I played my first Force on Force game in months today. I took the role of an Iraqi Republican Guard force defending a small town from invading US marines. My friend Tim had a full USMC squad (3 fireteams of 4 men, plus a leader), plus a 3-man GPMG team, a 3-man sniper team, & a CO. I had 2 squads of Republican Guard (2 fireteams of 6 riflemen, & 2 4-man support teams with RPGs & RPDs), plus a 3-man GPMG team, a T-55 tank, a medic, CO & a Ba'athist Party Official. The Iraqi setup can be seen to the right, and the USMC setup is below (the sniper team is atop the cliff).
The scenario was a straightforward Take & Hold, with an Objective building at each side of the battlefield, and 2 central Objective buildings. My Republican Guard leapfrogged along the buildings towards the 2 central objectives, whilst one fireteam tried rushing along a side alley to reach the centre-most Objective. However, they took a few casualties from Tim's opening shots.
Overall I was very lucky with my hit rolls, & also with my Morale checks, which I had to take every time I was fired at, being a Low Confidence force. Having a Ba'athist Part Official re-roll was useful, but I only used it 3 times. In contrast, I thought Tim was quite unlucky with his own damage & Morale rolls. My T-55 flanked my advance, & forced the snipers down from the cliff with cannon fire which seriously wounded one, and then blasted a marine fireteam which had moved into the rocks near Objective 1. It took me 2 pushes to get into Objective 2 in the centre of the board, but once I had established all my fireteams in the central Objectives, they were able to lay down heavy fire on the approaching marines, whilst shrugging off most incoming fire.
However, as the marines eventually pulled back in the face of significant casualties, one US soldier knocked-out the T-55 with an AT-4 rocket, & the crew had to bail. Despite this, a heavy Iraqi fusillade felled the surviving US marines who were trying to retreat through the ruin near the cliff, and only the US MG team made it off the board, escaping from the bunker on the right flank of the Iraqi force. As a parting shot, the CO who was now lying wounded in the ruins had called-in an airstrike on Objective 2, which hit and wrecked both that building, and the adjacent Objective 1 - but miraculously only caused 3 Iraqi casualties!
The Republican Guard suffered 3 killed & 3 seriously wounded, plus numerous light wounds. The USMC had 7 killed, 6 seriously wounded, plus 4 survivors near the cliff who may have been captured along with the wounded after the battle. I think this is only the 2nd game of Force on Force I have ever won, but I did have some above-average rolling. The victory could have been Pyrrhic if the airstrike had killed more Republican Guard.
"Run away!"
I was thinking about the way the FoF rules work when units have large numbers of defence dice. It makes it very hard to do damage unless you can either mass an equal number of defence dice yourself, or you have a higher TQ. That's why games with large numbers of insurgents work, because they're usually TQ d6.
ReplyDeleteAgainst regulars what you can do is suppress them, thus degrading their TQ. A large unit is not that much less likely to fail its morale roll than a smaller unit. So what you should do in this situation is throw suppression fire at the unit until they fail a morale check, then go for the kills (and hope you get a serious injury and the whole enemy unit's out of action next turn).
In this game your low confidence and average morale [i]should[/i] have made this a lot easier for me, as you had to make those morale rolls without me even having to suppress. Unfortunately for me, your morale never faltered. Some of that was good luck on your part, plus the Ba'athist official, but I think some of it is that morale checks are too hard to fail in FoF. I wonder if there's a way to tweak it. It'd be good to have something like repeated morale checks becoming harder, but would mean more counters on the board in a game that's already quite counter-heavy.
Oh yeah, also we completely forgot a fundamental rule - that you can't roll more basic defence dice than your opponent is rolling FP dice.
ReplyDeleteDoh! Yeah, that's a pretty important rule... :-s
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