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.

List for Remember December

This week I’m sharing the list I’m planning on taking to Remember December, an upcoming 45pt Team Yankee day at the club. I have decided to take a T-72M battalion from Volksarmee, as a change from the Soviet lists I've been running to date, and as a stepping stone towards running them as Czechs.

I couldn't quite see the reason for the demand on the internet for adding other Warsaw Pact nations to the game, as any new lists were still going to be based around T-72s, T-55s, and BMPs. However, now that they are on their way, the Czechs and Poles are welcome as they provide variety in ratings, and add DANAs and OT-64s to the range of models.

One disappointment with the Volksarmee lists is that you cannot take T-72s with BTRs without running multiple formations, and from the spoilers it looks like the Czech lists will be the same: if you want BTRs or OT-64s, you are limited to T-55s.

Back to Remember December. The basis of this East German list is T-72Ms, backed up by all the BRDMs, and a platoon of infantry in BMP1s. I expect the Czech lists will become available in the next week or so, so I'll have a decision to make then: stay with the Confident Trained East Germans, or see how many points are freed up by moving to Reluctant Trained Czechs, then finding things to fill the gap.

T-72M Tank Battalion - Volksarmee

Battalion HQ - 1 x T-72M

T-72M Company - 4 x T-72M

T-72M Company - 4 x T-72M

BMP1 Motor Rifle Company - Minimum size plus AGS-17 and SA-14 Gremlin

BRDM-2 Scout Platoon - 4 x BRDM-2

SA-9 Gaskin Platoon - 4 x SA-9 Gaskin

Spandrel Platoon - 3 x Spandrel

Hind Helicopter Company - 2 x Hind

Most of the list is painted and ready to go, just needing to paint a platoon of East German infantry, and wait for a box of Gaskins to arrive in the post.

I've arranged to take the list for a run next weekend, so my next post will be a review of how it performed.

Thoughts on "Remember December"

The club Flames of War event on Saturday was an enjoyable day. Full results can be found here, so I'll just focus on a couple of thoughts coming out of it.

I lost all my games, and only managed to avoid the wooden spoon thanks to my son winning his final game, relegating his opponent to last place in the process. It's fair to say that the Motor Company proved difficult to use. At 1000pts and having so many points tied up in the tanks, and with the small infantry platoons having a lot of firepower that is not available if you move, I didn't feel like I had many options to win as the attacker. And I ended up having to attack in all three games. I needed three infantry platoons, I needed the light mortars for an extra stand, I needed more carriers to give that mobile firepower, and I needed medium mortars for smoke and to give me another means of getting a pin. Basically, I needed a full Rifle Company in order to pull off what I was trying to do with a small Motor Company, and that directly stemmed from my decision to take the Shermans at the expense of all of those other things that I needed. But would I drop them in order to retool the list? Probably not.

One particularly good outcome of the day was Simon trialling a scoring system that completely abandons the official Battlefront victory point scheme based on broken platoons. It's a process that began back in the days of Version 1, by adding +2 points for a win to try and spread the table and reward winning a bit more. I don't know whether that practice continued and evolved through the years or if umpires generally reverted to using the official system, but at ValleyCon this year the rankings were determined by wins, with the VPs only acting as a tie breaker. Simon has now taken that to the next logical step, where it is the points value of the broken platoons that matters. The argument against this has always been the maths involved, but honestly it wasn't that hard to go "I lost 155 + 155 + 95 = 405 points". Still a little bit of tweaking to do, but the concept is good and the day was a good opportunity for it to be tested. A scheme like this pushes the definition of a "competitive army" far beyond just something that is able to win 6-1, and I fully support the change.