D'Acheville

It's been a while since my last game, what with the house move and all. In the absense of a game I have been steadily tweaking, rewriting and rewording the rules including cutting out some of the overwritten, overworked and overcomplicated stuff.

I plumped for what is probably my favorite 12" square terrain board for a skirmish as it has a lot of stuff around the outside compared to some of the other tiles where the visibility decreases towards the middle. (I may move away from terrain boards in the future, or incorporate something more flexible (see MHLuther's Flickr page, who uses a coloured groundcloth and chalked detail and texture as well as lots of scenery)).

The idea behind this game was an unequal struggle between a small but plucky British infantry outpost with a bit of AT & field gunnery defending a village from a German armoured & motorised recce group which has almost certainly overstretched its lead on the main body. The German CO had been tasked with a headlong advance into the village and with that in mind, the armoured car spearhead of SdKfz 222s and 231s hoped to punch through the middle of the Brits, circle about and attack from behind if at all possible while the light tank section and schutzen platoon advanced by stages across the fields.

The first casualty was the commander of the section of 231s. The remainder sidled into the adjacent wood and was gradually eroded away. The 222s fared no better in the crossfire of an 18 pounder and a couple of 25mm AT guns in the narrow lanes, the only survivor managing to skulk back to the laagered transport only with the intervention of the German CO.

Casualties among the Panzer 1s and German Schutzen miraculously had no effect on their morale throughout the battle, both units managing to advance across the cornfields, into the lane beyond and wheel left, driving the thinly stretched Brits out of the rhodedendron slopes at the foot of French House Hill.

However, the heretofore unengaged British right flank now charged out from Windmill Wood with a surprise flank attack. By the time the German infantry had crashed into the hedgerows, bayonets fixed, there were simply insufficient men to continue the attack, in spite of surprisingly good morale.

With only a few men and a couple of light tanks remaining, the German reconnaisance force limped away...

I suspected there were insufficient numbers for a German attack so I think I would like to replay the game, maybe with an extra platoon of German infantry or perhaps another German tank squad, to compare outcomes.

Rising Ground

Time for a bigger game, in a corner of the house where I can fit in a 3,600m square set of boards. I knocked up an angled bit of terrain for the NorthEast corner of the scenario so it fitted around some existing bookcases. It is my first game in the bookcase niche and although it is out of the way of the kids it is proving a bit hard on the back & knees.

The windmill plateau, river meander and hamlet terrain boards are all resting on thick timbers and so are about 200m higher than the village, the North Bridge and the angled board (hence the scenario name) creating a general slope up in the direction the Germans need to advance. I guess this only has an effect visually on the game except for any reverse slope line-of-sight problems it may create.

There are a whole load of reinforcements available for both combatants, each unit being checked for arrival by dice roll. For the Germans this includes bridge laying vehicles, one or two platoons of motorised infantry or schutzen, various abteilungen of mostly light tanks and for a laugh, a StuGIII troop. Allies have some armoured car squadrons, carrier platoons and understrength light tank units and will also be rolling to check if demolition charges have been wired up and the results of detonation. The game will probably end if both bridges are destroyed and German progress evaluated at this point.

 As the Schutzen debusses in a somewhat autumnal-looking wood, their 8-wheelers take a bit of a pasting as they approach the North Bridge.

In the centre, panzers sweep down the valley like a majestic herd of wildebeest. (I notice in the photo that two of the Panzer IIs have jammed guns so perhaps there was more dissent in the Ruhr munitions factories that we know of).

HQ units lurk and/or skulk behind a wood (must get some more green lichen!) and some SdKfz 231s crash through the bracken in the foreground. The artillery spotter and wireless operator who have just leapt from their Kubelwagen will in due course have a couple of infantry figures added to the unflocked half of the base just so that it has a combat capability.

A Carrier Platoon roars through the hamlet and an A13 squadron presses on towards the river. The A10 CS tanks need some shadow washes due to the application of matt varnish before the dry brushed highlights were completely dry and the A13s sport my teenage modellers all over dark green without any highlights whatsoever. Heinous crime!

As the Germans overrun the Belgian side of the river the plucky Brits do their best with Boys AT rifles, MkVIB light tanks & Scout Cars.

(The somewhat naff hardware in this phase of World War Two is, I reckon,  one of the best aspects of gaming this period).

The struggle for the North Bridge. (If I get more organised, only Panzer III & IV unit COs and HQ tanks will have the turret type with stowage bin at the rear, just for visual differentiation. Other tank type COs will get detailing such as swastika flags draped over hull superstructure although there is no bias if you determine randomly whether a tank destroyed is the CO or not).

Cycle-mounted infantry still uncommitted in reserve in the dusty cornfields.

I like to imagine the perfume of lavender rising up from the tracks of the A13s as they link up with the infantry by the river.

 

Due to the German advance arriving piecemeal, the Allies manage to blow the bridges & force a wide detour.

It is possible that the bulk of both the Allied & German forces should have been available from the outset of the game as the steady trickle of firepower for the Germans was insufficient to maintain momentum. A few lucky or unlucky dice rolls regarding arrival of reinforcements and the power balance was irrevocably upset. Arguably this could have happened in the real campaign if the Allies had been more pro-active and if the Germans had been slightly less fortunate with traffic congestion.

Painting Hundreds of Tyres

Better get something down in print for June while I can!

Haven't had a game but decided to crack on with painting some transport, which doesn't require anything more complicated than 2 tone green for anything British I decide to do plus wash and highlights.

FCM 36 in an old game

I used to use a 000 brush and matt black Humbrol which gave a good thick coat of paint where tyres rested on the somewhat abrasive Polyfilla terrain but  I discovered a drawing pen in WH Smith's. Made by Pilot, it has a 1mm pigment ink fibre tip which does the job and is much more controllable. I originally sourced it to do some fine camouflage outlines on certain French tanks, well, specifically the Char 2C and FCM 36. (I did, in fact, go on to paint thin yellow lines on the D2 camouflage out of neccesity and they look ok except that this painting batch has not had a shadow wash).

Rules Tweak: Turn Sequence

I am quite happy using alternate turns (I fire & move; you fire & move) as it allows stationary elements to get the first shot on advancing units and precludes elements firing at the end of whatever charge move the unit may possess. However, I gather this method is looked upon as being old-fashioned, unrealistic and/or (lawks!), clunky, so I decided to see if I could make any system improvements.

I made some notes and had a couple of goes at drawing up timelines for the complete turn to see if I could break it down into parcels of different activities which could be allocated certain portions on the timeline.

I concluded that high speed factor or stationary weapons could pretty much pick the optimal moment for firing, whereas lower speed factor guns (in single man or low traverse speed turrets) should perhaps be restricted by having to be discharged in the middle of the Action Phase, in other words, neither at the start of the phase when targets could be prevented from moving at all, nor at the end when advancing enemy may have reduced the range.

I noticed that all the movement parts of the turn could be pulled together into the middle of the turn, which

was something I had thought about several months ago, whereby the fire and movement phases alternately overlap. The actual order of movement of elements may be determined by speed, for instance, FT17s committing their movement before SdKfz 232s due to their much slower speed

Similarly, I am working on integrating morale & comms phases of the turn into the schematic and some sort of 'speed factor' for main (perhaps all) armaments. This will take into account such factors as the manpower in turrets (very detrimental for many French & Belgian tanks), electric gun traverse, etc. and may be result in penalties for one-man turrets or restricting them, even if stationary, to only one shot per turn.

I think I need another playtest soon...

Rules Tweak: Operational Radii for Radio-Equipped Units

I have been thinking about tightening up the communications rules for a while as it was a bit of a free-for-all, especially in the higher-ups, not that it seemed to affect play mind you.

Looked up one of my references on the web French Radios & found that those French Platoon COs that actually had radios only had a range of 800m with the ER40. British & German platoon COs had far superior hardware but I decided to peg it at 1,000m for comms with all infantry company COs.

As regards AFVs it was implied that if a tank had a radio it would have a range of a few kilometres but I could not find anything concrete. Bearing in mind the reliablity of valve sets in jolting vehicles and the vagaries of atmospherics and so on I decided to bring them in line, to some extent, with foot troops.

For the higher echelons & forward observers I cut them some slack giving them a 2,000m range. Combined with some customised lists of which AFVs & units were radio-equipped, these amendments should bring a little more realism in an important area.

All a bit arbitrary but until someone writes a book about it that I can afford or a better website pops up I will, perhaps, have to settle for playability over realism.

It's only a game after all!!

Moulin Bruges: an infantry playtest

After drawing up the Suppressing Fire rules for vollies of small arms fire and rewriting those for Morale, it was time for playtesting.

I decided to go for broke and have a purely infantry engagement, no armoured cars, even, let alone tanks. I am not sure how 'realistic' this scenario would be without the usual swarms of armour dominating the show but I just wanted to give the new rules a sound thrashing out. In the event, if the Germans had but a single Kfz 13 they would probably have thrashed their opponents.

Due to some ongoing DIY upheavals and unavailability of dining room tables, a short range infantry skirmish on a 12"x12" board was ideal. A board was installed with a small farmstead and windmill on a hill with a sprinkling of woods and low 'soft-cover-only' hedges bordering fields.

Basically there was one British & one Belgian platoon holding a farmstead on high ground. They had 2 Bren Carriers for flank duty and a Vickers HMG team and that was it for them. The Germans had 4 platoons plus 2 MG42, 1 80mm mortar and 1 75mm IG. Perhaps not a very realistic mix but after all I just wanted to see how infantry battles worked themselves out.

Due to the game's small size it was easy to put it on top of a cupboard out of reach from curious little hands so I could do a few moves & come back to it later or next day. There were a number of occaisions I felt like I could have ended the game when it looked a bit hopeless for one side or another but I couldn't help but carry on to see what would happen.

Final Positions

Several times the German left flank was forced to test morale but each time they held firm; by comparison their platoon in the top left of the final position view stalled with a very low score & couldn't be persuaded to leave the relative safety of that wood.

How these situations came about (which is a feature of the mechanics of my morale rules) is that if a unit has low morale (for example, wavering assault, or desperately outnumbered town defence, etc) and yet it still manages to keep its head, the unit's morale level is boosted, affecting future tests. Thus the assaulting Schutzen dipped as low as 39% but by 'keeping going' ended up around 70% and the hapless bunch in the wood had a series of wobbly moments ending up at 6% thus could not be reused without retesting without probably routing.

As for the group volley rules (resembling some more often used in Pike & Shot or Napoleonics games I used to see as a teenager) whereby you fire 12 rifle groups and 4 MGs at an opposing unit & the resultant casualties calculated in one dice roll, well, the highest number of such firing groups I had at any one time was five, so although I think the rules would work I just don't think they will be used that much.

Next, I suspect I will play a regular sized game with all branches of land armies letting rip...

Rules Tweak: Morale Redesign

I had always wanted to streamline my morale rules.

In an online conversation with 'Za Rodinu' on the WW2Talk Forum, he mentioned some morale related percentage figures for the Spearhead rules that he uses.

Usually when one tests a unit one has to work out the unit strength & its losses then adjust for a multiplicity of criteria, some of which will always apply (eg: 'orders require an advance' or 'elite unit') and then consult a chart to determine the units actions. Its always nice to use the same dice rolling method for every aspect of a game anyway, so a bit of a rewrite was called for.

I wanted each unit to have a variable morale level which would fluctuate throughout a game. The confidence of the unit would be decreased (or increased, I suppose) initially by its troop quality and later by its casualties, combat history and enforced withdrawals but may equally be fortifed, in real engagements, by its perseverance in the face of adversity (in game terms, by getting lucky dice rolls in its morale tests). For solo games, the Morale Level of the unit could be displayed nearby on a numbered token making record-keeping unneccesary (or noted down elsewhere in multiplayer games). The small amount of record-keeping would greatly offset the time normally spent bean counting.

However, try as I might, mulling over formulae and sketch graphs once more, I could not arrive at a mathematical model which suited my requirements. Therfore using the Paint program I drew up a graphical representation of all of the morale results so that by reading along the Morale Level axis and up the Morale Dice Roll axis, the intersection gives you the troop reaction.

Playtesting has proved that this is a workable tool...

Rules Tweak: Small Arms Group Fire Rule

With an ever increasing number of foot units (although it is unlikely I will ever have enough compared to my total AFV strength) I decided to devise a method of resolving infantry combat en masse.

I had come across this sort of thing many years ago at the wargaming club in Cornwall when I had a go with a 15mm English Civil War game. I have no idea what rules they were using & I am sure it is a fairly common game mechanic where one has a block of troops attacking another block of troops at essentially the same range throughout.

HMGs are excluded from the method (which I originally called 'Volley Fire') because of their difference in effectiveness both in terms of range & hitting power. Rifle Groups & LMGs (Bren, Hotchkiss, MG34) differ only very slightly in my rules against unarmoured targets so these were all made identical at very little cost to any unique characteristics of the weapons, besides, rifles & LMGs are the standard weapons common to all infantrymen. (AP capability of weapons involved was preserved for use using individual Direct Fire.)

Average probabilities of destroying and suppressing targets for small arms at each range bracket were calculated in an Excel table for ease of calculating the multiples of firing elements and a table of adjustments to these figures was devised for use with the usual percentile dice roll.

Integration with the main rules was complete when I realised that my existing rather unsatisfactory 'Suppressing Fire' rules (which used different mental arithmetic compared to other types of fire) could be replaced with very little adaption by the 'Volley Fire' method.

'Volley Fire' was renamed 'Suppressing Fire' and the whole concept tidied up quite nicely.

Scattering To The Four Winds

I needed at least eight combinations of flocked base designs to differentiate between otherwise identical foot elements from differing platoons.

I finally decided that the standard base combination for the first platoon of each nation (British, Belgian, French, German) and on all other support, heavy weapon, high command & pioneer foot elements would be Humbrol 150 (a fairly bright olive green) sprinkled with a 50-50 mix (see left) of Javis Countryside Scenic Light Meadow Green and Hornby Scale Scenic Fine Grass Green (referred to henceforward as 'grass' and 'moss'). The 'grass' is very light and comprises quite coarse sawdust (see photo in 'Basal Cleavage' where Humbrol 150 plus the Javis scatter material only has been used experimentally) but does vary in shade nicely and the 'moss' is a somewhat yukky and samey shade of blue-green finely ground sponge-like substance. Each scatter material dilutes the unpleasant qualities of the other although when applied to certain base coats each type of scatter was occasionally usable on its own. Subsequent infantry platoons use a range of Humbrol base coats (83 'yellow clay', 98 'peat', 119 'earth') in conjunction with 'grass', 'moss' or '50-50 mix'.

Figure bases are smoothed over with model filler so that the moulding plinths disappear and foot elements look like they are perched atop a grassed-over chocolate drop mound. Owing to their diminutive size, motorcycles and motorcycle combinations are also mounted on tiddlywinks. Some of the bases have voids awaiting reinforcements from Heroics & Ros to boost them up to four-man groups for combat purposes.

Parent unit identification will be inscribed underneath for clarification and as stated in earlier posts, there will be the odd random log, rock or shrub for prettiness. (Again I must tug my forelock in Lloyd's direction for the tip with regard to 6mm scale rocks, spillages of which are obtainable from your local supermarket cat litter shelf)

Basal Cleavage

I have more or less caught up on my backlog of figure painting.

This included:

recent purchases of Heroics & Ros officer strips and PzB38 & Boyes team purchases (which may actually be used as MG34 or Bren teams once I sit down & have a look at what I have got);

much needed 25mm & 47mm allied AT guns & crews;

platoons of B.E.F. & French/Belgian infantry I never got round to painting from my previous wargaming existence back in the early 80's, which had been languishing in the loft in tobacco tins in their original packaging;

repainting of gun crews painted up as Afrika Korps & 8th Army.

(I had always been quite happy to use heavy weapons sans crews irrespective of the ground footprint of said hardware. Perils of solo wargaming, I suppose. Also I did (& probably still do) have way too many AFVs for the amount of infantry I can field. Standard proceedure on both counts for most wargamers, I suspect).

There was also a smorgasbord of sundry vehicles that had tickled my fancy which I could not resist from Heroics, Scotia & Ian Armstrong.

In order to visualise the overall effect of my painting standard it was neccesary to flock some bases. I found it a bit too distracting having unpainted plasticard or tiddlywinks from the ankles down, so I gave some of the groups a coat of Humbrol 150 on the bases & dunked them in Javis Light Meadow Green.

Some of Nikolas' French Infantry

Taking my cue from Lloydian Aspects, I will be customizing the bases somewhat so that the appearance of the base will tell the gamer which platoon each foot group belongs to. Simplified, the appearance of the base will denote the parent unit, as opposed to having any coloured markings or symbology on the base. Aside from unit identification purposes I expect I will be installing the odd random sprig of lichen or budget permitting, a rock.

As regards AFVs, these will display markings in keeping with, but not totally authentic to, the real thing.