Parking Lots of War: FoW game with some new friends
Today they would be recreating the Third Battle of Kharkov, the prelude to the Battle of Kursk. We flipped a coin and I ended up playing as the Germans, alongside another player. Opposing us would be the Red Army. Our goal was simple, to control the town of Kharkov. We would be moving across open fields against dozens of tanks, artillery, and fortified houses.
I had never played FoW, and World War 2 is not my forte. I know the basic framework of the conflict, but recognizing different armaments is not something I can do. This led to a few hasty, ill-informed decisions during deployment. The gist of our plan was to have a maneuver element controlled by one player, and a fire support player on the other. However, because I didn't recognize which Soviet tanks were what, we ended up deploying the maneuver element in front of heavy tanks, and the fire support element in front of light tanks.
Luckily for me, I was given a reserve of Panzer and Panther tanks, which tore through the T-34s I faced. Not luckily for my teammate, his vehicles ended up moving across an open field against heavy tank fire and lost a vast majority of his vehicles half way across the board. I gave my partner a few of my medium and heavy tanks to keep him in the fight.
And between both of those, we had the center facing the town of Kharkov, which was under my area of responsibility. On my side, I had 11 Panzer 4's and a platoon of infantry, supported by artillery. On the other side, I faced a compound of fortified houses supported by their own artillery. The Soviet players had chosen not to place any tanks in their center, this created an opposition that was simultaneously weak, yet also quite strong.
Although my tanks and their mounted infantry would not be under significant threat, I found that the rules for FoW made fortified infantry very difficult to dislodge. So while I could charge into them with little fear of being destroyed, I couldn't actually kill them, even while hitting the buildings over and over with tank fire, and as there were no rules for destroying buildings in FoW, this meant I would actually have to clear the buildings one by one with infantry.
A lack of understanding on how assault rules worked resulted in me losing 7 stands worth of infantry just to take 1 house. I knew that I would receive defensive fire by the enemy I was assaulting, what I didn't know was that every enemy that could see me would be getting defensive fire, I ended up taking a lot more dakka than I anticipated. Having taken so many losses to my infantry, I realized what was left of my infantry force would not be able to take the town on my own, and my teammates infantry were across the field and cut off by about half a dozen enemy tanks.
So by the end of the game, we had my side on the left, which had completely cleared the board of opposition. We had my teammate's side on the right, which had been rendered almost completely combat ineffective, but at a heavy price for his enemy. And in the center, we had tank superiority but not enough infantry to actually take the town. We all determined that the Germans would eventually be able to win the tank battle, but the infantry assault on the town was not likely to succeed. We would be able to encircle the force inside the town, but it would be many turns of ineffective artillery and tank bombardment to clear out the enemy enough to make an assault with our depleted infantry force possible. By this point the game had gone for about 4 hours, and we decided to end the game in a draw, which I can happily accept because everyone gets to leave in a good mood. Hopefully.
I had a lot of fun and enjoyed playing with these new friends. We set up our next game for October (the Battle of Lutzen, 1813), made our farewells, and parted ways. Until next time, folks!
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