Naval Warfare Simulations Steam and Iron and campaign expansion review

  Some people are into heavy metal, meaning armored vehicles. Then a smaller subset is into heavier metal trains. Once more we cut the group down to those who are obsessed with the heaviest metal battleships and battlecruisers. To me, they are elegant and stately in their deadly beauty. It is no wonder that for a hundred years or so the guns and armor of these behemoths were the epitome of weapons, and also a nation's ego. To send your mighty ships across the globe was a hallmark of a nation's place in the sun. Even the most backwater nations would strain their economies to own at least one battleship.

 The world in WWI waited with baited breath for the clash of the German, and British titans. In what should have been a Wagnerian finale in 1916 off the coast of Jutland, the German fleet twice sailed into the blazing guns of their more numerous cousins. Due to their greater durability, and a Valkyrie like death ride of the German battle cruisers into the hell of British 15" guns, the German navy survived, but not to fight another day. The Kaiser hadn't wanted to risk his pretties anyway. I beg your indulgence for this paean to these marvelous gods of the sea. Now to the matter at hand.

 Naval Warfare Simulations have tried to give the wargamer the chance to experience WWI from a captain, admiral, and naval high command seat. Have they succeeded, and if so how well?

  The game comes with several well written manuals to help you in your quest for maritime dominance. These are:

Campaign Manual
Players Manual
Scenario Editor Manual
Tutorial 

 The first absolutely amazing fact about the game is its size. the entire game with the expansion is less than fifty MB. The size brings us back almost to the days of floppy disks. True, it is in 2D and has minimal colors, but what they have stuffed into this bag of goodies would make Santa proud. 

              

                                THE HIGH SEAS FLEET AT THE BEGINNING OF THE BATTLE OF JUTLAND

 The game itself can be played out in scenarios that are tactical in size, and an hour of game time. To operational scale ones that can last several days. The nations that can be played are as follows:
US, Germany, Britain, Italy, Russia, Austria Hungary, Turkey, and France.

 You have the ability to fight anywhere in the world. It comes with a scenario, a ship editor, and a battle generator with multiple options. There are thirty two scenarios. Here is a small list:

The Goeben
Heligoland Bight
Coronel
The Emden
The Falklands
Scarborough
Dogger Bank
The Bosporus
Jutland
Otranto 

                       

                                                       CLOSE-UP OF THE BATTLE OF DOGGER BANK

 The scenarios range from simply duking it out or laying mines and bombardment, to even launching primitive airstrikes.


 
                                                           HERE IS THE PREFERENCE SCREEN

 The game models weather, night and day, and various visibility. One thing that the game models, which is truly annoying but historically accurate, is mechanical breakdowns on the ships. You will sometimes be all set for your next foray, and then when halfway there find one or two ships have had to turn back. It adds to the 'what if' nature of the game.

 The campaign expansion adds a total of four campaigns:
Baltic
North Sea
North Sea 1916
Germany Stronger 1916 

 The North Sea campaign gives an armchair admiral the chance of playing 200 weekly turns. It includes over 800 ships of all types and sizes. You not only have to battle it out with the enemy admiral. Your countries entire naval program is in your hands. Training, organization, and maintenance are all up to you.

 The campaigns add immensely to the game and immersion. Every turn of the campaign you are given a mission or a choice of missions to accomplish. The missions are assigned a point value toward victory if they are completed. This adds a cat and mouse feeling to the game. Unlike the scenarios which are usually ingrained already in players' heads from reading about them  (although the scenarios do not always play out the same and there are alternative history ones). With the missions in the campaign game you have absolutely no idea of what is over the horizon. The Grand Fleet may be out for target practice at the precise spot your mission wants you to be. Juggling the need to complete the missions, and also deal with regular maintenance and the chance of mechanical breakdowns is nail biting. Add this to the already very up in the air nature of naval warfare and it becomes a bit maddening. A few, or even one hit on your ships can completely turn the situation around at any second.

  

                                                         TURN DURING THE 1916 CAMPAIGN

 Submarines, although in their infancy, were a major part of the war at sea. A quick look at the reason for ship losses in WWI will show that many more were torpedoed than actually sunk by gunfire. 

  Submarines have their own patrol area, and can attack ships that enter it. Always keep destroyers near your capital ships. They make it harder for a submarine to attack, and increase the chance of the submarine being spotted. Of all your ships, weather affects your submarines the most. Calm seas make them easy to spot, and in rough seas it is hard for them to stay at attack depth. Per the manual, "a sea state of 2 to 5 is optimal for subs".

 Although both sides used submarines in their operational planning, they never really fulfilled their role. The navies tried to use them as spotting forces, but the game shows their historical failings in that role. In the game, their reports are only correct about 50% of the time. The game also shows the fear that navies had at the time of submarine attack. This is shown by having false reports of submarine, and torpedo wake sightings.

 You will also have to worry about anti-submarine warfare or ASW. Some destroyers will always need to be held back and unassigned to carry out this function.      
                        

                                  BRITISH AND GERMAN FIXED MINEFIELDS

  The other weapon that caused a large amount of ship losses and damage was mines. The game has two distinct types of minefields. most scenarios, and campaign turns show the fixed minefields that both used in the war.

 The player can also make his own minefield, either by having it as an objective to fulfill or as his own decision. Player laid minefields do disperse as time goes by. Enemy laid minefields can be detected and will then show on the map. The different countries took a dissimilar  approach to laying and removing mines. The British used specially built minelaying ships, while in other navies some of their other classes of ships could also lay mines. 

 The navies at the time had two main fears never realized in the war: that a retreating fleet would lure the attacker onto a minefield or into a waiting group of submarines. This never happened with submarines because of the infancy of the ships themselves and their communications. While mines at the time were the ultimate dumb bomb, it really would have been the height of folly to attempt to lure another fleet onto a newly placed minefield. The chance of mines floating free was a very real hazard, and more than a few ships were struck by their own side's loose mines.

  Your crew's training and ship maintenance cannot be overlooked. For many days of the war, ships (especially capital ships) were in their bases, and not at sea. You will see your crew's training level drop during the campaign due to rustiness. Your ships will also need to be refitted every twelves months. Letting your ships get close to or go over the one year mark increases the chance of mechanical failure. The game does come equipped with a 'Fleet Engineer' button. Clicking that will show you all ships that need refitting.

  Some ships will also be able to be upgraded during your time as admiral. This will show up in the turn events.

   The AI in this dwarf sized game is non-pareil. You will need all of your wits about you to even play the British side with all of their built in advantages. Things will seem slow and calm. The next minute it is full steam ahead. Then you realize that a few of your best ships are still in dry dock for maintenance. Shiver me timbers, the electronic Scheer has humbugged you.

 As far as other games like Steam and Iron, the games it brings to mind are Warship and Battlecruiser from thirty years ago, and The Great Naval Battles series from twenty years ago. This is not a knock on the game whatsoever . I spent hours playing those games, and will spend plenty more playing this one. 

 Once you have picked up this little gem, continue on in your naval adventures and pick up Steam and Iron The Russo-Japanese War, and see if you can outwit Togo.

Robert

Game: Steam and Iron with Campaign Expansion
Developer: Naval Warfare Simulations
Software Publisher: Naval Warfare Simulations
Review Date: 7/30/16

 

Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm AAR by Michael Capobianco

 

 

AAR by J Petho

John Tiller's Panzer Battles of Normandy Review

 

 The name John Tiller is well known to any wargamer during the last quarter century. His litany of games include the series 'Squad Battles', 'Panzer Campaigns', 'Napoleonic Battles', 'Civil War Battles', ' The Campaign Series', and even more. The game companies he has worked with are 'Talonsoft' and 'HPS Simulations'. For a few years now he has been on his own with 'John Tiller Software'. One of the more amazing things about this litany of games is that is is continually being updated all through the years. I just started playing a WWI mod for the Campaign series that was just released. This shows the longevity his games have. So we should expect the highest quality and gaming from a release of his. Let's see how his newest release 'Panzer Battles Normandy' stacks up. See, we are wargamers and I used the word stacks, I know, I know, sorry.


  Panzer, the word invokes a picture now, probably of a Tiger tank. Once it used to invoke fear. The word is short for 'Panzerkampfwagen'. All compound German words have to have an acronym. If they didn't you'd have a stroke trying to pronounce them; just look up the actual German word for FLAK,which stands for fliegerabwehrkanone, gesundheit. Mark Twain in his essay 'The Awful German Language' poked fun at their words with "some German words are so long that they have perspective".


 Panzer Battles Normandy is the younger brother of Panzer Battles Kursk. This new series is meant to allow the player to indulge in scenarios as counter heavy as the Panzer Campaign series or much less with it's smaller scale. The scale is 250 meters per hex and thirty minutes time per turn, where the Panzer Campaign scale was 1 Km per hex and two hour turns. Squad battles scale is 40 meters per hex and ten minute turn times. It has mouse wheel zooming for ease of use and eyesight.


  The master map has almost 400,000 hexes. The full Normandy map that comes with the game is so large I cannot do it justice with this image. Scrolling the entire map is only recommended for people who are looking forward to carpal tunnel syndrome. The stacking limit for a hex can be found when right clicking on the hex info area of the screen, by default it is on the upper left of the screen. There is a maximum stacking limit along with a road movement stacking limit.

 It comes with two campaigns and a total of ninety-three scenarios. The scenarios range from small battalion size to large where you are in charge of an entire corps.

•June 6th; D-Day Landings 14 scenarios
•June 7th; Hitlerjugend's counterattack 2 scenarios
•June 11th; Operation Perch 3 scenarios
•June 13th; Villers Bocage 2 scenarios
•June 13th to June 14th; Carentan 2 scenario
•June 22nd; Cherbourg 3 scenarios
•June 25th; Operation Martlet 2 scenarios
•June 26th to June 29th; Operation Epsom 4 scenarios
•July 4th; Operation Windsor 1 scenario
•July 11th; St Lo 4 scenarios
•July 18th to July 19th; Operation Goodwood 6 scenarios
•July 25th; Operation Spring 2 scenarios
•July 26th to July 29th; Operation Cobra 3 scenarios
•July 30th to August 5th; Operation Bluecoat 7 scenarios
•August 7th to August 8th; Operation Lüttich 3 scenarios
•August 8th to August 9th; Operation Totalize 4 scenarios
•August 11th to August 12th; US 3rd Army breakout 2 scenarios
•August 19th; Falaise gap 1 scenario
•4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards Campaign 5 scenarios
•2nd Armored Division (US) Campaign 18 scenarios

 For those of you who like to mod, you can use the unit components, order-of-battle, and scenario editors.

 There is even a campaign editor added to the game. I will post from the campaign editor 'Help File'.
 "A Campaign consists of a series of Situations. Each Situation offers each side in the Campaign a list of Choices. Each side picks one of these Choices not knowing what the other side has decided. After each side has selected their Choice, then the selections are cross referenced to arrive at an Outcome. An Outcome consists of a Scenario in a Module and 5 other Situations associated with the 5 possible victory conditions that can result from a battle: Major Defeat, Minor Defeat, Draw, Minor Victory, and Major Victory. In addition, an Expected Value is associated with each Outcome for use by the A/I (Artificial Intelligence). The Scenario is fought by the two sides and the Allied victory condition resulting from this battle is used to determine the next Situation according to the 5 Situations associated with the Outcome. This process is repeated and continues until a Terminal Situation is reached which represents the resolution of the Campaign."

 It sounds rather over the top, but the help file walks you through it step by step, and the way that the editor has been setup with its drop down menus is much more intuitive in reality.

  With the amount of editing that can be done, and the fact that you can chop up the huge master map into any size bits you want, we should be inundated with used made scenarios. I wouldn't be surprised to see a William the Conqueror or Viking raid scenario (just kidding). In reality you can edit pretty much anything you want. In this day and age of computer wargaming, it's like a breath of fresh air. To be more precise it's like a breath of older air. The modding capabilities remind me of games from twenty years ago.


  You can play against the AI, PBEM, and LAN and internet live play, along with two player hot seat. PBEM is not my cup of tea, but I have read all about the process and the comments from users and it seems pretty seamless.

  Besides the user manual download, there are five other excellent downloads for your use. This is the list.

•Designer Notes (149 page 15MB PDF file)
•Planning Maps (88 page 203MB PDF file)
•Getting Started Guide (42 page 9MB PDF file)
•User Manual (102 page 2MB PDF file)
•Summer Map (190MB PNG file)
•Visual Order of Battle (136 page 68MB PDF file)


  The game itself is pretty much what you would expect from a John Tiller wargame. You can see that their pedigree stretches back to board wargames. The Tiller system for most of his games revolves around a unit quality system that grades a unit from 'A' to 'E', with 'A' being the best. Movement, casualties, and combat lower the unit on the scale. Just as in real warfare, resting your units at times is essential for your cyber troops.


  Engineering units can do the following: Bridge operations, clear mines or rubble, lay mines, and damage bridges or anti-tank ditches.


  Air units are either combat or recon. You can call in airstrikes against a particular enemy unit, and you can also use heavy bombers to carpet bomb an entire hex, as was used by the Allies at several times during the campaign.


  Playing as the Germans, be prepared to keep your head down and learn to deal with the overwhelming power of the Allied air forces, land, and naval gunfire. When playing as the Allies use the same, and use your preponderance of material compared to wasting your troops.


  The smaller scenarios are perfect for the John Tiller neophyte to sink his teeth into. All of the John Tiller wargames are higher on the complexity scale. The Panzer Battles games with their smaller scenarios and counter count are tailor made for the tyro who wants to get further into our hobby than 'Axis and Allies', etc. To help newbies and to also speed up your turns, you can turn on the 'firing AI' for your forces and leave the shooting to them.

 
 Do not expect to have your way against the AI as the Allies or Germans. I have tried numerous times to replicate Michael Wittmannn's achievement in the battle of Villars-Bocage. For those who have forgotten, it was Wittmann and six other Tiger tanks and a handful of other forces against an entire British Armored division. The British had found the German left flank hanging in the wind and might nave been able to end the Normandy campaign much sooner. The British had stopped on the road for a 'spot of tea'. Wittman's gunner Bobby Woll made the comment,"they are acting as if they've won the war already." Followed by Wittmann's retort "we're going to prove them wrong." The Germans attacked and stopped the 7th armored (the desert rats) cold.   


 Whilst I admit I am not a lady of the evening concerning graphics, I am getting on in years and the prescription for my glasses is not getting any better. The newer map graphics that have been touted by JTS, and the graphics overall are much improved from the earlier games. It is much easier to distinguish elevation just as advertised.There have been some great visual mods done for the older Tiller games, and no doubt some more will be made for this one. It would depend on your personal likes and dislikes. For me, the graphics are their best yet, and I really don't see any need for improvement, but this is of course just my personal take on the matter.


 The only addition I would like to see is a campaign for some of the German forces. A campaign based on the book 'Grenadiers' would be a great way to understand the amount of material and forces that the Allies needed to use to pry the Germans out of Caen would be excellent. Thankfully, with all the editing ability that JTS put into the game, I think we will see that sooner rather than later.


  If this game is to your liking, and it will be if you are a wargamer, then head back online and buy Normandy's older brother 'Panzer Battles Kursk'. While there, take a gander at the rest of the excellent wargames for sale.  


 For anyone who has not looked at the John Tiller games for a while, the original DRM is long gone and it is a much simpler system of just adding your serial.

  Now for my pet peeve. Who else gets annoyed at an announcer when they read off 'Panzer tank'. Congratulations, you just made yourself sound like a three year old by saying 'tank tank'.

Robert

Game: Panzer Battles Normandy
Developer: John TillerSoftware
Software Publisher: John Tiller Software
Review Date: 7/24/16

2GM TACTICS

from Draco Ideas

 

First of all what's with the title 2GM TACTICS?  Well, if you saw WWII TACTICS, you wouldn't be asking the question and that's exactly what the title of this game means.  Instead of our English adherence to the good old-fashioned Roman numerals II, Spanish uses 2 and Guerra Mundial [World War or technically War World].  If this were French, it would be La Deuxieme Guerre Mondiale.  However, that leads me to my main problem, namely that this is in some ways an anticipatory review, as 2GM TACTICS is currently only available in its original 2015 Spanish edition.  So, my comments will be based on the latter's physical components and the current English translation of only the basic rules.

Though the company have said that the latter will be improved for the final published edition, I've got to say that language-wise there is very little to fault either grammatically or idiomatically.  In fact, I've read plenty of professional rule books, where English is the native language  that are far less accurate in spelling and punctuation!  Oh, those dreaded apostrophes! [And I'm not just talking about the fact that Brits and Americans don't always see eye to eye on spelling the same word.]

When I received the package from the delivery service, my initial reaction was what a heavy weight for such a comparatively small parcel.

If you've watched the Kickstarter video, you should have a very good idea of the essential contents:  approx. 220 cards, of which 18 are terrain cards, while all the rest are split between two decks, one for the German side and one for the American.  What gave the game box its heft though were the 16 oblong, double-sided map tiles.  This is a feature that I really like, as virtually all previous card-based attempts to simulate part of WWII, such as The Last Crusade or Nuts! have simply relied on cards for everything - units, equipment and terrain.  Instead Draco Ideas have included a modular board that is assembled into a 4 x 3 grid oftiles that creates a playing area that is slightly larger than 27 x 18 inches.  so, a final map board is created that is larger than the standard 22 x 17 inches of a typical folio game and capable of considerable variation in its permutations of terrain.  This is an excellent design feature, especially for the basic game which the company have chosen to call Battle Royal and this basic game will have to be the main focus of my review, as this is the only section of the rule book as yet translated into English.

But, before I explore those basics in more depth,  I want to bring to your attention the rest of the extremely attractive, substantial and well produced rule book, albeit in Spanish.  though of small format, it is from front to back cover a substantial 60 pages.. All the rules for playing the game come in just the first 20 of these pages.  So, what remains in the other 40 pages?  How I wish my education had taken place in more recent years, when Spanish is as often offered as a foreign language option as French in our schools!  Why? Because those pages contain all the scenarios. [Grinding of teeth and suppressed sighs.]  First of all comes a set of eleven individual stereotypical ones such as Blitzkreig, Supplies, The Village and The Rescue to tantalise and whet my appetite, followed by two historically based ones, Arracourt and Monte Cassino.  Then - and these are what make me wish my life away until 2017, when the full English edition of this game will appear [thank goodness that the Kickstarter has already reached double the necessary amount or I might be out in the streets rounding you up to sign up]  -   there are a series of Campaigns, beginning with the Normandy landings through to The Battle of The Bulge.  In all, four Campaigns: Operation Overlord, Operation Cobra, Operation Market-garden and The Ardennes, with each campaign containing from five to seven scenarios.  Here is just the first Campaign.

To use the famous quote "I'll be back", hopefully to provide a more extensive review next year of this aspect of the English edition.

So, what does the basic game give you?  Essentially, a point-based system similar to several other card versions of warfare in WWII and in the basic game your sole objective is always to reach your opponent's HQ and destroy it.  As already mentioned, I like the fact of a modular board created from tiles .  To my surprise the boards are connected by figure of 8 shaped pieces to stop them moving about.  Here are just four of the sixteen tiles with their connecting pieces

Once assembled, they look like this.

Don't worry, if you are wondering whether the outer edge of the final layout has unsightly holes.  There are pieces provided to fill them.  Just don't be like me and in my haste to get started, didn't realise their purpose and threw some of them away.  Fortunately, there are an excess number of the connecting pieces which when cut in half exactly do the job.  Anyway, I've only got to wait till next year and I'll have a completely new English set!!

Personally, I would have preferred the tiles to have been simply straight-edged.  But, as I always go for laying plexi-glass over modular terrain to prevent shifting, that's largely an aesthetical point.  My other minor concern is how well the cardboard connectors will stand up to the wear and tear from assembling the map.  Apart from the few games I've played, I've also tested them out by simply assembling the tiles repeatedly.  The indications are that they do stand up well to the job.

However, for many gamers a more significant decision point will be the choice of graphics for the many cards that are the essence of the game, as Draco Ideas has gone solidly for a comic book look in its inspiration.  If you've watched the Kickstarter promotional video you will know what I'm talking about.  If not, the cover of the illustration of the game box at the start of my review and the samples included below should help you get a good idea.

As you can see the infantry cards are graphically the closest to cartoon style.  Though there is a small amount of necessary text [just visible on the Bomber card], as you can see they are largely icon driven for game play and these are succinctly and clearly explained in the rules.

My personal taste is for the use of historical pictures, as used in The Last Crusade [1995] or Panzer General : Assault [2010].  On the other hand the latter game proved a huge disappointment when I bought it, because of its bland and simplistic play and it cost me nearly three times the price of 2GM Tactics.  So, just as I heavily invested in Heroes of Normandie despite its graphic style not being my personal favourite, so 2GM Tactics offers more than a superficial look at the cards provides.

To return to the rule book, I've already commented on the accuracy of the current draft, but what I'm even happier about is the clarity of the rules.  They are well organised and well sequenced taking you through the essentials of the game in logical order and above all make sense at a first reading.

Though a few more illustrations would have been nice, as the text is quite dense to fit so much in, there is a good balance of examples for each important point and so far I've not picked up an example that seems to contradict the rules.  Now that is something that happens all too often in far more expensive products.  If the extensive scenario section, referred to earlier, that makes up two thirds of the rule book is as tight as this, I shall be very satisfied next year when I get my hands on the completed English edition.  [By the way, if the rule book is not yet set in stone, one small language point I would love to change is Shooting; please, please, please, could we have Combat or at least Firing instead?]

To give you some idea of what seems original for a game at this level, I'd like to list just a few instances that I particularly like:-

Supply: instead of the normal rule governing what a unit can or cannot do when it is in supply or out of supply, here the distance your troops have advanced towards the enemy HQ and the continuity of the supply line determines how many extra Action Points you get to operate with that turn.  A neat touch! 

Suppression: not the result of a die roll, but the fact that more than one unit has targeted the same unit.

Covered Movement: just the fact that, in an essentially easy and fast playing game, such things as infantry gaining cover from moving with vehicles gets included.

Additional Equipment: the combination of both cards and counters to represent additional equipment along with a distinction between equipment that is deactivated or not deactivated when used. 

Specific cards for historical Generals: including good ole George Patton and Erwin Rommel - another reason for me to long for the translation of the Campaign material!

Terrain: integral terrain on the map tiles plus additional cards such as trenches, bridges, bunkers and landing craft [for the existing Operation Overlord Campaign and The Sword Campaign that is one of the unlocked Stretch Goals], buildings.

These to me are some of the bells and whistles on a very solid set of rules that take this game beyond previous games of this scale.

All in all, this is a well designed package that in the Spanish version got things right and so, perhaps not surprisingly, has almost doubled its Kickstarter funding, with 20 days to go.  Expansion packs that bring in the British, Italians and Russians are already underway and form part of the varying  pledge levels on Kickstarter.

Even if you just buy the simple English edition, you're getting not just a basic generic fast playing tactical card game of WWII with lots of flavour and colour, but a surprisingly varied set of rules for its small footprint and the potential for a much more extended experience through the wealth of Campaigns.

Hasta La Vista!

[Pardon the cheesy ending, but I really do hope to see you later, when I return next year with a review to take in all that my typical English lack of foreign language ability has not been able to cover.]

Kickstarter Link click HERE