AP17 The Valley of Death

by on January 13, 2016 at 7:40 pm
Posted In: ASL

Patch and I returned to ‘regular’ ASL for our next game. I forget our actual decision process, but I think Patch was wanting to see the Italians again. I remembered Few Returned, an action pack of Italian scenarios, most dealing with the Soviet Little Saturn offensive. It also has a good reputation for interesting and different scenarios, and we went with the first one in the pack, AP17 “The Valley of Death”.

The Russians are defending the board 18 hills (two of them are ignored to make it a single ridgeline) with twelve squads (almost half conscripts), a few machine guns, a pair of ATRs, pair of light mortars, an 82mm MTR and a 76mm ART, and have to put at least one squad and foxhole on each hill. The Axis force is nineteen Italian squads (mostly first line with some elites) and two light mortars, with a German 81mm MTR, 20mm AA, Stug IIIG, and a Panzer IIIJ. The Russians have to set up on or adjacent to the hill hexes, and the Axis wins as soon as there’s no Good Order Russian MMCs on the hill hexes if there’s at least one Italian GO on a hill hex. In addition, there is ground snow, and it is snowing at scenario start. As a final twist, the Italians can use Banzai Charges, as long as at least one MMC participates. The scenario has a pro-Russian record, so we took the Italian balance of extending the scenario a turn, to 6.5 turns, though I recall several people saying that the real problem is that the Axis player needs to know what he’s doing.

Patch had the Axis, and generally knows what he’s doing….

It’s a pity no one told his dice.

I set up with the northernmost (18Z7) hill as my main bastion as it has the only level 2 terrain. The two adjacent level two hexes got a 50mm MTR and the 82mm, while the third level 2 hex got the HMG and 8-1. The only other hill with cover is J2, with a wooden building and a woods hex, and that was my secondary command post with a LMG, MMG and the 8-0. The other 50mm was down at the extreme south in C2, and the rest was a line of positions that I hoped could help each other laterally if Patch concentrated on one at a time. The widest gap between the hills is near the center, and I put the ART in N2 facing the road, figuring that sooner or later a tank would cruise through there (and if not, it could cover my second concentration in K3).

Patch set up in roughly three groups, with the PzIII, and two mortars in the north, the other 42mm MTR, StuG, AA, and best leader in the south, and eight squads strung out in the middle.

The first thing that happened was the snowfall increased to heavy. The second was that his 82mm turned out to have no smoke rounds, and then malfunctioned when it tried to shell my MTR. On the other hand, his AA gun promptly broke my MTR squad in 18C2. His initial advance was fairly cautious, not going CX with anything except an armored assaulting squad in the north. What little fire I had was ineffective (including a ‘2’ on an ATR shot which of course cowered to nothing).

My DFPh went very well, with a CH from my large MTR against the PzIII which immobilized it and caused the crew to bail out. The second shot was another CH which reduced and broke the squad in the hex, while also breaking the crew.

AP17-1A
Situation, Axis Turn 1, showing the full board. North is to the left.
↓ Read the rest of this entry…

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Joan of Arc: A History

by on January 9, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Helen Castor describes the story of Joan of Arc as normally being written backwards. Everything is colored by the knowledge of what she would become to history. Also, the histories pour over the transcripts of her trials looking for clues to her early life from people who had already been heavily impacted by what she had done.

So, Castor starts with the story of the civil war that tore France apart and allied Burgundy with an English bid for the French throne. How continuous political dissension tore apart the Kingdom of France and left it unable to act even in the face of a serious external threat.

And only at this point, is Joan introduced, at the point where she steps in to contemporary reports. Castor does a careful job of trying to present the religious attitudes of the day, of showing both how popular opinion would have reacted to events, and the careful scholastic investigation into Joan’s claims.

The last part of the book continues the collapse of English France after her death, and concludes with her second trial, where greatly changed political conditions guaranteed a different verdict than the original. It is at that point where people from Joan’s home village were questioned, and anything is said of her early life. There is then a short afterword that talks about her canonization as a saint in 1920.

In all, it’s a surprisingly short book, but well done, and a good look at early fifteenth-century France.

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Anime Fall 2015

by on January 5, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Anime

Ah, winter break and a season of anime wrap up at the same time! Again, I didn’t have anything I was actively watching from previous seasons carry forward into this one.

Haikyu — Smudge watched the first series of this a year ago, and she talked me into watching it and the new series when it restarted. It’s good; volleyball is not a sport that I ever got into (well, that’s almost all sports), but it’s very well done, with good characters.

Utawarerumono: The False Faces — Our group really enjoyed the original series, and I was looking forward to this one. The beginning was fine, and started looking like there could be a good story, but then the second half turned into a bunch of character introductions, and tying into the first series. It looks like there’ll be another season, and I hope the plot gets into gear.

Beautiful Bones — It wasn’t until about episode 3 that Smudge became impressed with this one, and had me start watching it. And it certainly does get better as it goes along, and they start dropping some of the overly-dramatic touches.

Heroic Tale of Arslan — I’m still not caught up to this, but I’ve seen partway through the second season now, and I’m continuing to like it. I do wish the novels would come over here though.

One-Punch Man — Smudge recently went for Hulu’s new commercial free subscription, and immediately found this. It’s a very silly superhero farce, and I’ve only seen about half of it so far, but it’s been very good.

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2015 in Review

by on January 1, 2016 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Life

Well, I managed to greet the new year last night. Was ready to go to bed at 11 though.

I need to get back to paying more attention to the blog, there’s a number of things I still want to write up. But, for much of the year I was maintaining a pretty good schedule. This next year, I plan to be a bit more aggressive about spacing postings out, so if I can get another big batch going, it’ll cover the dead times, and I won’t go 10+ days without a post.

Gaming has been something of a mix this year, with the usual dead spots for FtF gaming, but we also had a bunch around November. Patch and I got in three games of ASL, and are currently mid-way through AP17 “The Dead of Winter”, which has had a number of problems for Patch, but is still fairly tense. We got in one SFB game, and I soloed a monster scenario, and I’m hoping we’ll do the next one soon. I spent $325 on games, which is a little low for me, but not quite a low as I’d hoped, with a couple larger purchases near the end of the year. I’m currently behind on RPG reading, and not sure if I’ll continue my Pyramid subscription.

The beginning of the year saw Smudge and I say good-bye to ArcheAge, setting us adrift on the MMO seas again. We spent a fair amount of time back with Neverwinter, got our mains from level 70 to the new limit of 80, and got through a couple of the campaigns (harder than it might sound, with much of the content having been shifted up ten levels on us). A few months back, both Wildstar and Guild Wars 2 went Free 2 Play, and we’ve been spending most of our time since on Guild Wars 2. Wildstar is good, but has a poor UI experience, but I hope we can get to it some more some day. Smudge is also starting to talk about doing more in FFXIV again, so we’ve gone back from famine to feast.

The holidays have been fairly quiet as usual, but I got some good gifts. Smudge gave me a wonderful watercolor piece of my main character in GW2, Lunysa:

Lance got me a Kangaroo PC, which is mobile desktop system. I’m not just sure what I will end up doing with it, but at the moment, it’s hooked up to the TV, and allows us to stream Funimation without going through the somewhat flaky iOS app. So, meet Akatsuki:

The stats for the blog show that I had 124 posts last year! I’ve been hoping to get up to an average of a post every three-four days, which I am in excess of, now to continue to spread them out a bit better. Looking at the categories (instead of tags), this breaks down as: 25 books, 11 boardgaming, 8 D&D, 7 ASL, 6 CC:Ancients, 5 BvR – The Wind, 4 each anime, Four Vassal War, 3 each computer games, MMO, 2 each life, F&E, SFB, and 1 each GURPS, comics.

So a lot of my posting comes down to trying to give some sort of review for most of the books I read. The fact that I have three or four reviews that I need to get explains why the blog’s been a little silent lately. And speaking of reading, my official count was 47 books, though I’ll note that one was a three-in-one of The Darwath Trilogy and another was The Legacy of Gird, a two-in-one of the Paksenarrion prequels, so it’s actually more like 50.

A final bit I meant to post on a month ago when it happened: While I was visiting my parents, I naturally got to help solve (or try to) some of the little technological glitches they’ve been having. It beats trying to do it over the phone. And then Smudge’s machine back home suddenly had an error, saying that her second hard drive was failing. This is especially annoying, as we just had to replace her main drive a couple months earlier. Since it was the data drive, I had her go down to Computer Central, get a new hard drive, and talked her through installing it in the machine over the phone/Skype. Then had her format it and copy everything from the old one to the new one, unplug the old one, and shift the drive letter. As far as Myzal’s concerned everything’s right were it was. And with Smudge able to take photos or send video of what was happening over Skype through her iPhone, it wasn’t too hard to do.

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The Four Vassal War Coalition Turn 3

by on December 22, 2015 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Four Vassal War

Crossposted from the SFU blog on BGG.

And with turn 3 this truly becomes the Four Powers War as the Lyrans attack the Kzinti in support of the Fourth Klingo-Kzinti War.

Thankfully, the Lyran border with the Kzinti is in much better shape than the Hydran border. The Count’s Fleet is in position, but everything else has been needed against the Klingons, giving a much better fleet ratio. The opposite is true for the Hydrans, with the bulk of the Hydran navy sitting in or near Lyran space.

The Lyrans are still struggling with a lot of cripples, though the last of the repairs from the recent civil war are done, and a DD from the Far Stars fleet became active (now that the entire fleet is repaired, one random ship from it becomes available each turn). Meanwhile the Klingons have enough extra money to start the process of turning various inaccessible base stations into battlestations (which is worth VPs… or rather, not doing so is worth VPs to the other side).

Builds:
Klingons: D7, TGA, F5L, F5, 3xE4, E3, D7->D7C, D6->D6D, BS-BATS
Lyrans: BCE, CA, 2xCL, 2xDD, 2xFF

Raiding continued to go poorly for me. I put repaired both ships from last turn and sent them raiding into Kzinti space. Despite attempting to stay away from heavier ships, a Kzinti CC reacted to the Lyran BCE and destroyed it while the CC was crippled. The Klingon D6 only had to deal with a called up POL, and successfully disrupted a province.

The Klingons counterattacked at four Hydran bases along the border, while Lyran efforts focused on getting at the logistical train that had moved up to 0513 (a convoy, FRD and TG hauling the parts for a mobile base).

On the Kzinti front, I spent a lot of time and effort trying to avoid confronting all the Kzinti forces on the Klingon border while still conducting an offensive, but couldn’t manage it. Bel aggressively reacted to all my province raiders, which helped dilute the base defenders, but not by enough. I ended up by concentrating on the west side of the border, with the real drive at Zelkrat in 1105, while Lyran forces took on two border bases unopposed.


Combined assault on the Hegemony


Counterattack into Hydran space


Limited operations in Lyran space

Combat:
0703: Kzinti: dest BATS, crip CL; Lyran: crip FF
0803: Kzinti: dest BS; Lyran: crip FF
1004: SSC: Kzinti: crip CL, retreat; Klingon: crip E4, retreat
1205: SSC: Klingon: retreat
1105: Kzinti: dest FF, 2xPDU; Klingon: crip D6, F5, capture planet
1304: Kzinti: 2xSIDS, crip CL; Klingon: crip D6, D6J, F5, F5S, dest E4
1605: Retreat on refused approach
1219: Hydran: dest BS; Klingon: crip F5
1217: Hydran: crip SA, dest BATS; Klingon: crip 2xF5, F5G, E4, E4J, dest E4
1116: Retreat on refused approach
0915: Hydran: crip HNG, dest BATS, POL; Klingon: crip D6, D6J, 2xE4, dest F5
0211: SSC: Lyran: crip CL, dest FF, retreat
0513: Hydran: crip TEM, RN, dest 2xLN, FRD, Convoy; Lyran: crip CC, 2xCA, CL, dest DD, FF
0412: Unopposed defender withdrawal
0512: SSC: Hydran retreat

Both 1004 and 1205 were province raiding missions gone bad when Bel proved more willing to react off of bases than I had supposed. Neither of us rolled very well in either of them, which was fortunate in 1205 since I was overmatched.

Our lack of experience with the ground attack rules showed at 1105. I sent in the D6G, and directed on a FF. Bel took some of his leftover damage on a PDU, which gave the defense gap needed for a bonus on the ground attack. If we’d looked at the modifiers, I’d have directed on the PDU. As it was, the ground attack took out the remaining PDU, and Bel retreated out.

I’d sent a reasonably sized force to SB 1304, which drew the Kzinti reserve. Without that, he only had a pile of cripples stationed there. I went in for one round, then retreated, but between cripples and SIDS, his repair capacity is overloaded there….

1217 had about half a line protecting it, which with all the fighters was able to do a good amount of damage before retreating out right before the BATS blew.

Bel was determined to make my raid on his support units as painful as possible, and succeeded. We went five rounds, increasingly desperate to keep a viable force together while I tried to kill the valuable units. Eventually, he retreated out, and I was just able to kill the FRD and Convoy in the slow unit battle. (For some reason, hauling around a MB doesn’t make a tug slow….)

0512 was another in a chain of SSCs with low rolls. I did one casualty to him, which he used to retreat out. However, he’s stuck against the edge of the LDR, and was forced into 0511 and out of supply.

Killing five bases this turn does a lot for my score, as does capturing a Kzinti planet. My VPs are up to 63.25, and a healthy percentage of that is in points that can’t be taken away later. The Alliance is up to 73.2, thanks to the ships I’m loosing, which shifts me up to a Minor Defeat.

A big problem is that just to do this much, I had to use just about all my available ships, and my reserves are small for the upcoming turn.

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