Remember December

On Saturday we had the club's annual Remember December event. This year it was Team Yankee, based on a 45pt Firestorm Red Thunder campaign. I ran Afgantsy, which was a change of plan from my original East German intentions.

Air Assault Battalion - Red Thunder

Battalion HQ - 1 x AK-74 team

Air Assault Company - Minimum size plus AGS-17 and AT-4 Spigot

Air Assault Company - Minimum size plus SA-14 Gremlin and AT-4 Spigot

Hind Assault Helicopter Company - 2 x Hind

Hind Assault Helicopter Company - 2 x Hind

T-64 Tank Platoon - 3 x T-64

Shilka Platoon - 2 x Shilka

BMP-1 Recon Platoon - 3 x BMP-1 Scout

The thinking here was that the infantry is really good, with Spigots and plenty of RPGs for dealing with light armour spam, T-64s are really good, the Shilkas are needed to protect the T-64s, and the Hinds are a potential game-winner. On the whole, I thought it was a pretty decent list.

The List

I won't subject you to a blow-by-blow account of the day, but it didn't go well for me. I was run over by LAVs in a Free For All in game one, had to attack Dutch YPRs and Leo 2s in a failed Counterattack in game two, and was unable to hold off a very well-executed attack by West German Marders and Leo 2s in a No Retreat for game three.

The Afgantsy come under fire from a Spectre

I still think the list was good. In the first game I struggled with rallying the infantry (on 2s and 3s), which crippled my AT-4s, and the rest of my infantry had too short a range to avoid being shot to pieces by the LAVs. 

In the second game I failed to concentrate my attack on one objective. The Dutch didn’t have huge numbers on the board, and their reserves were coming on from miles away, so I should have been able to use my infantry to overrun the objective while my armour watched their back. 

The third game was the one my list was designed to play, but my opponent exploited a flaw in my deployment and slipped a platoon each of Leopards and Panzergrenadiers down the flank and onto the back objective. I was annoyed at my stupidity, as this was absolutely a game that I should have won, but on reflection it showed exactly what is so good about 45pts on a 6x4: you simply couldn't pull that kind of attack off against the density of units that you get at 100pts.

The top Warsaw Pact list was ten T-64s, which I did not expect. The first few times I played TY, helicopters dominated tanks because we didn't have any air defence units. Here, it was a brilliant play to the meta: 45pt red-vs-blue games, and NATO helicopters are expensive. And it paid off, with only one NATO list having a pair of Cobras.

In terms of list breakdown, we had a really good variety:

• 1 x Afgantsy battalion
• 2 x T-64 battalions
• 1 x BMP-2 battalion
• 1 x Soviet T-72 battalion
• 1 x Polish T-72M battalion
• 1 x West German Leopard 2 company
• 1 x West German Marder company
• 1 x Dutch YPR company
• 1 x Marine M60 company
• 1 x Marine LAV company
• 1 x British Mech company (the competition winner)

No M1s or Leopard 1s. No French, Canadians, Australians, East Germans, or Czechs. No strike aircraft.

The Firestorm format worked really well, and it's something that I hope we will use again for both TY and FOW. A huge thanks to Pelarel from The Regiment for pulling it together. A possible refinement might be giving the sides a choice about what posture each of their lists should take, rather than attack/defence being decided by random draw. The aim would be to get a bit more teamwork going into building lists, planning the strategic element, and picking matchups.

Next week: I look ahead to summer painting plans. I have some reflection I need to do about where to next with TY, but that will be a post for later in the summer.