Somewhere in this issue is an article on the WW2 rules, SPEARHEAD, and I had just about finished the article when I received an invitation to participate in a COMMAND DECISION (CD) game. Talk about coincidences! Neither of these two sets, while very popular in the wargaming community, rank very high in my estimation… and so here was an opportunity, just after I had enjoyed the wonders of SPEARHEAD, to again sample the delights of CD.
J T King sponsored the game; J T was president of HMGS some years ago, and I was curious to see what type of scenario he’d offer. There were 6 of us at table-side… 3 were designated Russian commanders (me amongst them… or is it “I amongst them”… it’s certainly not ‘myself amongst them’… ah!… who cares? ) and 3 were German. J T’s troops were 20mm in size, and one infantry stand, measuring about an inch by 11/2 inches, represented a platoon. One tank model represented a platoon (3? or 4?) of real-life tanks.
J T had laid out a table some 8 feet long by 4 feet wide… this was a ‘German-retreat-and-run-off-the-board’ scenario, and we Russians were supposed to destroy as many German troops and as much equipment as we could, as the dastardly Boche dashed from one 4-foot baseline to the other. The Germans appeared on one of the narrow table sides, and proceeded to zip up along the larger, 8-foot, dimension of the table.
And “zip” it truly was, for the German recon units appeared on the first move and whizzed along, moving some 50 inches on the field… and this didn’t even allow for road movement! The slower vehicles (the heavy armor) that followed the recce units all moved around 20 to 30 inches per turn. At first it seemed to me that within 3 turns, all the Germans would have easily exited, and we’d have an extremely fast-going scenario.
As the map shows, the field contained two clumps of trees, one ridge and one town… all else was completely bare.
Scattered around the field were a number of Russian green marker chitties… some were dummies, and some represented partizan units hiding under rocks and crannies. At first, the German recon tanks approached the chitties and stopped at a distance of 4 inches, and diced to see if they ‘spotted’ them… they needed a toss of 5 or less on a 10-sided die to see ‘em. For some reason, on the subsequent turns, the German armor was permitted to run right over the partizans… no spotting necessary… just rumble! rumble! right over them, and the partizans would pop up. I never found out what happened to the spotting rule.
Movement in CD is simultaneous… each side gives order chitties to its companies and the first phase in the sequence is ‘movement’. For the first 5 turns, we Russians sat there and watched the Germans move… the only units we were permitted to have on the table were our partizans.
One of the German tanks disturbed a partizan stand, which popped up to defend itself. After movement comes ‘opportunity fire’ during which all non-moving units may fire. Despite being ‘non-moving’, the partizans had nothing with which to fight off the tank, and so we went into the second fire phase. I should note that CD has three fire phases within the turn:
- a. The first, ‘opportunity fire’, is for stationary, non-moving units only.
b. The second, which I think is termed ‘regular fire’, is (a) for units that were stationary, and (b) units that had moved ‘cautiously’ (less than ½ their permitted move distance).
c. The third… and I have no idea of its name… is a general sort of fire in which it seemed that everyone blasted away.
Of interest is the fact that in the above 3-phase firing sequence, stationary units get 3 bites at the apple, i.e., they can fire in each phase. And some units are more equal than others, for some of the tank guns, due to their higher rate of fire, can fire twice each phase.
Lots and Lots of 10-sided Dice
For armor firing at armor, we had, at each given range increment (every 5 inches? every 8 inches?), two parameters for the firing weapon:
- a. First is the weapon’s ‘to-hit’ value. Toss a 10-sided die under the
value and you’ve scored a hit.
b. The second parameter is the penetration value. Add this to another 10-sided die roll and this is the armor level that you’ve penetrated.
c. Now you look up the target armor grade and see if the shot penetrated.
d. I think that most of the armor on the field required 3 hits to be destroyed.
e. Infantry were handled a wee bit differently. The units were graded… green, veteran, etc., up to elite. Each grade requires a number of hits to destroy a platoon stand… greens were 1, regulars were 2, etc.
Going back to the battle in which the German tank discovered a stand of partizans, in our encounter the partizan infantry would be destroyed if the stand received 2 hits. Since neither unit fired in the opportunity fire phase, in the second firing phase, the tank fired both of its machine guns and hit our partizans once. The partizans retreated into the nearby town.
The first three turns took only 15 minutes… perhaps a world’s record. This was because the only units on the field opposing the Germans were the partizans and most of the green chitties which had been rolled over by the tanks turned out to be dummies. Very little shooting. J T was very happy with the rapid progress of the scenario. “I love this game!”, he said.
Our Russian units, the big stuff, were scheduled to come on-board on Turn 6. We had been given a choice of a ‘pursuit’ scenario, in which we would dash up field following the Germans, or a ‘blocking’ scenario, in which I thought we’d place ourselves in front of the Germans. I had chosen ‘blocking’, thinking we would defend Mother Russia with our lives, not letting the Germans through.
Unfortunately, ‘blocking’ didn’t really mean ‘blocking’. Looking at the map, note that I’ve divided the field into 6 areas. The Germans completely avoided areas 4, 5, and 6, going up the western side of the table. On Turn 4, the German mass of infantry and armor sat squarely in Area 2, which was the entry point for all our Russian armor. On Turn 5, the Germans had reached the northern edge of Area 2, and on Turn 6, they were grouped in Area 3, which is when our Russian forces suddenly materialized in Area 2, behind them. What sort of ‘blocking’ scenario was this? The enemy was just about to exit the field!
Bob Liebl was the German commander… Bob didn’t like the ‘surprise’ ploy wherein an entire Russian battalion? division? mysteriously popped up: “How could they have snuck up on us? Didn’t we see dust clouds? Couldn’t we have heard them?” But J T stood firm… surprise was written in the book and surprise it would be.
And so, on Turn 6, our Russian armor appeared in Area 2, and each tank… I think we had around 15 of them… moved some 20 inches onto the field going north and facing the Germans.
The range from our tanks to the closest Germans was about 8 inches. J T indicated that, given the “to-hit” numbers at that range, it would be hard to miss, especially so because we were facing the rear ends of the Germans, with their puny rear armor defensive factors. That was perfectly acceptable to we Russians… after all, we had waited 6 full turns to come on the field, and it was obviously time to make Kutusov or Trotski or Lenin, or some one, proud of us.
Oh! Oh! A new turn of events. Our host suddenly took pity on the Germans. He permitted the rearmost line of German tanks to face about, 180 degrees, and get into firing formation. Since both sides had moved, neither would fire in the opportunity fire phase. But now, instead of our Russians firing alone in the regular phase, the Germans would return fire.
And another item I must note. When we Russians moved onto the field, the guy who moved our armor did the usual “thing”… the “thing” that all CD players do… he simply placed all our tanks in line, shoulder-to-shoulder, hub-to-hub, wheel-to-wheel, in one grand phalanx formation. There were 12 tanks abreast… that’s all there was room for. At about 2-inches in width per tank, we had a solid tank line of 24 inches of heavy armor.
Seeing the Russian phalanx, and all their armor crammed together, Bob Liebl asked about the “collateral damage” factor. He wanted to fire HE between two tanks and damage both of them in the blast zone. J T shook his head… I assume there’s no collateral damage rule in CD.
I then mentioned that the phalanx business looked rather silly. “No!”, said one player, “This was a common ploy of the Germans during WW2.” And another guy chimed in: “And the Russians also used this formation… they’d line up their tanks hub-to-hub and blast away for more fire power!” Faced with this unusual display of expertise concerning WW2 battle tactics, I said no more.
J T permitted about 7 German tanks to about-face, and the firing routines began.
The result was that we Russians destroyed 5 of the 7, and suffered around 3 of our own tanks destroyed. J T used little chitties to denote damage markers on the tanks. As I previously mentioned most tanks blew up after receiving 3 hits. And use of the chitties, of course, transformed the scenario into a Class B quasi-abomination. Surely a couple of smoke puffs would have been sufficient? But little chitties?
Then I noted something new… we had damaged the Germans to so great an extent, that they had to take a morale test. I asked who, or what, was taking the test… was it on the platoon level? The battalion level? I was interested in this because in the SPEARHEAD battle, it seemed that the morale test was on the battalion level… an entire battalion would test, and either all its stands would run back or all would stand.
J T really didn’t give a definitive answer… he said something about the mass of German armor clustered together, but it wasn’t too illuminating.
I didn’t follow the morale testing procedure, but J T announced that one German armor platoon had to fall back. But in this instance, the platoon was so near the end of the field, that ‘falling back’ meant that it ran off the board. The Germans were quite happy with this… having run off the field, the platoon added to their victory points, which were based on the number of units they could get off-board.
I looked for the famed command/control rules in CD. And found none. Sometime back, I thought I had read that Russian troops had to cluster closer together than German troops, which could spread out, giving them a greater tactical ability. In SPEARHEAD, to change Russian orders, a toss of a 6 on a 6-sided die was needed… to change German orders, a toss of 1, ,2, 3, 4, or 5 was needed.
But here, there were no command ploys. J T stated that the turn length was around 15 minutes, and that each turn, you could simply lay out different order chits for your units. No dicing and no difference between Germans or Russians.
Post Game
In our post-game discussion, J T asked his audience if we liked the scenario. Cleo Liebl spoke up and said we all enjoyed it. In truth, the scenario didn’t encompass a battle, so much as a simple 2-turn fire-fight once the Russians appeared on board. And this required 6 full turns of waiting by the Russians and 6 full turns of movement by the Germans.
Everyone gave their opinion about how to beef up the encounter to, perhaps, provide a running fire-fight, rather than a sharp end-game exchange of bullets.
And to me, of course, CD remained one of my not-so-favorite sets of rules. I didn’t like the 3-phase firing sequence… too much dice rolling… and J T mentioned that in CD III, the author, Frank Chadwick, had changed the firing rules, and coalesced them into a single phase.
The other procedure I didn’t like about CD was the fact that every token on the field had to toss its own dice when firing, once for the to-hit process, and once for penetration. . There was no “group-firing-on-group” routine. If I had my druthers, I’d go with a platoon-on-platoon firing routine. CD is not a skirmish game and doesn’t distinguish between turret hits and tread hits and other types of damage. A hit is simply a hit, and 3 of them and you’re out. The die rolling effort would be quartered, and the same 3 hits on a platoon would remove one token.
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© Copyright 2001 Wally Simon
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