This weeks club day included a game of Team Yankee - a game I haven't played in ages. With new dynamic points, it seemed like it would be worth rolling out some M1A1s and seeing how the really big bois run.
Clubmate Tom rolled in with a really cool Polish list - taking some of the good kit - T72s with ERA and Songsters - and attacked me in Escape.
I'm going to preface what follows with a caveat - I didn't get reserves or air support until the third turn and that makes winning in Escape fairly difficult when your only reserve is 40 points of M1A1s. Also, I picked the wrong end of the table, deployed badly and then didn't play to my failing to get reserves. Not to take away from Tom's game at all - he played it well knowing that there was an inevitable pile of M1s arriving behind him!
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| In some sub-par defensive positions |
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| Army defending their favourite TV show... |
I made a bunch of long range ATGM shots in the first turn and polished off some Monkey T72s and a few light vehicles but lost most of my Bradleys (who weren't properly concealed from the return fire because I didn't think through my first turn properly). Tom pushed slowly and deliberately up the whole front and having the good T72s definitely gave him better odds of landing shots, even with RoF1!
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| Air support finally arrives and is roughly handled |
Turn three and my Abrams and Harriers finally arrived. The Abrams removed Tom's Gaskins and wrecked a Dana but couldn't get a bead on anything heavier from the base edge. The Harriers weathered a phenomenal amount of fire (and left Tom and I looking up loads of AA rules) but their cluster bombs managed to miss everything of substance.
The LAV-ADs, having had no air assets to go after in the whole game, rolled out and gave the Polish BMPs an absolute hiding with their GAU-12s. It was pretty effective but they went down in a screaming heap to some T55s and T72s.
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| Polish T72s roll onto the objective |
So in the end, I needed a to hit a very specific pair of T72s with a couple of shots from my Cobras, which I didn't. I probably had a turn where I could (and should) have moved my infantry across the table to defend that objective but like I said - Tom played well!
It was actually a good game and I would like to play it again. It was interesting to poke around the list and see what else I could do with it. Basically I concluded that probably need to fit in some M106 mortars and shift the infantry out of the Bradley company and into a Mech platoon so that I could have four more Bradleys on table. That would have given me measurably more AT firepower and a smoke bombardment which could have given me better opportunities to focus TOW2s into the T72s.
Kings of War
The rebasing of the old Warmachine army is nearly done - I have four more units to rebase and a couple more that need flocking and then it's all done. This current batch is pretty much the last of characters:
I took the army out for a run yesterday and it went surprisingly well - I got a 2 - 2 draw with Scotty in a very very swingy game and then clubmate Ryan got pinged by some very lucky boxcar Nerve tests by me. The cool thing was learning that the army standard bearer can hand out Aegis Fragments making the fairly beefy army beefier. Downside? 10 year old superglue is a PITA and I have got a very big and irritating repair job on the blasted Errant Standard Bearer. It was a nuisance in the Warmachine days and, it turns out, still is! I'll be giving a few variants on this army a go in the foreseeable future.
Next Time
Good question. The to-do pile is diminishing nicely so probably a bit of a mixed bag of whatever I feel like painting this week!
