"counter battery fire in rules" Topic

Hi
just wondering what rules out there exist that feature off board artillery and then also counter-battery fire – so a situation could happen where there are two off-board artillery units firing at each other – the kind of thing that might happen in SSI's Steel Panthers pc game

The old Corps Command and Korps Commander used counter battery fire, in larger games it was very important. The US in particular used counter-battery a lot in conjunction with areal observation aircraft. Larger scale rules such as LWRS also uses it.

Yes, it is generally present in more operationally focussed games. Largely dependant on getting the CB guns in range and locating suitable targets.

It is curiously overlooked in more tactical WW2 games though, partly I suspect as if you give wargamers several battalions of medium and heavy artillery they much prefer to fire it at targets on the table than harassing fire on enemy artillery! Eg Spearhead has extensive CB rules in its WW1 and Modern versions, but no mention at all in the WW2 version.

If I'm doing brigade to Division level games, I usually factor it in to the pre game barrage or make something up. Obviously if the on table players manage to get into observation range of on table batteries, then they usually shell away happily.

In WW2, CB fire was generally the preserve of dedicated sound/flash location units and assigned medium and heavy artillery battalions plus airstrikes, although set piece attacks also usually incorporated extensive CB programmes, depending how many weeks of recce and prep there were beforehand. Later in the war counter mortar radars were introduced though, which allowed CB fire against less mobile mortar units (like 120s).

Was there CB preparation before 2nd Alamein? I don't recall it being mentioned (I'm no expert) but it would seem logical.

thanks for that info and insight there
i will look at the corps commander rules – i am surprised that it is not in spearhead but in the ww1 derivation . I guess it would make sense also to have it abstracted to the degree that it perhaps is not even the concern on the players so much, I just like those kind of possibilities, and anythign that will bring a game into being like Steel Panthers or Tigers on the Prowl, in tabletop form

In Fistful of TOWs it is a random chance in firing artillery. Basically if you fire your guns at the enemy and roll very badly, you end up on the SNAFU chart and one result is to lose guns to CB fire.

I'm beta testing a game for 15mm that has this as a part of artillery fire.

Command Decision has rules for flash and sound detection of artillery and counter-battery fire.

Play or use CB in our Ver3.0 Flames of war games all the time. Our expansion and partly taken from the old Across the Volga rule. Thus, for the majority of our large table format FOW Ver3.0 games the artillery batteries, unless smaller caliber guns, are deployed off table.

"Was there CB preparation before 2nd Alamein?"

Yes there was.

The question to ask is surely:
"How often was counter-battery fire used in WW2, and how effective was it?"
If the answer to the first question is "seldom", or to the second question is "not very", then you don't need to model it in rules.

CB fire in WW2 generally comes under the category of 'massive preparatory bombardment', which for some odd reason many players don't like to game.

Certainly later in the war there was a lot of ad hoc CB fire as well, and artillery was always a prime target for airstrikes (which is why the divisional AA was usually positioned to cover the artillery), but tbh in a brigade sized action you can just factor it in to the available artillery to the defender.

"Command Decision has rules for flash and sound detection of artillery and counter-battery fire." – that is cool, the kind of thing i am interested in

but yes it makes sense to abstract it into other parts of the rules in most systems – I got Sitzkrieg ohne Hass from WGV and in it they have CB as die roll – if the player has designated a cb mission and its effect if successful is to either cancel the opposing players artillery fire and at worst damage it – so i like that implementation of the concept and being a specific order may mean it is not somethign a player will be able to regularly do if they have limits on mission orders

I think the issue is how much load do you want to put on players? In our period CB is much reduced in effectivenes certainly by SP guns which were appearing more and more in WW2, by the use of Shoot and scoot so the CB cannot easily respond fast enough to do dammage but does restrict fireing time of the guns. We suggest in our rules you allocate virtual batteries. That means that dependoing on the effectiveness of enemy CB fire the number of battries available at one time is less than all of them available due to shoot and scoot.

In our "serious games" well past beginners being in them, we do have more sophisticated rules that better reflect the issue. However this adds to the decicion load and is not universally applicable.

In the 6 day war and proably earllier and to the dissapont ment of the Russians in Ukraine, CB was done by Air power as the batteries can be a long way behind enemy lines. Thu8s the timescale of responce is large, you need a game that can go on with sufficent time resolution that such things have effect, in the order of hours not minutes generally.