“…and that’s it. This is the latest ASL scenario I’ve finished.”
And so Patch gets a good die roll to end our current game the day after I said that. One last weekly post:
A little while back, Patch and I volunteered to help playtest further Festung Budapest scenarios. We ended up starting with a Saturday FtF session where neither of us was adequately prepared. In fact, I wasn’t able to get the counters all pulled before Patch arrived. So I left Patch to start planning the Russian defense while I pulled out the Germans.
It is January 25th, and the Germans and Hungarians are counterattacking to take Hill 259 on the outskirts of Buda. This dominates the west edge of the FB maps, rising to level 7 at the top. The scenario is reasonably large, space-wise, being 15 x 26 hexes, covering from level 2 to the top of the hill. In version 4, which we played, the Germans enter in two groups, with six squads, two tanks (Pz IV and Panther), and two halftracks (one with a 20mm AA cannon) in the north of the east edge, nine SS squads (of varying quality), with two halftracks (one is a flamethrower 251/16) entering in the middle, while the Hungarians get nine squads (including three assault engineer squads), and a Zrinyi II assault gun with 9-1 AL in the south, and along part of the south edge.
The Russians have fifteen squads… and six crew-served guns (two 82mm MTR, two 76.2mm ART, and two 122mm ART). Four of the guns have to set up on or near the top of the hill, but everything else gets the run of most of the map. There’s also six hexes of buildings to rubble (with the usual FB chances of creating falling rubble or debris), and the first thing Patch realized was that it was theoretically possible to cut the main German armor off from the rest of the map with the rubble. It would take some falling rubble or debris, but it would force bog checks on the tanks, and be impassible to the two halftracks. I pointed out that A2.5 would allow the vehicles to enter a turn later, having gone around the obstacles (assuming that debris counts, even though A2.5 only mentions Blaze/rubble, but that’s pretty obviously within the intent of the rule, as debris doesn’t exist outside of HASL).
On the other hand, it’s still a way to choke off paths into the rest of the board, and Patch did a modified version of this scheme, leveling buildings to get better LOS into that corner from the hill. He only got falling debris once, scattering it into T27, T28, S29. This left S26 as a VBM path out of the NE corner, and W24 at the edge of the set up area, but I forgot about that when I set up. For the rest, Patch found that despite a fair number of units, he had a lot of area to cover, and went with a ‘shell’ defense that would fall back during the game.
Victory features the common idea (in FB) of the attackers needing to get four out of six objectives. More than half of them feature the top of the hill, with the Axis needed to get 9 buildings at level 5, elim/capture two of the four guns that set up at level 5 or higher, getting three AFV with functioning MA at level 5 or higher, and/or getting two squads up to level 7. The remaining two objectives are to capture all the stone buildings and getting 22 CVP. Ground snow is present (making going up those crest lines even harder…) and the Axis is at Ammo Shortage level 2.
I concentrated the SS troops towards the north end of their area, planning on one big mass mostly aimed at the X27 area. The Hungarians set up entirely along the south edge, planning on concentrating on the three stacks there, and bypassing/flanking two more that were covering the east edge part of the Hungarian set up area.
I started off the game with the southern area, flooding the Russian defenders with Magyar hordes. I managed to press in fairly hard, and keep a concealed reserve, which proved to be somewhat superfluous when his forward stack turned out to be a Dummy. Elsewhere, I was much more cautious with my entry, not liking some of the terrain I had to cross. The FT halftrack parked in AA25, two hexes away from two Russian stacks, and revealed both of them with the FTs, but didn’t manage to do anything to them. And then late in the turn we had our only Sniper activation, which hit the HT and Recalled it.
The initial assault, German sector.
Initial assault, Hungarian side.
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