Gaming Tactics - Using British Tanks In Defence

One of the tactical rules of using tanks in WW1 is to never use them in defensive actions. But in cases when you have no other option, what is the best way to utilize these machines when playing the defender in a tabletop game? Here's my thoughts on the matter...

General Tactics:

• Always keep tanks dug in. In most rule sets tanks can use cover so prepare defensive terrain for them to reduce the tanks profile.
• Watch out for artillery. Keep tanks back from their intended position if you anticipate a preliminary bombardment and they could be damaged by it.
• Once in cover, keep them there. Unless using Whippets try not to move your tanks that much and expose them to further fire, a breakdown out in the open can shatter your defense.
• Let your infantry do their own thing. Don't let them rely on the tanks too much or have them defend the tanks for the whole game. Tanks make good last stand areas though and can be a good fallback point in dire circumstances.
• Tanks are imposing units and act as bullet magnets. Careful placement can draw fire away from other areas of the line or other valuable troops, even if the tank isn't adding much to the overall battle.
• Placement of Tanks can create roadblocks or push the enemy into your fire lanes. Forcing enemies to go around your tanks through it's physical presence can force them into choke points or other kill zones. Even knocked out Tanks accomplish this, so your armour can still aid you after their deaths.

Male Tanks:

• Male tanks are probably the least useful of British tanks for defense. Two fixed position 6 pounder guns can do very little against infantry and there are much better ways of combating tanks than using them.
• What machine guns there are on the tank do not cover everywhere, giving enemy infantry chance to advance up close to it.

Female Tanks:

• Female tanks become useful machine gun pilboxes, while not as effective as heavy machine guns they can bring three LMGs to bear on attacking troops if facing forward.
• Unlike the male tanks their guns can cove all areas of the tank apart from the direct rear, so that if the line breaks it can actually add more firepower, and fire in all directions at once rather than limiting it's fire output.

Whippet Tanks:

• Whippets, while they can only be used in games after Spring 1918, fill two roles in defensive actions.
• Firstly they also act as machine gun pillboxes, while not as effective as a Female tank, can also fire in all directions, although they can't fire all weapons at the same time due to limited crew.
• In this role thanks to their speed it can be beneficial to move these tanks out into no-mans land to harass assaulting troops and force them into other pre-set fire lanes. 
• Whippets work best as line pluggers, best kept in the rear of the battle and rushed in to plug breaches in the line, due to their small size they can work in teams to cover each other as they advance.

One nice aspect of using tanks in a defense is that the idea of it is so stupid that it is often not anticipated and an attacking force without heavy anti-tank weaponry can be seriously set back by a well placed tank covering the line, stopping dead the momentum of an attack.

That's my thoughts on the matter, more tactical ideas coming soon!

WW1 PC Games Spotlight: Verdun

WW1 Video games are few and far between, and there's nothing at all coming from major game developers. Most WW1 games are grand strategy games, but for those of us who don't enjoy these sorts of games there are very few games out there. But there are a few indie games and a few excellent mods out there that cover the genre, and this spotlight series will cover some of the best of these that I have played.

Verdun

Usually I don't buy early access games on Steam, but when I saw what was promised from the game Verdun I had to break my rule and make a purchase. Verdun is a multiplayer only first person shooter set on the battlefields around Verdun between French and German troops. The game is still in development and is rough around the edges, but it's well worth a look at here.

The game follows a defense and attack gameplay style based around trench lines. One side starts off assaulting the others trench, and then if they capture it have to repel a counter attack before pushing forward again. This combined with very open levels allows for both long range combat across no-mans land and close combat fighting in the trenches. The game has a one hit, one kill style combat, the only real exception being pistols and shots to the arm, leading to massive casualties during assaults and brutal close range fighting, whilst still being a little more arcade-y and not having such a steep learning curve as games like Red Orchestra. Currently games have 16v16 players, organised into 4 squads per side, each squad with four distinct player roles. This amount of players seems to be just right for most of the maps, although sometimes areas can get very crowded, and become mortar or machine gun bait for the enemy team. Currently both France and Germany have a sniper team and a light machine gun team, teams are supposed to have a mix of these squads in them, as they don't balance that well at the moment, with the machine gun team being much more useful and powerful than the sniper team in the games current state, to the point that sniper teams are very rare on servers at the moment. Squad leaders have special abilities, either to call in mortar fire or to request aerial recon, revealing the enemy on the mini map. They also possess a "command aura" than increases the effectiveness of the squad as well as giving them extra experience points and so encourages squad based cooperative gameplay, although without voice coms between players it is very easy for squads to get separated and turn into individualistic play. Squads level as members in them gain experience and over time uniforms and squad abilities are unlocked. You might be able to see the mix of early and mid war French uniforms in the picture above, and while this doesn't bother me much in game it does take the authenticity out of it a bit, as well as putting early war French troops in their scarlet trousers at a bit of a disadvantage when coming up against late war troops. Other than this though (and the current bugs) I have no problems at all with the game as the developers have created a very well executed and implemented game with interesting combat and back and forth gameplay, with the same areas of land being fought over time and time again during a single game, making for frustrating, but exciting gameplay.

As the game is currently in development there's still a lot more to come from this game. Currently the developers have said to be adding two extra squad types to the game, Canadians and German Stormtroopers as well as gas and gasmasks to make the hellish combat even more like a nightmare. Between the machine guns, mortar fire and bayonets you already die a lot during a game and hopefully this will make the game even more deadly. Updates and fixes come regularly to the game and the dev team seem to be dedicated to produce the best game that they possibly can, which is great news for players, even if you are wary of early access games. WW1 FPS games must be hard to pull off and still make them both authentic and interesting to play at the same time, and Verdun ticks all of the boxes here. The game looks fantastic even on low end machines like mine and runs very smoothly, the pictures given here are screenshots from my laptop with the settings on minimal, and so really don't do the game justice.

Verdun is currently available on steam, it is not yet finished but content and fixes come regularly. The online community is decently sized, so finding a game is not an issue, although there are some team balancing issues at the moment on smaller populated games. Well worth a look at if you want a game to fill the WW1 FPS hole.

WW1 PC Games Spotlight: The Great War 1918 Mod

WW1 Video games are few and far between, and there's nothing at all coming from major game developers. Most WW1 games are grand strategy games, but for those of us who don't enjoy these sorts of games there are very few games out there. But there are a few indie games and a few excellent mods out there that cover the genre, and this spotlight series will cover some of the best of these that I have played.

First up: The Great War 1918 Mod

The Great War Mod is a free complete overhaul mod for Company of Heroes, completely changing the game. The mod is still under development and currently includes the BEF and Imperial Germany as factions, with France and Austria Hungary currently under development. Both factions are well balanced, have unique units and tech trees, some more useful than others, and weapon damage and range is drastically increased from the base game.

At first by biggest worry was whether or not the game would portray trench warfare correctly, seen as how in base CoH gameplay is very mobile and fast moving. Not the case here. As machine guns are so effective and heavy base destroying weapons like artillery or tanks come very late in the game, it is impossible to destroy the enemies base buildings early on in the game. Machine gun emplacements are cheap and infantry die so quickly in the open that the battlefield becomes lined with trenches and machine gun nests protecting the game command points, as well as protecting your own infantry. Trench building is much easier with lines being built as long as a player wants rather than being a standard size as in the base game. It is much easier to defend than attack so the the game becomes a build up defenses and wait for the heavy equipment to arrive. Even late game heavy equipment often doesn't break the stalemate. Tanks are slow and can be easily taken out by field guns and artillery is limited, prone to counter battery fire and have a long cool down. Gas is a new weapon in the game, but acts more as an area denial weapon than a way of mass killing infantry. The mod currently has 5 custom maps that encourage trench warfare, with large open killing lanes and lines of pre-built defenses to hammer home the idea of playing defensively.

As a result, even games against the AI can take up to an hour, and games against human opponents can take ages, the last one I played running for 6 hours before one of us surrendered with no overall victor in game terms. Casualties ramp up drastically as infantry can be produced very cheaply, with British infantry being able to be organised into platoons for ease of ordering around as the game has an unlimited population cap so huge numbers of troops can be fielded for added carnage, although some units have limited numbers, like the British stokes mortar and the German A7V both being limited to 2 units per player.

There's way too many changes from the base game to look at here, so if you have CoH it's well worth picking the game up yourself and giving it a play. With CoH being a relatively old game not the mod will run on pretty much anything and the base game is pretty cheap to pick up now anyway. As the mod is still in development there is more to come from this and I'm looking forward to it.

Our World War on BBC3 - My Thoughts so Far

With the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of WW1 in full swing our TV's are full of documentaries and dramas about the war at the moment, and most of them are really well put together. The one that I've been enjoying the most is Our World War on BBC3, the channel choice being a bit unfortunate as it really is worthy to have a spot on BBC1 or 2 where it would get much higher ratings. The show runs for three episodes, two of which have been aired so far and follows a Band of Brothers style affair complete with a desaturated colour palette but does mix things up a bit with overhead tactical maps showing the bigger picture, all set on the frontlines of the biggest battles of the war and all the characters are based on actual people who were there.

The first episode was extremely well done, minus an obnoxious camera choice of putting in almost GoPro style shots following the runner going back and forth to HQ and some weird shots where it seemed that the camera had been strapped the the end of characters rifles. These were forgivable though as the rest of the episode followed a well done, events based telling of the first battle of the BEF in France, and didn't dwell on individual characters for too long, switching perspective between about 5 different people throughout the course of the episode, whilst still making us care about every single one of them. The tension leading up to the action scene builds up perfectly for edge of your seat action. Overall, the first episode made for immerse viewing where you can just sit back, get lost in the battle scenes and not question what was appearing on screen, everything made sense and wasn't cliched or too overly dramatic. One of the rather cute things from a production standpoint though was the costume department apparently didn't want any of the British uniforms damaged, and so bullets miraculously miss uniforms and some characters don't have access to their tunics during the battle scenes. Saying that though, that sentence could be considered a spoiler. Obviously the BBC has a lot more WW1 productions coming up that they need the uniforms for, so we have those look to forward to.

With episode one being so good, I was really looking forward to the second one, advertised as being about PALs Battalions at the battle of the Somme. This premise had a lot of promise, having recently watched the film The Trench that had also been shown on the BBC I was expecting a similar sort of plot. A bit of a spoiler here for the film, The Trench follows a platoon of PALs sent to the trenches in the week before the opening day of the battle of the Somme and later find themselves in the first wave going over the top. It's more of a depiction of trench life than the battle of the Somme, but it's the same formula that I was expecting from the second episode of Our World War. But Our World War takes a completely different plot line to a conventional story about this time, this could of been a good thing, but the execution of the episode seemed altogether off. Starting the action in France on the first day rather than spending more time in the run up, what should have been a centerpiece to the episode seemed rushed and small scale. This wouldn't have bothered me that much if the rest of the episode was linearly told, but it was plagued with flash forwards and flash backs that broke up the immersion of the episode and slowed it right down in places. Modern music appeared a few times at the beginning of the episode, maybe intentioned as a "look, these guys are just like us!" attempt, but it's a big immersion breaker. This was also present in the first episode, but I either didn't notice or was too engrossed in the story to care about it. The episode focused on only one man, and so the rest of the characters seemed a bit distant compared to those in the first episode and so their deaths didn't have the impact that they should have. For a more character based episode, focusing on the emotional aspects of war and the friendship of the PALs this is a major problem, not enough time is spent addressing this other than in almost direct exposition. The whole drama of the firing squad plot, while well intentioned appeared to me to be detrimental to the rest of the story as the issue is built up to so much and is resolved too quickly, this is the main focus of the flash forward scenes and it mostly feels like filler. While the whole story is based around fact and so you can't change the story much, there are much better ways to present a story like this.

This whole thing sounds really negative, and the episode isn't bad, it's perfectly watchable and very interesting for the most part, but it fails to live up to the expectation that I came away with after watching the first episode. If the flash forward sections were taken out the rest would be fantastic, but it's this breakup of tension caused by these scenes that spoils it. An interactive episode is also available online and runs for about 15 minutes, with branching choices that effects the rest of the episode. It's a nice addition and a very interesting watch, even if it isn't a true story like the rest. The third episode, showing this Thursday takes place during the battle of Amiens, following a tank crew and appears to include a functioning tank, probably the Bovington Tank Museum tank made up for the War Horse film. Hopefully this will bring the episode back in line with the first episode and make it a gripping events based story of the battle. I'll probably write up another post on that episode after it comes out.

Both the first and second episode are currently available on BBC iPlayer and will be for the next 11 days.