Easter had an impact on attendance but we still had enough folks show up to run 2 tables at GHG. Kevin and Lance were not able to make it so we wound up rescheduling the War of the Spanish Succession scenario. Marty and William set up our first game of Cold War Commander. There was also a Flames of War game going on.
Here is an excerpt from a battle report that Marty and Rob Smith submitted to our club Yahoogroup:
Marty’s Post
Well as many of you know, we play tested the first games of CWC today using 1/285th scale micro-armour. I dug into my stash of old models and threw together a couple of forces for today’s game. The first scenario involved the stereotypical “World War Three” NATO vs. Warsaw pact armies (circa 1987 or so) with 5000 points of Soviets depicting two battalions of motor rifles and one or tanks one one side attacking a 2500 point British defending force of two companies of mech infantry and one company of tanks. The game started out rather bumpy with the Soviets being slightly delayed in aproaching the NATO lines due to bad command rolls on one side and the British infantry suffering a nasty “friendly fire” accident involving a bombardment by two bateries of their own M109 155m guns. However the Soviets quickly recovered their cohesion and managed to soundly defeat the Brits. The combination of skillful use of artillery firing smoke to mask the Soviet advance , agressive use of the rules for Soviet rigid doctrine (which is a modified verision of Warmaster’s “Warband” rules), and a very poor deployment by the British forces allowed the Soviets to quick close with and overwhelm
their foes.
For the second game, Rob Smith ran home and grabbed his Modern West German force and a 2500 point army contemorary with the aforementioned British force was created. This second games was deemed to represent a NATO training exercise in the late ’80s and was fought using the “meeting engagement” scenario. The result was a much closer game with alot of movement, ducking, and dodging. The result was yet another defeat for the Brits mainly due to a poorly thought out flanking manuver on the part of myself. However it was a close run thing and when the game was called, the Germans were a single unit away from reaching their own break point.
Despite the fact that I was on the losing end of two games (one of which was a complete shut out) , I enjoyed myself. While it’s not my favorite modern rules set, I think I’m going to like CWC. A few random observations:
-Despite some initial misgivings that some players have had, it seems that very late period games are not one sided or overly comples at all. It seems that the “super tanks” (The Brits employed Challenger 1s in both games)do not dominate to the extent to which we feared, number when used with skill can indeed win out over higher technology forces, and the prolifilation of ATGMs was not nearly as deadly as in other sets and did not bog the game down to any real extent.
I’m looking forward to trying this one out again an to that end I am touching up my Soviets and Brits, building late ‘60/early ’70s West German force, and will probably paint up the handful of Modern US troops I have on hand.
Rob’s Post
I, too, had a great time playing Cold War commander. Fond memories of youth, pushing around micro-armor. I wasn’t sure how the mechanisms would all come together, but I was very pleased by both the command and combat systems. While the big tanks are not completely invulnerable, they are certainly tough. In our game, we had 3 Leopards in a defensive position behind a hedge pounding Challenders in the flank and still, after several rounds, managed to only kill one of them.
One thing about these rules is that it feels to mee more like a stand/vehicle represents a platoon. The abstract fire and armor system does not really represent a single vehicle. (This was one of my main problems with Command Decision, that vehicles seemed more like individuals than platoons.) Marty and I had a dust up in a small village among armored infantry formations. It was a lot of fun with difficult decisions required by both sides. LAWs and auto-cannons were dangerous, but you could not depent on auto-kills against the enemy carriers. Marty fired a Milan ATGM against a Marder in the town and we were able to dodge back behind a building. Helps illustrate the weakness of missiles in an urban environment.
All-in-all, a thumbs up from me! I’ll begin stocking US and Russian equipment in the next week couple of weeks.
Left: Setting up a Flames of War scenario
Middle: US infantry deploys in the woods
Right: German Tigers on the prowl
