I was fortunate enough to have Stu over today to bring in the new year with a new game, our first try of V for Victory. I had just about enough figures for a command section, 2 infantry sections, a sniper and a MMG team for each side.
I set up the first scenario from the book that has three objectives spread across the table with VP's being scored for holding the objectives at the end of each turn and destroying enemy units. As we'd not played before I took a guess at how much terrain would be required and I think it was probably about right, perhaps a little high on the linear terrain and wooded areas. We will need to have a little play about with larger (and better armed) forces to see what is the sweet spot.
The rules themselves flowed reasonably well for a first play through with the usual amount of flicking through the rule book to answer queries around specific scenarios and checking how modifiers stacked up. The spotting rules meant that you could manoeuvre into place without the enemy being able to spot you straight away but once you opened fire then that pretty much gave your position away.
The main clash of forces ended up being on my left flank around the oasis as we both only lightly opposed the opposing forces push on one of the other tokens. The Germans went for both the flanking objectives and I went for the oasis and the central tank.
The big decision around shooting is if you go for direct fire and try to remove models or suppressing fire and try and erode the enemies morale and pin them in place. The Germans in general went for the kills more often but with some poor dice on their side and decent saving on mine didn't really make much of an impact at the start of the game. My suppressive fire was more telling and I managed to keep the German sniper out of the game and keep the heads of the Germans around the oasis down as well.
The German firing did pick up during the end game and they managed to remove my team holding the oasis objective and kill my snipers mate. I also managed a couple of good shooting activations with my MMG to take out the German MMG (with help from some poor save rolls) to leave us tied on kills but we me having held one extra objective in the last round we played.
Neither side lost masses of troops and even though we had one more round to play when we stopped it didn't feel like either side would reach the break point of >50% models lost. So perhaps a little less terrain next time will give some more shooting and greater casualties. The card mechanic is a nice improvement on Muskets and Tomahawks in that you have all the cards to choose from so you need to assign them to the correct units to make best use of the available resources and does act as a natural dampening of the firepower of both sides with a limited number of fire activations being on the cards.
With the ongoing Kings of War/Armada campaign and the Armada event we have booked in February we probably won't be playing again for a while but I should have some more toys painted up by then to increase the firepower available to each side. In particular I'd like to see how vehicles and HE weapons alter the game dynamics.
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