#16_14s Wacht am Rhein (Herbstnebel)

[Plain Ian]

I've been helping Brian Jennings make adjustments to his Bulge campaign scenario. Brian thinks he is close to making his final adjustments to this detailed scenario so I thought I would do a quick-ish AAR of my second playthrough. 

We have already played one round of 6 turns and are on turn 4 of our second play through. I'm not sure how far we will play before we stop, but on we go. I'm playing as the Americans so most of my comments will be from that view point.

Lets start with the map.



As you can see this scenario uses a slighted extended map than the standard campaign scenarios (#16_01s and the Alt version). The map has been extended north so that Eupen is now showing on the map and Verviers is now not anchored on the map edge. 

V Corps HQ now starts at Eupen and not the map edge and because of the extended front we have two more Divisions on the map. 
The US 78th Division and all of the German 272nd VGD. The US 78th starts Fixed and some of its units are heavily fatigued. It won't be making much of a contribution to the battle. 
The 272nd is not Fixed but there are valuable VP hexes behind it. I'm guessing that the Germans won't be poking the bear with a stick in this area and will let sleeping dogs lie.

I've played #16_01s before and one of the bug bears I had with it was the northern map edge and the fact that the supply was tied to the two roads which ran to Eupen. (off map) This is now fixed.

The other pain was west east movement from Seraing to say Monschau. A lot of reinforcements came in at Seraing and had to be routed via Verviers along the torturous south bank. With the north network around Eupen now being made available, route planning should now be easier.



The map has also been extended south. This hasn't made too many differences to the starting OOB. The US 4th Division now has the 12th and 8th Regiments starting on map along with some elements of 4th Armoured.  
The Germans appear to unchanged as the units down here are mostly Festung type units which won't be participating in the battle since they are Fixed. 
I'm not sure how much of a difference this extra space in the south will be. I guess I will find out when I start falling back west. 

Next up will be the OOB/TOE changes. Since I had space on the maps I've shown some of these above.

[CountryBoy]

Any updates? I picked up Bulge not too long ago and I'm interested to see how the campaign plays out.

[Plain Ian]

Any updates? I picked up Bulge not too long ago and I'm interested to see how the campaign plays out.

Yes sorry I didn't get very far. Trying to keep notes of my game to make an AAR, and look at the scenario in detail turned out to be a bit challenging. 

Just to make it harder, we stopped playing and re started the campaign. I am now the German player so I've doubled the work load. 

I had some things saved in MY Files so I'll post these tonight.

[Plain Ian]

Ok here his a snap of positions in the Monschau-Hofen sector in the north. Its not a critical area but the Germans were still keen to secure it on the opening day of the 16th. It illustrates Brians changes to the OOB. 



Anyone who has played Normandy 44 will be familiar with this. Heavy weapons are broken out and shown separately. So a standard US infantry battalion (the 3/395th in this case) has a separate HW company shown and the anti tank guns are also shown as a separate unit.

The Cavalry Squadron (the 38th) is a bit more complicated but basically unit types (infantry/tanks) and weapon systems where possible are shown individually. The Engineers and Tank destroyer units I suspect are units attached at the Group level? Maybe someone can confirm this as I'm not a US OOB authority just a PzC player with an interest in WW2 history.

For the Germans I have only shown the changes to a Volks Grenadier Battalion. But this treatment is extended to all German units, panzer and motorised. 

Yes there are an awful lot of units to move folks. But each unit now does different things so there is now a tactical aspect in the game. 

I'll leave everyone to go colour blind looking at the map and try to dig up more stuff to haver on about tomorrow night.

[CountryBoy]

Thanks for the follow up. That picture must have taken you an age to do!

[Plain Ian]

Thanks for the follow up. That picture must have taken you an age to do!

Yep it probably did and it has too much information on it. Most people will switch off or have that eye glazing moment when they look at it. I should have just posted this which was my Turn 1 situation as the US player after the Germans had moved and fired. 



Here is an even simpler snap. The set up for #16_03 Wacht am Rhein showing the same area.



I've changed my graphics since I took the first snap and haven't bothered putting any ID's on the map but I think everyone should be able to see the 38th Cav Sq at Imgenbroich and 3/395th at Hofen. 
The German units in red are the 326th VGD which is supposed to be attacking Monschau/Hofen on the 16th? Mmmh I can't see this happening.

[Plain Ian]

Here's a quick comparison of #16_14 with #16_03 which I suspect will be the main campaign game that people play. 



In #16_03 the 3/395th starts off at Battalion strength but can be broken down into 3 company sized units of 255 men if its at 100% strength...which it isn't quite. 

In #16_14, the heavy weapon unit (155 men) is shown separately and has quite a decent soft attack factor. In practise this means that even firing at enemy VG units in Woods you can expect to hit 2-3 per shot. There is also a hard attack factor useful against light armour and Bunkers/Pillboxes.

The ATG company is also shown separately and its hard attack factors are now shown and I guess are decent for 1944 but this is a very small 3 gun unit so they are pretty ineffective. However since these are AT units they can go into T mode without triggering fire and scoot off. Unless in woods not on roads of course! Rats. 

The soft attack factor of the infantry components is reduced from 8 to 7 as a result of this change but the hard attack factors remain the same. 

Interesting for the bean counters like me.

[Plain Ian]

Might as well compare the 38th Sqdn.



I guess the #16_14 OOB looks a bit strange with 60 man units but remember the Germans are operating in units between 100-300 men unit depending on how many company sized units they have broken down to. Plus since we are using Alt Indirect and Direct Fire, smaller units will incur fewer losses from artillery and small arms fire. 

One down side of the change is that you cannot combine the infantry component of a troop with the Greyhound component of the same troop to reform a unit such as A/38th. The best you can do is combine all the infantry components of all the troops and all the vehicle components so that the squadron operates as two groups if you want to combine things. 

That's just a few quick comments. I might add more later.

[Plain Ian]

Options for #16_14 below.



Most of the usual ones plus a few unusual. 

Explicit Supply is used and programmed weather for historical reasons.

Optional fire/assault results and Surrender are ones I don't see too often. I guess the Optional 
Surrender is to ensure pockets are removed quickly.



The Alternative rules I suspect we are all familiar with but I'll refresh everyone's minds again.



Also notice that Locking ZOC is not toggled. In fact if you look at the pdt file you'll see that there no ZOC in this game and that movement costs are doubled when moving past units which would normally exert a zoc.




A few other things different or things that players should be aware of that are in the pdt and are different from #16-01s Alt Wacht.



Night disruption % is standard now at 40%? but is 30% in #16_01s. Digging in and mines are slightly higher than normal.  



Rubble is slightly higher which I assume means that its harder to Rubble? (Correct me any one?) Given the the amount of heavy artillery the German has at start its still very easy to Rubble things which slows their advance even more.



Speaking of artillery here are the artillery pdt changes. The allies now have the edge in counter battery and can stock pile. Both sides take marginally longer to set (90% is usual) with the US again being slightly better.

Ok that's the boring bits done. I'll start putting up the AAR. I've switched to playing the German side so it will be from that point of view.

[Plain Ian]

On turn 1 the German player gets to decide where he wants to drop his special paratroop unit von der Hydte. 

As you can see there are 3 drop zone options and two possible groups that can be dropped. I'm not quite sure why there are two possible groups. One represents the group dropped in a reasonable way and the other clearly shows what happens when the drop does not go well? I've embedded the OOB of the groups in the map.

In both cases all the units involved will be rolled for scatter, disruption and loss as per rules.

Just to see the different options I've ran through the 1st turn several times and this seems to be the pattern I see below. The further away you drop the better the group you will receive. In fact the Trois Ponts drop gives you both groups.  

Which is the best option will depend on your strategy. Given the level of scatter that sometimes occurs then there is no guarantee that you will not land adjacent to a US unit even though rear area US units are few and far apart except near Spa.