Ground attack scenario

By Pour Le Merite, in Wings of War (WWI)

I am just starting the planning for next weekends scenario.

I am thinking about having a massive ground attack scenario where one of the sides will have soldiers moving from the trenches and over no mans land. If they reach the enemy trenches and the aircrafts have strafed the machine gun nests and supporting artillery the will take over the trench, I am thinking about having 2 trenches to take for them. Once they own the first new troops will spawn at that trench and try to break the second one.

If the second second trench is taken to wins the attackers. However will the defenders try to kill storming soldiers and stop the attacking side from bombing the artillery and machinegun nest. If the second line is unbreached after 4 hours of gaming have the defenders won.

The game will take place in October 1917 (I will make a Cambrai tank scenario for November). Each side will place the same number of planes on the ground as they themselves are, to use as backup planes if they lose something.

The sides will have Access to the following planes (and I am not sure what planes the players themselves have, at least 3 Camels and 2 SE5As. The central powers have at least 1 Dreidecker, 1 Pfalz DIII and some old Albatross DIII):

Allied:

1 Sopwith Camel

1 SE5A

1 Spad XIII

2 Sopwith Pup

1 Breuget B2 (heavy bomber with one engine)

1 RE8 (and I know that at least 1 player owns one)

1 DH4

Central Powers:

3 Fokker DrI

1 Pfalz DIII

2 Albatross DVa

1 Halberstadt CLII (2 seater specially made for ground attacks, but it is ok in dogfights too, about the same size as a Albatross)

1 AEG GIV (2 engines heavy bomber)

1 Gotha GIV

I also have some older planes if we get more players without their own planes, I hope for at least 8 players, preferably 10.

The heavy bombers will have a bonus to bomb artillery and anti air defense (defenders will also have 4 heavy anti aircrafts guns and 2 light. The Halberstedt will get a bonus on strafing. The allies is usually 50% french, 1 RNAS and the rest RFC, sometimes we have even more french. Also have the allies 2 Aces, germany have just a guy with 4 victories. We will flip a coin to decide who will attack.

You guys have any ideas of stuff to add to the scenario, or any other coments?

We had a lot of bombing scenarios before but I want something different. Particulary the germans were a lot into ground attacks and a scenario with moving targets will probably feels like a fresh wind compared to bombing, balloon busting and dogfights.

Sounds like you've got everything covered there. How do you plan to treat infantry units ? I'd use the trench card size and rules for firing from/at them and have them make one move at the third phase of each turn, no more than 1/2 ruler (perhaps a card length ?). I'd also allow them to shoot at trenches and MG units as if they were aircraft at height 0 (but reversing how infantry fire works against them i.e no special damage, points only). Trench assaults could be performed once an infantry card touches a trench, with both sides drawing cards alternately each phase(defenders in the trench draw first) until one side loses.

IRM said:

Sounds like you've got everything covered there. How do you plan to treat infantry units ? I'd use the trench card size and rules for firing from/at them and have them make one move at the third phase of each turn, no more than 1/2 ruler (perhaps a card length ?). I'd also allow them to shoot at trenches and MG units as if they were aircraft at height 0 (but reversing how infantry fire works against them i.e no special damage, points only). Trench assaults could be performed once an infantry card touches a trench, with both sides drawing cards alternately each phase(defenders in the trench draw first) until one side loses.

Good question. I think they will move the lenght of their rather small base everytime a plne uses a movement card. It is a lot shorter than how the plane moves but they are running and it should force the pilots to think a bit to know where they will be when the plane is there.

As for attacking trenches and machineguns I think we will just skip that for playability. The scenario is about the planes, the soldiers are just cannon fodder to make the scenario a bit more fun.

It would of course be interesting to make a game that mixes Wow and a strategy game for ground units but that will be in the future, maybe for the last big german offensive in '18.

Thanks for the suggestions :)

Well, we have played the scenario now. The attackers failed miserably becuase they spent all their time hunting planes instead of doing the mission. One bomber suicide bombed out a cannon and one of the machinegun nests in the first trenchline got strafed out.

The attackers did shoot down 5 enemy planes (2 Fokker Dr1, 2 Albatross DVas and a Halberstadt CLII (or rather it crashed when it tried to land after a mid flight collision). They lost a Breuget and a Spad XIII. However did one of the defending players leave the game after 1 hour and another after two making the attackers 4 against 2.

The defenders also shot out a large number of attacking soldiers, the allied did take a small part of the 1st trenchline but the great attack was a big failure, the poor footsoldiers idea of "tea in Berlin on friday" was just a fantasy.

The scenario in itself was rather amusing, it was too bad that the brittish didn't care at all and that the french did rather badly (they lost the two planes that actually tried to win the mission). The dogfighting got rather interesting.

Pour Le Merite said:

Well, we have played the scenario now. The attackers failed miserably becuase they spent all their time hunting planes instead of doing the mission. One bomber suicide bombed out a cannon and one of the machinegun nests in the first trenchline got strafed out.

Stupid Question: Did the ground-support acft. have *any* incentive to do the mission they'd been assigned? It sounds as tho' they could as easily have ignored the ground-support mission altogether without penalty.

The thought occurs: One *could* use cards for a ground-combat game movement could be simplified (instead of decks, for ex., infantry could move a distance equal to that between the center-dot of the card and the forward edge of the card...).

Pity FFG doesn't have submission guidelines.... :P


csadn said:

Stupid Question: Did the ground-support acft. have *any* incentive to do the mission they'd been assigned? It sounds as tho' they could as easily have ignored the ground-support mission altogether without penalty.

The thought occurs: One *could* use cards for a ground-combat game movement could be simplified (instead of decks, for ex., infantry could move a distance equal to that between the center-dot of the card and the forward edge of the card...).

Pity FFG doesn't have submission guidelines.... :P

Yes, we use a experience point system and bombing gives a lot of XP. The allied did lose their heavy bomber rather fast and choosed not to launch their smaller bombers (RE8s) until they had air domination. They had that for the last 30 minutes of the scenario but then it was too late. Strafing also gives a lot of xp fast. The anti aircraft guns gave also xp and was irritating enough for them to bomb, or should have been.

In this scenario we had the groundsoldiers running straight but you could easily make a template on how long they can run and where. Cards doesn't seems like a perfect system for people on foot, even though it works well for moving vehicles.

Mark IV tanks are easy since they only can turn more than a little by standing still, otherwise they go straight.

I just got my heavy armored Junkers J-I a day too late (from Reviresco). That plane will be awesome in ground attacks. :)

And I would love to see an official ground attack expansion, it would be the logical expansion after balloon busting and heavy bombers.

Pour Le Merite said:

In this scenario we had the groundsoldiers running straight but you could easily make a template on how long they can run and where. Cards doesn't seems like a perfect system for people on foot, even though it works well for moving vehicles.

I'm thinking the card represents the "main force"; damage points would represent folks getting killed, or fleeing, or otherwise being separated from that main force.


csadn said:

I'm thinking the card represents the "main force"; damage points would represent folks getting killed, or fleeing, or otherwise being separated from that main force.

In our case was any damage enough but it is not a bad idea for vehicles. We had a lot of small groups therefor they just had 1 hitpoint.

Hmm, I wonder how many HPs a Mark IV should have?

Pour Le Merite said:

Hmm, I wonder how many HPs a Mark IV should have?

Against air attacks? Not much.


csadn said:

Against air attacks? Not much.

Bombing out them are easy enough but they must have been able to take some punishment from when they were being strafed. They were after all ignoring a lot of fire from maxim guns when they attacked.

Pour Le Merite said:

Bombing out them are easy enough but they must have been able to take some punishment from when they were being strafed. They were after all ignoring a lot of fire from maxim guns when they attacked.

I'm not so sure they were able to do that, but I can't find any good cites one way or the other. A successful bombing run, however, should be an auto-kill.

Their top armour was supposed to be vulnerable to machine gun fire. Even modern tanks have much lighter top and bottom armour than elsewhere to keep the weight down (but it takes something a bit bigger than an MG to get through those :) )

IRM said:

Their top armour was supposed to be vulnerable to machine gun fire. Even modern tanks have much lighter top and bottom armour than elsewhere to keep the weight down (but it takes something a bit bigger than an MG to get through those :) )

Yeah, I will use some rules making it really hard to shoot thru them with guns and easy to bomb them.