"Blitzkrieg Commander IV question" Topic

Still pouring out more minis and terrain every day and have been playing a few games with my oldest. Slowly getting our heads wrapped around the rules. My main question right now is about on table artillery. Do mortars and infantry guns use a template when firing? Or do they just target one unit like any other shooting?

Was going to sign up on the Pendraken forum but it tells me registration is currently disabled.

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on table artillery targets one unit. Unlike off table artillery (which fires only once a turn), it can fire multiple times a turn (on each successful activation), so it can 'spread' its fire that way.

Thanks, Leon. I've sent a message there. and already got a reply.

Thanks, olicana. We've played a handful of games and using the templates but after losing entire companies to my kid's Sig33s and 81mm mortars something felt off. Reading the rules closer I thought it was how you said but thought I'd check with other people. The Sig33s have a good chance of taking out there target as it is without hitting multiple targets at once. We were doing indirect fire with on table units wrong too. The kid is sad that his artillery is getting toned down.

I like my off board artillery for canadians/Commonwealth in NWE when it works but have terrible luck so it doesn't shoot a lot of the time. Same with air support

BKC4 are a good set of rules, as were 1&2 when they were released. I use them for the Western Desert 1941 (own collection in 15mm) but, over the years I've played them for most theatres (collections of others 6mm – 28mm). They make doing quite large games possible, and they have just the right level of detail.

The only problem I have with the rules, is with off board artillery. As with so many rule sets, barrages can land off target. This is rubbish. Artillery can blunder, firing blue on blue, or hitting the wrong village say, but it pretty much ALWAYS lands on the target area on which it was called. This is because the lead gun in the battery ranges in under the direction of its FOO, then when it hits the target, all the other guns in the battery are calibrated to the same target point and they fire for effect. Of course, landing on the target area doesn't mean it always causes damage to the enemy but, in the game, you roll separately for that anyway.

Some shots of games at my place. Bottom one is the teeth arms of 15th Panzer Division, November 1941, on parade. 2nd to bottom shot are some 6mm off table artillery markers (to save on rosters) next to 15mm on table stuff.

I think randomized artillery barrage beaten zones is the only practical way to represent FO error. FOs had severely limited perspective like everybody else on a battlefield, players do not.

But I don't like it either.

The off-scale off-table markers are a great idea.

I'd rather deal with it before it lands in the wrong place. The real limiting factors seem to have been target spotting and identification, delay, and finding target concentrations worth the ammunition expenditure: Delay making it almost impossible to hit moving targets, except by prediction. Consequently, that's how I deal with it.

The last thing I tried was making the observer 'spot' before activating to call his artillery in. I didn't bother with range because I figure he is using a good optical device but, I made vehicles and limbered artillery easy to spot, infantry and deployed artillery harder (3+ and 4+ if memory serves), and one point harder still if there was a closer enemy that could be spotted. If he failed to spot a target he could try to spot another one. This worked well because 88s were not always automatically picked on or seen.

When it came to calling it in on targets that moved in their last turn, I made it one pip more difficult for a concentration.

I also added a blast marker somewhere over which the template had to be placed – template contact with a target being sufficient for a hit. Both sides rolled D6. If the shooter rolled higher or equal he placed the template, otherwise his opponent did. This worked well too.

There is an argument for having limited ammunition supplies, and I may use this in the future. It will stop FOOs calling artillery in on the most pointless target just because he can – his CO would get very annoyed if he was directing a whole battery against one man on a motorbike: Ammunition stocks are too valuable for that kind of thing.

Because artillery is more accurate in my game, my templates are smaller than the rules allow. They are a third smaller, if memory serves.

Olicana, thank you for raising the 'artillery drift' issue again. The more it is examined the more likely rules writers will wean themselves off this gamey and unrealistic mechanism. In my military experience as a mortar fire controller we only fired for effect when the observer told us our most recent ranging shot was on target. In the desert, with heat haze and difficulty in judging distances, the observer might take longer to walk the fire on to the target but if he really couldn't see what he was doing would probably call off the fire.

I bring up 'artillery drift' rules at any given opportunity. They are rubbish, factually absurd, and should be called out as such.

Just because 'artillery drift' appear in lots of rule sets doesn't make them okay. It just means that the original designer's logic was flawed, and everyone who cut and pasted them into rule sets since is guilty of laziness. That's harsh but, never the less, true.

Beautiful looking set up, olicana. I can't comment much on the artillery drift debate. Pretty much every set of rules I play uses a similar system. We are using smaller templates in out games because our base size is about half the size. 25mm instead of 50mm. When one shot can take out almost my entire force on the table I decided to down size. We've been happy with the smaller templates so far.

Beautiful terrain set up and models.