A fun event hampered by a mission designed by idiots!
As many of you know my group was wrapping up our Firestorm Lorraine campaign, and what better way then with a big group battle? As part of our rambles through the internet, we stumbled upon this summary document for large group games called Total War. One of these missions seemed perfect to cap off a short campaign centered on crossing the river Meuse: River Rush.
The thrust of the mission involves one side trying to seize a river crossing, while the other side tries to slow them down by blowing bridges. The attackers have endless waves of troops, while the defenders need to figure out how to trade land for time. On the face of it, the mission looks fun and thematic but it immediately starts to fall apart as you probe the rules, but we will get to that later.
The Game:
For this mission, the Allied forces (1 American, One British and one mixed) decided to go infantry heavy to counter some of the issues with the mission. We anticipated that the bridges would get blown up early and wanted to catch out opponents off guard by fording the river at all points. We did have a suicide charge wing in order to try and keep the Germans honest and to defend the bridges.
The Germans brought two identical lists of 88’s a KT pioneers and some Pak 40s, while the third brought some jadgtigers.
Early allied advances were covered by smokescreens, and we almost captured a bridge, except the British player rolled 5 1’s and 2’s to hit in assault (he needed a 3+). This somewhat counteracted our luck of managing to bail a King Tiger on the first turn
As the turns wore on the allies managed to secure a foothold and were threatening a number of objectives. A particularly heroic set of paratroopers (pictured on the left) were just about on the objective, after having swept up the remaining german engineers and a platoon of StuHs when we had to call time.
Sadly, we don’t have as many pictures of the event, mainly as we were trying to play fast. The game itself started to bog down as allied reinforcements built up trying to cross the ford, or cross the fields to get to the objective. We only managed 9 turns (which itself is an achievement given we started at 1ish and went till 7:30 or so). There were some other great moments of flamethrowers clearing troops, jeeps shooting down BF 109s, King Tigers bouncing artillery rounds and more.
Mission Review:
To be fair I need to disclose some facts before I give a full review of the mission that may lend context.
- Our group has some house rules that make it easier for artillery to fire and a few other tweaks to speed up game play, or adjust it to our tastes. However, we did play the mission stock without any changes to the core rules therein.
- As mentioned, we were limited on time. We had 1750 point armies each. We took a short dinner break, but didn’t finish deployment until 1:30 or so meaning we only played for 6 hours. For a 40k game of comparable size I would recommend 8-9 hours.
Okay, now that’s out of the way let’s break down why this mission is poorly thought out.
- The Bridge Blowing rules are obscenely unfair: The defenders get the option to try and blow the bridges by rolling a die per model next to the bridge, with a success roll of at least 1 “6” being needed. Dedicated engineering units can re-roll this result. The problem is you can easily stack 6-7 models around each bridge. If they are Veteran infantry, your opponent can only hit them on 6’s and you get a 3+ invul to pass the wounds, and then an additional feel-no-pain between 2+ to 6+ depending on what shot them. Being pinned doesn’t impact your ability to blow the bridge and several armies get fearless engineers meaning morale is also not an issue.
- The Attacker Starts Too Far Back: In most missions in Flames of war you need to start at least 16″ away from enemy units before the game begins. This is fine for normal battles, but in this battle you are even further from the objectives meaning you need to cross a minimum of 36″ before you get to an objective. While this is compensated by allowing the attacker to revive units that die (on a 5+) it means you cannot assault units on bridge turn 1 reliably. Some tank units can reach there early on, but are easily killed by engineers in combat and are vulnerable to almost an AT gun within range, which can be as durable as infantry units until they shoot.
- There is no Guideline for the Number of Turns: This is a big problem with some of the Flames of War missions. Many, especially in 3rd ed, have no set game length meaning the defender often has an incentive to rigidly stick to a time limit for their own benefit. This creates awkward interactions where one side may very much want 1-2 more turns, but their opponent may realize that by granting the extension they will almost certainly lose. To compound that, I wasn’t able to find any guides or battle reports for this mission to use as a frame work. Smaller games have a limit of 2.5 hours per game but that is for much smaller armies and boards.
The sad thing is that the first two issues should have been immediately apparent to anyone who tried to test this game. The fact that it made it to publication in its current state is a sorry statement on the quality control of Battlefront. With that in mind there are several remedies I would recommend
Lord Paddington’s Fixes
Here are my recommendations for anyone looking at adapting or playing the mission.
- Have a time limit of no less then 12 turns, maybe 15. In comparable regular missions you have around 8 turns to take an objective while starting 24″ away. Since you start more than 50% further back in this mission; a similar minimum turn length is roughly 12-13 turns. For our group of gamers, 6 people split on two teams, we would have likely needed around 8.5 to 9 hours to do this including set up. I wouldn’t recommend this mission if you have less time, unless you wanted to drop the army size to around 1500.
- Do not allow any unit to deploy with 8″ of the central point of the bridge or river; but allow pioneers a vanguard move. You shouldn’t be able to blow the bridges turn 1, and you shouldn’t be able to do it with almost no risk to your own forces. Furthermore, units that are pinned don’t get to roll to blow the bridge. It makes it more risky to try and blow the bridge and makes players decide if they want to defend the river or the objective without making it painfully easy.
I think you could likely play the stock mission with a ton of caveats on unit rosters and rules. Unfortunately, the difference in army abilities make it difficult to translate between games. The Germans tend to dominate this mission type, but even American or Soviets lists could be a huge pain to fight. I think most times this game (as written) will boil down to a quagmire in the middle of the board which makes for a dull affair.
What do you think? Am i being too hard here? Any other changes that jump out to you?
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