Battle Report - Flames of War - Early War Desert

Hello Again,

So this passed Friday Duncan and I both took a day off so we decided to go for some gaming. The Frostgrave stuff has already been discussed but now I thought I would put up a battle report of the Flames of War game we played. Duncan has already done this, but I am going to put it up anyway as it can be interesting to see both sides, and it's not that much work anyway.

Duncan's Report

German List:

So I wanted to give early war a go since I find it to be quit fun, and have been nostalgic for our Early War campaign that we did a few years back.

I decided to go for a Panzer list (can also do Infantry or Armored Cars (not sure there is a list for this now thou)). So that meant it would be a Panzer 3 force, which as we were playing 1500 points pretty much set my list right there.

You may notice that I am over by 5 points, but I arbitrarily decided that this didn't matter!

Italian List:

I don't have the Italian list, but Duncan was using a Bersagleri force with lots of motorcycle recon units, artillery, air support, tanks, armored cars, anti-tank guns, the whole 9 yards. I was more then a bit intimidated at first, but it is always important to remember that this is a bucket of Italian stuff so not to worry.

Game:

We ended up playing Free for All, which is not my favorite scenario, but is a decent choice for two mobile armies like this. Especially since the Italians weren't keen to dig in and leave their fancy motorcycles behind, for good reason.

Here we are after a pretty symmetrical deployment, one objective on each side of the table for both of us, and armies spread all along. I had a platoon of tanks one each objective, recon on each flank, and infantry in the middle. The shutzen infantry elected to start off in their trucks as they didn't want to be shown up by a bunch of Italians.

My plan in the start was to hold on my left, and the converge to the objective on that flank, avoiding the anti-guns in the town. Also important to spread out and avoid that nasty artillery and plane.

But the Italians decided they wanted to attack hard on both sides, so this caused me to just play defensively for the early game. I had my cars on the left advancing, hoping to bait out the tanks a bit, and also to put some pressure on that side. My infantry had no idea what they were doing, so they just stayed on the hill and bleed. Meanwhile my cars on the right moved at the double to help out the right flank. In the early part of this game I was quite lucky, the Italian tanks failed to make their fire power tests to kill my tanks, where as mine were killing on every hit. They couldn't even take out my armored cars. Then plane flew over every turn but caused no or little damage. So things were going my way very quickly.

I think on this turn the plane killed 1 armored car, so fair enough. The Italians were not quite able to finish out my infantry with shooting, so decided to press for an assault. Unfortunately for them my 2IC was within support range and was on the ball. I think the cars assaulted first and my tank killed one and bailed another stopping that assault. Then the motorcycle guys went in and finished the job at the cost of a few stands. So not a bad trade for me.

Next turn my tanks cleaned up the remnants of the attacking elements and now the time came to move in on the artillery and pay the piper. However as luck would have it the Italian commander was dead and they were almost broken, so instead of having to lead a potentially disastrous assault on the artillery (they are very strong in direct fire in early war typically), I just had to eliminate the conscript infantry around them. That sounded much better.

This they were able to do while using the burning Italian tanks for cover. So we had a pretty solid German victory, but keep in mind that even just the plane alone had a couple of chances that could have easily seen off on of my platoons, so this could have gone another way very easily.

You may think that the terrain is a bit light, but in early war a long ranged gun is 24", so this is very much less of an issue.

Thanks;
Mike