Air support in TacWWII - part one

I was asked some time ago to do an air-support version of my post on artillery fire in TacWWII. I think I'll break it down into at least two posts. Note that this will be how I do it; not necessarily how it's written in the rules.

Let's start with the basics: how do you get air support in a TacWWII game and how does basic air-to-ground combat work?

Well, there are three basic approaches; your air support may be pre-planned, on-call, or determined randomly depending on the scenario. I tend to use the last of these except in longer games like Stary Boleslav where players had plenty of time to plot out their airstrikes using either or both of the other approaches.

Note that I'll refer below to "the aircraft" but we should remember that at TacWWII scale one model represents a flight of maybe three real aircraft.

Typically the random approach will be something like, "Roll a d10 at the start of every turn. On a 1 or 2 the Soviets get air support. A second d10 shows the available support: 1-3 a LaGG-3 fighter, 4-8 an Il-2 Sturmovik, 9-10 two Pe-2 light bombers."

Whichever of the approaches you use, you're going to need to specify the aircraft's altitude (low, medium or high) and its flightpath. 

For altitude it's player choice. As regards flightpath, if not pre-planned I'll usually ask the player to place the aircraft  model on their baseline facing in the direction of the straight-line path it will take across the table.

You'll also want to determine if the aircraft is to use fixed armament (guns or cannon) or dropped ordnance (bombs or rockets). In the case of pre-planned or on-call air support I'd allow the player to choose. In the case of random air support I usually roll a die and say, "Odds it's fixed armament, evens it's dropped ordnance". 

So let's work through an example.

Near Remagen, early 1945

Fritz, our German player, has rolled for random air support and got a flight of Arado Ar-234 jet bombers. The Americans have been caught with their pants down and there's no fighter cover or anti-aircraft support available. 

Fritz places the model (on a medium altitude stand) on his baseline pointing towards the American player's brigade headquarters. 

Tom, the US player, immediately queries such selective targetting and the umpire agrees, requiring that Fritz make an additional Tac roll to go for an HQ out of all the possible enemy targets. (This is typical of the kind of ad hoc use of the Tac roll that makes highly-trained forces more effective in TacWWII.) Fritz rolls a 10 and tries not to look smug.

Fritz moves the Ar-234 model up to menace the US HQ...

Tom again complains that he should get to make AA fire as there's an M-16 GMC modelled on the HQ base but the umpire points out that at Medium Altitude the Arado is too high for even a quad HMG to engage.

Fritz must now make a Tac roll (at +4 to the die roll) to determine if he's identified the right target. Our scenario states that Luftwaffe elements in this game have a Tac value of 6. To his horror, Fritz rolls a 1! 

He must now make another Tac roll. If he succeeds the pilot abandons the mission. Unfortunately he fails so the attack will go in on the nearest friendly element! A check of the table reveals that the closest friendly element is a Panzer IV platoon just the other side of Windmill Hill. He will attack this element in error!

The Arado has no fixed armament, relying on its speed to escape interception, so we're straight into dropped ordnance for the attack.

A medium bomber covers a beaten area equivalent to two artillery batteries. Centred on the Panzer IV platoon we see that the adjacent Tiger platoon is in trouble too!

First, though, Fritz has to check for deviation with yet another Tac roll (with a -2 modifier as he's bombing from Medium Altitude). Sadly this time he makes the roll and the bombs fall on-target!

As we said, the Arado is a Medium Bomber so its Ground Attack factors are 5/3 (5 against soft targets, 3 against hard). The armour values for the Tiger and the Panzer IV are 3 and 2 respectively so the modified target numbers are 6 and 5. 

Finally, luck turns slightly in Fritz's direction as he rolls a 4 for the Tiger and a 5 for the Panzer IV. The Panzer IV platoon is Neutralised but things could have been a lot worse. A puff of dust marks the Neutralised platoon and an explosion marker reminds us that the end-of-turn morale test will be at -3 for "under air attack".

We'll call it a day at this point with Fritz pretty miffed. Next time we'll look at AA fire and maybe fighter cover.
 

From the workbench

I'm really enjoying making terrain at the moment, particularly inspired by thoughts of using Infamy Infamy to follow Germanicus into the woods on the trail of the lost legions of Varus.

I've just added four more marsh scatter pieces:

Which added to the three I made last week gives:

And with the addition of some I made earlier in the year using offcuts of PVC board we getr a quite substantial area of boggy ground:

I may have a go at making some small trees on matching bases to give the option of swampy forest.

One of the Romans-in-Germany games I have in mind involves the need to guard a party of engineers working to repair a causeway. First of all they'll need some materials to work with:

As with the previous pieces, the base is a 3D printer raft. The timber is cut from left-over balsa wood. The shield and pila are from Victrix and are held in place by being embedded in a small amount of Green Stuff. I've carefully cut away the hands that were holding the pila. 

The causeway the Romans are working on is still on the workbench. It'll be another swappable module, this time with pre- and post-repair versions:

The base this time is a cheap floor tile from Poundland. I cut out the first and then used it as a template to mark out the second. That way I can be sure the repaired version can be slotted in directly when the engineers have done their job.

Lolly sticks, coffee stirrers and scraps from an old wicker basket have played a starring role here.

Finally for now, I've also made some "Battered Unit" markers for dark ages/early medieval Lion Rampant games:

The Late Roman chap is from a box of assorted figures that's been back and forth between Richard P and myself on a couple of occasions. I now have uniform-specific "Battered" markers for three of my Late Roman units.

That's all for now. Look out for finished causeway pics soon, I hope.

Scatterlings

A couple of days ago I went off on a creative fugue about a possible future Infamy Infamy game that, were it ever to happen, would demand lots of marsh and bad going. As always the thought triggered a rash of concentrated modelling and I ended up with some new scatter terrain pieces.

These late Roman bow-armed skirmishers are behind a couple of flat bad going markers. The bases are cut from 3D printer rafts coated with wood filler. The rocks are cat litter (unused!), the grass is static grass over fine flock and the tall tufts were made from some static-grass-type fibres I bought years ago.

The Picts are picking their way through a marshy area. This is made in much the same way but with some commercially made tufts. The areas of standing water are irregular shapes cut from old business cards and painted glossy black.

Finally, the Turcos are passing through some generic broken ground. Same approach but with the addition of some stones from the garden.

Mixed in together we end up with about a square foot of cavalry-unfriendly countryside. Total cost - a couple of quids' worth of flock, static grass and tufts?

I don't know what it is but I like it

The Baroness and I were in York yesterday to take our son out to lunch. Beforehand we popped into a branch of The Works: it's always a good place to look out for crafting bargains.

We found this:

It wasn't entirely clear what it was but at £3 for a pack the size of a bag of icing sugar it seemed rude not to give it a chance.

I figured that if it was individual particles it would serve as an alternative to clump foliage and if it was in sheets it could be glued down to basing material to make fields.

It turns out to be an elasticated mesh material that, when removed from the bag, expands out to maybe the size of a handball. Sorry, I seem to be choosing odd size analogies today.

It looks like it should cut easily with scissors, maybe to form the canopy of homemade trees? 

The "bobbles" along the individual threads are not stuck on but are part of the threads themselves. As such I think this would be significantly more robust in transport than lichen or rubberised horsehair with glued-on flock.

The pics below show the whole pack with some 28mm Pictish skirmishers for scale.

As the title above suggests, I've no idea what this stuff is called aside from "Artificial Moss" but I think I might pick up another pack or two if it's available from my local branch. It will do for pretty much any job you'd use lichen for and looks more realistic in my opinion.

 

I have a peel tower!

I've always fancied owning a peel tower and now at last I do!

Back in 2012 I took a matched pair of Border Reivers armies (The Reivers and The Warden's Men) to the Berkley Hordes of the Things tournament. HOTT armies need a Stronghold that they have to hold onto if in the role of defender.  At Berkley both armies used a Stronghold in the form of a group of stolen (or recovered) animals. 

The Reivers with (at rear) the old Stronghold

I'd always intended that The Warden's Men should have a peel tower or bastle house as their Stronghold. The Reivers force includes a Sneaker element that includes a guy with a ladder and another with a burning torch - both handy for attacking enemy buildings.

Although I cut out and began scribing the walls for a peel tower at the time, it was only recently that I went back to it and finished the thing.

There are two doors, one leading into the ground floor space where domestic animals are kept in the event of an attack, and one to the first floor accommodation that's accessed via a ladder (now pulled up into the building.

The tower's made from foamcore and thin card on a hardboard base.

At last The Warden's Men have their own Stronghold to defend...

A couple of years ago we stayed at Hallbar Tower near Lanark and I think the experience may have been in the back of my mind when I finally undertook this construction job.

A River Flows Through It

Last week I popped over to Staffordshire to see how Richard Phillips was doing. We hadn't managed to get together in person since his health scare meant that he couldn't attend Joy of Six. It was great to catch up and see him looking so well.

I passed on to Richard some terrain that I no longer have a use for but that can potentially be useful at his wargaming venue, The Unit. I also took over some of my 3D printed TacWWII makers for Richard.

In return I was delighted when he presented me with a pontoon-ferry that would work really well with my Woebetides collection.

In fact thinking about it there's no reason it wouldn't also work for the American Civil War or the Second French Intervention in Mexico. Ooh, or the Napoleonic Wars in Livonia!

It fits nicely on my larger (9" across) river sections and would, with the addition of suitable ramps, work fine as a pontoon bridge too.

Other riverine work had gone on at Stately Counterpane Manor. 

When setting out the terrain for the playtest of "Ambush" or "The Princess Bride (not that one)", I'd realised I needed some more curved, 3" wide, river sections. 

Fortunately I had some offcuts of hardboard that could be made to do the job nicely. I had also started a couple of straight sections designed to allow a river to enter the table on a diagonal.  

My usual approach of raised banks made from filler with black paint and varnish for the water gave me over a metre of gently meandering river or, if the curves are rearranged, a single sweeping 90 degree bend.

Then with rivers on my mind I decided to revisit the replaceable ford modules. I wasn't entirely happy with the relative lack of visual difference between the second and third modules. I added a bit more in the way of Milliput paving sloping down into the water and repainted.

At the risk of giving away slightly too much in advance of the Steel Lard outing for the game, I'll reveal the effects of the progressive flooding of the ford. I'm sure you'll promise not to reveal this to any potential players won't you?

Stage 1 - Units crossing the ford roll 2D6 for
movement discarding the lower-scoring die.

Stage 2 - Units crossing the ford roll 2D6 for
movement discarding the higher-scoring die

Stage 3 - The ford is now impassable to wheeled vehicles
but a Leader may try to carry the princess across on foot.

Stage 4 - The ford is now completely impassable.

No scenario designer worthy of the title could refrain in such circumstances from designing a "Carrying the Princess Across the Ford Table".  Such I have done but, alas, revelation of the details is a step too far at this stage.

Upgrading past endeavours

Getting Ebor Lard (and the associated mad rush to prepare and test a new game in too short a period) out of the way has freed me up to do some modelling purely for the fun of it. 

The French 1940 artillery tractors have already appeared here and some upgraded US HMMWVs were recently seen over at Andreivian Tales.

Inspired by how well those two went, I pushed on and did two more as well as an M113 armoured personnel carrier.

I've also upgraded some very long-in-the-tooth Char B1 bis models that have been in storage for far too long.

I'm in no danger of winning any points with the local IPMS chapter with any of these but I think they'll improve the overall appearance of any games I use them for.

This has got me thinking about past triumphs (and disasters) and how we really ought to revisit some of them to get best value out of the sweat and treasure invested in them. The Prague Summer, Andreivia and the Woebetides are three settings that I'd like to resurrect and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in that.

I suspect a Crisis Point 2027 is going to required.