The Magic Spell

When we have the pleasure of receiving the latest game from The Gamers, our perception of the world changes dramatically. Family, friends, work, business, money, politics recede into outer space as we focus on the parcel we have just received. This is the new baby who will occupy our spare time for the next month. We'll have to care for it (sorry, for him), learn how to deal with him, how to get the most from him. Our sleep time will be seriously reduced and our war-widows will complain we care more for the new-born child than for them (how could it be different?). A spell has completely enchanted our life.

It's time to open the box, the most interesting time in our game's life. We put aside the rule books, then unfold our radar antennas to search for cats, dogs, and kids before setfing the maps up. Next, on to the counters: we immediately locate powerful tank formations and start imagining how they will move all over the map. We look at those intermediate counters worthy of escort or defensive line duties. We hear the thunderous barrages our arty units will unleash upon our helpless enemy.

Finally we discover those extraordinarily weak units which are always included in games, the bottom units in the counter manifest, the ugliest units in military history, and we say in disgust: "They stink! What is this trash for?" The marvelous spell is broken ...

... which is not really bad, as we realize our wife, fiancee, mother, or sister is about to convert our baby into paper pulp unless we immediately forget about it and sit at the table for dinner (unless we happen to be James Sterrett or Frederic Jordan who are fortunate enough to have gaming wives).

During dinner, our minds wander to the extensive plains of Ukraine, the mountains of Tunisia, or the jungles of Burma, seeing our panzers blasting their way into the enemy's supply centers, our infantry infiltrating behind enemy positions, our Katyushas flattening a city into a desert. We forget all about those stinky units.

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

Lots of subunits have been omitted in the game's design process, and those that made the cut are there because they can and must be useful. No matter how unimportant a unit may look, each has a mission you must carry out in the best possible way. If you don't think so, I'll be glad to play against your elite armies, stripped of all those apparently useless units before we start.

Conventional Approach

The objective of this article is to show some ways to get the most of those units we usually despise. If we manage to make our enemy say "Those units look stinky but hey! they hurt," then we can say that we are getting the best from our resources; otherwise we're wasting our units.

First, I'll try to analyze the conventional use of these units; afterwards I'll analyze why the conventional use is not the best we can get from them and suggest some ideas about the use of selected weak units to improve their performance.

I'm sure some of you will raise your eyebrows when I speak about "wasting resources" and think "No, not me, I appreciate these units and I assign them useful tasks"; but let's be honest and admit that 90% of the time those units are used in two conventional missions: "camouflator" and "strength booster." If intelligently used these are not bad missions, but these units deserve a second look to show what they're capable of. Maybe some of the ideas explained here are obvious to you, but my experience says most players are happy with conventional ideas and ignore more imaginative and fruitful approaches.

Let's see what we can get if we use them conventionally:

1. Camouflator:

This mission consists in assigning our weak unit the honorable top place in a stack. We usually do this to hide our best units from our enemy's sight. This way he may find a couple of surprises when attacking our stacks. The problem is this "tactic" usually shows as much as it hides and it sometimes manages to inform our enemy better than putting a strong unit on top (more eyebrows raising). Not that camouflage is useless, but it must be used with reflection and not indiscriminately.

As an example, imagine you are the Stalingrad Pocket II (SPII) Soviet player and you have five 2-5-5 infantry divisions and one 1-1-5 infantry brigade to cover three hexes. Distributing two units per hex you'll have one hex with a defensive strength of 6 and two hexes with a strength of 10. Routinely deploying the 1- 1-5 brigade as the top unit, are you hiding anything? NO! You are showing your weak spot in the line! The German player will look at your stacks and, assuming a 2-5-5 division is under the top unit he'll have a clear view of your line, thus knowing where to attack with a minor risk.

If you deploy your "useless" brigade under one division, the German player will see a solid line with three apparently equal two-unit stacks with a 2-5-5 unit on top and with no way to know where the weakest spot is. He'll have to attack blindly, thus suffering the risk of being surprised by a stronger stack than anticipated, or to mass strength enough to blast a 10-point stack, thus using extra units he could have used in another place had he known where your 6-point stack was. Clearly, using the 1-1-5 unit to hide an infantry division was, in this case, a mistake.

2. Strength Booster:

This mission is self-explanatory and usually goes along with the "sacrificial lamb- cannon fodder" mission. The usual argument behind this mission is "Rather than seeing it in the rearguard, I prefer to deploy this useless unit in the front so this stack is one strength point stronger (only one half if the stack is DG'd, by the way) and I can always lose this unit as the second step loss if this stack is attacked, thus saving a more valuable step."

Sometimes this argument works, but sometimes it backfires on your face. I'll explain it briefly: if you expect a massive attack on a bridge in SPII and you have only an Alert Bn and a Rumanian Cavalry Bn to slow this advance, you'd better put both units in different hexes (both sides of the bridge, if possible). A 12:1 overrun against your "massed" stack would kill it with anything over 4 and this "strength booster" mission would have been costly. Deploying in two separate hexes, you'll make your opponent use more resources to get the same result; this is what "slowing" the enemy means. This is an extreme example but it illustrates more usual situations.

Strength boosters can sometimes be useful, but be careful not to increase your losses for nothing just because you don't know what to do with a weak unit.

Horses 'R Us

In SPII 0-1-8 Rumanian cavalry battalions are much better troops than usually considered. Sure, they're not good for their strength ratings, but for their speed-and their size. The usual "camouflator" mission is not possible. Since they are 0-attack strength units, you cannot hide anything under them except arty and HQs. You can use them as cannon fodder if you want, but the SPII Combat Table is bloody enough to make you regret this use, unless you are a masochist.

In my opinion, these battalions can be used in two far more valuable missions: rearguard security and as reserves (what? yes, as reserves).

1. Rearguard security:

You are right, cavalry battalions are stinky and useless. Why deploy them in the front? They're far more useful in the rearguard. Lots of times we have seen in SP2 the "bear hug" of the Red Army. A brittle Axis line is massively attacked by Soviet forces and dangerously crumbles under the bear's pressure. After a heroic resistance and not a few losses the line manages to slow the Red Army for one more turn, having to retreat three or four hexes and rebuild a new resistance line with survivors and any available reinforcement in range.

The story repeats time and again. But sometimes it's different and the Axis line is seriously breached, thus allowing Soviet reserves (not very numerous, but fast) to pour behind the Axis lines and take some important places such as Perelazovskii, Surovikino, Bokovskaia or Kalach, which happen to be at the end of their movement range.

The premature loss of places like these seriously hinders the Axis capability to reform effective defensive positions and receive much needed reinforcements in the right place. Sometimes this can be avoided just with the presence of one unit, no matter how weak it is, in the critical spot as Soviet reserves are quite often able to take a village in the Axis rearguard if unopposed, but not able to fight for it as they lack those extra 2 MPs to overrun the place. The rearguard security detachment has saved the village, or the bridge (no overruns across allowed) and the Soviet spearhead will be caught in the open next turn by German counterattacking forces.

Why use the Rumanian Cavalry Battalions as rearguard forces? Because they add little to first line combat, being dispensable there, and they are fast enough to move from one critical spot to the next in just one turn.

2. Reserves:

Rumanian Cavalry Battalions are excellent reserves to be used during the Axis Reaction Phase. Yes, they add little in strength, but their main value is not their strength, but their size. No matter how many strength points the Axis stacks in a hex, if the Soviet wants to attack it at high odds he will do so (a DAM'd stack can be as strong as 45 points or so). Thus, the main defensive strength of the Axis line is not in its defensive factors, but in the number of steps per stack, and here a cavalry battalion adds as much as a panzer unit with far less risk of losing valuable units in the fight. If a stack built with non-essential units in an important location can resist the whole Soviet turn, even losing all steps but one, then that stack has been gloriously successful. Of course, you do not have enough units to stack every hex in the Axis line up to the highest limit (6 steps), as you do not have enough units; therefore the use of reserves is crucial. After the Soviet movement phase you'll be able to see what hexes are most likely to be attacked, so you'll be able to reinforce those hexes or to make up for losses due to Soviet overruns with you reserves.

Why use cavalry battalions instead of panzer units as reserves? Who said "instead of"? They must be used "along with." Panzer units in reserve can be an excellent resource to blast any exposed enemy unit after the Soviet movement; such a counterattack can even entirely disrupt a carefully prepared attack. But this is not all: you must often reinforce stacks that are evidently going to be attacked. Doing so with your mobile forces keeps them from counterattacking, thus diminishing your reserves' combat potential, so you need other reserve units available to strengthen your defensive positions.

Rumanian cavalry battalions are perfect as they are fast enough to cover a big sector of the front, they do not subtract much from the first line while out of it and, in spite of their weakness, they can be a tremendous reinforcement as, not being on top of the receiving stack, they reveal no more information to the Soviet player than that a unit has reinforced the stack. Not knowing the real value of that unit due to the Fog of War rule, the Soviet player will have to assume it can as well be a 5-rated mobile infantry unit (if it sometimes is he'll have to assume it always is or run greater risks), thus having to mass more attackers (diminishing pressure against adjacent hexes which were also to be attacked) or completely forfeit the attack (assuming the hex will be a harder nut to crack than it really is). In both cases the cavalry battalion will have managed to distract enemy resources from attaining their objectives.

Maybe they will not decide the game, but their use can be far more imaginative than that of sacrificial lamb!

The Pain in the Ass

Usually most ideas, rules, and decisions taken while designing and playing our wargames are scrutinized by inquisitive eyes and raise a dust cloud in the world of discussion. Sometimes such a cloud is small and short lived as people rapidly agree or reach a compromise about a given question.

Other times long and heated discussions arise and even flame wars erupt everywhere as players feel themselves in the field of honor and flood the net and magazines with the smell of powder instead of keeping their ammo to use where it really belongs: the battlefield. Nevertheless, from time to time, a new star rises in the sky with its own incontestable light and nobody, not even the bravest, dares to challenge the strength of Absolute Truth.

Owners of Afrika are fortunate being among those blessed with one of those absolute truths, maybe the most absolute in the SCS system: "Kill that bastard scoundrel!"

As soon as the British Long Range Desert Group enters the game an immediate raid against the damned Fox must be launched. If it succeeds you'll have a permanent smile on your face during the whole game, even if you lose. If it doesn't (and let's admit this is the likeliest possibility) you will have lost a small unit trying to manage a greatly important event for the development of the campaign. No big loss for, perhaps, a great effect: just do it.

But the main objective of this section is not to stress the importance of blasting the "pesky bugger with the Blue Max" (Dean scripsi) out of the game, as we already know about it. Successful or not, what should you do with the LRDG after the big bang try? A superficial analysis would say it's the perfect candidate for both conventional missions: a low rated camouflating unit adding an interesting defensive point and able to absorb one loss if needed.

Maybe better than other units in such missions, but an imaginative player should get far more from this unit, converting it into a pain in the ass for the Axis player-and I really mean a pain in the ass, in the geographic ass of the Axis forces. The LRDG should use its unique capabilities to disrupt the enemy rearguard as much as possible.

The LRDG is second to none in movement allowance. With its 25 MPs it can outrun any Axis unit in the game. This high movement allowance coupled with the fact that the LRDG need not pay EZOC costs allows the LRDG to be even aster than those agile German recon units, which have to pay EZOC costs and thus cannot move as far as the LRDG as they must pay the latter's ZOC cost. Therefore the LRDG can make a raid and safely return to own lines in the next turn unless the Axis has some rearguard security units. The ability to survive in the enemy rearguard without supply also encourages such missions.

The deeper the Axis advance into Egypt, the more interesting such LRDG missions become. When/if the front nears the Delta, an LRDG raid can be a very disrupting affair. Able to infiltrate any non-solid Axis line, it can use its fast MA to move deep in Libyan terrain. If the Axis player has not been careful, some essential supplies could even be destroyed /captured by the LRDG. During the Exploitation phase the LRDG could advance still farther into Libya and finish its movement in the mountains beyond Derna to interdict enemy supply movement, or even into Benghazi, completely disrupting Coastal Shipping and road movement of supply. Such a move combined with bad Tobruk and Bardia Shipping rolls can even cause an Axis general retreat towards Libya. Be careful to leave the LRDG in non-overrunable terrain if possible. This way, if Axis units cannot reach the commandos during the movement phase they will be immune to enemy attack during the exploitation. If it is possible, occupying Benghazi or even Tobruk (if no German Recon unit is available) can be useful to distract Axis units and even cause some interesting losses during the exploitation, even at the price of losing the LRDG.

If the LRDG survives the raid and Axis units have reacted to kill it in the next turn the LRDG will have been able to make the enemy lose time and can freely move back to safety to prepare a new raid. If no Axis reaction is seen you can thank your enemy and go on with the raid trying to chase any unprotected supply available or disrupt enemy supply traffic to the maximum. In any case a real pain in the ass.

Patton's Organs... Well, Not Quite

How can a 2-rated artillery unit have a great effect in battle? For sure not by firing 2-point barrage attacks, but neither by acting as an isolated roadblock. You can use arty units of American airborne divisions in Ardennes as roadblockers (sacrificial lambs), but then be sure they're not alone and form a creditable blocking stack; alone such units will be overrun and destroyed for little material gain (maybe one or, if you won the lottery this week, two enemy steps) and no time gain at all. Being non-attack capable, these units cannot act as "camouflators" either.

The best use of airborne artillery units is precisely that for which all artillery units are there: barrage. Of course this is nothing new and lots of us add those two points to win a column shift. The usually underestimated question is where and how to add these two points. A careful study of the barrage table along with the ordinary American artillery units will give us the answer. In my (not so humble) opinion airborne arty should be used along with one or two 8-rated arty units:

• When coupled with one such unit the probability of inflicting at least a DG on the barraged stack rises from 28% to 41%, thus converting a somewhat poor chance into a fairly likely one. This arty team can be used in places where disorganizing the enemy is not essential but can reap interesting benefits for you. A special advantage of this combination is that you don't need both points from the airborne arty, one being enough to manage the column shift you need; this way you can use the airborne arty in move mode, which means you can use it far away from the unit's position at the start of the turn.
• When making a trio with two 8-rated arty units you'll get excellent results from your airborne arty. Enemy stacks will have an almost guaranteed DG on their heads as the probability rises from 72% (very good chance) to 92% (excellent chance). This combination is especially interesting in places where you really need to disorganize the enemy and the slightest chance of not doing so can bring horrific results (in which case you'd better make a 3 x 8 barrage, but that's not always possible). Besides, if you are lucky, you may even kill an enemy step (17% chance, compared with the almost negligible 8% obtained without the paras). Unfortunately, in this case you need both barrage points to break the table, so you must remember this team is shorter-legged than the other one. (In any case I'm sure the German player would love this kind of short legs for his "foot" arty units.)

Such teams can be difficult to organize during the first turns of the game, but once the Americans enter the map in force you should be able to couple the appropriate units with no great difficulty, so remember not to stupidly lose those apparently weak arty units. If they die for a good reason, no problem, but don't sacrifice them just for the sake of maybe killing an enemy step while overrunning.

[Ed. note: remember that the mobility of your para- artillery enhanced team is constrained by the availability of paratrooper regiments from the same division to spot targets. See Ardennes rule 1.10b, item C.]

David vs. Goliath

If we had to pay our counters for their relative strength point values in reference with the median value of all counters in each game, Yom Kippur's Israeli Jeep company would be one of the units with highest efficiency/cost ratio in the whole SCS series. This tiny unit, small as it would be in any SCS game, looks almost ridiculous in the gigantic world of Yom Kippur.

Maybe the Jeep company is the best example of conventional approach being wrong with smaller units. Using the Jeeps as a cammo counter is a perfect way of misplaying fog of war. All of the IDF's important stacks are very heavy, and by putting the Jeeps on top you hide absolutely nothing; the Egyptian player knows perfectly what the Jeep company is trying to hide. But to add insult to injury, you are not only failing miserably to hide info, you are even revealing info to your opponent!

The Jeep company is by far the fastest unit in the game and keeping it far from Egyptian eyes is the proper way to play fog of war with this unit. If the Egyptian player cannot see your Jeeps he will have to assume any Israeli stacks might have a unit with 20 MPs available (thus taking unnecessary measures and wasting resources) or forget about the unit, take no special countermeasure, and hope for the best (thus leaving an open gate to your Jeeps' profitable operations).

Using the Jeep company as a strength booster in this game is something like trying to stop a tornado with a straw wall and the idea doesn't deserve further comment.

The most successful tactic for the IDF is the constant hit and run we have learned to hate when playing the Egyptians. The IDF moves fast toward the Arab units, unleashes a hell of land and air artillery, blasts survivors with tank and mech units, and retreats to safe havens in the rearguard to avoid the Egyptian hug. The question is doing it fast and effectively enough to sweep the Sinai and win the game before the cease-fire arrives. Given infinite time an experienced Israeli player should not be stopped by the Egyptians, but time is limited and a good Egyptian player can convert the Israeli glorious victory into a shaming draw-or even worse if the Soviets are fast enough in the UN Security Council.

To avoid this, the IDF must get the most from its resources and the Jeep company must be used to its fullest extent to help blast the Egyptian Army. The first evident feature it must use is its speed. 20 MPs are many MPs and they will allow the Jeeps to reach hexes the rest of the IDF could never reach. Using the hit and run tactic, most Israeli units may be quite far from the Egyptian units at the start of the Israeli turn and this distance may keep them from enveloping the enemy

This is not a problem with the Jeep company as its long legs allow the unit to move through two extra EZCC hexes, which may be vital to surround the enemy. Gaining the enemy rear is very important in any SCS game but it's especially important in Yom Kippur as its combat table has a lot of defender retreat results (even at 1:2 the chance to force a retreat is greater than 50%). The second and speed-complementary feature of the Jeeps is the attack capability of the unit, which allows it to exert a ZOC. Having the Jeeps behind the enemy may yield you juicy results in the form of extra losses.

This is almost self evident and all of us have realized it, but my experience is most players think only of just one important combat instead of carefully studying all combats and all possible retreat paths to decide where the Jeeps will be most harmful. Properly placed, the Jeep company can cause two or even three extra losses instead of the usual one (remember some units cannot retreat through swamps or across the canal and the usual cluster configuration of combat groups in the game). Remember also to assign the Jeeps to block retreat paths of stacks which will probably be DG'd to be able to move away during the exploitation phase; causing an extra loss but remaining engaged by surviving enemies is not the best of ideas.

Important as it is, the ZCC effect is not the only one the Egyptians should hate. The ability of the Jeeps to move long distances can also be coupled with the excellent ground attack capability of the Israeli Air Force once the game advances some turns. A careless Egyptian can offer on its side of the canal some interesting targets (armored reserves, HQs, arty units) trusting in the security provided by the water barrier and long distance if he sees the IDF is not in a position to launch a cross-canal attack. This is the time to show him that sense of security is nothing more than an illusion.

If the target is worth the effort, launch your Jeep unit in a Deep Spotting Raid, move it adjacent to the enemy, and blast the hex with two air points; rolling on the max table you'll have a nice chance of causing losses (42% with 17% of killing two steps) and a DG result is almost certain (92%). Can you imagine the Egyptian commander's face when you blow out one of his scarce HQs using this method? He'll never offer you the chance again, but doing it once is enough to laugh forever.

This procedure can also be used to deal with big clusters (5- 6 hexes) of enemy units which are far from the rest of the Egyptian Army (far enough to avoid fresh Egyptian forces to reinforce the place or counterattack) without having to use most of the IDF's available forces to blast the enemy concentration. Send some forces with artillery support to destroy some 2-3 Egyptian stacks and use the spotting ability of the Jeeps (not to distract bigger units from the killing mission), air support, and artillery (if needed) to DG the rest of the cluster. During the exploitation phase you'll be able to hit survivors again with your strong fist to "terminate" the cluster. If the enemy occupies non-overrunable terrain, you can remain in place or even surround survivors who, being DG, will be too weak to counterattack.

These uses, and other imaginative ones you may come up with, are reason enough to hide the location of your Jeeps, which on the other hand should be near the center of the map to offer it the greatest zone of operations. When a second loss is called for, remember all this before happily killing your Jeeps instead of another unit. In my opinion, if your armored losses are low, there's no problem in sacrificing a tank unit to save the Jeeps; tanks will come back soon but Jeeps will never return.

The Power of One

In contrast to Yom Kippur and its abundant heavy units, Crusader offers us plenty of weak units to work with. I'm not only talking about those few Italian 0-1-8 garrisons but also of the large number of units which reach such or similar values when reduced. The small map and long legs of mobile units leave all those units apparently useless and ready to be slaughtered time and again. Nevertheless, and even this assumption not being completely wrong, these units can be killed (only temporarily most of times) while carrying out a useful mission, instead of becoming harmless units waiting for their destruction.

Studying the Crusader map, we can clearly see the chain of escarpments and slopes dividing terrain in two sectors. For the sake of this article I'll call this sectors "coast" and "desert." This separation in sectors and fluid communications between them can be essential to decide the final outcome of the game. At the start of the game the Axis player has the key to control the coast, including the always important Via Balbia. Maintaining this control is one of the objectives never to forget as it will enable the Afrika Korps both to switch forces (east-west and coast-desert) or to retreat to a safe haven for one or two turns if needed.

The long chain of escarpments running from hex 53.20 to hex 31.24 is of great help to keep the Commonwealth forces from interfering with DAK's freedom of movement. The chain has only two passes, in Gambut and in hex 47.22. Such passes must be garrisoned to prevent the British Matildas and Cruiser tanks from freely marauding along the Via Balbia. As the passes run through escarpments or slopes defending garrisons will enjoy excellent combat modifiers, the most evident one being the halving or quartering of attacking units.

Nevertheless, more important than attack penalty is, in my opinion, the impossibility of overrunning those garrisons from the desert. This inability allows the Axis player to devote light units to that mission, instead of having to waste valuable resources in such a defensive posture.

If you have plenty of available units you'll have no problem garrisoning anything you desire, but as the game advances, aggressive players will see more units (both friendly and enemy) waiting on the reconstitution track than on the map. Then the importance of those 0-1 units becomes evident. Just one of those units is enough to guard the passes against Commonwealth raids, thus providing the dwindling Axis mobile forces a good haven where they can regroup.

Sure, those tiny garrisons will be blasted during the combat phase, but the core of the Axis forces will remain out of enemy reach until the exploitation phase-and it's not a good idea to overrun a German mobile stack. Losing the weakest units will cause no harm to the Axis player as they'll be constantly coming back as reinforcements and losing them all is unlikely. Maybe they are worth only one strength point, but properly placed these units can prevent attacks against the cream of your forces for a whole turn.

Of course, this blocking approach can be used both ways, and that's why the flanks of the ridge line must be kept under strong control. But this is another story out of the scope of this article.

I hope all these ideas renew your interest in the older SCS games. My gaming experience is not enough to talk about Gazala, Drive on Paris, and Fallschirmjager. Maybe in the future.