Mockern-The Battle for Germany 1813

 

Last Saturday, 5 of us got together for the penultimate battle in our 1813 campaign.  The scenario features the Battle of Mockern and was fought in October of 1813, as part of the Battle of Leipzig. As you can see from the map below this action was fought north of Leipzig and featured the French under Jarmin defending against attacking Prussians under Yorck on day one of the battle.

Overview of the Battle of Leipzig

Victory conditions for the Prussians were to capture Mockern in 20 turns that was made up of 2 BUA's back to back. Victory for the French was to inflict 3 Suave qui Peut's on the Prussians.

GdA has a scouting phase and myself and Iannick played it out a couple of days before our gathering. The French (myself and Helge) had to decided to just field 3 of our 5 brigades and the start of the game. 

Pelleport was deployed on the yellow marker, with Lorge's Cavalry on the pink and Jarmin on light blue, despite 4 scouting attempts the Prussians were only able to identify the position of the cavalry. 

We ended up having a pretty tight deployed frontage that I believe almost lost us the game but more about that later. 

The French kept Bouquet and Joubert as off table reserves. The Prussians had no off table reserves aside from Rummel who would arrive as a reinforcement on Turn 6.

The Game

Saturday came and the Prussians (Graham, Iannick, David)  rapidly deployed their troops across the whole width of the table, I dod not remember their exact order but Mecklenberg was deployed on their right flank with Sohr on their left flank with the other 3 deployed infantry brigades in between. We deployed Pelleport on our left with the 1e Marine holding the front Mockern BUA, with Lorge next and Jarmin on his right. I will let the photos tell the story.

The table, I think it is roughly 8x5', Mockern is in the distance with the French position to the right. There was large hill on the French side, otherwise open ground.

Here are the starting positions as seen from the Mockern side of the table. You can see to the left the Prussian wide deployment with their cavalry in the distance. The French had a very tight deployment with their 3 artillery batteries deployed together in defence of Mockern with their cavalry to the rear. Skirmishers were deployed to the left of and in front of Mockern (one legere unit deployed in skirmish). An infantry brigade was deployed to the right flank to defend against a flanking manoeuvre from the Prussians.

The Prussian players;  Graham, Iannick and David

Helge for the French and I am taking the photo!

Turn 4. The Prussian advance, as you can see they went into line pretty quickly, I believe this slowed their advance but did protect them against cannon as did the skirmishers. The French held their position aside from advancing the skirmish units on our left flank to harass the advancing Prussians. Our initial plan was to focus on our 3 batteries of artillery to weaken the enemy. The Prussian cavalry moved quickly to challenge our right flank.

Turn 6. The Prussians have advanced on all fronts and now their reserves have deployed. By now our artillery batteries are starting to suffer some attrition but we have weakened the front line Prussians.

Turn 12: Th ePrussians are now advancing on Mockern in column with their reserve. Their initial assault in line was repulsed. You can also see that Jarmin's infantry on our right flank is collapsing. The French have now brought on one of their reserve infantry brigades to buttress the right but also to be ready to support Mockern. You will notice that we have left the 2nd BUA unoccupied.  Our skirmishers have been pushed back but our cavalry is still intact.

Turn 12; a close up of the defence of Mockern.

Turn 18. A lot has happened. The Prussians were able to drive the French Marine Veterans out of one part of Mockern and only with great difficulty were one of our reserve units able to occupy the other half of the town. Our cavalry became trapped and was unable to challenge the advancing Prussians. By now, however, we had inflicted 2 Suave qui Peut on the Prussians. Before the Prussians could take all of Mockern we were able to inflict the 3rd Suave qui Peut...thus a very narrow French Victory.

Summing Up

I thought this was going to be an easy game for the French but the Prussians almost did win it. If their initial advance was a little more aggressive at the start, I think they might have got a victory before we met our Victory Conditions. Our defence was good but we had a lot of difficulty bringing in our reserves because of our narrow frontage. In retrospect, Jarmin should have been more to our right allowing our reserves to move more easily to support Mockern. I am not sure also if Pelleport should have started one of his battalions in the 2nd BUA. Certainly, his skirmishers did a good job to protect Mockern and were able to retreat in good order once their job was done. The French Cavalry, as usual, caused significant havoc to the Prussians. But a good game was played by all. I should note that around Turn 13-14, some of the Prussian players considered withdrawing their troops, Helge and myself urged them to continue the game as all was not lost. I believe we were quite correct in this and once they got "stuck in" they almost turned it around. 

There were also complaints about the actual scenario design with the one objective being stuck in a corner. I disagree totally. As gamers we are presented with what we are given, this was a historical simulation and the scenario was what it was. It ended up giving us a very good game, not an easy game but it was quite exciting.

Hopefully, we will get to the last game (Liebertwolkwitz) in this campaign fairly soon. I should note that there were 1500 18mm AB figures on the table and with the last scenario using the large OB option we hope to hit close to 2000 figures. And what will be very exciting is that we will see some Austrians.

Many Rivers Turn 3a Blitzkrieg!

 

Myself and Graham got together yesterday for our next turn in our Many Rivers to Cross Chain of Command campaign. It had been May since our last game so we were both a little rusty, I should note that this is the first time we used CoCV2 for this campaign, it seemed to meld easily with the OB and support information for the 1940 Germans and British from the Blitzkrieg Hand book. We had the game at Grahams.

Forces

Guards Platoon 2, FM 10 (fresh)

FR 0, 5CD, Regulars

Supports (18)

Barbed Wire 2

Minefields 2

2" Mortar

Pregame Barrage

Sniper Team

MMG Team

Infantry Section

Schützen Platoon 3 FM 9 (still fresh)

FR +1, 5CD, Regulars

Unchanged Supports (18)

Engineer Team

Shabby Nazi Trick (fifth columnist)

Red Dice

MG34 Tripod Mount

Pregame Bombardment

Extra Schützen Squad

IG18 IG

Patrol Phase

The JOPs are circled, not the best Patrol Phase for the Germans. Graham did a very nice table.

The Game

This was a challenging game, first because it was a Blitzkrieg, I felt it did not adhere to the rules for support generation in the campaign so we felt it best to go with the support generation as determined by the scenario rules for Swift to Support in the 1940 Handbook. I had the same supports as Turn 3 with 18, so the Brits got 18. This is a lot of supports for defence.

This was my base of fire on my left flank with a planned advance on my right. It looked pretty lethal with a 5cm Mortar, an IG18, a Schützen squad and a SL.

Graham put down an SL and a 2" Mortar in the farmyard compound. The SL had LOS so smoke started to come to block my base of fire. I have some questions about this as there did not seem much I could do about it. I will have to check with the TFL cognoscenti though as something did not seem right.

There is nothing like the effectiveness of the 2" British Mortar

Graham had deployed 3 of his sections as the game progressed, one on his right flank and 2 behind the fence in the farm compound. By now we had both deployed our MMGs in entrenchment. They were both destroyed by the end of the game but I was take to take out the Vickers first.

My advance squad did very poorly as you can see and ended up breaking on the next phase. 

I had deployed my last squad on the road, but by now it was too late and once the squad in the opened broke my FM dropped to 3 and I decided to withdraw. Luckily I had not lost many of my core platoon (5 figures) so the cost to the platoon was limited.

Summing Up

German Platoon #3 (Final FM 3)

Platoon Leader Outlook: Content

Men’s opinion: -3 (FM roll -1)

CO’s opinion: -2

German Platoon 3: 2 dead, 2 missing

German 1st Platoon has lost 5 dead 

German 2nd Platoon has lost 8 dead

British Platoon #2 (Final FM 8)

Platoon Leader Sociable: Affable (FM roll +1)

Men’s opinion: +1

CO’s opinion:  +1

1 missing next game

British Platoon 1 has lost 5 dead

I think I was really against it with the British having 18 supports in defence. I did set up a nice firing line to cover my advance but I could never get my advance moving along, I might of waited too long. I did kill quite a few Brits but the difference in the FM made an easy recovery for them.The good news is that I did not lose a lot of men and on the same table the British will have many fewer supports although there are quite a few fixed defences on the table. We will just have to see how it goes.

The Gifted- A Carnevale Faction

 

My friend Graham recently (well a couple of months ago) finished painting a new Carnevale faction for me. This figures were well beyond my painting ability and as you can see Graham has done a brilliant job. This is my 4th faction and although I play the game seldomly, they are all beautiful figures. 

The Mask Maker

Brighella

Harlequin

Il Dottore

Pantaleone

Il Capitano

Justice and Fate

Columbina

Elegoo Centauri Carbon-First Impressions

Elegoo Centauri Carbon 48 hour Review

On June 2, I purchased and put myself in the queue for the new Elegoo FDM printer. This will be my 5th 3D Printer purchase, and the 3rd FDM printer. My last 3D printer was SWX2, this was pretty good printer and I got 2 1/2 years out of it. I had heavily modified it as well klipperising it but I kept on screwing around with it and final blew the motherboard. Time to throw it out as it was a bed slinger and the new CoreXY machines allow much faster speeds.

The most noise I heard on the internet was about the BambuLabs PS1 and the Elegoo Centauri Carbon. I knew that the Bambu was a solid printer as 3 of my friends had one but the price was at least twice that of the Elegoo. There was a sale in June at BambuLabs where I could order one for even less than the Elegoo but when I had difficulty ordering it and when it finally went though they automatically added an extra charge of $80 on PayPal with out informing me which took me a month to get back. I think in the sale they oversold and this was a computer glitch but it made me a bit uncomfortable with their processes.

So back to the Elegoo, my first printer was a Creality and the experience was poor and I am not too sure about their approach to Klipper OS. I have had a Elegoo Mars Resin Printer for a while now and it just works. I watched probably 30+ reviews and they were quite good. I am not looking to use exotic materials, it will be almost exclusively PLA. I wanted a CoreXY machine which ran on a form of Orca Slicer. What most impressed me was the release process, they started the release about a year ago and each release was in small numbers so they could get feedback. This allowed them to proactively fix issues with each release. I suspect my machine in a gen5 as the light and camera are improved, the packing was reinforced, many adjustments have been made to the software and the added materials were all quite useful.

It arrived 2 days ago; it was unpacked there was no damage, I removed 3 screws, turned it on, ran the 30 minute start up protocol and printed a benchy (15 min) withe the enclosed PLA. I then printed a benchy with some old Sunlu matt PLA. Both perfect. I ordered some Elegoo PLA+ and the roll came Saturday afternoon. So I started the testing various STL’s. I am doing terrain mostly. So that is where I focussed. I started with a large flat floor, no release or elephant’s foot A+, next a peaked roof, A+. I next went to very small prints (15mm) with no brims; fences upright, barrels with about a 2mm build plate contact as well as some more scatter pieces, A+. Finally multiple small pieces on one plate. No loss of prints.

I have to admit to being pleased, but this only 36 hours so more to do. I will update  my experience after a month.

I see no defects, 15 minute print

I prefer Orca Slicer, but the Elegoo Slicer allows you to paint your own tree supports

1/100 scale, these are tiny, printed without supports or brims.

M3 Grant- A Bit of an Orphan Tank

 

I recently resin printed a M3 Grant AFV, I got the STL from a Canadian Vehicles kickstarter. I have to say that these were the best vehicle STLs I have received with supported and unsupported versions but also a hollowed version. I find hollowing vehicles a little challenging, so I was quite happy that this was already done.

Most of the vehicles in the kickstarter were trucks and it was an interesting collection but after some research not really a collection that was useful for wargaming. This was especially relevant to the M3 Grant which was primarily used for training purposes by Commonwealth armies except in North Africa where both the British and Australian armies used it for operational purposes.

I have to admit that I had not done this research before I painted the tank. So I will have to make it a training vehicle for the 2nd Canadian Armoured Division. 

But who knows it may end up being transferred to the Soviet Union where the M3 Grant did have operational history with a new livery.

Chain of Command Version 2

Two weeks ago, we had our June Gamesday on or about the second anniversary of the founding of our club. We initially put up 5 games but only 3 were subscribed fully. I put on a game of Chain of Command to illustrate the changes in version 2. We also had a game of Muskets and Tomahawks as well as a Pirate game of Port Royale. 

I actually ended up playing the Chain of Command game twice, first with my friend Pierre-Yves. We are both experienced CoC players and seemed to have little problem with the rules changes. The planned game had PY, Iannick, Julien and Jen-Philippe. Everyone had played before except JP who I believe was a novice to the game. He has played a lot of Battle Group but was quite interested in giving CoC a go.

I went with a terrain dense table using the Delaying Action scenario. This wa quite different than the same scenario in version 1. Here we have an objective to capture with a possibly a limited amount of time to capture it. Interestingly enough the defender can take no engineering works. I decided to replicate an action that the Canadian forces were involved in the follow up to D-Day.

Saint-Lambert-sur-Dive, August 18, 1944. During Operation Tractable, to close the Falaise Gap, elements of the 4th Canadian Armoured Division were ordered to attack and hold St Lambert to prevent elements of the German 7.Armee breaking out of the area in their retreat east. Our scenario will recreate the initial attack of a Canadian Rifle platoon on an entrenched German Grenadier platoon.

I used the forces from the CoC v2 rulebook with the said supports, the Attacking Canadians had 10 supports and the defending German 6. I will not bother to go into the specific action as I have forgotten it now but here are some photos.

I certainly enjoyed playing a game and games mastering the second game. This is a terrific re-vamping of a great set of rules. I personally found the mechanics basically the same and I cannot say the rules were more granular but there was a lot of chrome added. I am really looking forward to getting in my next game.