Panzer Grenadier Battles on March 28th:
Spearhead Division #15 - Dillenberg
Brick Wall
Author Matt W (United States)
Method Face to Face
Victor Germany
Participants Hugmenot
Play Date 2014-11-23
Language English
Scenario BlSS028

In this scenario a relatively huge American force runs up against a couple battalions of SS grenadiers holding a couple villages, a hill and a crossroads. The Americans have plenty of force but their commanders are a little bit confused and unable to ensure that the men receive commands on a timely basis. In addition a large river creates a roadblock for the Americans and provides the Germans with the ability to bottle up the advance somewhat. With only 18 turns the Americans have precious little time to maneuver as there is a 1 in 3 chance that a leader you are counting on to help your men make that aggressive move will be unable to direct the men at that time.

I actually had less trouble than I expected with the confusion rules but they still did have an impact on the play. Several times I wanted to perform a chain and either the first leader failed or one of the key links in the chain failed and thus I needed many more activations to do anything. Add to that the fact that my main attack was straight up the road and was stopped by very effective opportunity fire (2s and 12s mainly leading to many instances where the moving platoon simply vanished.

Finally, we had 4 or 5 turns where the FoW roll happened very early in the turn leaving a lot of my units exposed. With the heavy losses I lost much of my initiative early in the battle and frankly, if I was the American commander I would have called the whole thing off much earlier than I did (we played 13 of the 18 at which point the victory points were 49-9 in favor of the Germans and the Americans were neither causing losses (outpointed something like 28-9 in losses alone) nor did they seem likely to gain any traction by at least entering the town hexes to contest the control.

While the die roll results were clearly abnormally good for opportunity fire, Daniel seemed to roll badly on his artillery for most of the game so I can't even say that the result was simply luck related. This is a very hard scenario for the Americans to get anything other than trounced. The level of trouncing will depend on exactly how vicious the German defense is.

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