Botched Relief Scenario in OHW and Other News

My gaming buddy Shawn and I were able to get two games of One-Hour Wargames (OHW) in today (in two hours, no less) using some of my old medieval DBA troops. We decided to play Scenario 28: Botched Relief and, let me tell you, this is a very interesting scenario. Lots of choices to make and very quirky, although a simple design. Both games were very much until the end. (Okay, on game two you could do the math and figure out that Red was not going to inflict enough damage, but it was still a very exciting game.)

Botched Relief

The scenario notes indicate that this scenario draws inspiration from the Battle of El Molino del Rey (1847) from the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. A smaller force defeats a larger force largely because the larger force commits itself piecemeal.

The Blue Army (attacker) is assaulting the town held by Red units. The majority of the Red Army, however, is on a hill on the flank, unengaged in the battle. Although the units appearing there are on the table, they cannot attack nor be attacked until they "activate". Additionally, only one unit can activate at one time. The second cannot activate until the first unit is eliminated, the third until the second is eliminated, etc. So although Red has 6 units to Blue's 4, Blue will never have more than 3 active at any one time.

I brought my medieval troops so we were playing that variant, which is good because occupying the town is part of the victory conditions and all troops can enter towns in this period.

I am not going to go for a blow-by-blow narrative in this battle report because I think, for the most part, people don't really like that. (Maybe it is just me.) What I like in battle reports are highlighting where key mechanics in rules come into play (especially when reviewing rules) and the key decisions made by the players. I am especially interested in the latter as I am trying to develop a series of programmed opponents specifically for OHW and its scenarios.

Game 1

I played Red and rolled up three Knights, one Archers, and two Levy. Darn! No Men-at-Arms to defend the town with. Blue Army was rolled up as three Knights and one Archers unit.

1. The column of Blue Knights attacking up the road (not visible on the map, but trust me, it is there).
2. The Blue Archers guarding the flank.
3. The single Red Archers defending the town.
4. The Red Knights defending the flank.
5. The Red Knights coming in from the relief forces on the flank.

The key decision the Red commander has, after finding out their force composition, is which unit types to put where. With Knights having 12" movement and hitting with D6+2, they could afford to be in the relief column; they have the mobility to get engaged with the enemy the quickest. The Archers have a 6" move and a 12" range, so it is possible that they too can have an impact in defending the town (or re-taking it). The issue with Archers is that they are D6-2 in melee and Blue Army, using the road, would be on them in turn 2. So I now question my choice of selecting them for my initial forces. Putting a Levy unit in there would have lasted as long, but inflicted more damage over the long run. The main point was that there was no Men-at-Arms unit (i.e. dismounted Knights) to put in. As they only take 1/2 damage, they have staying power.

The first key rules moment came when I charge the Red Knights into the middle of the Blue Knights column.

As you can (barely) see, I intentionally charged my Knights past the lead Blue Knights at the head of the road column and clipped the flank of the second unit. My intent was not to claim "flank attack" (and in fact I did not), but rather to tie up the road column from moving any further. This action, as you will see, brought up a lot of questions on how to interpret the OHW rules. I would like to hear some of your ideas on how you would interpret them.

Despite my constant advocation of playing the Rules As Written, I find myself with OHW often "injecting" rules into the game that are not there, but are simply common conventions in other rules that I have played over the years. In this case I did not claim a flank attack because of the convention that you can only claim a flank attack if you are coming in more than 45º off of the front corner of the enemy unit, otherwise it is a frontal attack. It seemed cheesy to claim a flank attack when the charge clearly did not originate from the flank.

There are three interesting things about this attack though. First, that you could charge past the first unit. This felt right because I was coming in from the side. Second, because the Knights were all jammed up together, there really was no way to engage the front face of the second Knights unit. Charging a unit in column would have hit its flank. Third, the charging unit only has corner contact. Nowhere does Neil Thomas espouse "squaring up" units in hand-to-hand combat in these rules.

At this point, we had ruled it a frontal attack. Later we would both agree it should have been a flank attack, and thus caused double casualties.

One other point of note is that the Blue Archers unit failed to pivot at the end of the last turn. You can just barely see the second Red Knights unit coming up on its flank. If it had pivoted, it would have been able to fire at those Knights, but as it was, they were either going to fire at my engaged Knights and eventually be taken in flank, or they would pivot – losing their opportunity to fire – but able to face off against the flanking Knights.

That leads to another couple of questions: firing at units partially obscured and firing at units engaged in hand-to-hand combat.

When it comes to line of sight, Neil Thomas is silent. Generally speaking I use a simple rule. If the right-front edge of my unit can draw a line to the closest center-point of the edge of the target unit and it does not pass through a unit or terrain, then do the same from the left-front edge, I allow the unit to fire. This means that units can fire into a melee if they meet the above rules. Here are some examples of what I mean.

Allowed – Not Blocked by Unit or Terrain

Not Allowed – Blocked by Terrain

Is this how you play it?

The next significant event was the relief Red Knights hitting the Blue Archers on its flank. It rolled a '6', adding '2' and then getting doubled (see the rules for the order of operations; adding and subtracting come before halving or doubling), resulting in the Blue Archers being run down in a single turn.

Generally you think of OHW as an attritional game, given that it has 15 hits per unit, but you have to remember that hard-hitting units coming in on the flank can take out a fresh enemy unit 16% of the time!

One of the rules in OHW is the inability of most units to interpenetrate other units. Generally only skirmishers can interpenetrate, or be interpenetrated by, other units. In the medieval variant there are no Skirmisher units, so there is no interpenetration allowed. By the way, I like this rule because, as Neil Thomas wrote in a Slingshot article of his rules (paraphrasing): I don't believe in command and control rules because I think players do a good enough job of getting in their own way. This next turn showed that concept neatly. The Knights on the road are all bunched up and now a threat on the flank has appeared much more quickly than anticipated.

Although it is hard to see, the block of Knights on the left are actually two units, one behind the other. Due to the interpenetration rule the Knight unit in the rear cannot pivot. Interpenetration. Units may never pass through each other. So, it is not merely a matter of clearing the footprint of the friendly unit, one unit's footprint may not pass through another at all.

This leads to a second issue. Although the rules never state it explicitly, movement is always straight. The following passage makes no sense otherwise. "Movement is depicted according to a simple model, whereby rapidity is reflected by faster movement rates rather than, for example, allowing some units to turn more rapidly than others. Turning is instead depicted in a simple manner, by pivoting units on their central point. This avoids the complexity of wheeling manoeuvres, where wargamers have to precisely measure the movement distance of a unit’s outer corner. The difficulties of turning are instead provided for by only allowing evolutions at the start and/or the end of a unit’s move, but not during it. This reproduces the historical effects, but makes the tabletop process much easier."

That said, no word is mentioned of a unit backing up, reversing its movement. In the above situation the last Blue Knights unit would be stuck in place, unable to pivot, until the Knights unit in front of it moved forward or was eliminated. We decided to allow a unit to move straight forward or backward with no left or right drift. We felt the intent of the passage above was that there is no turning or oblique/drift in movement as the rules allow a free pivot both before and after the movement.

Is that how you play it? Or would you have disallowed it because the commander inadvertently bunched his troops up? As it happened, this command and control issue still had a penalty. It allowed the Red Knights to get the jump on the Blue Knights, inflicting the first hit.

The game ended with a Red loss. The Blue Knights eventually ground down the Red Archers while only taking 10 hits. The flanking Red Knights cut through all of the Blue Knights caught on the road, but in the end exposed its flank to the Blue Knights in the town. With the clock run out the Blue Knights turned around and re-entered the town long before the next relief unit could arrive and challenge ownership. Four determined units beat six cautious ones. It was a very close game.

In hindsight I do think having a Levy unit in the town rather than the Archers unit would have resulted in a Red victory. That -2 in combat resulted in the loss of 6 hits on the leading Blue Knights, which would have destroyed them first.

Let see how I fare as the attacker.

Game 2

Blue force rolled and got three Knights and one Men-at-Arms. Men-at-Arms (i.e. dismounted Knights) are notable in that they take 1/2 casualties due to their armor. Although they are slower, I wanted to have them attack the town. I wanted to make sure they survived the assault, leaving my Knights to clear the field. My strategy was going to be much different. (By the way, even though I did not plan it this way, I think the person that goes second as the attacker has the advantage as he can see what does and does not work.)

Unfortunately, Red force rolled and also got one Men-at-Arms! In addition they received four Knights and one Archers unit. Here is how we deployed our troops.

As you can see, Red went with the Men-at-Arms defending the town and the Knights protecting its flank. Red also chose the Archers unit as the unit from the relief force.

I decided to attack on a broader front. Now that I knew I would be attacking Men-at-Arms in a town – they take 1/4 casualties – I knew that I would have to keep the flanking Knights and all of the relief forces off of my back to allow me as much time as possible to whittle down the defenders. Also, I knew that mathematically with him taking 1/4 casualties (armor and town defense) and me taking 1/2 casualties, I would have to get a second unit in there hitting him on the flank as soon as possible. So my plan was to use one Knights unit to engage his Knights unit, another to engage the Archers unit, and the final Knights unit to take the Men-at-Arms in flank.

As you can see by the image above, I pushed my Knights all the way to the hill to take out the Archers. It did not matter much because the one shot they took was to the (white) Knights. But the problem was that I was now inflicting 1/2 casualties for attacking uphill. At the time I was not too concerned about that. In my game I only got one unit from the relief force activated until Turn 15 hit. If I could keep the relief forces pinned down as long as possible the second unit might not have enough time to take back the town, as happened to me. That said, my math was a little off. The Archers would inflict an average of 0.7 hits per turn (D6-2) while my Knights would still inflict an average of 3 hits a turn (D6+2 / 2). So as soon as I wiped out the Archers, he would have a Knights unit on my Knights' flank, which would likely wipe them out instantly.

That said, all was playing out well. My Knights in the center had his engaged frontally and on flank. I missed blowing out his unit by one hit, however. Once that unit was eliminated, I had another interesting decision.

The Archers had been inflicting a few good hits, so with the Red Knights in the center gone, my (white) Knights were free to slam into the Red Men-at-Arms defending the town. But what to do with the other Blue Knights unit? I knew that as soon the Red Archers collapsed the Red Knights immediately to their right would spring on the flank of my Knights attacking the hill. As they only had 5 hits it was possible that they could survive a flank charge (if the Red Knights rolled a 1-2). Even if they did not survive, I wanted to be in a position to immediately counter-charge their flank, if possible. So I moved my Knights forward to threaten any relieving Red Knights.

My opponent thought it was a bad move. What do you think?

As it turned out, the Archers collapsed, the Red Knights sprang on the flank of my Blue Knights, which were rolled over in a single charge. My Blue Knights then counter-charged (without getting a flank position), but were apparently still blown from the previous combat as they were rolled over by the Red Knights in turn. (There is something about Knights in the relief force being particularly effective as in both games they wrecked several units in succession.)

However, by this time my (white) Knights had hit the Red Men-at-Arms in flank and helped eliminate them. (My troops had been getting very good rolls while his Men-at-Arms had been getting horrible rolls. After three turns at D6 / 2 they had only inflicted 5 hits on my Men-at-Arms!) So I turned my Knights around to intercept the Red Knights coming off of the hill. We were both at 8 hits ...

I charged and rolled a '1', while he countered with a '4', leaving me with 1 hit remaining. That was enough to allow me to eliminate his Knights in the next turn. But that meant ... another fresh Red Knight was coming from the relief force. It charged off of the hill and took my last Knight unit out.

I had 5 hits, but he was going to hit at D6+2 / 4 each turn, so basically a '1' to '4' was 1 hit and a '5' or '6' was 2 hits. His first hit he rolled a '1' ... and his swing on turn 15 ...

Summary

Two really great games, both with the attacker winning (as it was historically). OHW, like Memoir '44, due to its quick games and simplified play, lends itself to playing a scenario twice, once as Red and once as Blue, then seeing who did better overall across the two games. For this scenario, it was definitely  hard-fought draw, going down to the wire.

It was interesting to see what kind of biases I brought from playing other rules, things I did not even question as to whether or not they were in the written rules (such as flank charges having to originate outside of the front 45º, or that there was no backwards movement defined). It was also interesting to see how close or far apart Shawn and I were on 'how things should be'. (Shawn is one of the few people that can stand playing with me, so I figure we must be closer in our gaming opinions than not.)

The more I play OHW the more I am impressed with how rich a game whose combat mechanic is 'roll D6 to accumulate hits up to 15 then remove the unit' and how tightly designed the scenarios are. I have used the scenarios for other rules, but you always had to modify a few things (like forces, number of turns, etc.) so you definitely lost the sense of how tight these designs are.

It was also really nice to be able to break out the old DBA armies, blow off the dust, and game with large units that had a better feel of 'mass'. Originally I had been playing using these armies with one base per unit, making units 40mm wide (instead of the recommended 4" to 6" wide). That allowed me to play on very small board (12" by 12", in fact). For this game I decided that I wanted to use units of the proper size, and using free movement no less! Each unit was 120mm wide (about 4.75") and with 15mm figures, it 'felt' great.

I was digging through the closet looking for DBA knightly armies and found a whole (large) Norman force that I don't remember purchasing, and had definitely never played with. Shocking. But this game played so well, I can see a lot more medieval OHW games in the future.

Gaming 2019

I did not do one of those end of year posts outlining what I accomplished, etc., but I guess I will tack it on here.

My last year was mostly wrapped around computer gaming, online education, and vegetating in front of the television. I got very little painting done, no big miniatures projects done, very few games played, and very few blog posts written. It really wasn't until December that I pulled myself out of that pattern and started gaming again. In my Solo Battles blog I published six posts in December, five posts here since Thanksgiving, but unfortunately none in my Wooden Warriors blog. (I have one coming up, however.)

The biggest change to my gaming was trying to get into mainstream gaming rules, like Warhammer Underworlds and Star Wars: Legion (SWL). The former was largely unsuccessful because everyone around here has pretty much stopped playing it. The latter, however, seems to be just starting up in this area.

So, why SWL? I am not a big Star Wars fan. I am not a big 'popular games' fan. The system is actually the kind I generally do not like (competition oriented; players like to min-max lists; points driven; scenarios are that in name only; figures are expensive; lots of tokens on the table; uses special, expensive dice; rules are 82 pages long; units have lots of special abilities, requiring cards to remember everything (but you will still forget a few); uses eyeballing line-of-sight and estimating the percentage of the figure exposed; and other such goodies. So why am I inflicting this upon myself? To be more social, to be honest. I have a very hard time meeting new people and asking if I can join in. As I get older I find that I get pickier, so my natural inclination is to solo game more. But solo gaming, well, is a lot of work. And it is lonely. I need to break out of that shell.

Gaming 2020

So, SWL will be more on the menu this year. Don't expect any battle reports anytime soon though. My painting of commercial figures has slowed down, especially as my eyes seem to have worsened. (I am getting my 'painting hand' back though.) I really don't like to do battle reports with unpainted figures and I can see it is going to take quite some time for me to paint all the figures I have purchased already. (Trust me, Citadel contrast paints can be a real time saver, if you use them correctly. Which is to say, not the way Citadel tells you to use them.) So I will be gaming with others using some primed but unpainted units [yuck] largely against opponents that have unprimed units (if current games are any indication). I have no intention of photographing my shame. I will post pictures of my painted troops from time-to-time, however.

I thought about having the figures sent out for painting but Stormtroopers are black and white, for goodness sake, and my Rebels are Hoth-themed so they are black, white, tan, and gray. I cannot bring myself to pay someone to paint such simple schemes.

Shawn and I keep talking about how we would like to sell all of our miniature collections and start over. One scale for mass battles and one scale for skirmish, maybe. Maybe not get into every period you can think of (except Pike and Shot; I have still resisted that!). Maybe spend more time on terrain.

But, I can never bring myself to actually do it. So I duplicate periods in different scales.

I am resolving to get rid of a lot of rules and game systems that I know I am not going to play again. I may do some serious digitizing of the rules and magazines. But there are so many game systems I have that I cannot bring myself to throw into a landfill and I don't want to pay to have to have it hauled off. For my old collectible card games, for example, I am probably just going to give it to a FLGS just to get rid of it. That alone should free up some space.

If you have ever seen some of my cartoony wooden figures that I make, well, I will probably be doing a lot more of that. When I was about 13 I started making figures out of wooden beads. Knights mostly. Now that I am grown (HA! my wife would say) I still find I like the style. Also, I very much like painting freehand. It is much easier than painting modern commercial figures with an incredible amount of sharp detail cast into the figure. It may not sound like it, but trust me, it is. And "making" a figure these days is pretty much gluing one bead on top of another and adding a toothpick for a weapon. I am currently working on making vehicles using "granny grating". My first attempt is a pickup truck for my modern African army. (It will debut on the Wooden Warriors blog when I am done.)

My temperament is such that I tend to rotate between activities and projects. For a long time that was computer gaming. Right now non-wargame computer games have diminished appeal. I need to paint and that can take a lot of time, but as my eyes fail I won't be devoting as much time to that. My solo gaming efforts are going strong, probably stronger than my non-solo gaming efforts. I am trying to change that, but I don't see myself ever moving away from solo gaming completely. So, hopefully, this year you will see more activity on this blog and my Solo Battles blog.