WW2: First Encounters

With the dust settling from the final confrontation in the Ill Tides campaign we've been kicking up dust in the north African desert instead with some learning games for V for Victory. We had played one game just after Christmas but this was a chance to play three in quick succession with Stu popping over on the Saturday between regular Friday games.

The pictures are from last nights game where I went lighter on the number of terrain pieces on the table and this led to more units being shot at without the benefit of cover, limiting heavy cover in particular  meant more casualties than we'd had in previous games. 

This game centred around capturing and holding two buildings with a lively recon skirmish also occurring on my right flank. The Commonwealth recon jeep comes with an extra LMG when compared to the DAK one so they had the firepower edge, fortunately my recon chaps had some cover and also some supporting fire from nearby units.

The main fight was over the buildings and both sides occupied one each early on but with the DAK forces getting a full section into theirs whilst the Sikh's only had a 1/2 section in residence. Both sides opted to prep the infantry assault with a couple of turns of mortar fire but the number of units in the building had a influence on how effective this was. When firing an indirect weapon at a building you roll to cause stress and then split this between the units in the building. So whilst my three units could spread the stress out the single unit in the other building had to take all the stress.

It also turns out that HE rounds fired at units close to your Commander model are also rather nasty as he's a single model he needs to save all the hits otherwise your Commander is dead, which is a big blow to your activation options.

We did notice something interesting around building assaults in that when a unit assaults a building then all the defending units get to fight (you can activate multiple attacking units to assault as well) and all the units are then marked as activated after the assault ends. So a good way to clear a building could be to sacrifice one unit to activate all the defenders and then combo-charge a couple more units in.