Markus Stumptner - Apr 16, 2012 11:51 am (50492.) new 
"The sky is always the hardest part" -- Ludwig Wittgenstein 	 


Over the Easter weekend I finally got my teeth into one of the "Death
Ride" games from Grognard Simulations. These games are quite interesting
as they were designed by someone with military experience and with
frequent reference to the seven "Battlefield Operating Systems", so I
was interested to see if there were any deep differences to other
systems I've seen. Unfortunately most of the games in the series are
total monsters and so I got the first that I saw was of reasonable size.
This battle (during Operation Battleaxe I believe) shows two British
armour regiments attacking an entrenched German AT gun position that is
reinforced by a German armour battalion. The system is a bit of a
shotgun marriage between platoon level counters with 330 yard hexes and
hourly daylight turns. In principle it makes for playable larger battles
but at the price of a very high stacking limit. In this game this is not
as much of a problem as it could be since there are few units and no
halftracks, so keeping the maximum to six instead of twelve (before hit
markers!) as it is for the Kursk games. For me that simply would be a
scale mismatch that should have been caught at design time. [I've read
since that the Salerno game and expansions are using company level units
which should give a more natural stacking limit.] 

The map is fairly nice though is somewhat disfigured by a huge company
and a 10-hexes long artist signature. 

The rules look like a draft copy written on a typewriter. Well, they're
not in Courier, but except for the eleven section headings there is no
highlighting of text in the rulebook, nor even any extra linebreaks,
essentially there are no other headings! You're expected to count the
depth of the numbering (this is 3.5.8.10 and the next line says 3.6, so
this must be a new rule section!). The rules assume a lot of stuff is
understood (the fire rules don't mention rolling rolling the die, nor do
they mention the full-page table that you are supposed to use to
determine fire strength modifiers! I found it by chance after the second
turn when I turned over one of the charts). 

The basic sequence is Igo-Yougo, though there is some reserve movement.
The odds-based combat system is a bit of a letdown - I don't think a
tactical system has used odds-based combat since the Panzerblitz series
(and rightly so). Also, what I normally look for in such a game is how
well it does with command control because that's just so important at
this level - at least as important as the hardware. Well, all we find
here is an optional rule that says "trace range of X hexes to the next
higher HQ". That's pretty weak and in fact it would turn the game into
silly bug hunting for HQs because those platoons are clearly marked. 

Anyway, in the game I moved the British so they would not be taken in a
pincer by the German tanks. Tactical play turned out to be a bit odd
since you can freely combine fires. So to get rid of a pesky fortified
AT gun you just have twelve tank platoons fire on it for an hour. This
is a rather strange effect that the Tank Leader series got rid of
eventually and it massively improved the game. Don't know what it would
do to balance here though. It's also much easier to shoot up multiple
platoons partially than to put extra hits on one that's been suppressed,
so losses tend to accrue only on the occasional outright kill (about 1
in 10 or 1 in 5). Another oddity is that since you can simply add
secondary values to the combat strength within range, the AT capability
of an 88 is increased once the tanks come in range of the associated
machineguns. (The machineguns accompanying an 88 unit are also much
longer ranged than those accompanying a 37mm AT gun - they can knock out
tanks out to 1200 yards.) 

Also, opportunity fire is unlimited but limited to one shot per stack at
one moving stack. This is nice to play but has the unfortunate effect of
making dense mass assaults the best tactic - trying to outflank someone
means he gets double the shots at you! This does make play a bit
unwieldy as you do get 5-to-6-high tank stacks plus individual
suppression markers. 

My British strategy seemed to work as they eventually levered all the AT
gun positions out of the bedrock by concentrated tank gun fire. They had
achieved at least a draw by the morning of the second day. However they
did not occupy every single hex of the ridges that constitute much of
their victory terrain and on the last turn the Germans raced a tank
company (three counters) past them to grab a ridge. Opportunity fire
just isn't strong enough to keep them from doing so and they held on
against the counterattacks. The other effect that showed up was that the
last ridge held by a German AT gun was reinforced by the German
regimental HQ. As that counter is a company formation it has a humongous
defense factor and essentially it was just too big to be really hurt
except for shooting it up with a tank regiment at short range and hoping
for it to suddenly evaporate with a "X" result eventuating after a few
hours (again, I thought we had left this behind with the invulnerable
Russian infantry in Panzerblitz). 

Overall: to be sure, this is cleaner and faster than Fighting
Formations, more action than Panzer Grenadier, vastly better than the
Decision Games Famous Divisions mess, but nothing that will supplant TCS
or Tank Leader on my shelf.