I played a game of Deluxe Advanced Squad Leader (DASL) with the local club, the DC Conscripts. My opponent was a veteran player, with a very thorough knowledge of the rules and a correspondingly expert knowledge of tactics. Meanwhile, I am still finding rules I need to learn, and my tactics development has been trial be fire.
DASL is ASL, but with bigger hexes. There are a few minor tweaks to the rules in DASL, but otherwise it's the same. The larger hexes make it much easier to handle the counters, and give the game a different feel.
The scenario was set in Russia in Winter 1942. A strong force of elite and 1st line Germans were attacking elite Russians. The Germans had to make it across an urban battlefield and exit enough units off the other side within 5.5 turns. The German forces had a couple of MMGs, two demo charges, and a flamethrower, which can be particularly deadly in close-in urban combat. The Russians were also well equipped, including an HMG, which is not common in Russian forces.
I was the defending Russians. One of the hard parts of being a defender across a wide area is knowing where the attack is going to come. You have to balance trying to defend all avenues of attack, taking advantage of terrain, and providing some ability to shift forces once the attack plan is revealed. In this scenario there were no obvious attack vectors, so I came up with a balanced defense, with my HMG on the 2nd story of a stone building, and my LMGs generally forward.
The Germans attacked primarily in the center and on my right. There were enough forces in the center that I couldn't completely abandon my left flank. The first two pictures show the situation in center and left, and on the right, around turn 2. My opponent did a masterful job of maintaining concealment, while stripping my concealment. That's an important tactic of the game I have to get better at. The German attacks in the center bogged down, but on my right side, thee German LMGs and flamethrower were very successful, and folded my right flank. I tried to get a leader over there to rally the troops, but I was a little too aggressive and he was broken when running in open ground. A tactical mistake I made was keeping him close to the action, where he continuously got placed under DM (desperation morale), instead of routing him away some place safe where he could rally and return to the fight. OTOH, even when he wasn't under DM, he refused to rally.
My defenders in the center got trapped in the two-hex wooden building. The open ground behind them would have made it too dangerous for them to get to my right side to shore up the defense. However, they did have good LOS down a key road, so this wasn't the end of the world, and they stalled some of the German forces in the middle. I did manage to get one squad over to the right and into the large building that was my goal-line defense. Along with the HMG still in this building, I had a pretty good defense going in to the last part of the game. I did manage to break his squad carrying the FT, but they rallied right away and were getting close to my defenders. He also moved some elite German squads with high firepower close in to the buildings. However, with 1.5 turns remaining, he couldn't afford to waste time shooting - he had to get off the board fast.
Stacking in ASL is usually not a good idea, especially for defenders, but my defenders all wound up together in the same location. This is partly due to my inexperience with stairwells in multi-hex buildings, but it's another thing that I have to get better at. Having my defenders in the same location allowed my opponent to concentrate his firepower. But with the protection of the stone building, his high firepower shots were not proving effective, and I thought I could ride it out for one more turn. But during one of the attacks, the vagaries of the dice caused my defenders to go berserk. Arrggghh This meant that during my last turn, instead of skulking back in the safety of the rear of the stone building where they would not get fired on in defensive fire, they had to do the opposite: drop the HMG, run out of the building and into the open ground, and charge the nearest German unit in a mad frenzy. At this point, the area in front of the building was filled with elite German squads, LMGs, and the flamethrower. My troops died a crispy death. On the next (and last) turn, the Germans walked across the finish line to win.
