"Fokker Scourge - Starting a 1915 Campaign" Topic

Lt. Carruthers watched the little monoplane ahead with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension, already it had completed half a turn to port and he knew it would soon be back behind them. He felt a slap on his shoulder and turned to see Captain Downs gesturing, "We're getting the Hell out of here, boyo", he shouted, "That's one of the Hun's new single-seaters – they've been causing quite the stir further up the line"

Half an hour later the little monoplane had landed back at Pont de la Croix. "Schnapps", the pilot, Rittmeister Fritz Engel, called to the steward as he strode into the mess.

"A little early, don't you think Fritz?", said Hauptmann Zeigler, barely looking up from his newspaper.

"I don't see that as any of your business, Max"

Zeigler shrugged and allowed himself a half smile. He didn't know why, but he always got some satisfaction from getting under Engel's skin. From down the hall there was angry shouting; someone was being carpeted.

"What's bitten the commandant?", asked Engel.

"Jager didn't get lined up on the target and they had to go around again. You heard that Schoneberg was killed?"

Lt. Jager was Major Sommer's pilot. Sommer was irritable at the best of times, but he'd wanted their first offensive mission to be the very model of precision and it had been chaos; the four aeroplanes had bunched up and Sommer's had had to go around as Jager hadn't been able to line up on the target without risking a collision.

"No, I hadn't. Pity"

"Ground fire. He, and his vizefeldwebel Wolf. It is a pity, Schoneberg was a decent sort"

* * *

Henry and I had started a campaign set in 1915 a few months ago using the free ‘Eindecker' rules in Miniature Wargames 396 from April 2016. To be honest, neither of us were that enthused and the campaign stalled, but when we discussed it a few weeks ago we came to the conclusion that the rules, in the ‘Wings at War' family from Tumbling Dice (not to be confused with ‘Wings OF War' by Ares Games), had felt a bit ‘flat'. One of the things that WaW does really well is model energy but almost all aircraft in Eindecker are restricted to one level, which sort of negated this aspect. A quick tweak to allow four flight levels as in their other rules and Hey! Presto – we had an enjoyable game.

More on the blog, here: link

Nick

Looks like a lot of fun! Would love to see more of the campaign.
Cheers and Happy New Year!

Love the clouds, very nice effect.

check oput nick yankosky's free rules. He has a group that meets weekly and at least 100 planes. Google as I do not know the web address.

I love the Wings at War series and have those old MW issues with the Eindecker rules. It motivated me to order some of the early war aircraft from Tumbling Dice; I ruined a few when I attempted to add struts (using pins) on the biplanes. Will have to give a go at the planes again to try out Eindecker with your modications.

Cheers guys, hopefully the next game will be this weekend.

Prince Albert's Revenge – the only change we made was to reduce the number of actions for a climb to 3 (otherwise most planes would be unable to climb) and increase the ceilings. Here's what we use:

DH2: Energy 4, Height Level 4
E/III: Energy 4, Height Level 3
Albatros C/I: Energy 4, Height Level 2
Vickers FB5: Energy 3, Height Level 3
Aviatik C/I: Energy 3, Height Level 2
BE2C: Energy 3, Height Level 2

We don't use the odd 'height advantage' rule in Eindecker because introducing more levels renders it somewhat unnecessary. We prefer our tweaked version, but you might prefer the rules as written when you have a go – I'll be interested to see what you think.

Oh – and neither the BE2C nor the Aviatik can fire directly behind as the observer was seated in front of the pilot!

All the best

Nick