Team Yankee - Practice game - Encounter Battle!

This weekend I played through a practice game in readiness for the forthcoming Team Yankee tourney at the Hall of Heroes on the 21st August.

 

The Encounter Battle has 2 specific mission rules: 'Meeting engagement' means that the first player has some restriction on their opening shots, restricted to moving rate of fire; and any air strikes have to be waved off. 'Scattered Delayed Reserves' mean half of your platoons go into reserve until diced for in turn 3, and may appear as per the diagram.

I set up a pretty generic table, 6 x4 as per comp. standard, with lots of terrain, more than I seems normal to my taste but I acknowledge most people like to see more terrain than me. I did try to leave some channels for movement however...

The Soviets had 10 platoons, with 5 allowed on table - 3 platoons of 5 x T-72, a small BMP2 Scout platoon and 2 x Shilka. The US force had 8 platoons, so the on table platoons were both armored platoons of 3 x M1, a small Mech Platoon and a flight of 2 x Cobras.

The Soviets were the attackers, and started off their deployment with the scout platoon opening up the deployment bubble. With the large swathe of 'no-man's-land' in this scenario, this was an effective move and allowed 2 of the 3 T-72 platoons to menace the centre objective early in the game...despite losing half their vehicles in the M1s' opening volley!

In fact the area around this objective, which was the Soviet main effort, soon became the scene of utter carnage...

Both side's reinforcement rolls were lucky and attention moved away to the other pair of objectives in what had seemed to be a less promising area terrain wise...

Where the only real defense looked to be a single US Mech platoon...

But these gravel-bellies stood their ground...

And even managed to thin out the Soviet armour with 66mm LAWs!

Back on the main objective the Soviets had rerouted half of the third T-72 platoon to make up the numbers, but conversely the US reinforcements included a M109 platoon being used in the direct fire mode...

It had all degenerated into a whirl of point blank meleeing...

With no clear front line....

And lots of opportunities for side shots!

But in the end the M1's rate of fire told, and the US line held....

To the extent that the surviving M1s, with no Soviet ground forces between them and the Soviet objective, started making a beeline for it, and a victorious end to the game...

However a timely patrol of the Soviet Frontal Aviation chanced upon the scene...

And stabilised that part of the front for the time being with 2 lucky hits from their Kh-25 missiles...

This gave the opportunity for a last ditch assault on what had been the secondary objective with some Motor Rifle reinforcements, who had chanced to arrive in exactly the right portion of the table...

However once again the hard fighting US Mechanised Infantry repulsed the assault with their firepower! The game could have gone on for a few more moves with no clear advantage either way, but I had extracted all likely teaching points from this scenario...mainly being that one of the key principles of war is - Concentration of Effort!