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Combat
Let?s have a quick look at combat. Here?s the starting situation:
Imagine we?ve had 1st Platoon chilling behind a large boulder in the forest since last turn, and no kraut in sight. Note that piling on troops behind the same cover could be very bad if the Germans were to throw a grenade in there, but for now let?s ignore that.
The 1st squad of the 3rd platoon has just moved into the Orchard bordering the woods. Of course, that movement means they are easy prey for any German lying in ambush, so we place an exposed counter on them (the -2 red counter). Now they are more vulnerable to fire until they manage to find somewhere safe to be in their terrain (the end of the turn).
That ?Potential Contact B? marker, however, can spell trouble for our troops. Every time we enter a card with one of those markers, we consult several tables I?m not going to bother you with to see if we trigger some German ambush.
In this case, we do, and two German squads appear on nearby cards. The system is pretty clever, and spawns different fortifications, kind of troops etc depending on the mission, whether we?re attacking or defending, whether we have contact or not, etc? Anyway, Contact!
Note that most of the time the enemy comes unspotted, meaning we can?t shoot at them because we only know they are over there, somewhere, but for now we ignore that.
We can remove the Contact Marker at the end of the combat, which is good, but the Germans automatically shoot at the troops that triggered the contact, which is bad.
Each shooting counter places a VoF (Volume of Fire) counter on their target card, automatically attacking one enemy if the target card doesn?t contain friendly troops. In this case, we place an Automatic Fire counter (from the squad with machineguns), a Small Arms Fire counter (from the German rifle squad) AND a crossfire counter, because there?s incoming fire from 2 or more directions. This makes more likely than our troops get hit.
The PDF (Primary Direction of Fire) in the spaces between the terrain cards just show the direction the fire is coming.
At least our soldiers can see the enemy, and immediately retaliate.
Automatic fire is applied to closest cards first, then the ones with heaveier VoF, in this case the machinegun squad. Our troops only have small arms, so we place one of those and a crossfire. Note that we have flipped the PDF counter in the middle to show that there?s fire coming and going.
Resolving fire is easy. For each card, we add modifiers:
- The worst ?normal? VoF modifier placed in the card (Snipers, grenades and other stuff ADD their modifier to this). There?s little reason to worry about being shot with a rifle when you?re being shot with a .50 cal, after all.
- Situational modifiers: Crossfires, Exposed counters, some other stuff
- Cover, both inside the card and the general terrain modifier.
In this case, we have a +2 for the Germans (-1 for the Crossfire, +0 Small Arms, +1 for the foxholes and +2 for the forest card) and a -2 for our troops (-1 for Automatic Weapons Fire, -1 for the Crossfire, -2 from the exposed counter, +1 for cover and +1 for the card cover). Negative number hurt more, usually.
Bad news come first, we draw a card from the Action Deck to see the effect on our troops:
Crosschecking the -2 modifier we see that the effect on our troops is a Pin. The shots haven?t done any real damage, but have forced our troops to keep their heads down for now. Their fire changes from Small Arms (+0 modifier) to All Pinned (+2 modifier), because they aren?t worrying about shooting as much as not getting shot. At least they get an extra +1 cover from the Pinned marker.
The Germans get a worse deal. They get hit. We draw another card to see the effects of the hit.
In the hit effect boxes we see that a Line squad would get a Casualty. Veteran squads are usually harder to damage. We?ll talk about different kinds of damage another time. For now, they are one third of the platoon down AND they change their Automatic Fire to All Pinned, which is great news for our boys (a hit is also a Pin).
We remove the Exposed marker, add Pinned markers and change VoF to All Pinned where necessary.
This is how the combat phase ends. We (and the Germans) can try to shake off the Pin condition, shift targets, spend time aiming, bring some heavier weapons to bear or call an airstrike, but the basics of the combat is pretty simple. I'll do the bookkeeping, even.