Post by CharleyNovember on Sept 8, 2010 16:39:37 GMT -5
Thank you to eveyone that came. I am back safe and sound. Some things right some things wrong as usual. These are my thoughts on what stood out to me.
I'll start with the Con and end on a happy note.
CONS:
NO FRIDAY NIGHT MISSION. I'm sorry about that I should have known that wouldn't work out. it got everyones hopes up and it didn't pan out. There just really wasn't the turn out that I hoped for Friday night and it didn't make sense to run the mission. This lead to some frustration for the people that did show up. It was my call to postphone it and I am responsible. I'm sorry fellas.
Civilian rules past mission 1. During the first mission those rules worked well but later on it was fairly hard for the Germans to NOT shoot a civilian player for one thing Resistance at this one ended up making up about 80-90% of the Allied forces. We are going to have to make some changes to get these to work better in the future.
Saturday night mission. This one was like the blind leading the blind. It was supposed to be a daytime mission but we were late as usual(See next Con) The germans were trying to use Arty with me hunting around in the dark trying to find the locations to do arty and failing and falling and getting shot up...and the Allies blowing up Arty that was not in play but left on the field from past missions.
I ran mission one Saturday morning to make up for missing it Friday night. As such I wanted to start a little early but ineviitably it become a herding cats thing and it took longer and longer to get the missions going. For my part I'd like to say I was ready but it was a little slow to get players ready to go all the time. You can always be a jerk and just play with the players you have that are ready now but sometimes that would leave out fun parts like the Germans with the MG that needed to fix a stripped cylinder and so forth. I thought the MG's on both sides were important to the fun for everyone. We always strive to be as on time as we can but we always run a little late I hope that no one was real pissed about that. If so I can understand but all I can tell you is I do my best each time to keep it on time. Some things it works out some things it goes slow.
Sunday Morning. Normally thier is low turn out for Sunday's follow up missions but I really expected more people than the very small handful that showed up to be there. Should we scrub Sundays all together you think guys?
Pros:
Uniforms. Everyone did a good to outstanding job this time around. I was impressed I didn't have to act like a dick to anyone about putting a minimum effort into it. Thank you to everyone.
Resistance guys really did a good job. In mission 1 the German commander was taken by surprise by some crafty resistance fellas in the town.
German initiavtive from Mission 2 on. WOW we really must have pissed them off because they were really really on the ball from there on out.
German Commander was leading from the front. He shouted a lot and I think that may have annoyed some of his troops but damn When he said forward he was right there leading the charge to encourage those around him to do the same. It made a real difference in how the game turned out guys.
Not many outburst or people being dicks. I didn't hear about problems with hit calling. There were a couple incidents were people got overshot and some harsh words followed but that was over quickly.
Conclusion:
Tactically speaking the Germans took the day besides the first mission they dominated the other 3 missions. If we want to talk about civillian casualties then they were high. 7 in the first 2 missions. This cost the Germans 50 points a piece but really this is a game mechanic that needs some tweaking. The allies were outnumbered to begin with but put up a valant fight.
Mission 1 The allies kept the Germans from finding the Allied landing spots while the Allies with the help of the resistance recovered the Axis commanders mission plans. At one point a German sentry stopped the resistance player carrying the dead German commanders intel(a marked map) He looked at the map but didn't realize what it was and let the player walk on back to the allies. The resistance also had a turncoat German who took the Allied commander hostage briefly but was not able to kill him before he himself was killed. So at this point the Allies were set up for mission 2 with an advantage. The Germans only had 4 players anywhere near the 3 landing zones they had to take for Mission 2 the rest of the Germans were a fair jog away from the area to be fought over while the Allies were dropped almost on top of where they had to be.
Mission 2 The Allies had a strong advantage they were almost on top of thier objectives while the Germans had to run from thier starting point which was a ways away to engage the Allies. amazingly the 4 Germans that were all on thier own were able to push off the Allies and once reinforcements arrived the Germans pushed the Allies all the way back to thier one and only landing zone they were able to secure. 6 Civilians were killed here. This is were the rethinking on the civilian rules came in. The civilians had no gun on them but they were actively moving wounded Allied soldiers back to medics. While technically they had no weapons and according to the rules couldn't be shot it made little sense to the Germans to allow them to do this..A pow wow with the resistance leader and German commander kind of resolved this and we switched to all civillian players being active targets for the rest of the day.
Mission 3 The Allies needed to push out of the one landing zone they secured all the way up to the mid field valley. This was going to be tough for the allies anyway you shake it and it proved to be too much for the allies to be able to do. The Germans held thier ground.
Mission 4 This was at dark and did not go as planned on my end. The Germans had two artillary pieces on top of bunker hill(Riez) and they had a lookout bunker with a phone wired all the way back to the hill. They would call in arty strikes which are easy to simulate during the day but almost impossible to do at night for staff. There were some prop arty pieces on the field left over from years ago and some confusion on what exactly they were supposed to demo. They demo'ed the wrong arty and never were able to get on top of that hill.
I think overall you can see the Germans took the day. They killed a lot of civillians but then that is sort of historically accurate. Tactically they squashed the beach landings and any progress the Allies hoped to make inland.