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There's gonna be a break but there's two options that I'm interested in at the moment. Either: - Bir Hacheim (Free French defending against Italian and DAK forces in North Africa): It's basically a siege, so will be quite static in terms of the map itself. - 4th Armoured vs Panzer Leer in the Saar: this is actually a magazine game, so it will be short and sweet. If people have any preference let me know.
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Feb 9, 2024 23:58
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Had a lot of fun reading, very enjoyable and thanks for showing off the game!
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Feb 10, 2024 00:20
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this LP has been absolutely inspirational; thanks tekopo for piquing me interest in board wargames again. It's been great following along my vote goes to 4th Armoured in the Saar
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Feb 10, 2024 00:46
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Thanks for the compliments! And yeah, leaning myself towards Saar because having tanks on both sides could be fun.
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Feb 10, 2024 01:35
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My thoughts on the system is that it has a nice balance between abstracting enough that you aren't forced to the entire "nuts and bolts" approach like ASL would need to do, but the game isn't so abstract that many of the actions you perform feel gamey in some sense, or are so abstracted that you almost lose what the situation on the ground is. What i liked about it is that the game seemed to reward me for performing actions with a semi-tactical mindset, and seemed to confirm some of the things I read about company-level tactics. For instance: - The primacy of artillery and other ordnance within the game almost requires you to perform counter-battery operations if you spot your opponent's artillery in a vulnerable position. This is something that wasn't immediately apparent to me because I placed too much of an emphasis on disrupting front-line infantry companies instead. - Artillery is hard to set up and move, especially artillery that requires an artillery park (Indirect HE, the orange fire value, requires artillery parks to be fired in indirect mode): you need to disband the artillery park at the start of a turn, spend an entire activation to mount the artillery, multiple turns to move the artillery and dismount it, then wait until the start and spend a DP to set up an artillery park. This is time consuming, and means that if you want artillery support in your attacks and have gone past the range of your artillery, an operational pause is required to set up the artillery again. - Barrages have a variety of different uses: they block line of sight (either when placed directly on a unit or through a hex that a unit is drawing LOS through), they slow down your opponents, they make your opponents fire rating go down. Enemy fields of fire getting you down? Screen your forces with a barrage. Needing to retreat? Barrages. Needing to blunt an enemy attack? Barrages. Need to suppress enemy units so that you can assault? Barrages. - Rules for night turns are really simple but have big implications. Being able to remove cohesion hits even on the front line is really useful, but the -2 to any attack makes it much safer to dig in on the front lines, or retreat your troops, or infiltrate enemy positions. The latter especially felt flavourful and was used well by the Germans in the campaign. - The game, although it doesn't have many supply rules, still reflects operational pauses. Without spending CPs the actions you can perform are low level and passive, but you can really supercharge a turn by going all out (which the Germans did in the last few turns of the game), but this will cause you to have lull turns where you are out of CPs and DPs. Attacks in real life peter out gradually, and the game reflects this. - Entrenchments are really tough to crack. The only time where I was forced to storm entrenchments was right at the end of the game (the other two times, the Germans bypassed them or forced the units out with infantry. I had stacks of 3 full-strength companies all assaulting at once in order to take out the trenches at the end. If the Allies had any artillery left, those Germans would have been chewed up. Overall I was pretty positively impressed by the system and the sort of stories that the mechanisms and rule implications created. The system as a whole does create memorable storylines, which I think is one of the big things that attracts me to games.
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Feb 10, 2024 11:21
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