Team Yankee Campaign - Games 1 and 2

Note: This campaign isn't a part of the official Battlefront global event, rather it's a campaign written by a friend for our club. Here's his intro:

"It is Sunday the first of July. This is the BBC.

As of four am GMT, a state of war exists between the NATO powers of Western Europe, and the Soviet Union. In the early hours of the morning, Soviet missiles struck British, American and German troops up and down the border, followed by an invasion by conventional forces. Downing Street has released a strong statement, assuring both the British people and Moscow, declaiming the use of Chemical and Nuclear weapons as reprehensible, and promising that any use against civilian targets will be responded to in kind. It is rumoured that Moscow, St Petersburg, Kiev and more would all be targets for a first wave of strikes. The Chancellor of Germany, Helmut Kohl, has declared a state of emergency, and has formally requested that all NATO member states immediately enact collective defence in accordance with NATO's Article Five. Declarations of war against the USSR have been made by Britain, the US, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Iceland. Declarations from other NATO states are expected later in the morning.

We now go live to our correspondent in Cologne, Martin White."

Captain Abelard is peering through the morning mist on the outskirts of the nameless village. British forces are nearby, as are Dutch and some Americans. But so are the Russians. A vehicle pushes up an alleyway, it's throaty roar giving it away as a tank before it lumbers into view. A Chieftain; the British then.

He watches the British tank for a moment as more vehicles appear from the mist. Something is making his forehead itch. The Chieftain isn't quite right, it's lines are wrong. The hatch on the Chieftain opened and fear trickled down Abelard's spine. The CBRN gear was all wrong. As he processed this he suddenly realised that the figure had locked eyes with him. For a moment that seemed an eternity, the two men stared at each other, before yelling at their crews. "Das ist keine Britischer! Feuer! FEUER!"

SPETSNAZ!

So this was my first game of Team Yankee and it... did not go well.

I started out by making a quite frankly insane 40" spearhead deployment down to the other (unguarded) objective. They didn;t go live until turn 6, but I thought it might be easier to defend one that try to kick Alex off the other. Chieftains are chunky bastards.

My positions at the end of my first turn

I wasn't aware when I started, and didn't really internalise quickly that tactical movement has no effect on Panther 2's rate of fire. This I spent both games effectively playing Flames 3rd ed. albeit with markedly better tanks.

Things went rapidly downhill...

Getting flanked by Alex' reserve forces didn't help.For some reason I thought I could soak them as they came on, but he got reserves straight away and within two or turns, the vice had closed, ending the battle.

***

Abelard's unit has limped away from its mauling at the hands of Zenit-6 Rota. Their ersatz Chieftains had performed almost as well as the real deal. His unit had been quickly reinforced as German forces rallied. What information was getting through told him that the Soviets were engaged in a general advance, with forces to the north and south of his position engaged. So far it had been quiet, but he suspected he knew why, and as the first Chieftain appeared on the other side of the town, he smiled. A chance for revenge.

Spetsnaz go hull down behind a hill

The Russians rolled forward but failed to land any hits on my units, most of which were in cover.

My return fire cost the Soviets their commander...

...and an ersatz Scorpion

On the left flank a Spetsnaz platoon armed with ATGMs advances

For the most part, I managed to keep my Panthers on my left flank safely out of range or line of sight of enemy forces.

Allowing me to do this on the right.

The Rolands, having done nothing for both games decided to make their presence felt and dashed for the opposite objective.

"Objective clear, where's our air support?"

For a moment I thought I had pulled it off, but Alex realised he only had to kill one tank to pull off a win, which he did.

If I'm being honest, I think I might have fallen afoul of the Tiger trap, where a new Flames player sees a monetarily cheap list with only 4 of what he has been assured is one of WW2's best tanks - the Tiger - and finds out two or three games in that he cant defend all his objectives and that there are more than enough things out their capable of ruining his day.

With only five Panther 2's in my list, every single loss counted. A Chieftain list suffers a similar problem, but are cheap enough to afford a few more, while not being significantly worse that then Panther 2. The Roland's did nothing other than their late game dash. I think I'll swap them out for Gepards or Jaguar 1's if I get a chance.

Things are looking grim for NATO, with Soviet forces surging across Germany. I'm sure this wont be the last we hear from Abelard or Zenit-6 Rota.

Thing a Week 24

We discovered that one of our Pathfinder witch's go to spells required secure anchor points to stick it to, so I knocked out some markers.

Couldn't really think of a fourth though, suggestions welcome

Operation Bronze Dragon - Armada

Sitrep
An insurgent force in possession of at least 2 large capital ships has been detected operating nearby. Navy forces are directed to interdict and destroy the terrorists before they can cause more damage.

Threat Assessment
Extreme - Deep range sensor indicate that insurgent forces are in possession of at least two large capitals from the Mon Calamari separatist worlds. They may have any number of escorts hiding in their sensor shadows.

Standby to make the jump to hyperspace.

Combat Report
 
I even managed to pull off a win! This was obviously down to pure luck LEET SKILLS and you should totally interpret this win as a sign of things to come.

In reality, my initial list was a little wonky and received some fine tuning before we started. To be fair I'm still in single figures of games played, and a lot of the game is list building, which I haven't really got a handle on yet.

Some of my list was fairly prescient, with the inclusion of killer android IG88 in particular, providing a hard counter to my opponents nasty unique squadron, while other parts, like the over-abundance of dice manipulation on the VSD being more or less wasted space.

ISD Avenger begins attack pattern YOLO

I managed to avoid the humiliation conga this time, with all of my ships avoiding ramming into each other for the whole game (except on purpose).

Alex was gracious enough to let me walk back on some choices during a firing phase to let me take advantage of my boarding troopers after my ISD wound up on the objective and exchanging blows with his Home One(?). The blow was fairly devastating and the ship never really recovered

Centicore pisses about behind a fighter screen while rebel Hammerheads just piss about

 We determined, after the battle, that my opponents Hammerheads were out of place, spending most of the battle doing very little, where, if they have been deployed on the opposite flank, would probably have tipped the balance.

Imperial fighter supremacy(!) kicks on while Home One gets stuck between two Star Destroyers

Things started to unwind a bit when the other rebel capital swung up behind Avenger. My dials were very badly placed and I was getting neither squadron nor engineering commands I needed.

Home One goes pop

 But with home one destroyed I managed to swing the ISD out of the other capital's arc and it spent the rest of the game trying to chase it down.

Closing actions

Meanwhile, Centicore bagged a hammerhead and got bagged by the other in return, while Warlord emptied its magazine into the defenceless transports serving as the rebel carrier.

Evasive manoeuvres

Some lucky placing meant I avoided flying my ISD off the table in the last couple of turns, but nothing else really changed.

All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable where my opponent got to try out an experimental heavy ship list.

We also got to try out our house rules which included a pass mechanic which worked really well and not counting flotillas for tabling, which didn't really become relevant.

Gaming Roundup

Not much on the wargaing front; I'm trying to get to grips with the new airbrush to knock out some West German armour for an upcoming Team Yankee campaign. The paint queue is mostly full of 15mm armour.

So I've been playing some boardgames, got some games of Betrayal at House on the Hill as well as a combat mechanic for a friends megagame under my belt. I've also been thinking about All That Remains again. I haven't even completed the first edition and I already want to overhaul everything...

Also played half a dozen games of a raptor based game, potentially called Raptor which elicited my frustrated shout of "stop gassing my babies!"

 

Clever girl

 Managed to get an intro to Fabled Lands from one of its major backers. I missed out on the kickstarter myself, but I'm really looking forwards to it. I could do with some skirmish based campaign action.

And finally, I got in some MLGpro hardcore gaming with my first cousin (once removed) with Gallina Coco!

QQ n00bs!

British Armour halts Finno-Japanese offensive

Possibly the result of a game of Hearts of Iron IV that got a bit out of hand, this improbable matchup was played at the Old Duke over the course of a midday using a double sized board and battlefront's random objective cards.

Setup

 What we thought might be a fairly one sided game was actually significantly closer than we thought it might be.

Finno-Japanese positions after tentative British Advance on the left flank

The paks in the above photo were responsible for a  number of kills. The Finnish Hero attached to them allowed one gun to re-roll misses, among other bonuses. The aggravating thing is, we agreed half way through the game that we could have easily ignored them at no loss to ourselves as they were hemmed in by trees and concealing terrain. So we effectively threw away a Sherman platoon for nothing.

The Finnish light tanks and the buckets of Japanese tank boats (called duck tanks by us throughout for no readily definable reason) advanced effectively unopposed.

A blob of Japanese infantry advances in the open

Before dying

Things went better for us in the centre where a giant Japanese infantry blob with some scary anti-tank sticks went on the assault far to soon and was cut to pieces by defensive fire.

We then drew an objective card which rewarded us if we killed the whole unit. We spent the next turn firing everything we had at it but failed to finish it off, allowing it to retreat into a nearby building and holding out until roughly the end of the game.

The left flank retires and pivots to take shots at Finnish recce in the centre.

Cromwells pick off tiddly Finnish light tanks while in turn being picked off by "the beast"

The centre turned into a game of tig with the gigantic Finnish tank hunter, which couldn't be hurt by the Cromwells from front, and so spent a lot of time being smoked while my partners M10's rolled miss after miss. The tanks on the left of this photo were bounced by Cromwell fire, and one was insta-popped in assault by a PIAT team when it was left bailed out and out on a limb.

Airstrikes are less fun when you're on the receiving end.

I've got to say, I'm a fan of the changes to airstrikes in 4th ed. even when I'm the one getting hit by them. Having brought no AA other than a single captured flak track I was reliant on my partner's plethora of .50 cals. to provide cover and they were not always successful. I think we were saved more by our opponents collective inability to call in either of their air support than our ability to drive it off.

Japanese duck tanks race to exploit the week looking left flank

While the Finno-Japanese Centre has been mostly hollowed out

At some point we realised that we could win the game by breaking our opponent. We kept drawing objective cards which only played to our weaknesses, while out opponents appeared content to throw units down our guns - while giving us a beating admitedly.

Eventually our persistence paid off...

We broke the Finnish formation... to virtually no effect. All his remaining troops were support, meaning that they stuck around to help the Japanese... who had two formations.

Meanwhile on the right flank

 If you're curious as to what was happening on the right flank, the answer is, not a lot other than an extended game of cat and mouse between a platoon of Shermans and some very annoyed Japanese infantry and armour, the latter of which couldn't harm the Shermans without a flank shot. My partner eventually began ignoring them. Cool looking as they are, they just weren't able to compete against the much more heavily armoured and armed British tanks. They did, however, float down the river while playing Vietnam appropriate music.

A second airstrike almost pushes me to company breaking point.

Knocking out the last duck boats breaks the final Japanese formation

Thing a Week 23

In one fell stroke Flames of War 4th edition wiped out recovery vehicles of all strokes, leaving literally dozens of players with no use for their highly contextually sensitive, glorified pillboxes.

Players just like me.

So I turned it into an objective, because of course.

Feels a bit cheap to count this as a "Thing a Week" as the figure was already painted, all I had to do was model the base.

After almost 7 years of playing this game, you would have thought I'd have put together some objectives, but this is the first. The problem is, the flat cardboard ones I got as a battlefront freebee a while back are just inherently more transportable, and less fiddly when it comes to actually playing with, on and around them.

Thing a Week 22

Greetings inkeep! My name is Twicelord Quell Osman Urth Jadhak. No, no. No need to bow. I and my companions merely wish to sample your wine, and maybe cast our eyes over your menu. Just stew? Well, I'm sure that will be lovely. Oh, a very strange land, a very long way from here, why don't you get yourself a glass and let me tell you about the Great Spindle of the Airwise Nepf.

This is my character in the game of Pathfinder I'm currently playing. I think this might be a rare case of the figure looking better in the photo than in reality. My attempt at blending didn't really work in my opinion, and my attempt at non-metalic metals in red on the shin guards and (hidden) chestplate (not really visible) didn't really work. It's also the first time I've made an attempt at doing eyes, and he looks a bit maddened. 

I had to extend the cobbling around his base so if fit properly on a 25mm base and it works well enough if you dont look too closely.

I realized half way through him that it's been a while since I did 28mm painting.

In the end, it's good enough for my purposes.