Troina (1 vs 1)

[Obsolete]

The following Troina scenario will be played with me as allies vs another tester. I`ve played this map more than once before, but always as axis in the past.

The map is relatively small compared to some of the others, but spans across 4 days of battle. On top of this, there are quite some reinforcements I will be getting over the next few days.

In the meantime, here`s what the very start looks like for the Allies. It should be noted that the Axis have even more units down south past my screen crop. And to explain things in a nut-shell, while I should have the advantage in numbers (soon), my goal will be to try and collect enough victory points before Aug 4 comes around or I may end up getting a one-way ticket back to America.

My opponent, in theory should try to dig in and try to use the terrain to stall my progress as long as possible...

I`ll let the manual explain the history:

Troina, August 1-4, 1943
Size of Battle: Medium
Type of Battle: American Attack
Axis: German
Allies: American
Location: Sicily
Description: By the middle of the summer, the Germans were conducting a skillful fighting withdrawal across the rugged country of central Sicily. Their movements had taken on a familiar pattern. They would create strongpoints in the mountains and defend them until the enemy forced them out in time-consuming and costly attacks. It was in this environment that the U.S. 1st Infantry Division approached the town of Troina.

American commanders believed the position to be only lightly held, by-passed in favour of positions further east. No one had detected the 15 Panzergrenadier Division’s abrupt halt at Troina.

Sensing no immediate danger, only a single regiment (the 39th, temporarily assigned to 1st Division) was committed to take the town. Instead of the expected easy capture, the 39th ran into powerful German defences in some of the toughest terrain in all of Sicily. (“I think there is a hell of a lot of stuff there.” One officer would note.) Statements from POWs indicated that Troina was to be “held at all costs.”

These revelations preceded 5 days of intense fighting resulting in heavy casualties on both sides. It was not until the 6th that the 1st Division would occupy Troina and only then after an orderly German withdrawal to defensive positions further to the east.

[Obsolete]

I am rather out-matched at this point, the good news is that Axis are never allowed to get reinforcements. Here`s a breakdown of what my opponent`s OOB list looks like:



Sadly for me, he`s got everything mechanized. His quality ratings are at 70% while most of my troops are a lowly 50%.  My main worry though is grouping of his artillery, however I should be able to run him over with a horde of allied units (at least in theory). We shall see how it goes.

Since the FoW is set on full, this will be the first and only time I`ll look at his exact OOB details. All other information from this point on will just be from standard FoW rules and guesstimations.

[Obsolete]

Whoops, I almost read Mi's thread by accident. Luckily the first thing I saw was big bold letters telling me to 'Get Out' (no joke).

Anyhow, I decided to advance toward one of the objective points (cautiously). Luckily, my opponent did not score any hits during my movement phase. I decided I would carry out an ASSAULT and pry off that unit defending. Unfortunately, that unit is dug in at level III fortification, and looking at the EXPECTED combat results, things are most likely going to hurt me far more than it will him.

I decided to try and do a safer gamble by aborting the assault, and instead will (hopefully) see if I can hit next turn... but with more fire-power behind me.

Question is, will he reinforce and make my job harder.... or will he simply run for the hills (umm, other hills).

Or...???




P.S. I'm still not sure what to do with my French units in the north. I guess I will keep them moving toward the nearest victory hex, and see if I can SCARE him with them    Yup... I don't think that's going to work either.

[Obsolete]

Oh dear, seems I got hurt bad by Axis artillery fire all over the board. And then opportunity fire ended up scoring very well against me too, seems I just can't do anything right sometimes. This then lead me into getting into another very gambity looking assault on my targeted hex. However, this time I decided the hell with it and went for it.

Bad news is I got hurt more than he did here (I think). Good news is, I forced him into a withdrawal after the assault and was able to gain an advance-movement into the now vacated hex.

One thing that worries me here, is I spotted him moving at least two companies to the extreme west. If I didn't know any better, I'd say he is up to something and trying to go after my precious artillery and/or HQs in the rear. I have therefore had to divert a couple companies toward the rear now just to counter what he does. I even stacked both my Divisional and Regimental HQs on top of my southernmost artillery this turn and will be curious what he tries on his movement phase.

[Obsolete]

Boy, am I really starting to take a pounding here. My weakest artillery piece even evapourated just due to a bombardment alone. Not to mention other damage elsewhere, and massive disruptions following lost of contact.

Losing the contact of many of my forward pieces was very unfortunate here. This now prevents me from a follow-up toward other units in the east. I tried though... with only 3 companies that were fit enough to race forward. Unfortunately I ended up aborting this assault, since the combat odds table looked like things were going to be terrible for me.

It is possible my opponent just tried to BAIT me into attacking here... but then again, if I don't attack I'm going to keep getting pounded regardless. For the time being, that one armoured infantry unit had just moved onto that mountain hex and I figured I could try to whittle him down a bit before he gets any fortification bonus. Oh well, we'll SEE if we can follow through next turn, or if my opponent punishes me and counter-attacks before I even get my attack in.

It is becoming apparent now why I am having such a tuff time with all the bombardments going on. Take a look at all that artillery:

[Obsolete]

Of course, I get the next pbem and things continue to pound me into the ground. I've taken even more hits this time around, and I've even taken a couple hits on a unit hidden under all those artillery bombardment windows.

Instead of carrying out my full turn, I decided it would be best to take a break here and re-evaluate how to proceed from this point. For the moment I decided to show the type of bombardment problems I am going through, though this forces me to re-load the pbem, which unfortunately is going to now warn my opponent that I re-loaded the pbem, and could be cheating!

Whooopsies!

[Fred98]

I cannot see any of your screenshots
 
All I can see is a frog frozen in an ice cube.
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[junk2drive]

Joe I see them fine. There is a problem with some of the photo sites and certain countries but Matrix allows uploading so I don't know what's up. Oz shouldn't be on the blocked list anyway.

Edit he is using imageshack. Try right clicking and open in another window or something.

[Fred98]

Our office ISP is based in HK and I cannot see the screen shots.
 
My home ISP is based in Sydney and I can see the screen shots.
 
So, Hong Kong must be blocked.
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[Obsolete]

Hmm, Hong Kong is the counterfeit capital of the world. I wonder if it is blocked because of that. At least now I know what the frog & ice-cube means, I've seen a few of those time to time on this forum as well from others.

[Magpius]

If I use the Peer Block app. Then imageshack images do not appear in the browser.
Are you running equivalent software?

[Obsolete]

Not so good a round for me again.
 
The artillery bombardments have also knocked a lot of my units out of contact. So again, I cannot follow up with any assault, unless I want to get raped.

Direct fire from axis has also hurt me even more, yet my attempts to DF back didn’t seem to score anything, not even a disruption. Grrrrr.  

At the end of the hell, I did have a little bit of luck for once. My opponent decided to move a small tank company and stack it with his armoured infantry on my next objective before my turn started.  

While I couldn’t carry out a full assault on that hex, I blasted it with my only artillery unit left. I was hoping to just force his 2-counter-stack into some quality checks, but I got lucky and scored a direct hit on the tank unit. Since it was only one hit-strong to begin with, it is thus totally destroyed. Well, I don’t think that really makes up for all my own losses this round, however, the fact that I will get reinforcements later, and HE WONT, makes the damage much more.... damaging to him (in theory).
 
At least, there may be a psychological effect which could force him to do something... rather rash as well.

 
 

[Obsolete]

We are back again, and this time the entire map may look different (laugh). I decided to give JMass' mod a little test again, though I'm not sure I like it for this scenario, the original graphics seemed much more DEFINITE with sharper contrast. On the other hand, maybe I just need to calibrate my monitor finally. Anyhow, we'll test-drive this current mod for the rest of the scenario and then I'll see if I want to stick with it. At least we have TOAW-type counters.

Basically during my opponent's turn he destroyed my foremost infantry unit, well I was worried something like that may happen. Meanwhile, on our current turn I threw EVERYTHING I could including the kitchen sink that could reach to try and dislodge another axis counter off from this here victory point. Over all, it LOOKED like things were more in my favour, but war does have uncertain outcomes, and you can see what happened after in the combat results window.

Grrrrrr.....!

[PirateJock]

Hi Obsolete

Really enjoying your AARs - great style of presenting them.

Also very useful seeing the CRTs as I'm still learning the game. One thing I was surprised by was the fact that your attack resulted in so many of your Allied units taking hits (2) and QCs (3). From the game mechanics point of view I've been working on there being a single dice roll to decide the combat result. From what you've got there it looks like each unit - attacking and defending - is doing it's own dice roll. Is that correct?

And to add insult to injury, do you think the Axis unit you was attacking had decided to withdraw rather than being forced to because of disruption?

The Gods of War are having a good laugh at your expense [;)]

Cheers

[Fred98]

ORIGINAL: PirateJock

From what you've got there it looks like each unit - attacking and defending - is doing it's own dice roll. Is that correct?

I suspect that the Germans threw in some artillery in support and as a result each Allied unit had to take a quality check.

If the quality check included the " +10 " thing then they had to take a step loss.

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[Obsolete]

To be honest, I should be paying even more attention to details in this game then I am. Actually I installed the 1.01 patch and I noticed it had re-set my 'show die rolls' option to the default of no. Because of that, I didn't have too much interest in scanning through all the details on the panel, particularly since we do have a combat results window to show the general outcome anyway. However, I did toggle the rolls back on so I can pay more attention to the details of what happened next time we have a blood-bath.

Each unit which is forced to do a QC ends up doing its own die-roll, which is then compared against the QUALITY rating of that unit.

Artillery supporting an assault, is always carried out first, then the ground forces attack. Therefore, if my opponent had some arty in reserve to aid his defending unit, and it scored a decent hit on my forces, this could drastically affect the expected outcomes.

My only artillery unit I had left to aid support was going to inflict a kill of ONE hit as long as the die-roll for it was a 1. Since there are only 10 pips on these combat rolls, that basically gave me a 10% chance to soften him up good before the assault was carried out. Unfortunately, as can be seen I scored no such hit, but that was expected 90% of the time, I was just trying to maximize my luck there. Like I said, I tried to knock out that unit with EVERYTHING I had there.

One of my infantry was knocked out of command so could not support the attack, it is POSSIBLE that extra unit may have been able to shift the balance of the attack even more in my favour.

Anyhow, my opponent has played many wargames in his time, and was part of the beta, so I knew this game wasn't going to be easy.

I also doubt he would intentionally want to withdraw his unit from the victory hex (unless it was some sort of elabourate trap somewhere). He had a good quality unit, in a good defensible terrain, an important hex, and IIRC he had fortification bonus on top of that. As a rule of thumb, it seems the main strategy for this scenario is for axis to slow down the allies as much as possible by forcing them into a slow grind of fighting it out.... until time runs out.

If the axis can hold out long enough to deny me my objective... they win.

[Obsolete]

Grrrr, what a week of hell. To make a long story short my main computer blew up last week, and I'm still busy trying to put everything back together again.

Anyhow, game re-installed and here we go with our continue...

My opponent has destroyed another unit during his turn of bombardments-from-hell, however I at least got to finish off killing one of his infantry units as well. I don't mind trading off my poorer units for more elite axis ones. Hopefully we can trade that way all day long

[Obsolete]

Grrrrrrrrr! [:@]

[Fred98]

Withdraw!    Which of the units is C39 ?

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[Obsolete]

Hmm, due to the counter stats, I think it would have to be the lowest one closest to that Axis tank platoon.