I visited Bob Hurst at his home in Texas, and while there, we started a WW II campaign game. The campaign background was ginned up by Don Bailey, way out in Colorado. Don and Mike McVeigh are taking the part of the Germans, while Bob and I are commanding the Allied forces. Everything is being coordinated via e-mail, which is fairly time consuming. Don sent us a map which contained a number of junctions connected by a road network. The Allies started in the south, and worked their way north on the map, their objective to reach the northernmost towns, while the German forces played only defensively. Our Allied command was given an extensive order of battle… lots of infantry, heavy tanks, light tanks, towed anti-tank guns, tank destroyers, etc. We organized our assets into Battle Groups of 10 units each… Don's instruction sheets stated that the stacking limit at each junction (town) was 10 units, hence 10 were all we could bring into battle at one time. The one exception to the 10-unit stacking limit were the Allied paratroop forces… here, we could drop in a number of supporting units to help the main battle force. The Germans also had an exception to the stacking limit… some of their more elite units. The Allied force designated as Battle Group A started out on Day #1 in the morning at Allied headquarters, and arrived at the German-held town of Donwald after a journey of 1/2 day. The battle commenced on Day #1 in the afternoon. We had not designated any paratroopers to jump into Donwald. It turned out that the Germans had assigned only 4 units to hold Donwald. Under the rules we used, Don's STURM, it took our 10 Allied units 3 bounds to drive the Germans back. The time scheme defined 2 bounds as a half-day… with a 3-bound battle, the battle was over in 2 1/2 half-days… or 1 1/4 full days… rather confusing, and in retrospect, I'd change the definition of the time aspect so that we could correlate the passage of time in the campaign directly with time on the battlefield. STURM's sequence is interesting, consisting of the following phases: First, the active side looks at all of his units that have taken damage during the previous half-turn. He dices for the permanent effect of the casualty markers they carry… until now, the casualty markers represented only temporary casualties… now, via a dice throw, they'll be translated into permanent casualties, and he may lose strength. Some of his unit stands may be placed off-board in the 'rally zone' where they may be rallied and rejoin their mother units at the end of the cycle. Second, the active side dices (1) for the number of actions his units will have (an action permits a unit to move or fire), and (2) the number of his units that will function. These two die rolls also determine a parameter called "clock time", which is accumulated from half-turn to half-turn. As he moves and fires, the active side sets off a series of reactions by the non-active side. The non-active side's units may return fire, fall back, advance, etc. In turn, under the STURM rules, these reactions by the non-active side may produce a response or responses by the units of the active side. What transpires, therefore, is that a number of fire fights spring up, eventually die down, and everything returns to normal. When the accumulated clock values (referred to in Paragraph (b)) total 20, the end of the cycle has been reached, and both sides again assess casualties. The sides may also attempt to rally the units in the rally zone. If unsuccessful, the units are destroyed. I like the way STURM sets up the 'to-hit' procedure. For example, when the heavier armored weapons fire, they have a probability of hit, they toss their dice, and if they do hit the target, the target receives a casualty marker. Note that in most armor games, at this point, dice would immediately be tossed to see if the hit penetrated, and if it did, more dice would be tossed to see what sort of damage would occur. Not so in STURM. In Phase (c) of the sequence as described above, units take hits and are marked accordingly, but the true effect of the hits is not immediately assessed. This means that a small weapon, say, a light tank, can pepper a larger target… a heavier tank, for example…during the fire phases, and can inundate it with hits. Then, in Phase (d), we finally find out what the hits mean. The larger, more heavily armored targets simply shrug off most of the hits they received, while the more lightly armored targets… including infantry… now take it on the chin. Each type of unit starts out with a 'vulnerability' factor of 50. To this is added a number (an armor value) representative of the defensive armored strength of the unit. For example, the armor value of infantry is zero… it adds nothing to its initial vulnerability of 50 percent. A percentage dice toss above 50 and all the hits on the infantry count. Looking at a medium tank, we see an armor value of 30… add this to its initial vulnerability of 50 and we get 80%. A toss above 80 will result in all the hits on the unit counting. In other words, there's only a 20 percent chance that all the hits count. A further example is a heavily armored tank. Here, we add an armor value of 50 to its initial vulnerability of 50… only a toss above 100 will cause all the hits to count. But since you can't toss above 100 with percentage dice, many of the hits are sloughed off. Even though Don Bailey had devised the campaign, we weren't obligated to use his STURM rules for all battles. We did so for the first two encounters, and then employed a different set of WW II rules (an award winning set, I might add). Three Routes On the campaign map, the Allies have three different routes they can follow as they strike north. I commanded the Allied ground forces, and Bob Hurst took charge of the Allied paratroopers. This meant that when we set up a battle involving an Allied paratroop drop, Bob wore two hats, or rather, had two conflicting loyalties… first, he acted as German commander in the game and ran all the German troops, but second, he rooted for his paratroopers as they fought their way across the field. The campaign map displays a series of rivers which the Allies have to cross. In fact, every major town on the map has a river associated with it. As the Allies progressed north, they found that the Germans had blown the bridges at most of the towns. And, in theory, that's when the Allied engineer units should come into play. Engineer units could ferry units across a river under fire, i.e.. during the battle, but they were forbidden to build a bridge during the battle. Only after the sound of the guns ceased could the engineers get out their hammers and screwdrivers and Dremel sets and begin to build. This bridge-building campaign rule proved a stopper to the Allied forces. It meant that a battle could deteriorate into a simple long range exchange-of-fire between the forces… the Allies on the south side of the river, and the Germans on the north, with a destroyed bridge between. The engineering units stood by. They could ferry troops across, but there were only three engineering units on the entire Allied side. If they performed ferry duty under fire, they'd be subject to enemy forces firing on them, take losses, and most probably be destroyed before battle's end. Which meant that if even if the Allies won, there would be no engineers around to build a bridge. I kept my engineers out of the line of fire. While using and interpreting the STURM rules, Bob and I beseiged Don with questions and questions and more questions. And each time, Don would answer something like: "Refer to page 6, article 5, paragraph 3, section 8(a)1, line 15. It's all there, you dodos!" At the town of Best, the Allies got their comeuppance. I had 10 Allied units advance towards Best... all of them armor, Not a single Allied infantryman was involved at Best. Opposing the Allies were 5 units... including two long-range weapons, one heavy tank and one super-powerful tank-destroyer. According to the way we laid out the terrain as shown on the campaign map, the environs at Best consisted of fairly open fields. A few clumps of woods, a hill or so, but mostly open fields. This meant that as the Allies advanced, the long range German weapons made mince-meat out of my troops. Both the German heavy tank and the anti-tank gun had the same 'to-hit' capabilities: From zero to 25 inches probability of hit of 90 percent 25 to 50 inches probability of hit of 70 percent 50 to 100 inches probability of hit of 30 percent We played the battle three times, two of them using Don's STURM rules, and the third time, one set of my own making. The Allies were creamed all three times, and had to retreat. Don then forwarded the results of his own battle at Best, which he had set up in solo fashion. We were not surprised when he, too, told us of the blood-bath at Best, and the fact that the Allies had to pull back. As Allied commander, I've got to keep records of all my units, tracking their hits and their status. Status comes in three flavors... crack, veteran, and green. I'm lousy at record-keeping, and I have no doubt that this campaign will prove no different. Back to PW Review January 2000 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com