"Capturing Caesar's Camp - Action 05 Chateau on the Hill" Topic

The Capturing Caesar's Camp campaign comes towards its climax, as the Camerons advance on the Chateau, crowning the ridge overlooking the Somme valley…

Please see the AAR link . And please forgive some very light-dark/shadow photos!

John,

Holy guacamole, promote that Platoon Commander to Field Marshal right now! ;) For what it's worth, the it feels like the Germans' struggles revolve around their lack of a unity of effort, lots of uncoordinated actions and deployment. As solo gamers, I think that's always one of our biggest issues, balancing the ability to surprise ourselves with some form of cohesiveness. I have no magic bullet to fix this, but what has worked fairly decently for me is 1) once enemy deployment is complete (or mostly complete) I block out a quick, rough, overarching concept of the attack or defense for them, and then 2) when an enemy unit activates I roll a D10 to determine their activity:
10 Most Dangerous COA
9 Most Dangerous COA
8 Most Dangerous COA
7 Most Likely COA
6 Most Likely COA
5 Most Likely COA
4 Most Likely COA
3 Most Likely COA
2 Most Audacious COA
1 Most Disadvantageous to Enemy COA

For me this has allowed a little ‘crazy' to jump in the game (rather than a lot, which tends to be the case when I use randomized actions, and a bit more exciting than Nuts!' OEF/enemy activity), but largely the enemy is doing things that will put my guys in a bad spot. The other thing I do is throw out the old military force ratio formula (I.e, "attacker must have 3:1 advantage"); from my perspective, the enemy AI (me) is not very clever, so I have to plus them up a bit in order to make it interesting ;)

So, please forgive me for offering some unsolicited advice, and to a wargamer more experienced than myself to boot! Hopefully none of this sounds too elementary, or you weren't just trying something new to test it out and already have a great system that works great; dammit, now I'm getting nervous and thinking about deleting everything I wrote!

"I am thinking about whether Kampfgruppe Heller wants to follow in the footsteps of KG von Klink link and see if that decides the issue…"
And also forgive me for dragging this over here, but I thought it would be easier than working two different threads simultaneously. I'm not following you, when I click on the link it tells me the object doesn't exist.

For my part, I am absolutely DYING to get KG Klink started in Barbarossa, but I can't figure out how…. I feel like I should go with 15mm, but I just loaded up on all this 28mm, and the table is set for 28mm, but it's 28mm Normandy and I'm supposed to be playing with my boys not solo.. Ugh!

In any case, congratulations on closing out the campaign, and thanks for sharing with us.

V/R,
Jack

Sorry Jack, not sure why the link back to your blog didn't work on the other Batrep. Hopefully this one will: link

Very happy to receive unsolicited advice on gaming – consider it permanently solicited. The difficulty here is that you don't want to lose the randomness and unpredictability of the activation system, since that is what creates the tension. Once most of the opposition troops are down, it is usually fairly simple for them to adhere to a coherent plan, given their objectives – the issue in this series of games has been that the Germans genuinely have been somewhat unlucky in their activations, but I think it is also that their army list has just seemed somewhat weak compared to the British. One way to toughen up the adversary would be to maximize the defenders. How it works currently is:

The German platoon's core elements are each assigned a card, usually Ace to Jack or 10 of Spades, depending on exactly what it consists of. Then each possibility from the army list is also assigned a card. For each possibility, a blank is also assigned. Typically I go through all the Spades, then Clubs, so the last card will usually be between 8 and Jack of Diamonds or somesuch. Then, of the possibilites and blanks together, I discard half the deck, then add in the core elements. This keeps things nice and unpredictable, but does leave the chance that the German platoon will be somewhat weaker or stronger than that a human would pick from the army list. I could use the full deck, and then 'everything' would appear eventually – this would miss out a lot of the tension though, and in some games, that would be REALLY difficult, because the army list might have something like 4 really high value options (say 3 different heavy tanks and a heavy mortar battery on call). Currently the Germans could 'expect' half of that. Plus, I would know what was out there somwhere. I think what I might try first is that when something is activated, immediately turn over another card, to try and activate the Germans in larger, more mutually supporting groups, see if that helps.

In any case, congratulations on closing out the campaign, and thanks for sharing with us.

You are very welcome…but this is not the end! Jerry, as is his wont, is about to lauch his counter-attacks…