As I alluded to in my last post I have a huge medical crisis at the end of February and nearly cashed in my chips. Happily things look good but recovery has been painfully slow. And slowly painful. :-) Today I finally got together with some of the gang for an exploratory game of 4th edition Flames of War. I've been anxious to give them a try so we went to the ever hospitable Adventure Games and set up a 1500 point late-war game.
We kept it small because some were on a short timeline and my endurance still has a long ways to go. So three Germans and three Soviets split up the 1500 points. Our side had a force from a PDF with five Tiger I, two Hetzers and a funky little infantry kampfgruppe with a Pak40, two HMGs, four PzGr. MG stands, a tank-hunter and the command stand. The Soviets had five JS-II, four gun batteries of 152, 76 and 57mm guns, plus two infantry units.
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| Starting positions, Germans defending. |
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| Turn two and we're already down 40% of our Tigers. |
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| Those Soviet 57mm ATGs are wicked. |
The last picture requires some explanation. For maybe three turns these three tanks dueled. The Soviets couldn't hit and the Tiger couldn't make a firepower roll. So when we quit after about six turns they were still facing each other.
It was a tough day to be an infantryman as both sides suffered. The 57s were run off but three Tigers had died. The Hetzers weren't going to do much against the JS-IIs to I figure we were losing. But people needed to leave and my endurance ran out so we called it a friendly draw. Nice to roll dice and nice to be among my buds once more.
First impressions of 4th edition: the learning curve is going to be a lot more than I expected. Artillery had better survival chances. Infantry that get hit with a bombardment have the choice of moving or dying. Casual players are going to have a tougher time keeping track of all the little changes to their vehicle stats and capabilities. Most of the changes are subtle, but there are a LOT of them. Looking forward to the next test game.
