Narrative wargaming

I spent last night playing a couple of games that used narrative dice mechanics. I had high hopes for it. In the end it fell flat. I've used it in the past for playing RPGs and it resulted in the most exciting gameplay I've ever experienced. For some reason, and I'm still not entirely sure what that reason is, it just didn't work on any level for a tactical wargame. 

It's something to ponder though. 

The Germans finally close in

Continuing the T3 Rangers Stronghold scenario, it became clear that the Germans would have to simply rush the hill in an almost suicidal attempt to overwhelm the slowly dwindling Americans with their quite large advantage of numbers. The problem is that there's no smoke available from mortars or OBA so the Germans attack can only go so far before it really does become a matter of throwing a few units forward as a blatant sacrifice in a desperate bid to engage the enemy at close hand. It didn't help that the infantry utilising their individual smoke grenades kept managing to fail their smoke rolls anyway, several times in a row if truth be told.

So this is the situation.

The Americans decide to pull back as the Germans rush the hill

As you can see, the Americans can see the way the wind is blowing and decide they're better off just pulling right back and letting the Germans rush right into their gunsights. And for a while it looked like it might work, but unfortunately a few lucky shots from German machine guns that had managed to flank them and fire at point blank range meant they lost a couple more units, one a veteran, the other a commander which in itself allowed the Germans to take too much ground. While this was happening in the south, in the north more Germans were beginning to make progress along the road in a clear attempt to flank the slowly retreating Americans.

Here's how things shaped up after the Germans managed to flank the Americans in both the south and the north.

The Germans outflank the dwindling Americans

Even though the Germans have lost a good number of troops, the Americans are clearly surrounded with nowhere to go. Had there been a few less Germans still in the fight it might have been worthwhile fighting on for while longer, but in reality at this point it really did seem like a forgone conclusion. 

A few things to note. 

I realised far too late that I'd labelled the MGs incorrectly. I had LMG at 2d6, MMG at 3d6. This should have been 3d6 and 4d6 respectively. Oh well, next time. Another thing was the lack of options for the Bazookas after the tanks had been dispatched. They did a great job disposing of those quite early on but afterwards I found there was very little I could use them for. They could have been used on units in buildings apparently, but this was a battle that revolved almost entirely around that hill. Very few buildings in play at all. Not much I could do there really.

So, once again I've found that these rules are really at their best when units are on the move. The minute units are stationary and trading shots it becomes too easy to slip into slugging back and forth and hoping for good rolls. There were a couple of moments where I had to force myself to throw troops forward, often against all common sense just to get things moving again. The lack of smoke from mortars and OBA was an issue here and would have made a big difference I think.

In the end it was an enjoyable battle but one that highlighted the odd issue, not outright problem as such, but definitely something that might need a bit of thought to make sure future battles don't get bogged down in trading gunfire at the expense of movement and manoeuvre.

See you on the next battlefield.

  

Another day, another random ASL scenario

This is a scenario from ASL this time, it's T3 Ranger Stronghold, and appears to be one of the historical ASL scenarios.

This one is played on board 2 only, the VCs state that there are to be no unbroken American units in hexes <=5 on/between hexrows H-P. I created some markers in the module to enable me to mark the various VCs, red and blue's set up hexes, and just general areas that need to be highlighted. In this scenario the aforementioned VCs are marked with the yellow square area in the maps below while red and blues respective set up hexes are marked with the red and blue arrows. 

And as if to set the tone for the impending battle, the Germans, who had the advantage of numbers and 2 tanks at their disposal, walked right into the LOS of an American Bazooka that rolled a 6 on the accuracy die promptly followed by a 5 on the penetration die. This was more than enough to see the German Panzer IV explode into a ball of smoke and flame. And all this with the very first shot on the very first move of the battle!

The Americans are blue, the Germans, red. Confusing I know.

I decided to allow stacking since the map is relatively small this time and the Germans have a lot of troops to squeeze onto the board. It didn't do any harm and had a stack been hit I was going to roll a die and count down from the top to see which unit was hit, a rule sort of stolen from ASL in itself.

After the shock of losing one of their two Panzers so quickly to Bazooka fire, the Germans may have been a little too cautious since they struggled to make any progress at all. This situation continued until most of the German front line was a mass of pinned and suppressed units with the odd no-fire in there too for good measure. Something needed to be done if the situation wasn't to deteriorate further, and I remember thinking maybe this battle was just a lost cause from the start and perhaps I should just give it up, or restart. Thankfully I pushed on after deciding to try deploying copious amounts of German smoke and rushing across the road onto the hill. Now, I had previously made a house-rule that stated that only Veterans could deploy smoke, in one hex only, and only in adjacent hexes, but there's no mortars or artillery available to either side in this scenario, so no chance at all to place smoke. Smoke, it has to be said is pretty much essential in Crossfire, and then I remembered that ASL has a rule that allows infantry to place smoke in an adjacent hex too, so that was all the excuse I needed. 

Just look at all that beautiful smoke. 

Lovely, lovely smoke...

I should mention that if I were playing by the official Crossfire rules there would almost certainly be mortars aplenty or even OBA missions. They're usually pretty generous with the smoke but limit it's use to one fire mission per initiative, which is fair enough. I think in future if an ASL scenario doesn't have either mortars or OBA then I might just add some in. It really is necessary if playing by (pseudo)Crossfire rules. And besides, I just love firing smoke all over the place.

Even with the use of smoke, the Germans take numerous hits as they make their way across to the hill in a desperate attempt to get into close combat with the American troops. A couple of units manage to get into close combat and take out a Veteran unit no less, but a lot of units end up pinned and suppressed in the attempt. Still, it needed to be done, and they have made inroads into the American line now.

Here's the current situation after the, mostly, successful assault on the hill.

Aftermath of the German assault on the hill

This is the latest shot of the current battle situation. The smoke was a godsend. I'm not at all sure the Germans had much chance without it. It's still all to play for, but at least the Germans have managed to make a slight dent in the American defences. I think a lot will depend on how quickly the Germans can rally their suppressed units and get them onto the hill before the Americans can re-group. 

I'll pick it up next time with the Germans retaining the initiative.

Things take a turn for the worse

Well, it wasn't entirely unexpected after all. The Soviets, and their Green troops in particular have done a sterling job here I think, but in a similar vein to the actual historical battle as it turns out, the Soviets manage to make inroads into a small area of the town but in the end simply can't sustain the attack, and so fall back. Well, they don't here actually but they would have done had it not been a single battle, and a kind of test battle at that. But as I mentioned in a previous post, if I'd been playing this as part of a campaign I'd have pulled out and retreated a lot sooner in a bid to lick my wounds and live to fight on another day. As it is, the Soviets surrender here.

So as this was as much a testing ground for house-rules as anything I realised much later than I should have that one of the house-rules I had made was being completely ignored right throughout the battle, right up until shortly before the end in fact. I had previously decided that Green Infantry should SURPRESS on 1 hit, and be KILLED on 2 hits*. This came about because it seemed a little off that a Green unit would hold their nerve to the degree that a battle-hardened Veteran unit would. I don't know really, but it seemed like a nice little house-rule to me, and I still like it now. I forgot it though. So I adjusted all the Pins to Suppressions as seen in this next screenshot. Too late as I say, but still...

*Thinking about this after the fact, I'm going to have to give this a proper test before implementing it permanently since I've an idea this may just be overkill. Pin results(1 hit) are very common, which would mean Green units would be being suppressed left, right and centre. I now think it's going to be too harsh. I'm thinking maybe it's enough that they only roll 2d6 in the first place. 

An overview of the current situation along with hastily adjusted Pins/Supressions

I've zoomed in a little in this next one so you can see the main area of battle a little better. As was only to be expected, the central board 3 was the main kill-zone throughout. The stone buildings are now marked properly as victory points and you can see the small area in the north-western part of the central area that the Soviets managed to capture. This is all they managed in the end and surrendered shortly after due to mounting losses, and those hastily re-assigned Pins/Suppressions. 

Here's the final shot of the actual situation at the point the Soviets actually surrendered. I've added the little notepad that I was writing rules/house-rules on during the battle just in case anyone's interested. I quite like most of them. Some of the terrain modifiers need a little work I think. I don't like how pretty much everything is considered to be -1d6 modifier. Part of me likes the blanket simplicity of it, but another part thinks that a heavy stone building should give more protection than a light forested area. Attempting to adjust for it by making it a xd6+(-1) or (-2) etc... doesn't really work since it makes it so much more difficult to get any hits at all then, on anything. I'll have to think about it.

So here's that final screenshot.

Final situation in and around the area of Piepsk, along with house-rules

So that's it. Final thoughts are that this scenario seemed to be almost custom made for my little Crossfire (house)rules battle. The ASL boards are just about perfect for Crossfire in my opinion due I think in the most part to a good deal of them containing plenty of terrain features. Certainly the three boards that are used in this scenario seem to be almost ideal, and the scenario itself ended up being a really nice ratio of attackers to defenders, which as I've mentioned before surprised me no end. 

Really enjoyable battle, and it has to be said, a really successful experiment with the pseudo-Crossfire rules. I'm already thinking of attempting a mini campaign.

 

The Greens take the first VC, but at a huge cost

Well, if you'd asked me if we'd be here singing the praises of the Green Infantry I'd have laughed at you, but here we are. 

To be fair, the Green Infantry had a lot of troops. They hadn't had the best of luck up until now but that was all about to change.

Here they are amassing for the last ditch attempt to make a dent into the German positions.

The Soviets amass in the north

At this point I knew the only hope was really to get into close combat and try to open a gap in the lines. Luckily the German's Veteran troops were tied up in the east holding off the Soviet Regulars so only one lone Veteran unit was available to help out with the defence on the northern side of Piepsk. Also, I should just explain that the German units are able to operate on their own, so out of LOS of their PC. This isn't the case for all countries units, but its fine here. Also, I'm playing solo so I probably would have allowed it anyway if it felt right at the time. That's the beauty of playing solo. 

So anyway, there was one Fire Mission still available to them though which brings an attack of 4d6. It also supresses all units in the immediate vicinity, so in our example this means all six hexes surrounding the attacked unit. What this means is if the attacked unit is killed then any units around it are immediately supressed. This could potentially have resulted in one unit killed and three more supressed. Unfortunately the attack only resulted in a pathetic Pin result. Oh well.

This is directly before that failed Fire Mission.

The Soviet Green Infantry move into position for the impending close combat

Smoke is a big thing in Crossfire. There are no ranges. Every unit is able to fire their weapons right across the map as long as they have LOS. This is one of the reasons I love the Crossfire system. It's almost too realistic and yet because the rules are so lightweight you really feel it has no right being anywhere near reality. Somehow it manages it. 

The Germans had spent too much time and energy halting the attack over the hill in the east and had left themselves very light in the north, probably assuming the Green troops wouldn't be able to do much anyhow. I mean, you can understand it. They're rolling 1d6 most of the time due to terrain modifiers. It's a real wonder they managed to even stay alive let alone take a major VC.

But take it they did.

The first VC falls to the novice Soviets of the Green Infantry

So their close assault turned out to be a success. But it came at a terrible cost. The units that survived are nearly all pinned with the odd suppression. And as I said previously, it's not that easy to rally Green troops. If the Germans pull their remaining Veterans back to cover the north, the Soviets could be in real trouble.

Crossfire on an ASL board with a SL scenario...

I began playing Pub Battles by Command Post Games recently and really fell in love with the light and fast playing rules, to the extent that I resurrected the module I created in Vassal a year or so ago to enable me to play it and generally experiment. I loved playing it, but there was always that nagging downside to it all, that being that I have absolutely zero interest in the American civil war, which is really what the module and the rules are geared towards. There are some Napoleonic era battles played out with the system but it really does have the look and feel of the ACW era, and I just couldn't get past that feeling in the end. 

So, fast-forward a little. I wanted to play some English civil war battles with a similar, light rules system and began to create another little Vassal module to experiment with various rules. I remembered playing a little of Arty Conliffe's Crossfire for a while and being quite enamoured with them. But they were very much geared towards ww2. Nevertheless, I found myself diving into a few battles in this era using my new module and the Crossfire ruleset to see how it played and if it was going to work well, or even at all. Who knows, maybe I could use a version of them to create and play some ECW battles too sometime in the near future.

I began with a few little experimental battles and skirmishes to test things out and found the Crossfire rules were actually working extremely well with Vassal and the ASL maps. Next thing I did was to take a more or less random scenario from SL and set it up in my own little Vassal module ready to begin a full battle. The scenario is called The Hedgehog of piepsk and is numbered scenario 4.

In my enthusiasm to get started I completely forgot to screenshot the starting positions, but here's a shot of the battle shortly after it began. The Soviets have the first Initiative(in Crossfire speak), and must enter from the eastern edge of the board. The scenario uses boards 2,3 and 4 and they must take all of the stone buildings on board 3 to satisfy the VCs. The Germans win by stopping them from doing this.

Here's the first screenshot shortly after the Soviets move in from the east.

Both sides lose a few units as the battle begins

I have a few house rules, one of which is that Veteran squads get 4d6 rather than the standard 3d6. I had thought the Germans looked to be at quite a large disadvantage when I first looked at this scenario and so I increased the dice they roll. I actually like this idea anyway and will continue to use it. They would roll the same dice as Regulars normally, and although I can sort of understand this, I think it makes more sense to make Veterans something special rather than just Veterans in name only. I like it. 

So when the battle really commenced, I was quite surprised to see that the Soviets were having a really hard time of it. One of the issues may be that modifiers are quite simplistic. What I mean is, in ASL and SL for example, stone buildings give a higher modifier than wooden buildings, but here in Crossfire they're identical. This makes for much less choice and so there's less option to really pick and choose targets since the terrain is almost inconsequential when it comes to deciding who to hit and who to leave well alone. They're all the same modifier.  In a bid to rectify this I tried making the modifiers deduct -1, -2 etc from the actual dice rolls rather than deducting -1d6, -2d6 etc but in the one instance I tried it I seem to remember thinking it was a little too harsh given that a hit is only on a 5 or 6. I'll need to work on these modifiers soon. I'm certain the more nuanced system above would work very well here if given half a chance.

So the battle begins to heat up.

The Soviets first major assault costs them dear

At this stage the inexperience of the Soviets Green troops begins to tell. They only have 2d6 to attack with in the first place and are extremely difficult to rally from Suppression. Even in close combat they take a -1 modifier into the fight so it's not even as though you can hold them back for when you need to just throw them into close combat, they're not good at that either. At the start I was looking at the great swathe of red in the east and wondered just how the Germans were going to survive this one, but my god those Green Infantry are very squishy.

And just in case you thought the loses above were bad, just take a quick look at the current state of affairs.

The Soviets struggle to make inroads

In case your wondering why that big stack of Soviet corpses there are mostly Regular Infantry and not the squishy Green Infantry, it's because I quickly realised the Green Infantry were pretty much useless and so decided to attempt a major assault over the hill into town with those Regulars in the hope of taking some ground. Suffice to say, it didn't go well.

I nearly had the Soviets surrender at this point, but I think I'd like to attempt a close assault with the squishy Greens in the north before I finally admit defeat. It's interesting though that I've been thinking of starting a campaign soon, and would definitely have had them make an organised retreat under these circumstances to at least enable them to replenish their troops and make ready for the next battle. 

Next time: The Green Infantry launches a last, desperate assault in the north.