Solo Theatre of War Campaign: the Aftermath

Map After First Battle
Originally uploaded by The Gonk

So, what exactly happens to these poor Deutschen Volk after losing this battle? We need to figure out the Battle Points for both the American and the German sides. This is done by a formula using the Army Morale Points (see discussion below) and the Victory Points won during this battle.

Victory Points are only scored for the Objectives held when the battle ended. Obviously, since the poor Germans had NO TROOPS LEFT when the battle ended, they get a big fat goose egg. The Americans, however, held a 10 point hill, a 7 point hill (both on the German right, by American companies that hardly moved from set up), and the hard won 26 point bocage. Left on the table were the 8 point rough hill in the German left flank area, the 8 point crossroads, and the 3 point hill the Shermans left to finish off the last PaK 40 battery.

Solo Theatre of War Campaign: The Battle of Le Petite Bocageville

The Battle Commences
Originally uploaded by The Gonk

With the forces laid out on the table, I now went ahead and rolled randomly for unit quality. There's no reason I couldn't have done it before, although populating stats for fourteen American units and eighteen German units in up to ten different battlegroups is a bit much-- better to do it once they are needed. The paratroopers got a veteran bonus and rolled up very nicely, even discounting the temporary hindrance of being out of supply. The Germans had a mix a green, regular and experienced infantry, although in general, they rolled fairly poorly for quality.

Solo Theatre of War Campaign: Eve of First Battle

The Upcoming Battle
Originally uploaded by The Gonk

So now we move from the campaign map to the tabletop. Since both battlegroups used the Attack action, the battle will be a standard Encounter fight, as opposed to something like a Flank Attack vs. Defend. A Retire action would have avoided the fight altogether.

Theatre of War includes rules for setting up the tabletop based on the campaign map and forces involved. The tabletop is divided equally into sixteen sections, in a four by four grid. Cards from the force sequence decks are drawn for the eight grid sections on each side's half of the table, which gets translated to terrain. Since this battle took place in a Heavy terrain square, with movement cost five, it risked some pretty dense terrain. It wound up with some open areas in the end, though. Here is the battlefiend I drew:

Solo Theatre of War Campaign

The Campaign Map
Originally uploaded by The Gonk

I'm finally getting enough WW2 stuff painted to play with. Ideally, I'll play mostly with my favorite rules system, Piquet. I've been reading through the Theatre of War campaign book, and decided to sit down and play a solo campaign using my new troops.

Originally, I started browsing maps around Utah beach, trying to find something that showed enough geography to provide movement info yet not enough writing on it to make it difficult to use. I finally decided I was making it way too hard on myself and just made a random map. This is one row taller than the default map size suggested in ToW. Each map square has a large number in the middle indicating the movement cost to move into that square. Square with cost 6 have a random edge that is impassible. Each square has a smaller number which is the victory points for that square.