North Africa campaign turn 6 summary

Turn 6 of the North Africa campaign was played this Sunday at the usual FoW spot in Lund. Turn 5 and 6 had increased the army list size to 1000pts, the next two turns will be 1250.

Anyway, as it turned out I ended up in another multiplayer game with 2 defending Axis vs 3 attacking allies.

Just like in the previous multiplayer battle it was just impossible for the Axis to do jack shit, severely outgunned, outnumbered in infantry and matched in numbers with better Allied tanks not to mention the better allied air support it was a rather lackluster game for the defending Axis side.

It looked quite ridiculous on the defending side, we ended up on the "open half" of the table while the attackers helt the small village from the start. I also messed up a bit with the deployment of one of the axis objectives - the "total war" rules from Das Book were completely unfamiliar to me but I don't think that it would have mattered in the end anyway.

After turn 4, having been astonished about the amount of allied units on the battlefield it suddenly became clear that the allies were playing 3x1000pts against the axis 2x1000pts. The compensation was to allow the axis to throw in 3 Tiger tanks, but at that point it was long since game over for the Axis in terms of points collected. Also the allies managed to kill 1 Tiger with a 17pdr AT gun and the other with a double bail result from a Sherman tank.

The Allies won without breaking a sweat in our game. In the other games played this day the allies managed to win as well. So the campaign has pretty much broken out of the stalemate and allowed for a Allied advance towards the German held cities after weeks of movement back and forth on the campaign map.

All in all I have to be honest and say that the game I played wasn't fun. The only thing that had any kind of "impact" was that the PzIIF tanks managed to face off against reasonable opponents this time around, British universal carriers, and with the help of some German AA trucks wipe out 2 platoons and then take on and kill 1 AT gun and 1 artillery piece before getting killed towards the end of the game.

This game pretty much convinced me about the total crap of a list that I'm playing. It has not been working at all, either at 500, 750, 1000pts or when playing in full force during the mega battle event.
All PzIII tanks have way too short range to do anything and their guns are laughable. The PzII platoon can only ever take on very light stuff like the universal carriers - there's no point even trying to assault infantry. The only thing that can actually do something is my Tiger tank and that just conveys a "broken list"-feeling to me, when you have but 1 single model unit that you have to rely upon to do all the hard work. And it's simply not fun to play.

I ended up buying 2 more Tiger tanks and a platoon of infantry when Maelstrom Games had their 30% sale. I may end up painting the Tiger tanks to try out the Tunisian Tiger company again but on the whole I'm leaning towards selling my DAK force after the next mega battle event, the North Africa campaign will also be over by then. I'm not having anywhere near as fun playing this army/nation compared to the fun I have playing my Early War Polish armies. I think I made the correct choice from the start when picking up FoW  Early War as it is really the only period that appeals to me the most after having tried out all 3. I hope for a return to Early War and my Poles once the North Africa campaign is over.

After the campaign game I tried to demo the Victory Decision to some of the guys using Early War FoW miniatures. It went just like the first time I tried to demo the By Fire and Sword rules, people arsing around and being tired so their focus was not really on the game. Still I think they learned the basic game mechanics and the things that stand out the most in the V.D. rules. I actually got an email from Agis Neugebauer the writer of the V.D. rules that very same evening with questions about what I would need to play EW Polish stuff as he was working on a Early War supplement. Really looking forward to that. Sorry for the small amount of pictures from this particular demo but at this time I was more involved in trying to explain the rules than documenting the game.

What I really like about V.D. is that I can get to use cool stuff like the recon cars or crappy FT-17 tanks against single Sdkfz recon vehicles and stuff in a way that is not possible with the FoW rules and actually get something out of it. Looking forward to playing a more serious game of V.D. in the near future.