Artillery in TacWWII

The question of how artillery works in TacWWII came up on the Facebook group but I decided the best way to answer it was to give a detailed description here.

Let's start with the simplest case; artillery units firing at targets in their line of sight. This is what gunners call "firing over open sights". This takes place in the Direct Fire Phase, not in the Artillery Phase. 

A German sIG33 battery is firing at a troop of British A13 Cruisers at just over 400 metres range (11cm).

A13 (left) comes under fire from a sIG33 (right)

I would treat the 15cm sIG33 as a 100-130mm howitzer. In the 10-20cm range band that gives it fire factors of 5/5. We are shooting at a hard target so we use the number after the slash (not that it makes a difference in this case) giving a target number of 5. However the A13 is an armour class 1 target so there's a -1 die roll modifier. Personally I always think of a -1 modifier as increasing the number I need to roll to hit so our revised "N" value is now 6.

The sIG is in Defence Mode so our German player rolls to hit in Fire Phase A. He rolls his d10 and gets a 6. He's scored exactly "N" so the A13 troop is Neutralised. If he had rolled an 8 (N+2) or higher the result would have been a kill. Because the A13 was in Bold Attack and wouldn't fire until Fire Phase B, it doesn't get to shoot as Neutralised units may not do so.

It's worth noting that had the sIG been replaced by a mortar, a 12cm heavy for example, its "N" value against an armoured target would have been 10 meaning that it could only Neutralise a tank unit by rolling a straight 10 on the die.

-o0o-

Moving on to indirect artillery fire and to the last year of the war, let's assume we have a British Field Regiment of three 25pdr batteries firing from a location three kilometres off the British edge of the table.

This being a prepared assault on an enemy position, the entire Regiment has been ordered to support 2nd Bn the Devonshires.

As the Devonshires begin their approach march, the artillery delivers a programmed bombardment. Before the game (specifically before German deployment), the British player specified a target point, a duration (one game turn) and a barrage type (linear). 

In the artillery phase of Game Turn 1 the fire automatically arrives on target, which happens to be a road junction where the unfortunate German player has deployed a company of dug-in Fallschirmjäger.

Because this is a linear bombardment, the area covered by the fire is 4cm x 12cm oriented parallel to the British table edge.

All three of the Jäger platoons are at least partially under the template so the British player rolls three d10s for effect.

The 25pdr is treated as a "75-90mm Field Gun" and the firing range is in the <160cm bracket so the base "N" values are 7/10 (7 against soft targets, 10 against armour). Infantry are soft targets so the target number would be 7 but it's raised to 8 because the targets are in cover.

The British player announces, "as the dice fall" and throws the three dice. Reading from left to right he gets a ten, a two and an eight. 

N+2 isn't enough to destroy an infantry target so the result is that the two platoons at the ends of the company position are Neutralised. We mark them accordingly and note that we'll need a company morale test at the end of the turn. The explosion marker reminds us of the centre of the barrage area and that the company morale test will be -1 due to "under artillery fire".

-o0o-

Later on in the game, the British player attempts to call in fire on the single model that represents the hamlet of Valkenhorst. The Devonshires' battalion HQ is close enough to have observed a German platoon moving into the location so this is allowed.

Normally requesting fire would follow the sequence "write the request in the Orders Phase of this turn and try to send it in the Orders Transmission Phase next turn". However, because this late in the war the British are deemed to use "Sophisticated Doctrine", the request can be written and transmitted straight away.

The British player writes his request thus: "Whole Regiment to fire HE for two turns, point bombardment, target is the centre of Valkenhorst". For this scenario the British are rated Tac 6 so any roll of six or higher means the fire will arrive.

In the Artillery Phase, the British player attempts a Tac roll to see if the fire is on target. He rolls a two, which is four under the number needed to get on target. This means the fire deviates 3cm x 4 = 12cm in a random direction.

The British player curses when he sees that the deviation puts a Devonshires platoon under the bombardment marker (which is 4cm in diameter because this is a point bombardment).  

The unfortunate infantry must suffer three dice (one for each battery firing) at the 25pdr's a target number of 7. The nine causes them to be Neutralised (ten would have been a kill).

Because the Devonshires requested two turns of fire, the artillery will fire again next turn but the Tac roll for accuracy will be done again, this time with a +1 to the die roll. Hopefully the accuracy will be better next time!

I hope this is helpful. I'll amend this if further info is requested.

The Joy of Calais

As Sheffield just began to get over the hump of the recent hot weather, a few hundred wargamers descended upon the multi-room sauna that is Sheffield Hallam University for the annual Joy of Six event. Despite the thermal discomfort it was a really enjoyable day and I was delighted to meet new people and introduce them to the TacWWII rules.

As regulars here will know, this year the Cold War Commanders group were putting on Calais: Encounter on the St Omer Road, a scenario depicting events on 23rd May 1940, just prior to the start of the siege of Calais.

Early in the planning it looked like the rest of the group fancied a year off from staging a game.  Accordingly I planned to do what I fancied, thinking I'd be running the whole thing myself. This at least had the advantage of speeding up the decision-making process and allowed me to develop the game across most of the preceding twelve months.

A couple of months into the planning period, though, a plan to wargame a 1980s Soviet invasion of Iceland emerged so a two table, two-rule-system offer was planned for. Until, that was, our terrain maestro Richard P suffered a serious health set-back and suddenly we were back to a single game. Get well soon Richard!

Among the innovations I wanted to try were a couple of Keynote (I'm a confirmed Mac user) presentations. One of these was running continuously covering the background to the battle, forces orders and organisations, and telling people how to get the rules and engage with the on-line community.

The other presentation was advanced as needed and served as a turn-by-turn progress display and a reminder of scheduled events such as the arrival of reinforcements.

In the end, the TacWWII Calais scenario happened with sterling help from Andy T and Ian S. They set up the Germans and British respectively before we were joined by show attendees and new friends Ian F (for 1st Panzer Division's Aufklärungs Abteilung) and Les H (for 3RTR).

The area bounded by Windmill Hill, Fréthun station and Nielles-lès-Calais would be where the British forces began to muster for the fight.

With the two sides almost bumping into each other this isn't a scenario where the action is delayed by long approach marches. To reflect the confusion of the unexpected collision, only one company on each side can dice to change Mode on game turn 1. 

Point of Contact!

Andy (before Ian F's arrival) had elected to have the Kradschützen (motorcycle infantry) company lead down the road and with British tanks to their front, they rapidly got out of the way and tried to outflank them along the road to Nielles.

This left an armoured car company in the front window. As reported previously, I'd distinguished the cannon-armed armoured cars from their machine-gun-only compatriots by use of air-recognition flags. This worked well for players not familiar with my model collection.

B Squadron 3RTR at the level crossing.
Regt HQ in the field.

The lead armoured car company managed to get into Deliberate Attack Mode.

Early on, a strafing run by a Hurricane took out the German engineers' Opel Blitz.

By game turn 3 a complex melee was in progress.

Les looks confident as 2pdr rounds make short
work of thinly armoured German machines

Things looked bad for the Kradschützen as two squadrons on British tanks converged on them.

They would, however, take out one troop of Cruiser tanks before being destroyed in fighting between the Fréthun road and the railway.

A few British reinforcements were scheduled. Unlike their German opponents, they would arrive automatically, selected by card draw. I did this because they were very much there for historical flavour rather than fighting power. On game turn three a RASC petrol convoy arrived, its drivers dismounting to form single rifle platoon, and on turn 6 a searchlight battery (commanded by Lt Airey Neave) deployed behind a roadblock in Nielles.

The Germans, however, had to roll each turn to see if reinforcements arrived. This they proved sadly unable to do to any useful degree. Turn after turn the reinforcements failed to appear at all or if they did turn up, it was in the form of two companies of truck-borne infantry: not ideal against tanks.

Even a Stuka strike proved ineffective.

With a regular trickle of casualties causing Company Morale Tests it was inevitable that bad rolls would come along sooner or later and although the British had one company flee entirely, it was the Germans who failed a Battalion Test. The Aufklärungs Abteilung received a Halt result. 

Although division HQ got an order through to restart their attack, and a light tank company with Panzers III and II arrived on the penultimate game turn, it was clearly not going to be possible to clear the Calais road in the time allotted.

We therefore agreed a British victory with 3RTR still holding the line at Windmill Hill.

I was very pleased with how the game went and owe hearty thanks to our recruits to the cause of resurrecting TacWWII:

Left to right: Andy, your host, Les, Ian S and Ian F

Now on to packing for next weekend's West Mid Lards event (after a much-needed beer!)

 

More Joy of Six prep

I've tweaked the Calais game mat with the addition of green edges to the roads and completed a few more village modules as well as creating some signs to identify the villages to onlookers.

I haven't used the "fill in mix" I created recently at this stage as I want to keep it available for use on the day.

I'm increasingly more satisfied with how this is going to look but I've every confidence that I'll come up with some kind of tweak, probably late on Saturday!

Prepping for Joy of Six

At the end of this month the Cold War Commanders are putting on Calais: Encounter on the St Omer Road using the TacWWII rules. 

I've created the game board by airbrushing the road network onto a suitably sized green cloth.  Although I've dusted on some yellows and paler greens to break up the overall colour, I decided it needed some of my field modules to give the proper Pas-de-Calais countryside look.

A shot from the first run-through of the game
with just a few fields

On Monday I decided to do another terrain test, with a larger number of fields present. This looked better but there's a strong sense of "these are terrain pieces sitting on a cloth" rather than actual countryside.

Then I was reminded of Al Seward's game at Ebor Lard a few years back and how he blended together individual terrain pieces to form a unified built-up area.

I decided to experiment with various flock and clump foliage recipes to disguise the boundaries of the terrain pieces. The starting position looked like this:

Here we see three field units butted up against each other and the edge of the table. They do rather stand out as separate pieces.

I've had some mixed brown flock stored in an old Lyle's Golden Syrup tin for years as well as a small amount of mixed green flock previously used on figure bases. I tried sprinkling them both into the gaps between fields.

Okay but not quite what I want. How about using tiny pieces of torn-up clump foliage?

Possibly better but this isn't Normandy; I didn't want to give the impression of hedge-lined fields.

In the end I settled upon a mix of all three:

and made up a batch that can travel to Joy of Six and be sprinkled into the joints and probably around the boundaries of terrain pieces on the day.

Here's the full table with all but one of the villages in place:

And here's the village after a couple of hours' painting and matching base shapes to the previously painted road network:

I'm now more happy with the look of the battlefield but I think I may experiment with adding brighter green verges to the sides of the roads outside the villages. That'll help them stand out better. As some of the pictures above show, they tend to disappear in certain lighting conditions.

Gabr-el-Ahmar

Regulars here will be aware that a month ago I managed to get my 3D printer working again. By way of celebrating the return to productivity I decided to start some WW2 Western Desert armies in 1/300th scale. The resulting burst of creativity means that four weeks later I've not only completed Italian and British forces and accompanying terrain, I've also managed to play a first scenario!

On Thursday evening Alex and I took advantage of a table booked at Outpost Games in Sheffield to play Frank Chadwick's Gabr-el-Ahmar scenario.

Gabr-el-Ahmar, the Red Tomb, my own 
3D design (let me know if you want the STL file)

The scenario appears in the Benghazi Handicap sourcebook for Chadwick's own Command Decision rules. I amended it to fit with the TacWWII rules and was pleased to get this chance to give it a first run-out.

At TacWWII's 1cm = 40m ground scale the table is just three feet square. I set it up on my 6'x4' desert cloth folded in half. I have some left-over Venetian blind slats cut to various lengths to mark out the small tables often required by TacWWII. Our tiny models got some odd looks throughout the evening from the surrounding Warhammer players!

Alex took charge of the Italians.

This left me with the Brits. Gabr-el-Ahmar is an odd scenario for the British player; you're out-numbered badly by the Italians. Your few 2-pdr-armed A9 Cruiser tanks out-gun the Italian M11/39s but they're in mixed companies with Light Tanks Mk VI that are in turn out-gunned by the Italians!

Alex handled the Italian force very well, bringing his infantry forward to occupy the ridge beside the tomb and concentrating his tanks where their firepower could do most good.

I managed to stop a couple of M11/39 companies with long-range fire...

... but then decided to throw the British forward to get the Light Tanks' heavy machine guns into effective range. 

The resulting debacle saw 6th Royal Tank Regiment failing a battalion morale test at which point I conceded the battle.

If I recall correctly we had the action completed in a couple of hours of play, which I think was pretty good considering Alex hadn't played TacWWII before and I was explaining things as we went along. 

Alex kindly agreed that he'd give the rules another try. He's keen to try them with later war tanks so next time we're going to try using Bob Mackenzie's "Attack towards Valkenswaard" scenario. I think Alex should be able carry off an impression of Michael Caine in A Bridge Too Far!

A bit of Western Desert

Inspired by the newly working 3D printer I've carried on producing a few models for Gabr-el-Ahmar, 1940.

Two battalions of M11/39 medium tanks appeared in my last post but here's a slightly more close up view of a few of them.

I've also done some L3/35 tankettes.

For the Commonwealth forces, I started off with a couple of portee 37mm Bofors AT guns. The only portee set-up I could find on Thingiverse was a 2pdr. When scaled down to 1/300th scale the AT didn't print properly but the truck was okay. I decided to scratch build the AT guns using one in my 1941 Hungarian force as a scale guide.

Stretched sprue of various thicknesses gave me the wheels, gun barrels and trails while the gunshields were fashioned from thick paper. I'll add some crew figures when my order from H&R arrives.

The scenario calls for A Squadron, 11th Hussars in the form of two troops of Rolls Royce and one of Morris armoured cars. These were my first attempt at the Caunter camouflage scheme. I used Vallejo Dark Sand as the base with overlaid patterns of Basalt Grey and Pastel Green.

Finally (for now) I delved through the bits box and managed to find an old Irregular Miniatures Bren Carrier and some Heroics and Ros British infantry. Together I think they make a reasonable KRRC carrier platoon. I'm quite pleased with the way they remind me of the work, in 20mm scale, of the late John Sandars, one of my earliest wargaming inspirations.

Review - Command Decision - Benghazi Handicap

Following our recent look at the Rapid Fire book on the Eastern Front, here's another review of a scenario book that may work for TacWWII. Again I'll score the book from 1 to 5 in each of these categories:

• Book Design - layout, illustrations, maps
• Historical Content - does the book provide useful background?
• Scenario Design - are they interesting, challenging?
• TacWWII Relevance - relevance and ease of conversion to TacWWII.

This time I'm looking at Frank Chadwick's Benghazi Handicap for the Command Decision rules.

This is a 170 page, soft cover book, approximately 8.5"x11" (ie slightly smaller than A4) published by Test of Battle Games in 2007.

The book covers the Western Desert Battles from June 1940 to the end of 1941; from the start of fighting to Operation Crusader. The illustrations are mostly in black and white but there are a few colour photographs of games in progress and there's a double page spread of colour illustrations of allied and German unit insignia and Italian uniform collar patches (probably something I can ignore in 6mm scale).

Most of the book covers the organisation of Italian, German and Commonwealth units in the desert. I've previously provided advice on converting these and won't go into detail here. 

Instead, let's concentrate on the twelve included scenarios. The maps are scaled with (rather difficult to see) grid lines defining two-feet squares at Command Decision scale or one-foot squares for TacWWII.  As such, for us most of the games will be playable on a 3'x3' table. They are detailed enough but we will need to convert the accompanying descriptions (shallow wadi, paved road, track etc) from Command Decision terminology to the TacWWII equivalents.

Overall I'm happy to give Benghazi Handicap 4/5 for Design of the Book.

Moving on to Historical Content; we get an excellent overview of the campaign as a whole at the start of the book and each scenario gets its own "Situation" section that clearly sets out the local context. 

In addition a section entitled "Battlefield" provides useful clues as to how to rate battlefield areas in TacWWII terms. Finally the sections "Historical Result" and "Battle Trivia" also help to paint a picture of the battle. For Historical Content I'm rating Benghazi Handicap as 5/5.

When it comes to Scenario Design I have to confess that I haven't yet played any of these; the Middle East portion of my WW2 collection has been focussed on platoon level games in 20mm scale. One day, though, I will do some 6mm desert TacWWII!

When I do come to use the scenarios I think I'll omit the advice given to players in the "Tactical Note" section. I'm not keen on telling my players how to fight the battle and some of the guidance ("Early on you're facing only a single A9 and an anti-tank gun") seems to me to stray into providing excess information.

Noting that the Little Wars TV guys appear to have used a couple of them for their Operation Compass episode, I'm going to give them a provisional 4/5 for Scenario Design.

The twelve scenarios are ideally sized for TacWWII adaptation. Each force typically has two or three battalions and some supporting companies. A couple of scenarios use up to half a dozen battalions on one
side but this should still be manageable.

Each game has overall mission descriptions; "Breakthrough", "Hold at All Costs", "Counterattack" etc and several include a situational addition such as "Capture location X" or "Exit three units of the southern edge". The mission descriptions relate to the number of victory locations that need to be captured or held, as detailed in the CD rulebook but an experienced TacWWII referee should have no problem extrapolating victory conditions.

If we reserve maximum marks to scenarios written specifically for our favourite rules, we are clearly in 4/5 territory for TacWWII Relevance.

Overall, then, we get a score of 17/20 for Benghazi Handicap. If you're in the market for some early desert war scenarios, this may be the way to go. Unfortunately, though, the book is out of print and second hand copies seem to be going for silly money. Get it if you can!