Caesar's Camp: La Ferme de Caubert

 

Myself and Graham got together at the Abyss before Xmas for our fourth turn in our Caesar's Camp campaign. This was the second go with our platoons from our third game, so we both had some missing men.

German Defenders-217th Infanterie Regiment (FM10)

2nd Wave Infantry Platoon #3

2 SL's

3 squads of 10 men, lead by a JL's, one squad with a MG08/15-missing 6 men

Supports 12

2 barbed wire

2 minefield

Flamethrower Team

Entrenchment

Infantry Squad

Scottish Attackers-The Cameron Highlanders (FM8)

British EW Infantry Platoon (D Company)

2 Senior Leaders

2" Mortar Team

3 sections of 11 men, lead by Junior Leaders-missing 1 man

Supports 16

Vickers MMG

2" Mortar Team

Sniper

Char B1 bis

Hotchkiss H39

Scenario

This is the Attack and Defend scenario from the main rulebook.  The victory conditions were going to be difficult with the Scots having to capture 2 of the buildings in the German position or reduce their FM to 0. Clearly the latter was going to be easier and I should note that if I brought in AFV's they would be restricted to the road. I had expected that Graham would go with a Bunker Buster, but I guessed wrong!

Game

JOP's, no real advantage to either side but I would have liked to get a little further up on my left flank. The Germans are defending the village to the right of the photo and the Scots were attacking from the left of the table.

Advancing Scots to the right flank as Graham had made my left flank impermeable to attack.

Graham put 2 barbed wire on the road which really shut down any advance of my 2 French tanks, once I moved my troops to their right flank I was able to place the Char bis on the road. It did a pretty good job of showering HE on the buildings.

Graham basically put his men in the stone houses, I felt the Char could deal with this, so I started to lay down smoke and of course at a critical moment a turn end came up so I lost all my cover. I think this was going to be OK as my advancing troops were mostly out of LOS. But then catastrophe, that I should have been able to predict. The Germans ambushed my advancing section with their Flamethrower team, essentially dropping them to 3 figures, my FM fell precipitously and I made the decision to withdraw. Unfortunately some of my men ended up being captured as they were more than 12" from a JOP. A German victory!

The Butcher's Bill

Germans Platoon #3 (6 dead, 1 missing next game)

4 figures lost

CO 0

MO -1

Outlook Cheerful

The Camerons Platoon1/D Company (3 dead, 2 missing next game)

7 figures lost, 5 captured

CO -2

MO-5

Outlook Concerned

CoC Demo

After our game we had a demo game of CoC with 3 new players, all members of our club. From left to right is Dan, Graham (who was checking on my tutorial mistakes), Michele and William. We played on the same table with the same scenario but Dan brought his Italians so we made them defending against the Canadian attackers. I think we all had a good time and I found that the 3 new players picked upon the game quite quickly. I only had to play the Patrol Phase once as we got a satisfactory result. We did not finish the game and did not use any vehicles but we got in all the mechanics including combat. It went quite well and I am pretty confident that they will all want to play again.

Dan's beautifully painted Italians

Myself and Graham will pick up our campaign after Xmas. I am going to have to figure out a way to deal with his ambushing Flamethrower Team!

New Troops for GdA2

About a year ago I decided to add to my Napoleonic collection of AB figures. Some of us in the  Montreal Historical Wargaming Club became interested in the 1813 campaign put out by David Brown for Général d'Armee. With GdA2 coming out, I was hoping to get everything in place for it's launch. I have no real interest painting 18mm figures, so I engaged 2 painters who I have used in the past. I was starting from scratch for both the required Russian and Prussian armies.

For the cavalry and generals, I had decided to go with Old Guard Painting in the Ukraine. As you can imagine there were going to be some difficulties with getting work done in the Ukraine but after a back and forth with Vladimir, I decided to go ahead. The painters with Old Guard do a superb job and of all the painting companies, I have worked with they are the most accurate by far in respect to uniformology with no input required by myself. Quite a bit more expensive than the Asian painters but well worth it.

For the infantry, I went with Fernando in Sri Lanka, they have a very good price and had painted a Union ACW army for me some time ago. This was going to be a lot more work for me as they need a lot of direction and back and forth requires a lot of my time. I felt though that the Russian and Prussian uniforms are pretty simple and that would probably work. I am not a button counter and to be honest at 18mm for wargaming purposes, things do not have to be exact. In respect to Russian infantry there are minimal uniform distinctions between different units, so that would be easy enough. For the Prussians, the main difference is the colour of the collars and cuffs for different units so I asked them to paint them all white. My plan was to add the specific colours myself. So this required a bit of work on my behalf.

It took about 3 months to get 750 infantry figures done in Sri Lanka, which is pretty good. The mounted figures took much longer, maybe almost 11 months to get 140 figures done. I am not really sure how Vladimir was able to do with the power outages and the war. But he did get it done. I based all the figures myself as well as adding the flags (I really miss Flag Dude). 

Here are a few photos, I did not bother to photograph individual units as there are over 900 figures. I am quite happy with how things came out.

Russians

Prussians

The Orders of Battle can be seen in the left side bar. My friend Graham has been also been painting up a Prussian AB army, which I believe is slight bigger than my own, so we should be all set for the 1813 campaign when GdA2 is released. Hopefully we will see the start sometime in January/February. Now I just need to find some Austrians in case they show up in the final scenario.....................