Manual Defensive Fire and Alt Fire/Assault Optional Rules

[Elxaime]

What have been people's experiences using Manual Defensive Fire and the four Alt Fire/Assault optional rules?

On MDF, aside from taking longer for PBEM, do the rules make gameplay more historical in tempo?

On the four Alt Fire/Assault optionals, do they encourage players to adopt more historical deployment and use of units?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts or comments.

[Ricky B]

Haven't played with MDF, so no comment there. On the alt fire/assault rules, I suppose it depends on what you consider a more historical deployment. The games typically have a stacking limit of 1600 per hex - each vehicle is equivalent to 10 men. So you can have 1.5 men per meter, which would be just about shoulder to shoulder but without any depth in that case.

Throughout the war but especially in the late war, at least, the Soviets attacked with frontages of 3-5 km per rifle division, plus support troops, on the key axes of attack. Thus, at three hexes a division could pack all three regts on line, with some support troops in reserve or easily 2 bns up and one in reserve without pushing the stacking limits, which was a common formation, or 2 regts up with an "empty" hex between and one in reserve.

Now using the alt fire rules, then artillery slaughters an attack on this line, which for me means spreading out the units much more so than historically. As I stated earlier, you are not crowded by any means even if you stack up to the limits allowed, even under tactical doctrine, unless you are working off the assumption that everyone is on the firing line rather than deployed in depth over the 1 km front and 1 km depth.

The losses to artillery, anyway, ramp up quite a bit as the stacking does, and losses of 50+ men to single stronger artillery units become common. If you can get three-four of these artillery battalions on a target in one 2 hour turn, it can lose 200 men out of somewhere around 1500 men, and the units will very likely be unusable for awhile. The same 4 units with regular rules might cause 75 casualties, depending on the terrain, probably more like 50.

So anyway, for me the alt fire rules cause me to spread out more than historically, at least as Soviets, although maybe history can be replicated more easily? But I always feel that you should use the rules the scenario was optimized for as that makes a huge difference in the actual results. I always go back to the Kharkov campaign, where I played a game as German - my Soviet opponent chose the alt fire rules and we ended the game after about a day because his attacking units were disrupted and slaughtered so badly in that short period. So here it didn't work in the overall picture.

I do wonder how it might work in games like Stalingrad, where the Germans have a tough time keeping their pocket alive once it forms - although that might be more a result of most of the Soviet forces trying to crush it rather than historically forming an outer ring to stop relief forces- or in Minsk, although the German artillery is already pretty strong in that one.

Rick

[Elxaime]

[Ricky B]

Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately as I don't like to delve into the math involved personally, I don't think the calcs for the alt fire are known outside of by Mr. Tiller himself. However, I do think that it is basically handled as a straightline relationship, that may also include the size of individual units in addition to overall strength in a hex.

So a single small unit is nearly invulnerable to losses from fire, medium sized units/stacks suffer moderately and large units/stacks suffer severely. I just haven't looked at the relationship between density, unit sizes and stacking to tell overall, but for 1 400 man unit vs 3 400 man units, I would guess the alt artillery fire will cause around triple the losses to the 3 units. But I am not sure what would happen with 12 100 man units vs. the 3 400 man ones - no idea if losses would be higher or lower. But 1 100 man unit probably wouldn't lose more than a couple of men compared to a 1200 man stack losing 30-40 maybe.

Sorry, not much help on that.

Rick