Largest Battles?

rommel58 · Post by **rommel58** » Mon Jul 04, 2011 7:40 am

Was just wondering what your guys' largest battles were.
Try to be detailed and try to list the approximate number of units, and maybe, if you remember, the amount of each unit type.

Good Luck!!!

piersyf · Post by **piersyf** » Mon Jul 04, 2011 11:22 am

Largest on field battle, single session, single board was 1 US combat command (WW2) with 2 artillery battalions, 2 tank battalions, a recon company, 2 TD companies and an armoured infantry company. I was attacking a german heavy panzer battalion and a separate panzer regiment. Game took 2 days, 1:1.

Largest game overall, hard to quantify but I refer to it as Corps level, 1:1. Full US armoured division backing up an amphibious landing by a UK commando brigade. Naval task force assets and air assets were included. Landing was contested by a full panzer division with air assets in support. Played as a campaign over 2 weeks.

P

BattlerBritain · Post by **BattlerBritain** » Mon Jul 04, 2011 3:20 pm

Largest single battle I've ever played was at Cheltenham Wargames Club on a Sunday.

We did D-Day, British+Canadian beaches of Gold, Juno and Sword, across 11 tables with ~18 people playing using 1/300th figures and Spearhead 1:platoon scale rules.

I think we had ~150 landing craft, a Destroyer, lots of other boats and I also remember lots and lots of gliders.

All the figures were owned by 1 man: Chris James.

He has (or had) enough figures to do the whole of the Normandy campaign and Kursk at 1:1 in 1/300th scale! And that is no exageration either. I've gone through his collection and it's massive. Most of it is 'adequately' painted.

He now plays Flames of War as he can't be bothered doing any more painting.

sultanbev · Post by **sultanbev** » Mon Jul 04, 2011 11:58 pm

20mm battle of D-day in the 1970s, on 900 square foot judo matt, picture made it into the Battle magazine (the offshoot of Military Modelling). Can't remember how many models, but it was all we had!

Mark

scopemaster · Post by **scopemaster** » Wed Jul 06, 2011 2:49 am

Largest micro armor game I was involved in was at the Last Grenadier in good ol burbank california in the the mid-1970's it started at 5:30 pm and had 24 player in game with 2 companys each on the second turn the referee had to leave (His personal emporer the wife called) well after about another 10 minutes people were getting hot at each other and deploying more and more companys etc we were useing the wgr 1950-1975 rules so it was one to one scale at 11:00 pm when the store owner call halt time and pick it up the count was 325 destroyed nato/israli vehicles and 440 warpack/arab vehicles destroyed we had over 8,000 vehicles deployed on a 12/14' x 5' table, it was acually a very good game and relaxing, the reason everyone had so much product is we were haveing a campain at the store and the guy running it wanted to see we had what we had listed in the to&e we had turned in I had the entire jordainian 40th & 60th armored brigades but one of the guys had a red china division. I have lost all of the micro armor and ships I had collected due to a friend who was a thief so when I relocated to kansas non-of my armor or book collection made it oh well. I am restarting to collect now with wwii and some modern stuf and I will expand back out into ships again. Dave

WHM · Post by **WHM** » Wed Jul 06, 2011 6:27 am

Can it be included the size of the terrain used as well?

rommel58 · Post by **rommel58** » Wed Jul 06, 2011 7:15 am

Sure, i don't see why not.
I am also glad to see that there is an interest in this thread, please keep it coming!

RedLeif · Post by **RedLeif** » Wed Jul 06, 2011 1:21 pm

Scenario: Kursk: Prokharovka

Rules and Scale: platoon scale, Century of Conflict rules -this is what John called the rules before being published by GHQ as WWII MicroArmour: The Game

Forces: SSLAH full division vs. basically most of the 5th Guards Tank army (3 brigades of tanks and one mech brigade if I recall correctly).

Terrain: hand made 5 by 10' three level 1/8" luann wood board on 1" foam base, it might have only been 8' long. I 'm confident it was fairly close to the correct scale.

Players: meant for about 8. But it was mostly just me and my apartment mate, DJ. I ran it pretty much two player at Enfilade in 98 or 99.

It was nuts running this much lead each. We got through 10 turns in 2 FULL days of play. We experienced only one argument during the whole game, when I forgot i'd already fired one of my arty units and DJ insisted I had (I was wrong, DJ was right).

I will never run this version of this battle again, mainly 'cause my data and research has gotten better. Some of my friends might argue I created it as 'payback' for loosing the same 'battle' (under different rules and a great group of gamers in Tacoma at American Eagles). But despite those TOE's being MUCH more inaccurate than the one's I created for this game, that wasn't it.

I think I created this scenario in part to see how well the rules handled really 'BIG' games (div vs. div), and they worked alright for this many units. What we really needed was more players. I know I really don't want to run three soviet tank brigades single handed again. Now that more people have the rules I feel it will be easier to recruit players but I think it unlikely I'll try to put this much lead on one table again.

But I can't give it up, I'm working on TOE's and Kursk scenarios again, and they seem to creep up in size really easily.

Clear Skies,
RedLeif

macscrooge · Post by **macscrooge** » Wed Jul 06, 2011 5:30 pm

A few years ago I ran a game based on the northern flank of Kursk, using 20mm toys and Megablitz rules. 24 players and over 1500 toys - the game began at 1000 and lasted until 1630 the same day. We played through 3 days of game time by which time the Soviet second line had been breached. I still have Rokossovsky's suicide note somewhere...

Sven · Post by **Sven** » Tue Jul 12, 2011 7:00 am

scopemaster wrote:Largest micro armor game I was involved in was at the Last Grenadier in good ol burbank california in the the mid-1970's it started at 5:30 pm and had 24 player in game with 2 companys each on the second turn the referee had to leave (His personal emporer the wife called) well after about another 10 minutes people were getting hot at each other and deploying more and more companys etc we were useing the wgr 1950-1975 rules so it was one to one scale at 11:00 pm when the store owner call halt time and pick it up the count was 325 destroyed nato/israli vehicles and 440 warpack/arab vehicles destroyed we had over 8,000 vehicles deployed on a 12/14' x 5' table, it was acually a very good game and relaxing, the reason everyone had so much product is we were haveing a campain at the store and the guy running it wanted to see we had what we had listed in the to&e we had turned in I had the entire jordainian 40th & 60th armored brigades but one of the guys had a red china division. I have lost all of the micro armor and ships I had collected due to a friend who was a thief so when I relocated to kansas non-of my armor or book collection made it oh well. I am restarting to collect now with wwii and some modern stuf and I will expand back out into ships again. Dave

I remember that game!
Sven

Baphomet69 · Post by **Baphomet69** » Wed Jul 13, 2011 11:38 pm

Largest my group has run was a cold war Soviet division (4 regiments) vs. West German armored brigade. We used Modern Spearhead (1 stand/vehicle = 1 platoon).

I love those rules, but we have come to the conclusion that the ratings for Warsaw Pact units are...understrength, to say the least. Granted, the Soviet player (me) made some tactical errors and didn't use Soviet doctrine correctly, but the kill ratio was between 8:1 and 12:1 instead of the generally accepted (at the time) ratio of 4:1 or 5:1. By the numbers: Soviet T-80 needed a 6 to suppress the WG Leo 2, whereas the Leo2 suppressed a T-80 on a 2-3, or killed it on a 4-6 (For those who know the rules, T-80 has DEF and AT of 10, Leo 2 has DEF and AT 12 = permanent -2 for Sovs and +2 for WG).

We are going to try it again this weekend with better Soviet-style tactics and see how much of a difference that makes, but I still see us house-ruling the Soviet stats in the future.

paul · Post by **paul** » Wed Jul 20, 2011 8:48 am

Use lots of art and smoke and get close.

paul · Post by **paul** » Wed Jul 20, 2011 8:53 am

We have played a couple of large battles over the last couple of years. One was an American Brigade holding of roughly a division plus of West Germans. The Americans had a rough go of it but managed in the end to really maul the West Germans before being pushed back.

On a second battle we had a Russian division attacking an American/German and British blocking force. Both sides were fed troops each turn to two turns. The Soviets pushed the U.S. back put really paid for the ground they took.

On another weekend we had a Marine Assualt force attack a South African force. The Marines made some good progress but stalled after the South Africans were able to build up their reserves.

Baphomet69 · Post by **Baphomet69** » Wed Jul 20, 2011 8:37 pm

paul wrote:Use lots of art and smoke and get close.

One thing about artillery in this game, it is basically ineffective against armor. Unless you are using PGM rounds (and if you do, you can only use one *battery* per spotter per turn), the artillery AT (usually around 4 or 5) goes against the vehicles *front* DEF...

We've been discussing another house rule:
Pre-Planned Bombardment - keep the rule as written (thinking being that if you are saturating a map grid square it will be less likely to actually hit a vehicle directly)

Observed Fire (called in vs. a platoon instead of a Beaten Zone) - in this case we would use arty AT vs. AFV *flank* DEF - much closer to a straight up roll. The thought being that if you are actually calling in fire on a platoons coordinates it should be much tighter and likelier to hit the actual vehicles.

Other than that, yeah, we used smoke to much better effect and made much more progress. We also used DEF and AT 11 for the T-80's after a discussion we had on the yahoo group for that game.

paul · Post by **paul** » Wed Jul 20, 2011 10:44 pm

Did the 11 take into consideration the T-80's ability to fire an ATGM? The Leopard II is a nice tank but it's strength is it's speed and not necessarily the armor.

Largest Battles?

Largest Battles?

Large games