8th Army: Support Units

Work on my Indian army troops for V for Victory has been progressing well over the last couple of weeks with several heavy weapons and a new vehicle joining the ranks. In fact I now have enough troops to field one side of a battle, which means I can start working on some Germans. I also received some decals from America so have been back to add those onto the recon Jeep.

Medium machine guns (MMG) and mortars are a staple of platoon sized engagements, adding some extra firepower to the handheld weapons of your infantry sections. In VfV you can generally add one of each to your force if you have the spare Stars to spend.

In a WW2 game you are going to spending a lot of your time shooting at the enemy so it may be worth having a quick look at how that works in the game.

You start off by gathering your fire-pool of dice, with each weapon adding a number of dice of a certain type. VfV is interesting in that you are always aiming for the same target number for a success, 5+, (in fact the designers call the game 5 for Victory) and the number and type of dice you roll is what changes.

The dice have a hierarchy shown below which they work up and down by a system of  boosts and burns.

D6- <> D6  <> D8 <> D12 <> D12+

If we look at an average section of Commonwealth infantry consisting of 2 NCO's with SMG's, 1 Bren LMG, & 5 Rifles, they would generate 13D6 without taking any modifiers into account. The dice pool is then modified by the table below, you can see it's mostly burns so the pool will get smaller.

You start by reducing the highest dice first down a step until all are on the same step apart from D6's. If you have to burn a D6 and it isn't the last dice in your pool then it's discarded, once you get to the last one you roll 2D6 and take the lowest result, the games calls this D6-. If you manage to boost a D12 then you roll 1D12 & 1D6 and take the highest result (D12+). You can choose to make either a direct attack which causes casualties or suppressive fire which ignores cover penalties but only reduces the targets morale.

Shooting at armoured vehicles uses a similar process but has it's own table so it is fortunate that my troops have a 6pdr to knock on the enemy tanks armour with.

All of these models are from the Perry Miniatures site and they also see the Indian Pattern Carrier which is an oversized Bren carrier style vehicle. The hull comes is mostly one piece of resin with some metal additions to glue on. The crew are more Sikh infantry so these chaps fit in well with the rest of the infantry in the platoon.

I went with a brown striped camo option not having the nerve to do the full-on Caunter camouflage pattern. I'm sure Mr T will cover that when he paints his M3 Honey up.

The IPC comes with a Bren gun and an anti-tank rifle so given the scale of game and the light armour we plan to field it should be reasonably capable in most situations.

I've also put some unit markings on the recon jeep to show it as part of the HQ group for the 8th Indian Infantry Division.

And here's the whole unit, I do have a few more bits on order to add to the force but this is more than enough to get started with.