First Impressions

[Nat]

Ok, received it yesterday… but I was at the club so not had a look at the rulebook – thats tonights mission :p

But first impression is it looks good and robust, but limited to 2 players without some House Rules… will see if thats true or not!

[Nat]

So I have a question….how many of each type of iniative cards are you supposed to have?

[Barry Fee]

Started a game yesterday. components are good, system is simple. I played a North Africa board as my test,  The general setup was a little confusing at first with the situation cards. I wasnt too sure about the 10 card deck aspect.

found movement was simple and concealment quite interesting. Air power seems very powerful. starting to ask myself a few questions now on use of concealiment in a Campaign game though as the counter for the unit stays on the board so how does this allow you to conceal a unit when there is a plastic tank on top of it?

Trasferring games from the board to the tabletop is going to be where the fun lies in this game for me though. Sorry to say I am not sure I will use bolt action combined with Tank War I may adopt another system like Battlegroup. In a simple infantry v infantry confrontation I may adopt Bolt Action.

The VP markers look great and the bonuses from them seem good without being to overpowered, and by giving your oponent a boost as well as you they keep things even.

I can see a lot of questions on the rules coming up as always with Warlord, the game looks great and has possibilites but the rules are only 80% written and will need house rule fillink of gaps and plenty of clarification.

[Nat]

When you flip the token over to be concealled you take the plastic model off… you auto generate a scout (blank) token so your army will be in one of two places at the end of the move.

Totally agree with the 80% written, I feel its missed the mark on the campagin side as if you have more than 2 players (so pretty much every gaming group /club!) will have to house rule a lot to be able to use it….

[James Figiel]

Hi all, my initial impressions after opening the box and reading through the rules.  Currently I’m building out my models for Bolt Action, Blood Red Skies and Victory at Sea.  Looking forward to the campaign game and the tabletop battles.  The rules are pretty straight forward but I’m not sure about setting up battles between different types of units.  For example, how do you set up a sea battle between ships and troops in transports.  Can you use airstrike when aircraft attack a ground unit etc.  I’m starting to develop my own ideas, but it seems like an obvious miss in the rules.  The components are great, but since they did custom printing on both sides of the maps I would have rather had four more maps instead of a map sized picture that doesn’t add value to the game.  Overall I’m still really excited!

[Nat]

well… its official…. you only get 1 blue card …

so yeah if you want to play VaS or CS in your campaign your iniative card deck gets bigger :\
& either VaS or CS was a later addition and someone forgot to alter the number of cards in the rulebook on the number of iniative cards you get ….

[Andrew Cree]

Whilst I don’t see any reason you can’t play out an air-raid on a unit using Airstrike, or an attack on transported units using VaS/CS I would point out that in the first case there is no air defence, so it would simply be attack aircraft vs. Flak with no real penalty for the attacker.

In the second case, again there should be no warships in the transported unit, it would be warships vs. sufficient transports to ship the reinforced platoon. Sure, if you’re playing Germany you can take Siebel Ferries and Artilleriefahrprams to provide some escort in CS – but if your opponent has decided to field a British Black Swan-class Sloop (or equivalent) as their command ship you’re outgunned, outranged and outmanoeuvred.

 

I’d say in those two cases keep it simple and just roll the dice as indicated by the rules, inflicting the standard losses on the loser.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by Andrew Cree.

[Nat]

my view is that (as I’ve said else where) CA is a few ideas short of completion :p

but BRS v ground targets – see how many hex’s defending aircraft are away… thats how many turns go by before they turn up…half the turns (or turn 4 if not on the board) to turn up disadvantaged?

VaS idea… transports are free but you get a % of the BA points being transported as escorts

[Andrew Cree]

After finding my copy of Close Quarters (the Cruel Seas expansion), turns out they have ‘Invasion Rules’ on page 50.

A Reinforced Platoon would barely be noticeable in VaS. You can fit the standard 1,000pts into about 5 LCM-3s (British/Americans) , a Marinefahrpram (Germany/Italy) or 3 Daihatsu Landing Craft (Japan). Tank War force would be a bit bigger but not by much.

I suppose you could rule for diverting the airstrike from it’s initial target to defend a new target but…how often did that happen? AFAIK, only the RAF, RN – and later the USN – had a system in place for in depth fighter control of the sort you are advocating. Consider as well that if an air unit has made it’s attacks for the time period it would be out of fuel and weapons and therefore unable to defend a second location.

 

This should really have been made clear in the books, but from a practical side I think it’s best to just roll the dice for these particular match-ups due to their one-sided nature.

[Total Burnout]

The air seems to be a bit out of this discussion.

I made a revision with some ideas for tweaks some time ago. https://youtu.be/beqEerPLrR4

Anyone playing this anymore? It would be a shame not to use this game and give it a chance.

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