There's an on-going WW II campaign pitting me against Don Bailey, which I've spoken about in past issues. We each fight each battle... the results are sometimes amazingly different, since we each use different sets of rules. In fact, we may not even use the same set consistently for the battles, for I for one, regard the campaign as an opportunity to try out different procedures, hence the systems employed in Battle #1 may have little or no relationship to those employed in Battle #2. In the campaign, the Allies (me) are thrusting south, attempting to get to a town called Dorflin. Between me and Dorflin are several battle sites, at each of which the Germans (Don) have set out their defensive forces. After we each play out a battle, we contact each other via e-mail, and discuss the results, and try to 'iron out' the discrepancies that have popped up between the two battle results. For example, at a place called Rendal, Don decided to counter-attack my south-driving force instead of waiting passively on the defense. In his set-up of the encounter, his German force was driven back... he indicated that, according to the time scale involved, it took a couple of days for the counter-attack to peter out. When I set the battle up on my table, my Allied forces also drove off the Germans, but according to the table-top time scale that I used, it took only a single day before the Germans decided that their losses were too heavy, changed their mind, and pulled back. The reason that my re-play of the Rendal affair took only one day resulted from my definition of the time scale per turn. I used the following 6-phase simple sequence for the half-bound: Active Side, Side A Moves Dice to see which side (if any) gets an airstrike Non-active Side, Side B, Opportunity Fire Sides A/B, Simultaneous Fire Dice to see which side (if any) gets artillery support Close Assault After each side has gone through its 6 phases, then I defined the full bound, all 12 phases, as encompassing a total of 4 hours of battlefield time. Assuming that the battle starts out at 6 AM, the first full bound ends 4 hours later at 10 AM. The third full bound therefore ends at 2 PM, and the fourth at 6 PM. At the end of Bound 4, the forces separate, the battle ends for the day, and during the night hours, reserves are brought up, units reassigned, etc. Replay In my Rendal battle, the German attack lasted for 4 bounds. It was at this time, the end of the fourth bound, that they pulled back. Note that the assessment of time is rather subjective. If, for example, I had defined a full bound as a 6 hour period instead of 4, then the 4-bound battle would have taken 24 hours, two full days, instead of one. And this is where Don and I get on the e-mail, contacting each other, and work out the differences in our results. Prior to the campaign, Don had sent me a set of 'unit personality' cards. At Rendal, I drew a card for each unit involved, Allied and German, and found out that his heavy tank battalion was a 'green' one, that he had one super-fanatical infantry battalion, one veteran infantry battalion, that another infantry unit was short on ammunition. For my Allied units, I discovered that one of my medium armored battalions was "poor", that another unit had 'good marksmen' grades, that one infantry battalion was of 'veteran' status, etc. I tried to apply the applicable factors to the units involved, i.e., if the unit was 'veteran', add +10 to its morale level, and if it was composed of 'good marksmen', add +10 to its to-hit probability. Looking back to sequence outlined above, I prepared two decks of 8 cards each. One was for the airstrike phase, one for the artillery phase. The decks were identical... there were 4 cards stating 'No action', and there were two cards for each side, i.e., the Germans had 2 cards and the Allies had 2. One card was selected at random for each of the artillery and airstrike phases. The card draw phases suited the solo-gaming aspect of the battle, putting neither side at a disadvantage. The engaged units were defined as battalions, and each had a data sheet of 15 boxes: Survivability Factor: - 75 0 0 0 0 0 70 0 0 0 0 0 65 0 0 0 0 0 As long as a unit had uncrossed-out boxes on a line, it used the Survivability Factor (SF) associated with that line. In the Rendal battle, the SF was the end-all and the be-all for all of my combat calculations. For example, the fire phase consisted of 4 basic steps: 1. The firing unit's SF was used as the Probability Of Hit (POH) in tossing percentage dice to see if the target was hit. If so, one SF target box was crossed off. Certain modifiers were applied...if, for example, the target was in cover, deduct -10 from the POH, and if the firing battalion was 'heavy' and the target unit was 'light', add +10 to the POH, and so on. 2. For each hit on the target unit, a damage marker (a smoke puff) was placed on the target unit. A unit could be targeted by more than one enemy battalion, hence could have two or three smoke puffs on it. 3. Now the target took a morale test. It referred to its own SF as the base for its morale level; and subtracted -5 for every smoke puff on the unit. 4. If the target passed its morale test, all of its smoke puffs were removed. If it failed, however, it received yet another puff, and crossed off 2 more of its SF boxes. Note that most of the time, units passed their morale tests, and removed their damage markers. When they failed, however, they carried all their damage markers with them into the next round of firing, making them more vulnerable to enemy fire. Back to PW Review April 1998 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 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