Flames of War: Red Dawn Battle Report

Bon-journo. Ages ago the Darkster and I made rules for, and played, a beach landing scenario. With school starting up posts from me will probably slow down a bit. The rules were pretty simple. 

1. The Defender deploys his entire force, holding 1 platoon in Ambush.
2. The Attacker places 1 objective 18" away from the beach and no more than 6" within any table edge.
3. Each of the Attacker's Platoons is broken down into Squads and issued a landing craft based on it's composition.
1. There are 2 types of Landing Craft: Small and Large.
2.  Heavy Tanks and Heavy Guns (and any crew) are 1 per Large Craft, Medium and Light Tanks as well as Medium Guns (and any crew) are 2 per Large Craft.
3. Small Craft fit 1 Squad or 2 Light Guns (and any crew)
4. Soviet Companies are instead broken into Platoons
5. Landing craft have 1 Passenger Fired AA .50cal and are Armour 1 Front and Side and Armour 0 top.
6. If a landing craft is destroyed so are all models inside.
4. Attacker gets first turn placing all his landing craft at the beach, models may not move out of landing craft the turn they come on. This is to represent the Defender shooting at the craft as they approach. Models move out of the craft as if in Rough Terrain.
5. Attacker has sustained attack. On a D6 roll equal to or greater than the turn number any fully destroyed Squad comes back at the Reserves step of the next turn.
6. Attacker gets a Naval Bombardment at the start of every Shooting Phase, To Hit 4+, Anti Tank 5, Firepower 2+, ranging in on 4+. The template must be placed 16" away from friendly models.
7. If the Attacker takes the objective, they win. If the Attacker surrenders or has no troops left, the Defender wins.

So those are the rules. The first thing we did was set up a sweet beach to assault. The back-story is that the Russians are attacking Hawaii. Good enough? Yep.

Setup

 We used a blue blanket as the water, it actually turned out pretty sweet! We clamped it down and were ready to go!

Setup

My View

Deployment:
Deployment was pretty simple, I was playing a para engineer coy so I took cover and placed a huge minefield across the beach. One can picture the luxurious beachfront turned into fortified seawall.

Turn 1

Turn 1:
The Darkster's first turn was uneventful. The Landing craft puttered  towards the beach, the Soviets inside praying to the all powerful Athismo. His Naval Bombardment failed to range in. Other than that no shooting was done.

The Soviets are coming!!!

My first turn was also kind of disappointing. My aircraft did nothing, my artillery only managed to kill 1 Small Landing Craft, and my tanks fired wildly in random directions because they are evidently manned by the mentally disabled. Stopping them before the beach no longer looked like an option.

Turn 2

Turn 2:
The second turn is where things got interesting. Almost all of Darko's landing craft spewed their Russian innards upon the beach, making for a terrifying scene. He had placed his tanks on both flanks in an attempt to pincer my behind. That said, the stress of landing hampered the crews' ability to lay down effective fire. His ISUs managed to kill only one Sherman.

Turn 2

My turn was somewhat more effective. My M10 tank destroyers lived up to their name, ambushing and fucking the ISU right to shit. This meant my left flank was now free to cruse down the beach fucking shit up. My artillery and aircraft did a little damage to the T-34s on my right, but, as there were so many, I knew the next turn would hurt alot.

Turn 3

Turn 3:
It was a pretty scary turn for the Americans. Darko got his hoards of T-34s up to my line and surprised me with flamethrowers. His sappers failed to get through the minefield in front of them though, taking heavy casualties from mines and machine guns. Despite this Darko shifted the weight of his forces onto my right, and it nearly buckled, I needed a quick response.

Turn 4

Fortunately for me, those un-engaged M10s and Sherman's were racing across the beach. I brought all guns to bear on those T-34s knowing that if they went, the Darkster's infantry didn't stand a chance. I managed to kill a few more T-34s leaving him with 5. I had him on the ropes.

End Game

Turn 4:
This was Darko's last chance. He had to stop my counter attack before it drove him off the beach he charged his infantry and tanks towards mine it what would be the decisive clash of this battle. The inexperienced Russian gunners failed in their mission, leaving themselves open to the deadly fire of my 76mm guns.



With the fall of the T-34s it was only a matter of time till the Russian infantry broke, the few T-34's that came back in the 5th turn didn't make much of a difference, the majority of them died before the hit land. It was truly a great day for democracy.