Fight Your Own Battles

Please note that most of the rules that used to be here have now been revised appear in Heroes All.

The Bavarian Corporal famously made the prediction that he was coming to England a few months before changing his mind and heading East instead.  In solo wargame terms, planning and launching an assault against yourself may seem something of a thankless task - after all, unless I am a half-wit without a short term memory to speak of (no comments please wife...), how can I surprise myself?

The answer is as simple as a few blank white postcards.

It is bound 6 of the game and the British CO has seen off the German assault.  He now wishes to counter attack whilst the Panzers fall back.  The plan is to attack on either bound 7, 8 or 9 depending on how quickly he can bring up some reserves, shuffle his defensive line to release some much needed armour support and call up the artillery to harass the retreating force.  3 plain white postcards are used - one marked with an X.  They are shuffled and placed in a pile on the Admin table.  At the start of bound 7, a card is drawn and the attack will be launched if it bears the X mark.  If it is blank,  the preparations continue and the CO does not draw another card until the start of bound 8.  All unused or blank cards are recycled for their next use.

This system has the advantage of letting a predictive system determine when the attack will take place without it becoming totally random (you have control of the bound numbers and the number of cards used).  The CO will have been given his orders by his superior and now has the task of assembling the required force.  If he goes early, he may find the retreating Germans in disarray but may only have a small force at his disposal.  Going 3 bounds later may give him a better strike force but his foe may well have found a decent defensive line and "rallied" their confidence.

Incidentally, in FYOB, the "Continuous Momentum" and "Casualty Milestone" factors determine the mental state of the troops on the ground and the reaction of the German Commander as his attack starts to falter.  The mechanisms in FYOB determine (1) at what point the individual elements dive for cover or retreat and (2) when the commander calls off the attack and sets a rallying point for his forces.

Please note that most of the rules that used to appear here are now incorporated into Heroes All, FYOB or the new version of FYOW.

Recent games have suggested that the convoy rules, where a ship is a ship, are a little basic and do not allow the introduction of escorts such as Destroyers and Corvettes which had different roles.

The initial change is to consider the options when setting up the escort fleet.  Normally this is 1+d3 ships but now I consider that a Corvette represents 0.75 of a ship so a roll of "2" (giving 3 escorts) could give me 4 Corvettes instead of 3 Destroyers.

When defending against an attack (where the destroyers roll a d6) the Corvettes only roll a d4 but as you are likely to have more of them, they can double-team the raiders.  This also means that the Corvettes can disrupt attacks rather than sink enemy raiders - and that feels OK.

To clarify (and to clarify the original rules), when the initial "exchange" results in the attacker scoring higher, it rolls 2 x d6 to attempt to sink the escort.  Where the escorts are double-teamed, only one of the escorts is sunk should a double be thrown.  This is where having more ships can be a bonus.

Submarines

However, when attacked by a submarine, the Corvettes are damaged on a roll of 4 and sunk on a 5, 6.

A clarification - submarines can be selected as a raider option when the fleets are determined (pg 68).

Flying boats

The player can elect, instead of a squadron of light/dive bombers, to recruit an anti-submarine aircraft (the famous PBY Catalina perhaps?).  This aircraft has the range of a super-fighter.

The PBY can be sent on patrol over the sea.  It patrols a wide area for all daylight sessions less 1 (to simulate its journey to and from the patrol area).  For each session over the sea (squares do not have to specified), the PBY throws a d6 and on a score of 6 detects a submarine.  It attacks the submarine by throwing a d6 with the result giving;

6  =  submarine sunk

5, 4, 3   =  submarine unable to move during the next session

2, 1   =  no effect of attack

Subsequent attacks on the same submarine in subsequent sessions by the same aircraft (i.e. a continuous attack) get a +1 bonus on the dice roll.