pounders)

Universal Carrier Patrol (3 x Universal Carriers)

Universal Carrier Patrol (3 x Universal Carriers)

Valentine III Death or Glory Troop (3 x Valentine III)

Captured Tank command card (Rifle Company)

Cavalry Commander command card (Valentines)

Total Cost: 60 pts

I started pretty well with two wins, but fell apart in the final game. The Rifle Company played well- I definitely needed all of the infantry, but the Valentines weren't quite as tough as I'd hoped they'd be. The Captured Tank card was a bit of fun: I managed to capture an AB41 in Game 1 and a Stuart in Game 3.

I've continued writing for No Dice No Glory, but my output slowed during the year due to work pressures:

• An overview of Berlin: Soviet
• An article on my Canadian Rifles list from ValleyCon 2022
• A review of the Battlefront Sexton/Ram kit
• A piece on assembling the Battlefront 10.5cm railway car

For 2024, I'm going to keep over a couple of the goals from 2023.

1. I want to paint my ECW Royalists for ADLG-R.
2. I want to play two rulesets that aren't FOW.

FOW has a couple of new things coming out this year, with "Late War Leviathans" adding prototype and 1946 tanks to the game, followed by "Clash of Steel" as an alt-history spinoff. The models look cool, but I'm not sure how much interest there will be locally. 

Tournament-wise, ValleyCon is likely to be Mid War FOW this year, so I'll be looking to put together a new army for that. I can't play at Panzerschreck this year, but hopefully I can make an appearance at Call To Arms in August instead.

2022 Retrospective

I was flicking back through the photos I'd taken during 2022 to try and remember what I've done throughout the year. It turns out that a lot of what I thought had occurred in 2022 was actually from 2021. In effect, the last two years seem to have blurred into one. Matters haven't been helped by not having written a retrospective at the end of 2021, so I don't have a convenient marker to separate the two.

Looking back to the end of 2020, my goals for 2021 had been to run a T-80 company in Team Yankee, play through the Smugglers' Run campaign for Black Seas, paint 1500pts for 40K, and organise a FOW ladder tournament for the club. Of these I only achieved the first: a single game with T-80s against Pelarel's Challengers in December 2021. The 40K setting simply hasn't captured my interest as much as it would need to for me to devote that much time and money to building an army and learning the rules, and it turns out FOW isn't played often enough locally to support a ladder.

Moving on to 2022, I didn't play a huge number of games during the year. Most of my games were focused around the two Flames of War tournaments that I played in.

Priest Kangaroos

ValleyCon was 100pts Late War held in June. I ran a Canadian Rifle Company from D-Day: British, themed on Operation Totalize, with the gimmick being trying to run it as an artillery-centric "Always Attack" force.

Rifle Company - D-Day: British

Company HQ

Rifle Platoon (full strength)

Rifle Platoon (full strength)

6pdr Anti-tank Platoon (4 x 6pdr)

Wasp Carrier Patrol

Universal Carrier Patrol

2 x 25pdr Field Troop (4 x 25pdr each)

M10 SP Anti-tank Platoon (4 x M10 (3-inch))

Sherman OP

Relentless command card (two Rifle Platoons)

Kangaroo Transport command card (two Rifle Platoons)

Carrier Transport command card (6pdrs) 

AGRA command card (eight guns) 

Total Cost: 100 pts

I never wrote a review of the event, but the list was an interesting challenge. I won two games, drew two, and lost one, placing 9th out of 14. Funnily enough for a list that I had intended to attack with, my two wins were when I chose to defend due to facing large numbers of light vehicles. It definitely could attack, but really needed a third Rifle Platoon and the 17pdr version of the M10s. I'm tempted to try again at a later date, using a similar list built using Bulge: British that incorporates those lessons.

6pdrs

A 25pdr Battery

The second tournament was Panzerschreck, held in July. This year it was 140pt Mid War doubles. I partnered with Bede again, and we chose to run German Panzers, built around Borgwards and Hornisse. We had decided not to take the event too seriously, hence a force deliberately built around the inefficient long-barrelled Panzer III while avoiding the underpriced Marder, however we placed 4th out of 12.

My Panzer IIIs in action at Panzerschreck 2022

I didn't do anything for Team Yankee during the year. The Russian invasion of Ukraine removed all enthusiasm for doing any further work on my Soviets. I also have concerns about the balance of the game, which heavily favours ATGMs and 1960s equipment at the expense of the 1980s/90s technology that was the main attraction of the game in the first place. The release of Nordic Forces and Free Nations 2 in 2023 might restore some interest, but until the Dynamic Points philosophy is extended to TY, there's not much that can be done to fix the balance.

I've continued writing for No Dice No Glory, and have averaged a post per month over the course of the year. A number of my pieces were related to release of the North Africa compilation for FOW:

• Comparing the British lists to their V3 versions.
• Exploring the changes to the German support tree compared to V4's Afrika Korps.
• Looking at a more competitive build of the Crusader Squadron boxed set.

Another couple of posts related to the release of Bulge: British, digging into the details of the infantry lists and the reconnaissance Command Cards.

While I expect to keep using NDNG as my main writing platform, I intend to keep this blog open as it gives me a place to post things that don't fit well with NDNG.

2022 marked my first foray into board wargaming. Malta Besieged arrived just in time for me to play it while recovering from Covid,  and I also picked up a copy of The African Campaign. I can see myself playing more hex-and-counter games in future, subject to being able to find games with a strong solitaire mode. It has a significant nostalgia element, as it reminds me of the hours I spent playing Allied General as a teenager.

Malta Besieged

The African Campaign

I will start 2023 by running FOW for Remember December 2022. This event was delayed by a month due to many players being unavailable for the usual date of the first club meeting in December. This is going to be 85pts Late War, with forces to be built using the Bulge books.

There are a number of other events occurring during 2023, with Charicon in February (100pts Mid War), ValleyCon in April (111pts Late War), Panzerschreck in July (Late War doubles), an ADLG event planned for October, and of course RD coming around again in December. I won't be able to play in all of them, so I have a decision to make about which ones to prioritise.

The most important thing, though, is that I need to have a serious think about what I actually want to play, and try to find some focus. I've got lots of random stuff lying around, and a number of rulesets that I've never played,  There are games that I'd like to play more (Fate of a Nation, ADLG, Seven Days to the River Rhine), and games that I'd like to try (for example, Lion Rampant, Blood and Steel, Iron Cross could be a good option for 28mm WW2, O Group in 15mm might provide a different experience to FOW).

With this in mind, my plan for 2023 is:

1. Have a good clear out of the random junk in the hobby cupboard.

2. Play games of two rulesets that I own but haven't played before.

3. Rebase my 28mm Impetus Italians to give me 200pts for ADLG.

4. Paint 220pts of 15mm ECW Royalists for ADLG-R.

5. Consolidate my FOW/TY collections: tidying up and offloading any forces that I'm not passionate about, and finishing off the ones that I want to keep.

That is a relatively short list that should be achievable. Let's see how we get on.

The Origin of 17th/21st Lancers' M3 Lees

I recently wrote an article on No Dice No Glory about using the British Crusader Squadron boxed set to field a Death or Glory Squadron for Flames of War. The article touched on the history behind the Lee HQ option for that force, but NDNG wasn't really the place to expand on this so I am writing it up here.

Image: FOW North Africa (2022)

The story presented in the FOW books is that 17th/21st Lancers had three M3 Lees in C Squadron HQ while they were in Tunisia. It is said that the tanks were salvaged from those that had been abandoned by 1st Armored Division in the retreat from Tebourba. 

Photo: Battlefront Miniatures

I have not been able to find the origin of that story. The actual history of these tanks is as follows. 

It was announced at a 26th Armoured Brigade 'O' Group on 28 December 1942 that each regiment was going to be receiving 10 Grants for "close support." This was in preparation for the brigade being completely re-equipped with Shermans, with General Anderson, commander of First Army, advising during a visit to 26th Armoured Brigade HQ on 31 December that this was intended to occur within six weeks. 

The Grants were intended to be allocated with two to each Squadron HQ and four to each Regimental HQ. Those going to Squadron HQ were to replace the Valentine 2pdrs, with those tanks being sent to the Valentine troops, making them four-tank troops.

Training was provided by the US Army on 1 January, with three Grants being handed over to 17th/21st Lancers “filled with rations, extra sweets, rum, and a bewildering assortment of ammunition.” The other regiments in the brigade, 16th/5th Lancers and 2nd Lothians and Border Horse, received one Grant each.

It was announced on 7 January that those Grants were the only ones that the brigade would be receiving. No reason is given in the war diaries, however ffrench Blake speculates in his history of the regiment that this was due to the losses the Americans had suffered over the preceding weeks.

Where the histories refers to “Grants”, in FOW we would call them Lees, being the US version of the tank with the cupola MG. I am not aware of any photos existing of these three tanks, but it’s clear from the description that this is what they were: "like a wedding cake" with three layers: 75mm, 37mm, and Browning MG.

The Lees' first and only action was at Two Tree Hill on the morning of 13 January 1943. Two of the tanks were destroyed, with ffrench Blake being badly wounded in the third. Ken Ford’s “Mailed Fist” describes the Lees as being in “ffrench Blake’s C Squadron” for this battle, but ffrench Blake had taken up the role of regimental 2iC from 8 December. The orders for the operation and ffrench Blake's writings make it clear that at Two Tree Hill the Lees were part of RHQ and operating independently, supported by A Squadron. There is no further mention after this of Lees or Grants in any of the histories I’ve read. 

To reflect this in Flames of War V4, I would be tempted to use a Death or Glory Squadron with a normal Valentine HQ and a Grant Troop from Formation Support, instead of the Lee HQ version of the list. The alternative is to run the Lee HQ version anyway, as this is close to the way the Grants were intended to be used had they all been received.

Regarding painting, without photos it is impossible to be certain what the Lees looked like. They might have been repainted in British colours since they were intended to be part of the standard equipment of the regiment, or they may have been left in their original US olive drab, possibly with disruptive patterning applied in dark brown. The tactical signs on the turrets, if applied, would have been yellow diamonds, and the arm of service markings would have been Red 52.

To summarise, 17th/21st Lancers did have three Lees for a period of about two weeks at the start of January 1943. These were part of a delivery of tanks to 6th Armoured Division that was never completed, and the story of them being salvaged is a myth.

Sources:

• The Royal Lancers & Nottinghamshire Yeomanry Museum
• WO 175-292, The National Archives
• WO 175-210, The National Archives
• A History of the 17th/21st Lancers 1922-1959, RLV ffrench Blake
• Mainstay - A 20th Century Life, RLV ffrench Blake
• Death or Glory - The 17th/21st Lancers 1922-1993, Keith Shannon
• Mailed Fist, Ken Ford

A New Platform

In April I started writing for No Dice No Glory, a historical wargaming blog. I’m not sure what this will mean for this blog. Most likely it will lie fallow for a season unless there is something that I want to write that doesn’t fit with the NDNG theme.

 Here are links to the posts that I have published there to date: 

• Multiplayer FOW - reflections on our D Day game from a few years ago 
• Thoughts on the FOW Missions Pack update from April 2021 
• A preview of the Mid War Finnish booklet for FOW.  
• A review of the Panzerschreck tournament that was held in July 2021. 
• Modelling the Priest Kangaroo for FOW

I want to thank the people who have visited this site. I just checked the site statistics and my posts have had over 10,000 views since I started posting here in 2015. Many of those visits would have been bots, but hopefully some of those visits were by real people who have got some value out of what I have written.

Soviet AA Revisited - The Tunguska Edition

A couple of years ago I wrote a post looking at the cost-effectiveness of the various Soviet anti-aircraft options in Team Yankee. The new WW3: Soviet book has introduced the 2S6 Tunguska to the game, so this is a good opportunity to update that earlier analysis.

In the game, the Tunguska differs from the other Soviet systems by having two anti-aircraft weapons, cannons and guided missiles. Its guns are better than the Shilka's, with greater Range, ROF, and AT, making it the best AA weapon available to the Soviets. Despite only being able to use one of its weapons per turn, it carries a hefty price penalty for having both, costing twice as much as a Shilka. Yes, it's expensive, but it's guaranteed to always be able to shoot at something, whereas the Shilka is limited by range.

Note: There's an interpretation of FM-101 that says that if you fire one of these weapons in the enemy turn, you cannot fire the other weapon in your own turn. I don't agree with this reading, so have written this post assuming that my interpretation is correct, and will update the numbers if FM-101 gets clarified to say that I'm wrong.

I updated my AA spreadsheet to include the Tunguska stats, and reran the cost-effectiveness calculation: which unit will do the most damage to a flight of typical NATO jets per point expended (click on the chart to get a higher resolution version).

The Tunguska's guns come in as the third most cost-effective form of air defence, but suffer from occupying the same unit slot as the Shilka. If you are looking for long range air defence, the Tunguska's missiles on the other hand are terrible value for money - costing as much as a Gecko while losing a point of ROF.

This ability to fire both weapons at helicopters in sequential turns raises the question of which weapon should you fire in the enemy turn, and which in your own. The specific scenario I have looked at here is a pair of Tunguskas shooting at a pair of hunter killer helicopters (making the heroic assumption they are in range of both weapons), and compared it to an equivalent cost unit of Shilkas. In the turn which the helicopters fire, you shoot against a Concealed and Gone to Ground target, while in your turn they are only Concealed. Assuming the helicopters are in range of both weapons, is it better to fire the guns needing 6s and the missiles needing 5s, or vice versa?

Overall it's better to fire the missiles at the Gone to Ground target, because the guns are just so much better at killing stuff that it's best for them to be hitting on 5s rather than 6s. So the question then becomes: can you afford to lose the teams that the helicopters are targeting? If yes, fire missiles then guns in order to have a higher chance of killing something across the two turns. If not, either fire the guns first to try and kill them before they get you, or better yet just spend the points on Shilkas.

The final question I wanted to answer was how many points should I be spending on AA in my Soviet lists? Or more specifically, how much air defence do you need to be able to defend against four A10s?

Having braved your layered air defence, how many of your teams will the surviving A10s kill in return? For consistency, the target in the model is one of the armoured platoons, with the massive blue spike in the following chart at "Destroy 4 Teams" being when the unarmoured Gecko is the only target. Of course, that may not be the way things play out in the game, with the US player just as likely to take a run at the Geckos as the softest target whenever they're present, or split their fire to try and chip teams off multiple platoons.

There are a few conclusions coming out of this. 

• If Geckos get shot at, they die. Keep them concealed as best as you can.
• It's no surprise that the best protection comes from spending the maximum possible points across your three AA slots for quartets of Tunguskas, Gophers, and Geckos.
• For a given number of points to be spent on AA, it is more effective to spend those points on more platoons of cheaper weapons, rather than fewer platoons of better weapons. For example, four Shilkas and four Gophers are a more effective use of 8pts than four Tunguskas.
• My pick from the choices available for the best AA combination available to the Soviets would be a platoon each of Shilkas, Gophers, and Geckos.
• If you are simply looking at their AA performance, the Tunguska is too expensive, and the marginal increase in protection it offers is simply not worth the additional four points over a unit of Shilkas.
• Maybe they could have a role as an ambush unit? It would be kind of interesting to see what 28 dice at AT10/FP5+ would do to a LAV company. Apart from that, with Armour 1 they are not something that you should be relying on to kill ground targets unless you're desperate.
• I would only use the Tunguska for fluff reasons or because the model is cool. Which of course means that I need to get some Tunguskas. 

Seven Days to the River Rhine

In a spur of the moment decision during our lockdown last year, I purchased the PDF version of 'Seven Days to the River Rhine', a WW3 ruleset by Great Escape Games, and this week I played my first game of it with local blogger Pelarel.

The game is designed for 15mm and to suit Team Yankee basing. It's a smaller game than TY: set at reinforced platoon level, with activation by team.

The rules are brief at about 30 pages. The Facebook group has a FAQ/errata sheet, which is essential because there are a couple of places where the writing is a bit loose - particularly with shooting. There are embedded QR codes that link to tutorial videos on Youtube, which I think is an excellent touch.

Points are provided for a wide range of teams and nations, but apart from that there is no structure to support list building. Unit stats are relatively homogeneous across all of the nations, e.g. all infantry teams have the same stat line except some nations have slightly better morale.

A few scenarios outlines are provided, but these leave a lot to the player. Deployment zones and the process for placing objectives need to be agreed with your opponent.

The best aspect is the initiative rules. Each turn, both players get one command token per team (excluding APCs/IFVs), plus an additional two tokens for the battlegroup commander. The players dice off to see who starts with the initiative, then spend these tokens to activate teams, or to react to their opponent's actions. The initiative can pass from player to player during the turn, a process which continues until all the tokens are spent, at which point the turn ends. You can activate a team more than once, but each activation makes the next one harder to achieve. The chance of activating is also affected by the accumulation of morale markers, generated when the unit takes fire. 

We played 500pts on a 6x4 table, and completed the game in about 2.5 hours. This gave me six infantry teams, six BMP-1s, three T-64s, and two BRDMs. Pel had two Chieftains, two Swingfires, two Scimitars, three infantry teams in FV432s, a Milan team, a Marksman, and a Lynx. This was a good amount of equipment for the table size. Having more variety in his list seemed to work out well for him, and next time I’ll definitely run fewer infantry and a wider range of units.

My thoughts from the game are:

• The initiative rules create a fantastic ebb and flow across the turn.
• Tanks die really easily.
• Infantry on the other hand are hard to kill. They can only be removed through the accumulation of morale markers, which takes either a long time or a significant concentration of fire.
• You never really have enough command tokens to do everything that you want, particularly when you start to lose teams. You need to think really carefully about what you want to do in the turn and concentrate your command tokens on doing that, rather than spending them reacting to your opponent.
• It gets really hard to do things mid game, as the accumulation of morale markers makes activation harder. Things just don't do what you want them to, which I think is a great mechanic.

I really like it. I don't think the game would replace TY as my WW3 game of choice, but it is a very different experience and an enjoyable change.

2020 Retrospective

It's hard to do a hobby retrospective for 2020 without mentioning the pandemic. In New Zealand we were blessed that our remoteness gave the government time to put together a heavy-handed but effective response, combined with a whole lot of luck, which eliminated community transmission of the virus and allowed us to have a normal Christmas.

I managed to keep up with monthly posts until June, after which I totally overwhelmed with work and lacked the motivation and energy to do anything. In that time I did however manage a total of 13 posts, which was a significantly better effort than the year before.

The year was bookended by 100pt TY at ValleyCon and 60pt FOW-MW at Remember December. I ran T-64s at ValleyCon, placing fourth, and Afrika Korps panzers at Remember December, also placing fourth.

I didn't write about Remember December, nor take any photos, but as usual it was a great day. I ran a Panzer III company:

Panzer III Tank Company - Afrika Korps

Company HQ - 2 x Panzer III (short 5cm)

Panzer III Tank Platoon - 3 x Panzer III (short 5cm), 1 x Panzer III (long 5cm)

Panzer IV Tank Platoon - 2 x Panzer IV (short 7.5cm), 1 x Panzer IV (long 7.5cm)

Panzer II Light Tank Platoon - 3 x Panzer II

Total Cost: 60 pts

I thought the list would be terrible, but it was felt pretty good. I lost my first game against a US Rifle Company -  I made the error of choosing Attack rather than Manoeuvre, which forced me into a No Retreat, losing because I didn't know that the newest version of the mission requires you to remain within 8" of an objective to keep the game going beyond Turn 6. I won the next two, against US Lees/Stuarts in Free For All (by the skin of my teeth and some very lucky Unit Last Stand tests), and a Panzer IV company in Encounter (confirming that the short 7.5cm is terribly over-costed).

I had a good spurt of painting FOW in the middle of the year, finishing most of the remaining models I had left for my Mediterranean British - two more platoons of armoured cars and platoons of Mk VIBs, Carriers, Vickers MGs, and 4.2" mortars. I didn't touch my TY Syrians.

I had three goals for 2020 relating to 28mm - painting and playing. I painted two squads of Perry Fallschirmjager, but did not play any games with them, nor did I do any work on the 28mm Landsknechts.

My most successful goal was to paint a Black Seas fleet box, which I changed during the year to be painting the Royal Navy ships required to play the Smugglers' Run campaign. I fell slightly short, needing just two more cutters to complete this fleet. With Warlord Games not having released a cutter model at the time (one is now available), I ordered some from Hagen Miniatures in June. Covid got in the way, with Deutsche Post spending much of the year not shipping to New Zealand, and I only received them in December.

I have decided to set fewer goals for 2021.

1. Field a T-80 company for Team Yankee. I have picked up the Soviet halves of a couple of the new TY starter sets, which are great value for the number of sprues that they contain, so need to paint them up and get them on the table.

2. Play a 1500pt game of 40K. I painted up about 400pts of Adeptus Mechanicus this year, so there's a bit of work needing to be done first.

3. Play through the Smugglers' Run campaign for Black Seas.

4. Administer a FOW ladder tournament for the club.

So happy new year, and thanks for reading the blog. Stay safe, and best wishes for 2021.