ATS Berlin: Moabit Mayhem really long AAR

Contrary to appearances, I ain’t been shot, Mum! Extra-blogular events have transpired to add some rather lengthy delays into my publishing ‘schedule’ – you know, stuff like family, job and allergies.

So. What we have here is one mega-butt-kicking after-action report for a game of ATS Berlin: Red Victory. The game took a while to finish – the first three turn were played the first week of August, the last three turns were played the first week of September. But there you have it.

The scenario here is Moabit Mayhem, from Berlin: Red Victory. It uses a medium-sized slice of the game’s massive Berlin map to portray the initial Soviet assault into the Moabit district.

In order to win the game, the Soviets have to capture three of the four objective building complexes on the map – the Prison, the Train Station, the Customs Yard and a location just west of the Train Station that I’ll refer to as the Office Building.

The German setup was intended to lightly defend two of the locations – the Prison and the Office Building – and focus the main effort on defense of the Customs Yard and the Train Station. In addition to their on-map troops the Germans will receive 5 squads of heavily-armed parachute infantry on Turn 3. They also benefit from an SSR that subjects Soviet units moving near the river to possible sniper fire.



Turn 1

On Turn 1, my Soviets swarm onto the map, mostly with balls-to-the-walls movement (as evidenced by all of the ‘Winded’ markers in the turn 1 photo). As is the case in many scenarios, the attackers don’t have much time to sneak around in this one – so some early rapid movement to get stuck-in quickly is the prime directive.

My Russians attacking the Customs Yard spent the first turn just getting into position for more serious work. I rolled a couple of assault guns up to try and blast the defenders, and one of the heavy howitzers unlimbered where it can engage the German medium machinegun. If the Reds don’t get the initiative on turn 2, the gun crew may well get shot to hell by the MG – but at least they’ll provide a distraction so the rest of the attackers can get to work.




The Soviet troops tasked with taking the Office Building got stuck in to their assault rapidly. In the turn 1 photo, one of the ‘Winded’ stacks has already engaged in melee and eliminated the occupants of the Office Building.




My Russians’ turn 1 was aided by truly, honestly miserable shooting from the Germans (maybe because they’re Volkssturm?). Even with all of the running movement, the Russians took a grand total of 2 steps of casualties. In maybe 10 or so attack dice rolls (with a d10), my opponent rolled less than a ‘7’ exactly twice. Russian rolls were less numerous and no more successful, but since my main job on turn 1 was movement that was no big deal.


Turn 2.

The Germans won the initiative for turn 2, and the machinegun in the Customs Yard mowed down the crew of the howitzer before it had a chance to fire. But the SU-152 blasted the crap out of the machine-gunners and turned the upper floor into smoldering rubble.

Russian infantry, meanwhile, cleaned up the lurking Volkssturm tank-killer squad and also took out the crew of the infantry gun. My Soviet grunts took some casualties assaulting the tank-killers, but they did their job.



There’s another German machinegun upstairs in the Train Station that can fire to cover the flank of the Customs Yard. One of my goals for turn 3 is to neutralize that gun. The two 203mm howitzers can both draw a bead on it, as can the SU-152. If the Germans win turn 3 initiative, I think maybe the machinegun guys should run and hide somewhere.

In the center, I consolidated my hold on the Office Building and began firefighting with the Germans in the Train Station. I didn't want to put too much of my infantry in harm's way because the Germans will get their reinforcement platoons on turn 3 and I wanted to see where those guys go first.

In the north, the Germans simply tried to draw things out. The Volkssturm guys up there managed to infiltrate away from the my assault squads and avoid melee – but they had to retreat into an exposed cellblock location of the prison in order to do it. They will likely get shot to bits in turn 3. They’re going to lose the prison, of course, but it’s more a question of how long they can hold out and how many of my squads they draw into the fight and away from other locations.



Turn 3

Sometimes it’s a bad day to be in Berlin, as the 3_End photo probably demonstrates. What my honorable German opponent thought would be a steely defense of the Customs Yard pretty much crumbled in the space of a single turn.

His German paras holding the Yard had largely been hunkered down, holding off to cover the approaches to the complex with opportunity fire. I suspected that the Germans doing anything down there but holding their fire in anticipation of a Soviet assault would be a mistake. And I was right.

It was one of those ‘slippery slope’ chain-reaction things. All of my Russian tank fire on the Yard defenders was pretty ineffective, although I did manage to get BOT on a couple of positions that would improve my chances on turn 4. I was thinking about being patient for a couple of turns to let the big guns do their thing, but then I realized I had a Red assault platoon (three squads and a leader) in the orchard south of the Office Building that could actually move under the bridge and into the building below the rubble of the former machinegun nest without taking any opportunity fire until they were under cover of the masonry building.

So that’s what I did. Of course, the German para squad they moved adjacent to fired at them – but a single squad (even of paras) doesn’t really have enough firepower to score much of a result against steely Slavic grunts under masonry cover (even with the shift reduced by assault movement). My guys took only a single step loss and were then in a position for a melee assault.

Plus, that expended about a third of the available opportunity fire that was covering the front of the Yard. A para squad has a good chance of shooting up attackers approaching across open ground – but coming at them through the buildings on their flank was bad news for them.



I pushed up a medium machinegun on the far left of the map, and that’s when the Germans experienced a ‘command failure’. One of the other German para squads shot at it. They inflicted a C1 result and the crew then flunked their morale check and broke – but that expended another potential defensive fire. That left one German squad able to cover the front, but I had two assault groups in position. So I sent them in. The first group of two rifle squads and a leader got shot up pretty good on the way in when the Germans rolled up a jolly C4 result. That flipped both squads. The leader and one squad broke, but the Germans were then out of opportunity fire. Three Russian submachinegun squads (those lovely 8-2-8 guys) then charged in with a leader. They didn’t even have to get into a melee; their assault fire wiped out the German squad they were going to attack. In the 3_End photo you see the results of the German debacle: A second squad wiped out in melee and the surviving para squad withdrawing to a spot where the Russian tank guns can’t shoot at it. Bad day to be a German paratrooper indeed.



Endgame – turns 4, 5 and 6

After about a two week layoff, we finally got in a session to wrap up the scenario.

The accompanying digisnaps show the main positions after turns 4, 5 and 6. The Germans didn’t have enough of a toe-hold anywhere to give any help to their five counter-attacking squads of parachute troops. So the paras had to make their way into the Train Station and then figure out what to do. In order to prevent a Russian win, they have to contest occupation of at least two of the four major building complexes in the play area – the Customs Yard, the Prison, the Office Building and the Train Station.

The snappies tell the story in a nutshell. On turn 4, the paras moved into the Train Station as the remnants of a defending Volkssturm platoon fled from the approaching Russians. The lone squad of Reds in the Train Station had just used infiltration to engage and eliminate two broken VS squads.




On turn 5, the German paras managed to eliminate the over-enthusiastic Russian squad and then moved into a jumping off position for their final, bold attempt to contest a second building. Chances for a successful counter-attack were pretty slim – because with most of the rest of the German force eliminated the paras would have to leave enough behind to hold the Train Station.

As you can see in the End_5 snappie, my Russians pretty much had the Train Station ringed with infantry, assault guns and heavy weapons. Pretty desperate looking, although my flank near the prison appeared weak enough that we thought it might be fun to give it a try.




The End_6 snappie shows where we called it. The para platoon remaining in the Train Station delivered some punishment to the Reds in the Office Building, but got whacked by a blast from one of my SU-152s (thus the BOT marker on them). The second para platoon used smoke to cover the first part of their movement out of the Station, and moved to attempt a point-blank PanzerFaust shot on the SU-76. Their shot just missed, and they got blasted for their trouble.




So. With the most of the paras remaining in the Train Station sitting under a BOT from a 152 mm assault gun and the second para platoon fairly shredded and still outside of the prison, we decided to put the wraps on this one.

Nothing quite like a trip to the desert

My apologies for the slight interruption in this blog’s progress in detailing the fall of Berlin at the squad level. But everybody needs a vacation every once in a while – so we’re back and typing after a week-long visit to Arizona.

Of course, no trip to Arizona is complete without a visit to the Grand Canyon. So we trooped from Sedona up to the South Rim for a day and let Juanco chase after all of the wildlife he could spot. Here is a typical vacation moment as Junior Destructo Man tries to capture a squirrel.



Everything with four legs was fair game. He called them all “kit-kat”, since that’s what he calls the four-legged critter at home. The only one he actually managed to get his hands on, fortunately, was a rather well-behaved furry mop of a little dog. Both boy and dog survived the close encounter without a bruise or scratch.

The adventure included a Friday night trip to Chase Field, where we watched the Diamondbacks beat the Rockies. Nice ballpark, although I can do without the 118 degree summer heat in Phoenix. Needless to say, they didn’t turn off the air conditioning and roll back the stadium roof that night. It was still 100 outside when we walked back to the hotel (three blocks away) around 9:30. Any way you slice it, that’s just too damned hot.

ATS Berlin: Time out for a holiday

The battle for Berlin is underway on The Big Table – but there’s going to be a slight delay in the proceedings. The driving force behind the game – that being me – will be off on vacation for the next ten days.

Being a typical game geek, I’m planning to lug along at least one set of game rules for some light reading while I’m gone. I might even put into action my plan to take along a rules set for one of the Command at Sea games with the notion of actually playing a small game by plotting ship positions on a piece of graph paper. That’s pretty ambitious, though, so no promises there.

Last time I took a ‘real’ vacation and carried along a serious set of game rules, the whole project turned out pretty messy. I spent one morning at our condo in Princeville sitting out on the porch reading through the “Dirtside II” minis rules. I left them sitting on the table out there in the afternoon when we took off to play some golf and – as luck would have it – a windblown rainstorm swept down from Mt. Waialeale that afternoon and drenched everything. The drenching included our roofed-in back porch, so the rules got a solid soaking. I was able to eventually salvage everything into readable condition, but it wasn’t a happy sight.

I no longer leave valuable printed material sitting out. Yeah, yeah, we’re off to Sedona and it seldom comes a drenching there – but I know leaving something out where it could get wet would be the ultimate wargaming raindance.

This will be our first trip (since the trip back from Guatemala last November) with Junior Destructo Man. At nearly 16 months now, he’s quite a bit more mobile. So it will be, um, interesting to see how he takes to nearly 5 hours of air travel.

ATS Berlin: A look at Scenario 1

Strange Defeat has gone up on the shelf for now. Next on the table: Scenario 1 “Moabit Mayhem” from ATS Berlin: Red Vengeance. I’ve poked around at a couple of the Berlin scenarios in the past, but this time I’m keeping score.

A digisnap from the pre-game appears below. It’s the German setup for the scenario before flipping the weapons to the their FOW sides and applying any Full Cover markers. The Germans also get some reinforcements in the form of a parachute infantry platoon on turn three. The big white tile spacers on the map mark the scenario boundaries.




The Soviets mob onto the map from the west. In eight turns, they have to control three of the four buildings where the Germans are setup in order to win the game. They’ve got a horde of infantry, some assault guns and a couple of pieces of direct-firing artillery to work with.

Even for experienced ATS hands, the Berlin scenarios present some very special challenges. The urban landforms are more peculiar than those found in the various Stalingrad scenarios, for example, which means a thorough reading of the battlefield walkaround in the scenario book is extremely important. In scenario 1, there’s also an SSR that subjects any Russian unit within four hexes of the Spree to possible sniper fire (depending on LOS conditions).

The Germans here have chosen to contest a couple of the buildings with only Volksturm squads, which are generally pretty iffy in their performance. Defense of the warehouse along the river has been given to a parachute platoon, supported by a MMG. Defense of the railway station has also been leavened with some paras.

The basic idea is for the Volksturm defenders of the prison and what I’ll call the “office building” (J12) to delay the Soviets and inflict as many casualties as possible. The Germans need to hold or contest two of the four buildings by game’s end, and the two buildings where they’ll make their stand are the rail station and the customs yard.

If the Volksturm guys do their jobs, they should absorb enough of the initial assault to give the German reinforcements time to get into position. The para platoon that arrives on turn 3 can enter anywhere on the east edge, so they have some flexibility on where they’ll commit. They can reinforce the rail station easiest, so that’s a likely course of action. If the Reds quickly clear the prison but then get sloppy, the paras can counter-attack to take or contest that location. They might even be able to reinforce the customs yard, but that might prove tricky depending on how the Soviets can cover the approaches with opportunity fire.

Although the Germans have no tanks in this scenario, the Russian tanks just can’t go charging around the map. Two Volksturm tank-killer teams lurk on the map, and the German OOB also includes two panzerschrecks and six panzerfaust single-shot weapons.

The Red Army of Workers and Peasants have their work cut out for them.

Strange Defeat: One more try

A final look, for now, at Avalanche’s Strange Defeat, this time sans le chat. Managed to get in two games over the weekend.

The Germans won both games. I suspect in both cases that the Allies were over-aggressive, but finding a successful strategy for them is difficult.

In the first game, the Allies adopted a more spread-out approach. Their defenses deployed fairly dispersed, mostly one unit per hex with a few of the “AA” deployment group added for stiffening where allowed.

The dispersed deployment keeps the German armor from trying to ‘ooze’ the French defense, but it I think it opens up the Allies to defeat in detail. My thoughts on it are that the best chance the Allies have of inflicting step losses is when they’re defending. A good German player will always have an armor unit of some type stacked with his spearheads to gain the ‘Allies attack at half strength against armor stacks’ advantage – which means French counter-attacks frequently just bounce off.

Also, the bucket o’dice combat system punishes small stacks by making them easy to overwhelm. A German attack that scores three ‘hits’ will eliminate a single unit (two step) stack, but the same attack can be absorbed with a single step loss and a two-hex retreat by a larger stack.

At any rate, the dispersed defense seemed only to delay things. The Germans sort of stupidly pressed a frontal attack against the Belgians along the Dyle, which cost them some unnecessary infantry casualties. The Germans ended up bagging them eventually, but suffered from a few French/British counter-attacks in the process. Most of the BEF evacuated via Operation Dynamo, although once again the courageous French Gen. Piroux and his boys got whacked in the process.

Axis forces coming out of the Ardennes chopped up the dispersed defense facing them with a series of armor-led blasts that drove to Chalons by turn four. The Germans opted to not attack any of the Maginot forts, reckoning that picking up three or four additional Political Points wasn’t really worth running the risk of facing the defender advantage (hit on 5 or 6) of the forts.

On turn 5 the BEF evacuated via Dynamo and the French were down to a hand full of units defending in front of Paris. The PP index stood at -23 with little prospect of improvement for the French, which pretty much ended things.

In the second game, the French opted for a slightly different defense approach. Where possible they stacked defending units in groups of four or five steps. This left a few hexes uncovered except by ZOC, but it also forced the Germans to attack into stacks that would be rolling 9-12 dice against their panzer spearheads.

It worked for a little bit, I think. The Germans decided to take out the northern-most of the Maginot fortifications, which the Allies had stacked with 6 steps of defenders (two French fortress units and the BEF 51st Division). Both sides rolled a bunch of hits. One German infantry corps was wiped out and two more reduced – but the Germans rolled seven hits with some like 24 dice and wiped out all three units in one go. That was something like an 8 PP swing right there. Argh.

The Germans were loathe to commit panzer/motorized units to attacks against the bigger stacks without infantry support, and the jockeying around left them open to a couple of counter-attacks. The Allies managed to set up one good counter-attack in Belgium, which fizzled when they rolled 14 dice and got only 1 hit.

The turning point, I think, was a large French counterattack just west of Sedan. The Germans had driven Guderian and two panzer corps forward without infantry support, and the French managed to put them out of supply. But that attack failed even more miserably. They rolled no hits on 18 friggin’ dice, while the defending Germans rolled two hits with 6 dice. Had that attack succeeded, I think the Allies would have had a chance at winning the game. But, c’est la guerre. The counter-attacking British in Belgium then got chopped to bits and Ie called the game after turn 5 with the PP index standing at -26 and set to plunge even lower.

I think that will wrap up my investigation of Strange Defeat for now. More games beg for table space. Details shortly.