IHMN Photo-Log: The Return of Bad Jack

I had my regular opponent Bryan over for a game of In Her Majesty's Name last night. Bryan brought his British, and I wanted to try using my Prussians.

The Prussian list in the rulebooks seems mostly balanced to me - the force has some strong points, but it has some serious soft spots as well. One is Dr. Kobalt, who is essentially useless, but necessary because he carries around an Arc Generator. Also, because of the way the Revivificators work, you have four figures (the zombies) who can only enter the fight after their associated figures (the Jaegers) have been killed. So you're paying for 8 figures, but you only ever get to use 4 of them at any point in time.

A set of errata for the game came out shortly after the rulebook was released which re-costed the Prussians significantly, increasing the points value of the Jaegers. This means that I had the choice of either not using all my figures (super lame) or re-costing the figures so that they were weaker. I went with the latter choice and had a bunch of games where the Prussians felt really useless - it's a small list in figure-count terms already, and reducing the capabilities of those figures even more was pretty much the end of the Prussians as a viable force.

To make a long story short, I decided to play with the Prussians as they are written in the original rulebook to see how I felt about them, balance-wise, compared to the erratacized version. Look below to see the results of our fight!



We rolled for a random scenario and came up with "Bad Jack", so it was a race again to see who could beat up Bad Jack and return his corpse to their base for further study!

The Society of Thule emerges from their corner of the battlefield and begins advancing towards the ruined bridge and Bad Jack.

Across the city, the Brits begin making their way towards the bridge also.

The British captain leads the way. He doubtless feels secure enough, with the company's doctor standing nearby!

Von Stroheim and his silent bodyguard Krieg head up the centre, while two Jaegers and Dr. Kobalt (hidden behind the wall) go right.

The British, with their superior marksmanship, take up firing positions in a ruined building.

The captain places himself in Jack's view, using himself as bait to lure the mutant out for a fight.

Bad Jack emerges from the shadows... is that man-meat he smells?

British riflemen charge down the Brits' right flank to set up a crossfire on Jack and the Prussians.

Dr. Kobalt runs to join the two Jaegers on the Prussian right, but stops, astonished, at the sight of Bad Jack loping out from beneath the tunnel to savage the Prussian scout!

Von Stroheim and Krieg rush to aid the beleaguered Jager.

The British captain's gambit of luring out Bad Jack having failed, the Brits fall back on Plan B: shoot everybody from their elevated positions.

More Brits on the Prussian left manoeuvre into firing positions.

Bad Jack charges up onto a piece of ruins but the Jaeger flees, leaving a clear field of fire for Von Stroheim and Krieg.

The British marksmen continue to rain fire down on Prussian and mutant alike.

One Jaeger falls to British fire, only to rise again as one of the invincible* Tod-Truppen!  *invincibility not guaranteed

Dr. Kobalt, true to form, gets shot in the face early and dies like a sucker. With the Arc Generator he carries no longer mobile, the Prussian right flank has to hunker down somewhat, lest they fall out of range of the generator and render their revivificators useless.

The British Captain, having climbed up onto the bridge, descends on the Prussian right side, only to get swarmed by two Jaegers and a Tod-Trupper.

Bad Jack has now worked his way firmly into the Prussian line, so the Prussians surround him and begin to rain blows down on his iron skull.

The British Sergeant takes up a sniper's position atop the ruined bridge.

Another Brit soldier takes pot-shots from the Prussian left.

The British doctor, having already saved the life of one downed soldier, stays close to the rest.

Bad Jack bursts free of the encircling Prussians and leaps upon one of the Tod-Truppen, but his bestial strength has no effect on that which is already dead!

Fire from one of the Jaegers at last finds its mark and downs a British soldier. "No Move" indeed - a fitting, if somewhat ironic, epitaph.

The British captain succumbs to the attacks of the Jaegers. 

The British marksmen, having seen the effects of Bad Jack's savagery upon the Prussians, opt for a conservative, fire-from-a-safe-distance strategy. 

Von Stroheim recalls all the fighters from their positions to surround and bludgeon Bad Jack, while the Brits continue to fire into the fight from the ruined house, the bridge, and other safe locations.

The Prussians lay into the mutant with saber, bayonet, and club-like fist, but Bad Jack shrugs off every effort.

After several minutes of fruitless stabbing and smashing, the Prussians break off fighting Bad Jack and rush the British line, hoping to bring Jack along with them. Jack obliges and attacks a British soldier, while Von Stroheim fells another.

One Tod-Trupper climbs the bridge to engage the British sergeant, but is swiftly chopped to bits.

A trail of blood and destruction leads from where the Prussians first fought Bad Jack to the final melee at the British line!

Bad Jack breaks off from Von Stroheim and the Tod-Trupper who had attacked him and chases down the British doctor, who flees back towards the British base.

A second Tod-Trupper climbs the bridge and manages to dispatch the British sergeant.

At the end of the day, the Prussians emerge victorious, but at high cost: only Von Stroheim and two Tod-Truppen remain alive (if you can call that alive!). On the British side, only the good doctor and one rifleman emerge from the carnage.

So, the Prussians handled themselves very well I think. Bryan thinks (and I agree) that they may still be a little too tough, since they were able to withstand Bad Jack's attacks, as well as British shooting, for the whole game, and come out of it with enough troops alive to win on victory points. It's hard to make a clear distinction in a scenario game like this, though, when there are so many factors besides troop stats that go into deciding a winner.

LAV-III Update

It feels like a looong time since I posted anything, and the reason for that is that it's been a loooong time since I worked on anything but my LAV model!

For something that's essentially just green, it has taken a huge amount of work to paint and weather. I've had to research and try a bunch of new techniques and materials to get the dust looking how I wanted it. Also, I added a lot of extras, some from kits and some scratch-built.

A list of the add-ons that I have put on the model since the last time I photographed it:

- scratch-built toilet seat
- water bottles taped to the antennas
- cardboard boxes with scratch holding straps
- scratch-built tarp
- scratch-built stretcher to hold the coolers and boxes in back
- misc. bits n bobs all over



Still to do: Paint the figures and build a diorama for it to live within!

Panjwayi Campaign: ANP Rescue

Last night at the Trumpeter Club meeting I hosted a session of my Force On Force campaign focussing on the Canadian fight against a revitalized Taliban in the Panjwayi region of Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, in the summer of 2006.
This is actually the second game of the campaign that I have run, but we had a long break since the last game and the paper with the campaign results has disappeared, so we essentially started fresh again with this game.

Background

As the “fighting season” of 2006 begins in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, a storm looms on the horizon. Elements of the Taliban leadership, exiled to Pakistan, have developed an audacious plan.

Having studied the Coalition nations with a critical eye for the past several years, Mullah Dadullah Akhund has spotted a lever with which he might be able to bend - and maybe break - the fragile alliance. A new roto of Canadian soldiers is due to arrive in the spring, just as the political landscape in Canada shows an increased unwillingness to send their young men and women to die or be maimed in foreign wars. A bold, symbolic strike into the centre of the Coalition’s territory, even if it is immediately crushed and results in hundreds of dead jihadists, could be enough to break Canadian political support for the Coalition. .

With visions of a bloody Taliban flag raised above the provincial governor’s compound in Kandahar City, the “One-Legged Mullah” orders dozens of Taliban cells to begin infiltrating across the border into Afghanistan. The only thing preventing their push to Kandahar are the companies of Task Force Orion in the rural Panjwayi district.

The campaign is based loosely on the events in Contact Charlie by Chris Wattie, the best book I have found for understanding Canadian operations in Afghanistan at this level.

ANP Rescue


One of the first targets of the Taliban flooding into the Panjwayi district is the local Afghan National Police. The ANP are a force of wildly mixed ability and questionable loyalty, but support and training of local forces is a key part of the ISAF's reconstruction effort. A dozen or more ANP have been killed in ambushes and attacks in the last week alone. A runner has just arrived by motorcycle from a police station on Highway One near your FOB, with news that the ANP there are under heavy Taliban attack. The Canadians of 3-1 Bravo are once again at the sharp end, tasked with relieving the station and rescuing their dubious allies.

In rules terms, the Canadians start at one end of the board and have to "secure the area" around the ANP station by neutralizing as many Taliban Hot Spots as they can. Each Hot Spot is worth 5 VP to either the Canadians or the Taliban, depending on whether it has been neutralized or if it's still active at the end of the game, and the other standard OEF victory point conditions also apply. There wasn't a turn limit, we just played until the time limit for the night. 

Canadians started with two LAV-mounted infantry sections, plus a sniper team they bought with their Operational Momentum points. The Taliban starting forces and reinforcements were generated randomly via tables I created for the campaign.

Battle Report

Before I get into the blow-by-blow of the fight, I have to mention the photos that Martin, one of the participants, took of the battle. They show the action a lot better than my own, so check them out at his Flickr page. 

1 Section arrives along Highway 1 en route to the ANP station

Taliban cells materialize in the village.

The beleaguered ANP take cover in their station from Taliban fire.

Blackhawk's-eye view of the village, with the Canadian LAVs approaching down the highway towards the hidden Taliban.

The poor ANP morale begins to show as heavy Tailban fire from a nearby compound forces the policemen out of their positions.

Some of the ANP are able to rally and return to their firing positions, but not without taking some casualties.

More Taliban arrive in the village and begin to move out towards the Highway to intercept the cavalry.

Canadian LAVs push down the highway to engage the Taliban attackers. A cell of Taliban is caught out in the open of the small marketplace and pays a heavy price.

Canadian soldiers dismount from the LAV and press the attack. The rearmost LAV has suffered some damage from Taliban mortar shells, reducing its mobility. 

The Taliban in the building near the ANP station have faded away to focus their efforts elsewhere, and the ANP have regrouped within the police station.

A Taliban cell comes out of the village to approach the Canadians from the cover of the marijuana fields.

More Canadians exit their LAVs to engage the Taliban in house-to-house fighting.

The Taliban muster in a courtyard prior to attacking the Canadians on the highway.

Nearby, a team of Canadians catches a group of Taliban in a courtyard and wipes them out.

Post-Game

By the end of the game , the Canadians had wiped out dozens of Taliban fighters and had the remainder on the ropes. Unfortunately, they had somewhat lost sight of the mission objectives while fighting the Taliban soldiers. The Canadians and ANP had come out of the situation with just a few wounded, but the area remained a nest of Taliban activity. With all the Hot Spots still under Taliban control at the end of the game, the Taliban won a decisive victory despite their casualties.

In the campaign post-game sequence, one of the teams in 1 Section gained upgraded defence, and one of the teams in 2 Section suffered combat fatigue, resulting in degraded morale for the next game. The insurgency received no upgrade.

Canadian LAV-III in Afghanistan

It has been a long time since I have posted anything here, mainly because I've spent the last several months doing nothing hobby-wise except assembling my next 1/35 plastic model kit.

I thought that doing the Tiger with the photo-etched metal add-on had prepared me for intense model building, but this one has taken me far longer than building the Tiger did. Not only are there a lot of key, structural details that are made with PE, but tons and tons of tiny details like washers and bolts and almost-microscopic cleats for strapping on stowage. Add to that the fact that the model was very complex to begin with, and that I had to do a lot of modification to the base plastic kit, and it goes some way to explaining why I have been working on just the assembly for so long.

The modifications I had to make to the base model kit were:

-cutting off a piece of the rear upper deck and side hull to change the angle of the side panels

-slicing off and sanding down the bolts and washers that were molded in to the model, to be replaced by thinner, smaller PE bolts and washers;

-reducing the size of the rear basket on the turret;

-adding non-skid treatment to the upper surfaces of the hull

When those were done, I could start adding all the PE details. The detail kit I got was a mixed bag - a lot of the bits are really nice and well-done, and necessary to update the LAV to the period I wanted to work on, but there were a lot of problems too. The instructions were decent, but I had to refer to photos of models done by other people to figure out how to use some of the parts. Several parts were mislabelled in the instructions. There were quite a few unused pieces left on the photoetch frets, which isn't a problem, but there were also several pieces missing from the frets which were called for in the instructions. Not least among the missing pieces were bolt-heads to go on top of the PE washers all over the hull; I had about half as many as I needed, so I had to make my own out of thinly-sliced styrene rod, and they won't match to the PE bolts.

Also, several of the PE pieces just didn't fit. The rear fenders, especially, have large gaps where they are supposed to join, simply because, once folded, they don't fit the surface they are supposed to be covering.

The resin pieces that came with the kit were about what I expected: highly detailed but fragile. The inner hub of the spare wheel broke while I was cleaning off the flash, coming apart under the gentlest pressure.

I have several more parts to add after painting, which are not shown in these photos: turret hatches, stowage, the turret MG (a model kit in itself) and four figures: two for the turret, and two standing outside (again, a medium-sized project in their own right).

Next stop: primer and base coat.