Sunday, December 31, 2017

2017 Retrospective

With 2017 done and dusted, it's time for a look back at what I've worked on over the last 12 months, whether I achieved any of the goals I had set for myself, and look ahead to what 2018 might hold.

As always, the year began with the Early War FOW competition at ValleyCon. I ran a British Motor Company themed on 1st Armoured Brigade in Greece. I won four games out of seven, placing mid table, and winning Best Army.
Item three on my list was Team Yankee, and this was one of my main painting efforts for the year, putting together 100+ points of Soviets. There are only two of us at the club that play in 15mm, but we had some enjoyable games in March and November.
In May there was also a big multiplayer TY game in 6mm.
The major change during the year was FOW V4. I finished painting my Comets, although have not yet added the Cromwell CS tanks, and played a couple of enjoyable 1750pt 8x6 games with them in April. The plan had been to rebase my desert Brits and finish off a few odds and ends, but this didn't happen, partly because after the initial glow of some excellent tank battles using the new system, I became concerned about how it handles infantry combat. More on this in a later post, probably.
The last item on my list for the year was related to Impetus. I didn't add any light cavalry to my Florentines, so that task will roll over yet again. I was encouraged to play in V3 in June, despite hardly knowing the rules and only having a renaissance army to take to a competition that was classically themed, and had a great time.

My goals for 2018 are:
  1. Finalise my FOW list for ValleyCon 18 - I will be running an Afrika Korps list, but the details are not yet confirmed. The fact that I'm still at this stage of the process when the competition is only four weeks away is a pretty clear reflection of my feelings towards the game, given that in previous years I'd sorted my lists out in August, and spent the last three months of the year painting for it. I have the feeling that my interest in FOW will either live or die by how V4 performs at ValleyCon. 
  2. Actually buy and paint some Italian light cavalry and Landsknechts for Impetus after two years of just talking about it.
  3. More Team Yankee. I want to add a NATO force for both the 30pt and 100pt formats, and hopefully lure a few more locals into at least trying the game in 15mm.
  4. I will be taking a close look at 'Fate of a Nation' when it is rereleased. The original version missed the mark in terms of game balance, but hopefully the extension of the game to 1973 fixes this.
  5. Not entirely unrelated to Item 1, a couple of us are going to be trying out Battlegroup and Chain of Command. I have picked up the core rules for Battlegroup, plus the Normandy and Market Garden supplements, but haven't put it on the table yet.
So happy new year, thanks for reading, and I wish you well for the year ahead.

Saturday, December 23, 2017

Desert Basecloth

For the Team Yankee games last month, I had purchased some curtain fabric for a basecloth that I thought would be a good deserty colour. It wasn't, as soon as it was out from under the shop lights it turned out to be shiny and gold. After the games, I put some thought into what would make a better basecloth for a desert table. The commercially available mats look amazing but are quite expensive, so I set out to see if I could make my own.

All of the examples of homemade terrain mats that I could find on the internet use a canvas drop cloth covered with a thin layer of caulk, impressed with sand then painted. I couldn't understand why caulk was used, as to me this would add a lot of weight and expense, so I decided to try gluing sand directly to my golden curtains.

Materials Used:
1.4m x 2.0m curtain fabric
2 x 250mm test pots of Resene 'Camouflage'
60mm test pots, one each of Resene 'Triple Akaroa', 'Half Stonewall', and 'Half Mountain Mist'
1 x 1.5kg bag of bird cage sand
Small amounts of flock and GF9 medium basing grit
PVA glue

With a standard house painting brush, I applied PVA to the fabric in manageably-sized sections, then sprinkled on patches of the GF9 grit followed by covering it with the budgie sand. I use budgie sand for all of my basing because I like the grain size and it's sterile. Once the glue dried, I recovered the excess sand, then repeated the process until I had the whole cloth covered. I learned quickly to avoid applying the glue in rectangular pattern, as I ended up with noticeable borders where one section of glue stopped and its neighbor started. 
I painted the mat with Resene colours that are close approximations to my desert basing colours: Vallejo Brown Violet, Khaki, Stone Grey, and Deck Tan. The entire mat was first covered with a coat of 'Camouflage' to seal in the sand. 500ml was just enough to cover the mat, with some slight dilution towards the end when it looked like I was about to run out. The basecoat was followed by progressively lighter drybrush layers of the others colours, finishing with small amounts of flock as an accent.
First coat of paint
Working through the drybrushing
Finished mat
The total cost of the project, including the fabric I started with, was about $70, half of that being the paint. I can't really answer the question of why caulk would be needed, but it may be something to do with the weight of the material - mine is quite heavy, whereas a lighter fabric may require caulk to give it a bit more substance. At this stage the mat seems to be able to handle being rolled up without the surface being damaged, but we'll see how it looks after a bit of use.

Monday, December 11, 2017

Of Gauge and Scale

There was a recent question on the TY Facebook page asking about what railway track to use for terrain, and the discussion that followed has driven me to write this post on the topic.

The first key concept for railway miniatures is scale ratio, which relates to the size of the rolling stock relative to the full sized original.

The other concept is track gauge, which is the distance between the inner edges of the rails. Half of the world's railways, including those in France, Germany and Poland, have a gauge of 1435mm, which is known as Standard Gauge.

All model railway track, rolling stock and accessories are sold at a particular scale, which in this context refers to a specific combination of scale ratio, track gauge, and other factors that makes up the parameters of the system as a whole.

Scale
Scale Ratio
Track Gauge
Scale Error for Standard Gauge
O
1/46
32mm
+6.4mm at 1/56
S
1/64
22.5mm
-3.1mm at 1/56
OO
1/76
16.5mm
+2.2mm at 1/100
HO
1/87
16.5mm
+2.2mm at 1/100
TT
1/120
12mm
-2.4mm at 1/100
N
1/160
9mm
-5.4mm at 1/100
Z
1/220
6.5mm
+1.7mm at 1/300

For most scales, the scale ratio and the track gauge combine to create an accurate representation of a Standard Gauge railway. OO is a bit of an oddball where the track is underscale compared to the rolling stock for historical reasons. There are a multitude of other specialty scales, usually for narrow gauge prototypes. An example is NZ120, which is 1/120 on 9mm track, to represent New Zealand's railway network which has a gauge of 1067mm.

Obviously none of these are a perfect match for representing Standard Gauge in common wargaming scales. In 15mm you would require rolling stock with a scale ratio of 1/100 running on a track gauge of about 14.3mm, so it comes down to what compromises you are prepared to make: do you accept something too large, too small, do you go and scratchbuild your own, or do you simply avoid the problem?

I don't know why Battlefront chose to base their 'Battlefield In A Box' railway track on TT, but it seems to have led to an apparently widely-held but incorrect idea that TT is the perfect match for FOW. In reality, neither the track nor the rolling stock are any more accurate in 15mm than HO. As noted before, not all railways have the same gauge: in Russia the gauge is 1520mm, so for Eastern Front terrain the TT track is even more underscale than it is for the vast majority of rail lines in Northwest Europe.

From my perspective, what would be ideal would be a range of 1/100 rolling stock and accompanying 14.3mm track to use for 15mm wargames, with the next best thing being 1/100 rolling stock that sits on HO track, but alas as far as I can tell there is no such thing on the market. As such, wanting to have railway lines in my collection of TY terrain but being too lazy to scratchbuild, I have chosen to run with HO because of its price and availability, and am happy to accept that everything will be slightly too large.

Thursday, November 30, 2017

Team Yankee Day - 25 November

I had a couple of games of Team Yankee with Chris at the club on Saturday, with the main event being 100pts on an 8x6 table. This was the first time we had each brought a full bag of tricks in 15mm.

It had been a mad dash to get ready after work commitments had left me behind schedule on painting a stack of BMPs, and I had also made a late decision to pick up a couple of Academy SU17 kits for air support.

SU17, ready to pretend to be a Frogfoot
PRP-3 observer team
It was also a good chance to try out some of the terrain I had been working on. The EVA-backed railway track was a success: looked okay, solid and stable. The roads not so much - they are light, easily bumped out of place, and don't want to lie flat. Further thought is required for those. We decided to go with a desert setting as we generally have more terrain for that, however in the days leading up to the game I realised that we lacked a suitable 8x6 basecloth. At the last minute I picked up some tan coloured fabric for cheap, and was feeling quite pleased with myself until my wife pointed out that it was actually gold, shiny, and easily crinkled... It didn't look too bad once the rest of the terrain was down, but it wasn't quite right and the smooth surface did nothing to help keep the roads in place.

My Soviet tank battalion list was an attempt to get as wide a variety of kit on the table as possible, to see what things did and test out different aspects of the rules.
T-72 HQ
6 x T-72
6 x T-72
3 x BMP2 scouts
BMP1 Motor Rifle platoon plus Gremlin
2 x Shilka
2 x Gopher
6 x 2S1 and OP
2 x Hind
2 x SU17s (played as SU25s)
Chris ran a tank company from Stripes of:
1 x IPM1 HQ
3 x IPM1
3 x IPM1
1 x M113 Mech platoon
1 x Scout section
2 x M109 ITV
3 x M106 mortar carriers
4 x VADS
2 x Cobra
2 x F16s (played as Harriers)
We played Hasty Attack, with the Soviets attacking. The Americans ended up killing everything expect the Carnations and the SUs, losing the two IPM1 platoons and the Cobras. Notable was a decent infantry scrap for control of the town in the centre of the board, as we were both keen to try the assault rules. Over the course of a few turns, an American assault was driven off, then a Soviet assault was broken up by M113 support, before the Americans came back and managed to clear the area, thereafter using it as a base of fire to pour ATGM fire into the Soviet armour pushing forward on the left flank. Nicely done, and we were pretty happy with how the mechanics worked.

There were quite a few lessons from the game.
  1. 100pts on an 8x6 works really well. There was plenty of space, a good quantity of equipment on the table, no weird rule issues, and things died fast enough to keep the game to two hours. I suspect this might change if either of us went large on infantry, but I think we're pretty happy keeping the focus on the MBT lists.
  2. IPM1s are a nightmare to deal with. That additional point of front armour swings the balance against T-72s solidly in the Americans' favour.
  3. Karen laughs at IPM1s. My SU17s arrived every turn, and their Kh-25 missiles kept me in the game by accounting for the two platoons of tanks. Without them it would have been pretty one-sided.
  4. VADS are nasty. Kill them before attempting to bring your air support anywhere near them. I didn't, and my Hinds never got a shot off. Their range however is limited, and on a table this size they were unable to provide any protection against the SUs, and for big games they really need to be partnered with Chaparrals. 
  5. Just because you can Spearhead, doesn't mean you should. I used it successfully to get my infantry in the buildings in the middle of the board, but their BMP1s were too exposed and were quickly disposed of by a crossfire of 105mm, TOW, and 20mm gunfire. In retrospect, I was too aggressive across the board. I had good concealed positions, and could have happily held those for a few turns, taken the time to try and chip out the AA, and waited for my reserves to come on, before pressing forward.
Knowing what I do now, I think I'd tweak the list in future by putting BMP1s in the Scouts (so that I'm not pushing too far with my high AT assets), with BMP2s and an AGS-17 team for the infantry, increasing the Hinds and Shilkas to four each, and making space for all of this by dropping two T-72s.
The table after deployment
Cobras lurking, shortly before being Gremlined...
The SU17s earning their keep.
Last man standing: the Soviet Commander missed. The US Commander did not.
The end: a table full of burning Soviet AFVs
The second game was a lower key 30pt match, Encounter on a standard 6x4. I didn't get any photos of this one, but it was another enjoyable game. 30pts has a very different dynamic, being focused around small infantry platoons and light armour, and I'd be keen to play more of it.
BMP1 CHQ
BMP1 Motor Rifle platoon plus Gremlin
BMP1 Motor Rifle platoon
4 x BMP2 scouts
3 x 2S1
2 x Hind
From memory, Chris ran a mech company of:
Mech HQ
M113 Mech Platoon
M113 Mech platoon
1 x Scout section
2 x M109 ITV
3 x M106 mortar carriers
4 x VADS
My list was far from optimal. The 2S1s were a waste of space and I would have been far better served spending the points on four Shilkas and an AGS-17 team. The Hinds didn't do much, as there were no valuable targets for their Spiral missiles, but I would probably retain them for future games of this size because they are so iconic, and the 1:100 models are a huge part of the visual attraction of TY. Once again the VADS were dangerous, and they quickly gunned down the BMPs that started on table.

All in all it was an excellent day, and I'm looking forward to the next time we get this game on the table. My next steps, apart from picking up a last couple of things for the Soviets, will be a NATO list, before seeing what happens when 'Fate Of A Nation' is rereleased on the TY platform.

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

New Project - TY Terrain

It's been a quiet winter hobby-wise, with very little to write about. I have, however, recently embarked on making a table of terrain for 15mm Team Yankee.

The parameters for the project are:
  1. Covering an 8x6 table, because to me that looks and feels better for TY above about 50 points.
  2. To be made from scatter terrain that can be packed down for ease of storage and transportation.
  3. Provide sufficient visual clues to be readily identifiable as modern Europe.
  4. Provide a range of logical locations for objectives.
That last two points are key for me. This might sound strange to people who play for the game, but I enjoy games that tell a story. The table plays a key role in this: helping place the events in time and space, and answering the question "what is so important about this particular piece of dirt?" An objective in the middle of a wheat field doesn't make sense to me, but a town, a crossroads, a hill: it's easy to imagine someone having a reason to want to seize or defend them. My aim when setting up a table is to have key points in the objective zones no matter which scenario is being played. That's actually easier on an 8x6 than a 6x4, because I believe the best way to play a lengthwise FOW or TY mission on an 8x6 is as a double width 6x4 rather than adding 2ft of almost entirely wasted depth, so you don't have to plan to be able to play down its length.

Here is the progress so far:
I still haven't decided on what season to set the table in, as that will determine the direction I take with trees and agriculture. I had been hoping for more of an olive green basecloth, but the material is darker than it appeared under the shop lighting. Life, and the never-ending search for the perfect basecloth.

Nor have I settled yet on the built up area. The buildings in the photo are from Plastcraft Games' ColorED range, of which I have two kits still to build. These buildings look nice and are reasonably economical, but the range is limited. The church of Sainte Mère Église is an impressive model, but it looks a bit out of place without three times as many smaller buildings clustered around it, so it may not make the final cut. I'm slightly hampered by the general lack of Streetview in Germany, but there is enough photography on the internet to draw inspiration from, and the look of the Plastcraft buildings seems to be reasonable. I do need a few more, and some more modern pieces to go with them. I also need to decide what I'll build around the small railyard in the bottom left.

The autobahn is made from 3mm EVA foam - at $17/metre from a 1.2m roll from Para Rubber it's cheaper and easier to work with than MDF. I'm currently planning an interchange with the local roads (the white pieces of paper in the bottom right), with those roads to be cut from the same material, and I'm looking at options for modern touches like guard rails and lighting.
The railway line uses standard HO track, with the EVA as backing. With a gauge of 16.5mm, at 1/100 it is slightly overscale for the West German track gauge of 1435mm, however the commonly suggested alternative of TT scale at 12mm would be underscale by a similar amount. HO has the advantage of being cheap and readily available in NZ, whereas it looks like TT has to be bought in from Europe, so it was a simple decision that also opens up options for rolling stock and other accesories.
The plan from here is to finish off the rail sections, then move onto the interchange and the rest of the roading, and I'll post updates as progress is made.

Friday, May 26, 2017

FOW V4 - Nagging Concerns

My V4 experience to date has been quite a journey. From initial caution, through disappointment when the first MW lists were revealed, to wild enthusiasm after playing a couple of games with tank companies, I've now played a few games with a major infantry focus and my opinion has started swinging back again.

To be clear, I still believe V4 is a good game. The rules have on the whole been improved. It's just that there are a number of issues that have cropped up as we've delved deeper that have somewhat dampened my earlier excitement.

The main issue is a general lack of clarity about the rules. In the process of slimming down the rules from just short of 300 pages in the V3 rulebook to only 100 pages, there are important sentences that have been left out. McBeth has written a piece that does a good job of capturing some of the issues with the completeness of the rules. These things don't matter so much for social games, but as soon as we put it into a competitive environment, interpretations will differ and problems will arise. As an example, McBeth and I probably spent about 20 minutes during a recent game trying to work out whether aircraft counted as "on table" for the purposes of Strategic Withdrawal (final answer: yes). We spent another five minutes trying to decide whether an observer team was able to Shoot and Scoot after spotting for a bombardment (final answer: yes). A couple of other questions we had were resolved when we eventually read the next sentence in the paragraph, but they were a minority. 

An additional concern is that while tank engagements tend to be over pretty quickly, the game length increases drastically as soon as infantry are involved. It's not that the game is slowed down by them, but rather games involving infantry seem to be taking more turns to bring to a conclusion than they used to, and this may impact our ability to complete tournament games within set time limits. I think there are a few reasons for this:
  1. Last Stand. The need to get infantry units down to two stands, and formations down to one CHQ, Combat, or Weapons unit, means it takes much longer to win by breaking the opponents army. 
  2. Infantry Assaults. Changes to the line of sight rules mean it's easier to set up a strong defensive position and therefore a lot harder to pull off a successful assault. Instead of one turn of preparation to achieve a pin, and an assault that either blows the defender away or falls over in hail of bad dice, it seems like you now need to take several turns of chipping away with repeat bombardments, followed by possibly two or three moves of successive assaults, in order to fully clear a position. Not unreasonable, but it all takes time.
  3. Both sides losing in timed-out defensive battles. Without the ability to win by clock, the only way a defender can win in a defensive battle is by either being able to clear the enemy out of your half, or by hunting down weapons platoons in the attacker's backcourt to bring them closer to Formation Last Stand. In competitions, a lot will depend on the attacker's attitude: if they reach the point of no longer being able to win the game, will they concede and let the defender have the points, or do they take up positions that prevent the defender from winning, play the clock, and force the defender to risk a counterattack?
There are a few other things I've learned from recent games.
  • Don't take half-tracks, wheeled vehicles or medium+ guns anywhere near any kind of difficult going. The Cross scores are harsh, and you can be sure that if you end up needing to move them, the unit will play no further part in the game.
  • Anti-aircraft units are worthwhile, even though the maths suggests otherwise. In a game with Bede I took a platoon of three Bofors against a Sporadic Hs129, and while they did nothing during the first air raid, costing me a Churchill, they managed to down it the next time it came in. More importantly, even if the dice hadn't lined up the way they did, at least I felt like I was involved in the process and not just helplessly watching my tanks die.  I'll be looking at AA options for all of my lists from now on, at least until we see whether the local meta ends up leaning towards aircraft or not.
  • Keep tanks well away from Panzerfausts. This was always the case in V3, but even more so now, given that they hit with AT 12 against side armour on a simple skill check. No one is driving away from that in one piece.
  • I'm undecided on Night Attack. McBeth used it on me in Rearguard, and while it gave him more of a concealed approach, it robbed him of his Support platoons until dawn broke on my Turn 4. Did it change the outcome of the game? I asked him about it after the game and he thought it was worth it, so probably not.
  • I can't think of a solid justification for Observer teams having unlimited line of sight at night, but it avoids some of the weirdness that crops up in the same situation in Team Yankee. I still struggle with there being no benefit to being Gone To Ground when under a bombardment template.
I did have grand plans to touch up and rebase various armies for V4, but honestly I can't be bothered at the moment. I received a box of more 15mm Soviets for Team Yankee this week, enough to get me to a 75 point list, so I'm going to be focusing on those for the next little while. I'm looking forward to the release of Red Thunder, my initial thinking being that I'd like to pick up some T-64s and then re-purpose my T-72s to start an East German army. But the other thing I've been thinking about for TY, which would take me in a completely different direction to a battalion of T-64s, is to standardise on 30pt games. It would have a very different feel compared to the bigger games. A couple of platoons of BMP-mounted infantry trying to secure a bridge defended by a British Airmobile Company? Getting T-55s on the table without feeling like you have to drop 60 of them? Scorpions and Scimitars having a meaningful role? It sounds to me like smaller games could be fun.

Monday, April 24, 2017

FOW V4-LW Game Review

Let me get this out of the way first: Flames of War Version 4 is an excellent game.

McZermof and I played two games at the club on Saturday. The set-up was 1750pt late war tank companies on an 8x6 table. We were a bit light on terrain, particularly roads, so that's something we'll have to work on for next time. 48 square feet is a lot of real estate to cover, but we managed to arrange it to avoid having large lines of sight.
For the first game, we tried the "Battle Plans" mission selector from the More Missions PDF. I chose a Prepared Attack posture, while McZermof went for Hasty Attack. The die roll to chose the specific mission had me defending in Breakthrough. This made sense: you could imagine that the British were in the process of preparing for a major operation when the Germans threw in a spoiling attack. I quite like the Battle Plans concept, but would need to think through how it would work in a tournament context.

Due to the size of the table, the game broke into three separate actions: a German left hook of three StuGs running into three Comets, which was a matchup the Germans were never likely to win; a right hook of seven StuGs and two Hornisse against five Comets, which were slightly better odds; and a flank march of Sturm Scouts that had to come onto the table in the face of four Stuart Jalopies and three Universal Carriers. The end result was a British victory for the lost of five of their eight Comets, most of the damage being done by an Hs129B3, with the Germans hitting Formation Last Stand at the start of their Turn 5. All up, the game lasted a bit over an hour.
The British Right Flank: Comets afloat in a sea of burning StuGs.
The Killer Blow: The StuG missed, the Typhoon hit, the Germans broke.
For the second game we decided to play Dust Up. This game went much better for the Germans. Their reserves turned up and were able to make a concentrated push for their objectives, while the British reserves were late and had to be committed piecemeal to try and stop them. The Luftwaffe turned up every turn except for the first, and their lone Hs129 single-handedly removed five Comets from the British left flank. It all came down to a single 4+ Unit Last Stand for the Stuart Jalopies, who through speed and determination had managed to get themselves past three StuGs and onto an objective before being reduced to a single tank. They failed, leading to Formation Last Stand for the British at the start of their Turn 7. This game was a bit longer, at about two hours, but still pretty good for a 1750pt game that involved a lot of chat and leafing through the rulebook.
The End of Game 2. Note Stuart Jalopy on the objective in the far distance, about to fail its Unit Last Stand
As mentioned in my previous post, there were three main things I had wanted to learn from the day.
  1. Pace and Space. Light Tank mobility is amazing, particularly on such a large board. Special mention goes to the Stuart Jalopies, whose combination of Light Tank and Spearhead opened up interesting possibilities for deployment in Dust Up. Half-tracked is not as good cross country, but given a decent road network it would come into its own.
  2. Transport. I didn't end up using the halftracks at all. The infantry in fact didn't move much at all, due to me being the defender in both games: they parked themselves on the objectives and sat there. The lack of roads on our table would have limited their advantage anyway.
  3. Air Support. The Hs129 was the MVP of game two, and my Typhoons did pretty well on the occasions that they turned up. While the reduction in AT to 3 for all bombs and rockets means that those weapons are not going to be a huge problem for tanks, cannon-armed aircraft are incredibly potent against medium armour. An immediate change I will be making to this particular list is dropping the Carriers for a pair of Bofors SPs so that I don't feel like such a sitting duck next time around.
To summarise my thoughts from the day, the ruleset is quick and clean, yet are still undeniably Flames of War. Many rules have been stripped back or removed entirely, but it's evident that an awful lot of thought has gone into what has remained. This would be the benefit of having had Team Yankee in the wild for a couple of years prior to V4 being released, in what was effectively a massive open beta of the revised mechanics. No matter how thorough the playtesting process, there is no possible way that V4 could have been as significantly a change from V3 while still being as slick as it is, were it not for the influence of TY.

There were only a few issues that we came across.
  1. Fighter Interception. Under V3, purchasing air support gave you access to both ground-attack aircraft and fighter interception. It appears that under V4 the only fighter interception available is the 25pt purchase in the Early War British and French lists. I have no idea why this would be the case.
  2. Hans-Ulrich Rudel. Not present in this game, but if your opponent happens to bring Rudel along, then all you can do is resign yourself to losing two tanks a turn for the entire game. First impressions, given what I've already noted above regarding cannon-armed aircraft, are that he's probably broken. I cannot understand the logic of making him immortal (Charmed Life, page 43 of Special Rules and Warriors), rather than being given a variation of the 3+ Warrior Save (page 3 of the same book).
  3. Semi-indirect Fire. It took us a few minutes to try and work out what exactly can be rerolled by Semi-indirect Fire when needing 7s or 8s to hit. I'm still not quite sure that I understand how it's meant to work.
And that was it. Two full 1750pt games with a new set of rules resulted in only three quibbles. To reiterate my opening statement, V4 is an excellent game, and I look forward to playing more of it.

Thursday, April 20, 2017

Upcoming V4-LW Game Preview

This coming Saturday I have a game of FOW V4 lined up with McZermof. It's set up as a 1750pt late war game, being played on an 8x6 table. His post about it can be found here. I'll be taking my Comet Squadron for its first ever run, with my list being:
British Armoured Squaron - Nachtjäger
Company HQ, 290 pts
   2 x Comet
Armoured Platoon, 435 pts
   3 x Comet
Armoured Platoon, 435 pts
   3 x Comet
Recce Patrol, 185 pts
   4 x Stuart VI Jalopy
Motor Platoon, 140 pts
Scout Platoon, 95 pts
   3 x Universal Carrier + 1 x PIAT upgrade 
Limited Air Support, 170 pts
   2 x Typhoon
Total Cost: 1750 pts
I am borrowing M5 Stuarts and M3 halftracks from my American collection as I don't have models of their British equivalents, hence the difference in colours.  If the list is fun then I'll look to get the miniatures to do it properly.  I made up some removable commanders and .50cals to temporarily turn the Stuarts into turretless Jalopies.
Apart from getting a game in with a friend who is always great fun to play, there are a few other specific things I'm hoping to get from the game that have influenced my list build.
  1. Pace and Space. First impressions are that V4 looks like it promotes manoeuvre, so we want to put that to the test by putting quite small lists onto a table twice the size that they'd usually be found on. All of my vehicles have either Light Tank or Half-track mobility, so if the game has been built to favour movement then this is a list that should be able to exploit that.
  2. Transport. Under V3, motorised transport was only really of use on tables bigger than 6x4, and even then were usually more of a liability. Infantry have been given a significant speed boost in V4, but also now have a better save while mounted. It's going to be interesting to see how these two factors change the value of transport.
  3. Air Support. V4 is notable for the similarity of its rules to Team Yankee, and in that latter system failure to field air defence will cost you dearly. While nothing in V4 compares in any way to the firepower of the AGM-65 in TY, both of us are bringing cannon-armed ground attack aircraft to the table, and neither of us have any anti-aircraft units. Hopefully this will indicate whether fielding AA is going to be important in this system.
I'll post again after the game with some photos and thoughts.

Friday, March 31, 2017

Battlefront Mi-24 Hind

I had intended to do a build review of the Battlefront Hind, but there are lots of reviews and how tos out there so there's not really any point. To summarise my impressions of the kit, the model on the whole is pretty good. It goes together nicely, looks like a Hind, and is pretty impressive on the table. The join between the two fuselage halves follows the canopy framing rather than just running straight through the middle of the front windows, which shows someone put some thought into how it goes together. It hints at the characteristic twist in the Hind's fuselage without actually capturing it - undecided about this but it is probably a good decision for a game piece in this scale.
I was worried about the main rotors breaking, given their 170mm diameter, but there have been no problems so far. The blades come in three pieces, with a nicely detailed hub and three blades cast as one large piece, and two individual blades to attach and make up the five. Poly cement has done a good job of welding the blades together, but I used superglue for the mast as I didn't want to risk softening it. So far everything is holding together nicely.
As far as problems go, the tail rotor appears to have been cast backwards: on the original it rotates clockwise, but on the BF model it is set up for rotation in the opposite direction.
One of the red star decals delaminated slightly as I applied it - not a tear as the transfer was still intact, but part of the red printing seemed to come off. I was able to push it back into the right place with a brush and don't expect any further problems with them now the model is vanished.

The decals for the tail boom have misspelt  the warning "ONACHO" as "ONAOHO", and the decal for the starboard side has the lettering reversed. I have ended up painting them on by hand.
On the table, they are large beasts. It is difficult maintaining a 6" command distance without the visual distraction of having rotors overlapping. If I were to expand to a unit of four, I would vary the height of the flight stands for variety, with the added bonus being that they will be able to maintain command distance without looking ridiculous. In theory it would be possible to put a couple in line abreast and up to 16" apart, however while they would be In Command, there are a number of rules that have a 6" range, looking particularly at Good Spirits, Movement Orders and Replacing Leaders, so these won't apply even though you are In Command. I note that the equivalent rules in V4 refer to teams being In Command, rather than within 6", so would expect TY to be updated to match at some point. For the meantime, I'm happy with my two, and I'm looking forward to hunting more Abrams with them in the near future.

Monday, March 27, 2017

Club Day - Team Yankee and V4-MW

On Saturday I was at the club for the first time this year, having arranged with Chris to give Team Yankee a go. Having agreed on 55pt lists, I turned up with 11 T-72s and two Hinds, while Chris had six M1A1s and two Cobras, very nicely painted for Desert Storm.

We rolled for a mission, coming up with Counterattack. When I deployed my first platoon as the defender, we laughed and immediately switched to Dust Up instead. The issue was the distance between the two deployment zones, placing us 8" apart at the start of turn one, and that kind of standup short range slugfest was not what we wanted from the game.

With each of us setting up with just a platoon on the table, Chris did everything right: taking up concealed positions and getting off the first shot. He was let down by some awful dice that left two tanks dead on each side - no big problem for the Soviets but catastrophic for the Americans. They passed their Formation Last Stand, and second platoon of Abrams came on from reserve. The same thing occurred: the Americans took up good positions and fired first, but couldn't survive poor dice.
We ignored a failed formation last stand for the Americans and played on in order to get the helicopters onto the table and give them a run. The Cobras tried a few times to shoot down the Hinds with their Miniguns, but fell short on 5+ Firepower tests. With the second T-72 company arriving from reserve, it was only a matter of time before the last two M1A1s succumbed to weight of firepower.
The game was over in less than an hour, so we reset for a No Retreat with the Soviets attacking. Chris swapped one M1A1 for a pair of F16s. With the Americans having just three M1A1s available until their reserves arrived, I pressed forward, set up a gunline with one company along the ridge in the middle, and swung the second company around to the right and towards the front objective.
Chris got his Cobras on as reserves, and once again they tangled with the Hinds to no effect. I lost two T-72s from the centre company, but the remaining three plus the Hinds killed one Abrams, putting the platoon into poor spirits. The survivor stuck around, but the Hinds switched target and Spiralled the company commander, leading to an auto-fail of American formation morale on the start of their turn three due to having no units in Good Spirits on the table.

Once again we played on, and the game turned quicker than I believed possible. The survivor from the first M1A1 platoon was able to move into a position to contest the objective, the second M1A1 platoon came on from reserve, and the F16s decided to arrive two turns in a row. By the end of that second turn of air support, all of my tanks had been destroyed.
Reflecting on the games, the Americans struggled with the fragility of their two-tank platoons and their vulnerability to a single bad dice roll. The gameplay was fast and brutal, and it looked good. Apart from our issues with the Counterattack mission, there weren't any moments where we thought "this doesn't feel right". However, we believe it would play better with more space for manoeuvre, and to this end, we have agreed that our next game will be 75pts on an 8x6. The arrival of the American jets was a game-changer, and my future Soviet builds will have to include a decent amount of AAA. My plan at the moment is to extend the T-72 companies from five to six tanks each, keep the Hinds and add pairs of Shilkas and Gophers, and a BMP-2 scout platoon. It could feel sparse in a table that big, but that's more a function of the lists we are using, given the number of T-55s or Leopard 1s that could fit into 75pts.

With two games finished before lunch, I grabbed my 8th Army and Afrika Korps armies, and we ran through a game of FOW V4. Sorting through the collection, we came to 77pts each with the British having a formation each of Crusaders and Grants, plus a platoon of Humbers totalling 24 vehicles, facing off against a 14 vehicle mix of Panzer IIs, IIIs, IVs, and SdKfz 222s. Under V3 these forces would have totalled 1515pts and 1365pts respectively. I took the Germans, and we set up for Encounter.

Chris ran the British force exceptionally well. Cribbing an extra 8" headstart for his first Crusader platoon using Spearhead (which I had previously dismissed as all but useless), he hit my five-strong Panzer III platoon with five Grants to the front, coordinated with what seemed like a never-ending stream of Crusaders using their pace to turn into my flank. My positioning was never quite right, and I lost too many shots trying to fix it with failed Blitz Move orders. The Panzer IVs finally came in from reserve on turn five but by then it was too late, and by the end of the next turn I was overrun.

The game played well. It went quickly and produced no weird results. 75pts on a 6x4 felt reasonable - it could maybe do to be slightly fewer points but I certainly wouldn't want to go any higher, given the number of tanks the British can field.

I was left thinking that for this particular match-up the German list needed a platoon of PaK38s, either in the Formation Support slot or as part of a small Afrika Rifle Company. Crusaders are going to struggle to take an objective held by three PaK38s, creating a problem for the British: the Crusaders need to get into the flanks of the Panzers in order to do any damage, but won't be able to without being drawn onto the PaK38s, which they are going to struggle to kill. It's clear that while the rules have been streamlined, and the first release of lists brutally pared back to their most basic core, the mid-war game still poses interesting challenges.

All in all, it was an excellent day of gaming. My next immediate project is finishing my LW British armour for a game with McZermof, hopefully in a month's time.

Monday, March 13, 2017

FOW V4-EW/LW - First Impressions

My copy of the Flames of War V4 EW/LW rules arrived on Friday, and while we haven't put it on the table yet, my general first impression is favourable. Here are a few observations from reading it through, many of which are good things.
  • You have greater freedom than ever to operate out of command, but it has the potential to go horribly wrong once you start getting shot at. If you split a platoon you are probably asking to lose it.
  • While the consequences of failure are less significant than they used to be, tanks are much less likely to be able to successfully move through difficult going. Assaulting into woods on a 3+ cross check is going to be a very different proposition to doing it under the old 2+ bogging check.
  • Weapons platoons are more important now than they have been since Support/Combat platoon ratios were removed in V2. Since Support platoons don't contribute towards Formation Last Stand, stacking a list with divisional support is going to make it fragile. It's going to take a bit of gametime to work out what impact this will have on Early War tank lists at the 1000pt level usually played here, as (with the exception of the Germans) they generally don't have any Weapons platoons available to them.
  • Another potential impact on small games: I usually run pairs of anti-tank guns, but this doesn't seem sensible under V4 as the platoon will be testing as soon as one is lost.
  • Mortars are going to become more popular due to their low price, increase in FP, and being Weapons Platoons. This is despite losing their reroll on the first attempt to range in. Nebelwerfers have lost their primary advantage of not suffering a To Hit penalty for failing to range in on their first attempt.
  • Significant changes to the rules for flamethrowers to bring them into line with normal shooting. They now have a normal roll to hit rather than skill checks to hit. The addition of Breakthrough Gun to their statline means that teams hit by flamethrowers now get rerolled successful saves instead of being automatically destroyed. Balancing this, they no longer appear to be single use weapons, and there is no longer a restriction on movement prior to shooting.
  • Curious that going to ground does not improve survivability against artillery. The only difference between being caught moving in the open, and being dug in, concealed and gone to ground, is the Firepower roll. Combined with rerolling made saves under repeat bombardments, it looks like a deliberate attempt to make infantry easier to dig out, and is a big change from the previous philosophy of artillery being largely ineffective against entrenched infantry. 
  • I note that Spearhead doesn't stack like it does in TY: the move cannot be made if the Spearhead unit is placed outside of its normal deployment area using the Spearhead rule. The rule as a whole is very restrictive, and in most missions it is either not able to be used due to the layout of deployment and objective areas, or is only useful for cribbing a few extra inches of deployment area. Reconnaissance doesn't seem to be as important in this game as it was in previous editions.
  • Struggling to get my head around the logic of the air support rules. Your flight has a number of planes that is determined by the level of air support you purchased, but the number of planes has no impact on the effectiveness of the air strike. The only benefit of a more expensive level of air support appears to be that it may last a bit longer in the face of anti-aircraft fire. 
  • Staying with the topic of air support, Typhoon rockets used to have AT 6 FP 3+, which has now been mapped to AT 3 FP 3+. This feels a bit light given their reputation, and is probably not at a level where I'd feel the need to bring Wirbelwinds to the table.
On the whole it feels like a good upgrade, and I'm looking forward to getting the chance to try it out.

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Postscript to Thoughts on the Afrika Korps Spoiler

Less than 12 hours after my previous post about the upcoming Afrika Korps book, WWPD posted a spoiler of its companion, Desert Rats. This was one of the three missing pieces of context that I felt made judging AK difficult, with the other two being design notes, so that we could have insight into Battlefront's intended scope for the book, and an understanding of how the roadmap of future releases is likely to play out.

Like AK, Desert Rats is notable for what is missing: Shermans, Deacons, portees, 2pdr anti-tank guns, Priests, and variety in armoured car choices. It too has a dubious inclusion in the form of the 17/25pdr anti-tank gun. My guess is that the Tiger was included in AK because Tiger, and the 17/25pdr then had to be added to try and restore game balance. But once you subtract those anachronisms, in my opinion the two books are actually a very good representation of generic forces from British and German armoured divisions in July 1942.

Seeing what is in Desert Rats, the thinking behind AK, and mid-war in general, has started to become clear. It's now obvious that V4 is a total reboot of the system as Team Yankee WW2, targeted at those who have never played FOW, because with the completion of the V3 lists for the entire war there is now little money in existing customers. The mid-war models will all be sold as platoon boxed sets, and the scope of each list will be set by production capacity and release schedules for those boxes.

In a world where V1 to V3 didn't exist, V4 would be huge. A (presumably) tight set of fast-play rules that (hopefully) look and feel like a WW2 game, nice miniatures conveniently packaged, the promise of expansion into other nations and list types, an arms race between gamers as new units were purchased. But that those earlier versions have been and gone, that experience is exactly what playing FOW was like in its heyday, and the people most likely to be attracted by WW2 gaming in 15mm already have been there, done that, and many of them have drifted away. Since they have multiple armies across multiple eras sitting in boxes, they might try a game or two of V4 out of curiosity, but they won't stick with it because the lack of variety in the initial releases. It will be a couple of years before the system is mature enough to run a native V4 tournament, and by the time the game gets to that point those veteran players may not be able to be enticed back.

So where will the target audience, these new players that V4 is going to attract, come from? You can't accidentally find FOW in New Zealand any more. I believe there are only three brick-and-mortar retailers of FOW left in the country, and the nearest of those is a seven hour drive from my hometown, which just happens to be the capital and third-largest city. Without the product having a ground presence, people will only find out about the game by seeing it played, either at conventions or clubs, and that requires the aforementioned veterans to be playing it. There may be a small amount of growth from second generation players who have access to their dad's old miniatures, who will try it and may end up getting some of their friends interested, but that's it. But in all honesty, I can only see further decline for FOW in New Zealand.

The unknown in all of this is the EW/LW conversion, with the questions being how it plays, how the V3 lists balance out under the new rules, and how long it will be before those eras are remade in mid-war's image? And most importantly, will it be enough to at least keep people playing the game while MW sorts itself out?

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

First Thoughts on WWPD's Afrika Korps Spoiler

WWPD has posted a preview of the contents of the new Afrika Korps book for FOW V4. To be honest, my feeling when reading the article was one of disappointment, and my initial reaction was a thought that I should cancel my pre-order of the new mid-war books. After further reflection, I'm still buying the books, but the disappointment remains.

I have played Flames of War since stumbling upon the public beta in 2001, and the Western Desert Campaign has always been my primary interest. I have seen the mid-war lists progress from the barebones versions in the 1st edition rulebook, through the Desert Rats/Desert Fox/Avanti Savoia supplements, to the Afrika compilation. I skipped over the release of North Africa until it was converted to V3 and re-released on FOW Digital last year. With each iteration the lists have increased in depth, flavour and historicity. In my opinion the lists in North Africa are very good: the splitting of the period into separate theatres guides themed list-building, and they give you a range of options for representing the unique units of the setting.

Based on the preview, it appears that Afrika Korps dispenses with all of that development. It very much feels like the first Team Yankee lists: cut back to bare basics, with precious few opportunities for variation, for players to take different paths to achieve the same outcome, likely leading to all armies created from it being almost entirely in common with one another. Gone are the odd units that made the theatre distinctive: the Dianas, the Bisons, the ex-Soviet 7.62cm guns, the reuse of captured British equipment. There are no FJ, no Pioniere, no Aufklärungen. And to cap it all off the book includes Tigers, completely dashing my hopes that the new books would give 1942 its moment in the spotlight.

I presume the reasoning behind sending screenshots of an upcoming book to a blog is to generate discussion and "hype" for the new product. Unfortunately for the moment the spoiler is out without any design notes being posted by Battlefront, without any information about the opposing Desert Rats book to provide a point of reference, and without any understanding of the roadmap to how additional lists are going to be released in future. This prevents the book from being seen in any kind of context, and results in the book being judged against customers' expectations rather than the scope and purpose that Battlefront had established for it. Those expectations have been established by the late-war books, and Battlefront shouldn't be surprised that this lack of a broader context has resulted in customers becoming upset about the mid-war lists being stripped back.

If I were to guess at the path that mid-war will take from here, additional lists will be released to cover the options missing from Afrika Korps, very much in the pattern of the Afgantsy and Panzertruppen expansions for Team Yankee.  This staged release is a let-down from the comprehensive V3 books that the community has become used to, especially so given that the NZ$18 price tag for a single one those TY lists is half the price of a LW compilation of two dozen lists. Looking further into the future, once a number of books and digital briefings have been out in the wild for a year or two, the familiar pattern from earlier editions will repeat as the lists are once again revised and combined into a larger compilation. This is unfortunate given that many veteran players will have purchased the same MW lists five times over, with Afrika Korps/Desert Rats being iteration number six, all in the 14 years since FOW was first published.

So, what does it mean for me? I'm definitely going to give it a chance, but based on my first impressions of a spoiler of the first two books of an as-yet unreleased new edition, my dream that V4 would bring about a local FOW renaissance lies in tatters.