Reply To: Continued Explorations of Normandy Wargaming

[jamesevans140Participant 2055xp 1]

Thanks for your great reply @oriskany.

In just about any wargame a unit caught in the open is in high risk unless the opposing player is in some kind of melt down. Certainly any praise I give these little tanks are said under conditions that favour them, which are quite isolated from the norm. During the time slice we are looking at these conditions presents themselves a few times. Yes the 45mm is more of a glorified 37mm and does not compare to the German 50mm AT guns. Where in the time sliced we are studying the 45mm at short range will have time in the sun. At range most of my tanks can a hit on the chin from these things. It is my thin side armour the 45mm at close range can easily punch through. Don’t forget I am using 1941 Panzers without any up armouring yet. Nearer to March I will start to get stuff like that. The is also when the T-70’s will start to arrive but not yet replacing the T-60. I view the T-60 as a poor man’s Pz-2 while the T-70 its a rich man’s Pz-2. At least my Pz-2’s have been banished to recon duties.

The Russian doctrine for tanks is a little odd at this point of time as well. They don’t use these little tanks for recon but rather mixed in with the larger tanks sort of using them in the prewar tankette doctrine of using them for back scratchers and flank security of the medium tank formation. For the Russians at least they will properly get rid of them or using them for recon until they are replaced by T-34/76mm to do the job.

The examples I give here were straight up lingual comparisons without CAT considerations. Notice that in my army list for my broken army I will use the PZ-4 tanks as artillery. I scraped up two 75mm infantry guns and was lucky enough to get two of the new 50mm AT guns rather than two or possibly four 37mm AT guns, that would have sucked. It will be bad enough waiting for Paulus to release my tanks. Here we prefer to create rules so you feel the presence of a major commander. We don’t buy models of the generals and place them on the board. This annoyed me towards the end of FoW when they started creating models and rules for these guys. Really do you want Patton on the table, please. However I completely understand that gamers that came up the WH40K would be expecting them, as over the years this game has become character driven. A couple of years ago one of our players wanted to put all the space wolf special characters on the board at the same time. But no-one would accommodate him. So as a shaming thing I came out of 40K retirement and I teamed up with Yarrick. We took an pork ork army with no special characters that was just over 300 orks strong. We needed both our ork armies and had to borrow some from another ork player. So it was 7 or 8 space wolves special characters vs over 300 works. We the orks got wiped out and we only managed to push one special character off the board. We had so much fun we disrupted other games. It annoyed me that this guy had accommodated the other players on many occasions and they could not grant him this one game. But getting back the point is that players coming up from the 40K path are looking for and expecting characters that will have this kind of impact.

Just like any other tank in FoW the 2cm is the T-60’s main gun and you may fire this or you mgs on any turn. For things like soft-skins artillery and light support weapons that are dug-in your better off using the 2 cm gun, that has a lower rate of fire. For infantry your better off using the much higher volume of fire. Once entrenched any hits from the mgs need a fire power roll of a 6 to do any real damage. The high volume of fire tends to push dumb luck out of the picture.

The dirty little secret about all wargames in general it that they are actually quite bad at simulating real war. That was not their original purpose as set out by the Germans at their general staff academy. What wargames are really good at is simulating doctrine so budding staff officers can learn and gain experience with their doctrine and allow another side to deploy the doctrine of another country or at least their best interpretation of it. Ask any wargame what war is and you will get many different answers which are all correct and yet at different altitudes and latitudes they will all be wrong. Is war an art or a science or both? Now if this is not bad enough the modern hobby Wargamer has tried themselves to that wretched kitchen table. The modern wargame happens to space devoid of time. Yet we demand that it simulates full combined arms warfare for let’s say WW2. We are very demanding and see not that willing to take on disadvantages without a gun to your head or your just an idiot like me. Troop model size and wether one model represents one man or a hundred. What is the scale of the tables and the scenery placed upon it and finally what is the scale of weapon ranges and the impact of range on a weapon. Time just screws everything up. You play a game with time and it turns out that a historical battle that lasted 10 hours just took 18 minutes according to the game. There has been countless attempts to reconcile all this on to that kitchen table. We have often gone down the road of using different scales for different things on that kitchen table. Back in the 70’s I played one game that work well for most things except one hut represented a small village and for accurate weapons range half an inch represented 100 yards. It worked fine enough but it was visually broken at 400 yards apart our M4 had its gun crossed with the panther like a pair of swords. Plus landing on Sword beach and taking Caen took just a bit over an hour and half. Because of ground scale the two buildings representing the city was just over 3 feet from the beach. We thought this was great. We have come a long way since then. About 20 years ago I came across a game from New Zealand that tried a different way to shoehorn combined arms tactics on to that kitchen table. It used abstraction and contraction to deal with the different scales. It was also based on the results of a team and not individual. I figured that if I wanted to win WW2 by myself I could play a console game. It was not the best game in the world but a applauded the fresh thinking. In reality I don’t believe that the scales can be reconciled on the kitchen table. Even you have moved off the kitchen table and into virtual reality. It is here perhaps there may be an answer. An integrated hybrid system that acts like a dungeon master if you like. You mark your kitchen on the battle map. You play on the table as it is the centre of gravity while the application looks after weather, lighting and support units that are off you table but have the range to influence the kitchen table. It would handle such things as battleships, air observation. Even a squadron of M4’s that just cleared the crest of an off table hill but they have range onto the table with their off board fire arriving in the fire phase as off board artillery. We could have counter battery going on as well. So we finally have some control over what is happening in the larger battle space surrounding the kitchen table. I believe with app assistance all this could be done without slowing the game by much at all. As the app is acting like a DM things like true hidden movement can be done, friction of war is applied by it. Command and control could be realistically applied. Platoon X has just had its radio destroyed by a sniper. They will be out of command until a spare radio or runner arrives at their location. The platoon will still carry on its primary mission of taking Hill 123.

You want complete control in your tactics and that is fine. I on the other hand is an idiot that restricts the tactics to the period. I could not bring myself to suddenly invent blitzkrieg in 1918 even though all the elements are there.

With my Finns I use a basic ACOKA as that is what they have come up with just that they did not know yet that it is called ACOKA. On the other hand I could not bring myself to use the more advanced METT-C.

I believe that if you get fun your way and I with mine and someone else finds fun in an entirely different way our hobby is all the better for it.

That is why I will never say FoW is the best wargame out their. We have had to make changes to each version but for our group it handle most things well at the team effort results level. If we wish to zoom in on the details at an individual results level we use BG, again highly modified.

If we zoom out above FoW we use a very modified version of it where a tank or stand of men for a platoon. It we really zoom out we use the full V3 of Firestorm. At the end of the day all this means little other than this is the way we enjoy our gaming which is how we learn our history.

To me Soviet Storm was something done on the cheap. The maps really needed to be redone in English. So I assumed they did not employ a level 5 interpreter or translator for the Russian language either. This happens a lot. When I watch documentaries on Finnish wars with audio my wife who is Finnish often says that is not right what the commentator just said or more often she says I did not think they allow that kind of language on TV.

 

Yes I think it will take until mid the late August and I will have completely ruined @timp764 ‘s view on WW2. 😉

We are playing U-Boot as a group for the first time tomorrow, so I have a lot of prep work on. After that I will catch up with the current topic of Omaha at platoon level.

You really now how to punish yourself. 😉  🙂 😀