"Blog update: CoC AAR and first impressions." Topic

posted an AAR of our first Chain of command game and my first impressions of the rules.

link

Cheers

Interesting report and thoughts.

"Most of the first few phases were simply used to get the majority of out troops on the table."

It's worth bearing in mind that it can in fact be quite advantageous to keep some of your troops OFF the table. Remember that they can deploy from any jump off point.

yeah, i did that with my pak 36 immediately after hie brought on the the H39 , and played area denial with him.

also, although i mentioned the tank came on and shot up his charging squad, that happened right at the end of the 2nd turn.(the game ended early in the 4th turn)

Dan never brought his AT gun on, and his 60MM mortar only came on a half dozen phases before the end of the game.

Lovely table, bu it looks like a few key points are being missed here.

Keeping your troops off-table until you have located your opponent and obliged him to deploy inputs you in the strong position of being able to concentrate your force where your opponent is weakest. Thus is good tactics in any conflict. Deploying everything, or even most, of your forces early on is nit a good idea.

I'd also suggest playing more in than one game in which you state you dice rolling was poor before dramatically changing the firing or movement rules. You say that the tank movement variation is not sufficient, but an average roll will see a slow tank move 7" whereas a fast rank will go 10". That's nearly 50% faster in round numbers. If you made that +2 pips per dice you'd be nearly doubling the speed difference.

Troops in the open die pretty easily in CoC. Those in hard cover survive much better – this seems good to me. Shooting up troops in cover can take a long time – there may be better options than just doing this.

You may have skewed things by going support heavy and basic troops light- this is an infantry, with some support game.

Great looking game for sure!

I'd agree with TSM about not rushing into changes. I played one game and I was tempted to change some things (it's in my nature) but having played a lot more games I won't be too hasty in changing anything.

And as in reality it can be a huge advantage in holding some shock units in reserve. Try it out in your next game…keep a couple of units (anti-tank especially and see how it can swing things in your favour!

Great AAR though…thanks for posting

for the record, I did say at the end of the blog post that i would have to play a few more games before deciding any changes, if any.

we went so support heavy specifically so we could learn the rules about them. I don't learn nearly as much by reading as by doing. so now I know the rules for AT guns, tanks, infantry guns, mortars, as well as most of the standard infantry weapons after one game, instead of 3 or 4.

and as mentioned above, i didn't just deploy everything right away. however i saw an opportunity to both do some damage early in the game and learn the melee rules, so i took it. that required deploying my 2nd squad. the AT gun was held in reserve along with my LT and MG and tank. the MG was deployed at the beginning of the 2nd turn, and the tank ad the end of the 2nd turn(to stop my feldwebel from being overrun).

Tanks generally did not advance very fast when there are enemy infantry around. Not only would you leave your own supporting infantry in the dust, you become very vulnerable to some chap popping up from nowhere and serving you a molotov cocktail at the most inopportune moment.