Given the month what a great idea as PL is great for for this kind of thing.

I will be watching the videos a little later when I have a couple off free hours.

Now the late war Fortress Europe for V4 has been released, @timp764 is chomping at the bit to start doing some Normandy wargaming. I then asked his a question about what was he really interested in Operation Neptune or Overlord? He asked what was the difference. Long story cut short my reply boiled down to Neptune is getting to the beach and supplying it, while Overlord is about getting off the beach while being supplied by Neptune.

So he asked what the difference would be. My answer was that if we do Neptune it would be about having a detailed map of the board with known fortifications. From this he would need to develop a plan for his forces to take the beach but it would have to deliver his forces in a series of waves. What would you need to arrive first and not have it overwhelmed by the beach defences. The object would be taking the beach. If we do Overlord your forces are deployed on the beach and the object is getting off the beach and taking objectives inland off the beach.

He has not considered the difference and is excited about designing the landing waves.

I hope you guys had a great time.

Great stuff, really enjoyed that. 9 hour game is impressive, I usually enjoy a drink when I play but after 9 hours I may have been slurring a little!

I think the block spacing was fair. It did work out at a 33% casualty rate but then the game finished tight. Perhaps you could have given units hitting a block a saving throw with a pass leaving them dispersed. Or perhaps unable to move for a turn or two. Otherwise it looked fairly spot on. And wasn’t it the Sherwood Forresters? Or was there also a Rangers as well?

Edit. I just bothered looking it up and I’ve learnt something, there was a Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry there. There was also a Sherwood Forresters as well but they weren’t at D-DAY. I think some were in Italy with US fifth army.

You could of course alternate the block placement so that the gap between the first pair is 3 hexes and then 4 hexes with the next pair. That would deliver a rough 3.5 hex placement without slowing the game down. It would of course create more ideal landing hexes for the Allied player as there would be a golden hex where regardless of the drift, you would not hit any blocks, which may not be ideal.

Next option would be to introduce a saving throw. Current odds of being destroyed are 1 in 3, which as you point out is perhaps a little on the high side. A 3+ save gives odds of being destroyed as 1 in 9. A 4+ save gives the odds of being destroyed as 1 in 6. A 5+ save gives 2 in 9. And 6+ save gives 5 in 18. So the 6+ save is just slightly better than a quarter, which seems fair. You could also decide that any unit that makes its save starts dispersed.

I also imagine that Infantry is more likely to survive than tanks, which tend to sink when placed in water. So perhaps you could give Infantry a better saving throw than armoured units. You could take it further and perhaps start some units at half strength to represent the losses. So 1-2 destroyed, 3-4 half strength, 5+ survived but dispersed. But this starts to add increasing complexity to the game and will slow it down.

British units do seem to change their names, get merged and reorganised more than other countries. I was surprised at Dorsetshire for two reasons. Firstly, because I thought they were called ‘The Dorsets’, but this only really happened after the war. And secondly because while we like to stick ‘shire’ on the end of our county names (Yorkshire, Shropshire, Lancashire etc), Dorset is just Dorset. 🙂 And I’ll leave the digging into Russian unit names with those with the time on their hands!

Thank you @oriskany for taking the time for your truly great reply.

First off thanks for sending me the explosion graphics plus extras. They will do the job just fine and much appreciated.

I am a little amused at the moment that hexes are appearing on my table and now soon computer graphic will be on it as well. What kind of altered reality is my table top slipping into? Computer print out units??! I think I am losing it. 😉

What I liked about the opening of this PL game is that it demonstrated just how easily things could have gone for the British and Canadians. Just one or two oops things go wrong and your paying the ferry man.

Just like on Omaha there were several oops events. In on way you dislike what your reading, the careless waste of precious life. On the other hand I keep reminding myself that these poor hapless people are in the unfortunate position of having to write the text book while having to get on with it. So it looses blame and just becomes sad with the terrible choices that had to be made on the spot.

The documentary was a real eye opener. On a slightly lighter not there its a story about a Scottish DD tank commander while still swimming was taking firing. He lost his temper and ordered his gunner to fire the main gun, instantly flipping the tank. For years this had been taken as one of those stories. I even have heard it out hear in Australia. In the documentary in the British sector, sorry I do not remember the beach sector, they did find an upside down DD pointing not at the beach but is the only sunken DD tank facing England. This alone does not prove the story fact, just that it adds possibility to it.

SPI also made a second mega game, The Film’s Fulda Gap. It was down to platoon level and set in the late 70’s which was near future back then. We never managed to buy a copy of it to much regret. However it was just bad timing. They cost about an average weeks wages back then at $89 a pop. It must be remembered the oil crisis had bitten, high unemployment with few hiring and interest rate had just fine vertical, around 24%.  There was a rumor of a third mega game but SPI folded before it’s release. However Mega D-Day gave us many evenings and weekends of fun and it is a pity we only got to play the full game once. It remains one of my gaming highlights.

It was via this game we got to known the beach sectors well, Easy, Red, etc. Each beach for the allies had cardboard invasion boards were you placed your units in waves but had to be placed in a beach sector box.

You know me by now that I am attracted to things that don’t quite fit together properly. Utah for me is one of them. Another Omaha is too often quoted by historians if Utah had landed in the correct sector. I have wargamed this beach many times thanks to SPI’s mega game and other tabletop games as well. As you point out it is not overwatched from either end by enemy fire from the bluffs. Nor does it have as many fortifications and the quality of German troops is as high. Finally far more pockets of airborne are operating closer to the beaches in Utah. Another Omaha, absolute head lines garbage. Yes the casualties would have been higher. However I believe at best higher than the British but less than the Canadians. However the only way to get a clearer idea is to wargame this several times.

What do you mean that the US had issues using them dam fangled, Wizard of Oz jalopies the god damned British call funnies, that’s a joke in itself. 😉

I have read a bit on this and the amount of things that float to the surface is anywhere between amusing to shocking.

First a point of view of one paint brush paints all. What more could these specialist vehicles could achieve above the standard issue. That covers all the funnies and as you say the US has wading kits used in Sicily, Italy and the Pacific. After all you go with the devil you know. The US had a number of standard issue vehicles that could do the job nearly as well as an almost one use only over specialised vehicle. I will not go into the list of the as you and I have gone over these massed mass produced vehicles. This statement holds water when you consider that total wars are won in the factories not the front. Lose 10 Shermans for 1 tiger, not a problem (unless you a crewman of one of those 10 M4’s). While achieving a lodgement at Normandy is a one off event it remains one hell of a hurdle. So slowing down the factory lines just long enough to make these throw away vehicles might have been an investment and a bonus if someone else was happy to make them for you. As it turned out these vehicles came in very handy several times after D-Day. That is on one side and by some of those involved it came down to hatred of the British, Kennedy was not by himself on this feeling. These are the boundaries but there are many objections in between. It remains a friendly taunt from the European Historians over the years. At the time I see it as reasonable the reluctance of the US to embrace the funnies.

Yes over the next two wargaming seasons there will be a focus on doing the mid war Eastern Front properly. I would be happy to find a Russian play who can tell me what a Direction is. I would once like to be able to tell the difference between a mid war and late war players army other then looking for KVs rather than JS tanks.

I am not deriding Russian gamers here, I just mourn the loss of history. You are quite right about Moscow blinding out Rzhev. I think of this as Flash-Bangs as in the grenade, they blind and disorientate us from truly great history. They also do not fit well in the A-B-C storyline historians like to give us for “The Russian Campaign”. To be fair if the tried their story lines would look like spaghetti on the plate leaving the reader confused. But battles like Izyum where the Russians had a victory in the field where army corps and front go toe to toe. It was clumsy but has the beginnings of Russian offensive doctrine. Voronezh is almost unheard of nor is its strategic loss understood. Yet time and again truly important battles have been side lined by the Flash-Bangs of Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk have done. Look how often the strategy of using Rzhev and the Caucasus are used to strip Stalingrad of German reserves for Uranus to go ahead. I admit Hitler kicked a own goal here by trying to hold Tunisia. Like one of the battles I am looking forward to is lost as part of the battles of 2nd Kharkov is the