Twilight in the East - Now with pictures

After a week delay due to 'real life' getting in the way, Club Dave was able to continue playing 1914:Twilight in the East with the Tannenberg scenario. This time our brave AWB reporter managed to bring along the awesome might of the Pentax... and promptly screw up all the photos which will have to go down as, quote, 'Not my best work.'
Anyway, to recap, gaming had finished half way through turn 2 with the Germans to move. Let's have a brief look at the front before we begin.

Here on the Second Army front things are developing slowly. The Second Army has only just activated under the scenario rules and not really advanced to any great extent as yet. Of note is the large railway less areas on the Russian side of the boarder and rubbish looking terrain they are being forced to advance and trace supply through. On the German side the 20th Corps looks both powerful and lonely.
North of the army boundary we see the German 3rd Reserve division starting to get monstered. There is no way this unit can stand up to a Russian corps and is soon to withdraw, first to the NW and then onto the fortress under the dark brown objective marker in the lakes area.

A lot more fighting in this area as the Russian 1st Army engages the bulk of the German 8th. Mostly minor results so far with the exception of the Russian 27th division has just been roughly handled by the German 1st Corps and forced to retire.
The game is one of limited intel and stacks are not allowed to be examined. What this means is the white edges of the loss markers can't clearly be read in these picture nor can the 'players eyes only' off map tracks that show the divisions Combat Effectiveness ratings (morale if you like). If we could see the CE track we would note that Russian 27th was forced to drop two CE levels (drop four and you are really in big trouble) which is probably a much more significant lose then the steps or hex retreats.
The Russians at this stage were forced to advance before many of their divisions were fully mobilised, so many of the divisions have already started with a significant amount of hits. Also under scenario rules, the sub standard commander of the Russian Cav Corps has movement restrictions in play, meaning the massive mounted advantage is a lot harder to bring into play then would first appear.

Here we come to the end of the night, which means the Germans have had two full moves plus one reaction (half move) and the Russians one with two reactions as well as six rounds of combat being fought.
(Game turn is A moves, B react moves, A attacks if allowed, B attacks if allowed, swap sides. Attacking is voluntary but can result in what side A hoped was a local attack rapidly escalating.)
Russian 6th Corps has been making heavy weather of forcing the gap between the lakes in the top right of the picture. The Germans have managed to reinforce the original small blocking force but the Russians managed to, at 9:1 odds, to find the extremes of the bell curve during the first assault and are hence rather annoyed not to have cleared that rather useful rail line as yet.
Meanwhile in the middle the Russian 1st Division has just been roughly handled. It had mildly over extended it's advance during the Russian movement phase and the nearby German 20th Corps moved forward to engage it. The first German attack was relatively minor but the second prepared (as part of a players movement (not reaction) they may spend MPs to place 'prepared attack' markers which give column shifts and prevent the enemy from retiring during reaction movement) worked them over, caused significant step losses plus CE drops and a retreat. The Germans, slightly smugly, have taken no loses.
The problems for the Germans here is there are rather a lot of Russians. The Russians are next to move and the only real restriction is the rubbish rail/supply network. Reinforcements dragged from the France are not due for a long time so what the German player (AWB in this game) sees is what he has to play with.

Meanwhile, with the 1st Army we have red font to both hopefully provide better contrast and also reflect the massive mutual thumping that has been going on.
The southern German flank was found a bit hanging and is starting to fold back. Also of note is the formation of level 1 trenches in the German line. The game has four levels of trenches and at this stage of the war, armies are restricted to levels one and two. They are a mixed blessing as the games artillery factors allow for heavy and high angle weapons. Attack with both of them (which most first line divisions come with as standard) and you get to cancel out the column shifts the trenches normally offer. They do however offer some useful DRM for CE checks as well as a minor chance on the CRT to cancel a forced retreat.
There has been some mauling happening on this front. The Russian 20th Corps that at one stage was on the northern flank has come off worse and forced back with some painful combat loses to go with their non mobilised units. They are currently under that largish Russian stack.
The German 1st Corps (red corps marker, top division under the northern most trench with other division directly south) have been handling the combat reasonably well. The 17th Corps however has mildly over extended. Combat pushed back the Russian flank and, in order to put pressure on the Russian 25th division, advanced.
There the combined strength of three Russian divisions struck a counter and the advance now seems a 'bad idea.' Remember the next move is Russian so another assault against the exposed Germans is probably expected.
In the south the 3rd Res has fallen back onto the fortress and feels reasonably safe about being able to block the Russian corps facing it.
As the Germans it is difficult to decide if it time to smile or not. Strengths are 7 divisions to 9 with the German divisions typically being slightly stronger. The Russians have probably had 4 divisions here bloodied to the German 1 and if the Germans remain here then 1st Army are going to find it hard to continue to advance.
However, as mentioned before, until the reinforcements from France arrive, this is it for the Germans and Russian Second Army isn't just going to sit still and smile.
This is a rather good game and one that AWB is mildly annoyed has taken so long to play face to face. Combat and the positioning becomes surprisingly tactical. Withdrawing is worthwhile. Feinting forward is worthwhile. Pressuring a flank is worthwhile, and all are also risky. The combat system has a massive bell curve. A good looking attack can produce no satisfaction while a risky one can suddenly force enemy to retire with loses.
Most enjoyable.

Plan 1919 and J.F.C. Fuller

Considering AWB's mildly unhealthy obsession with armoured vehicles it comes as a mild surprise to discover AWB has never actually had a detailed look at the famous 'Plan 1919' for massed armoured offensives.
For those also not up on their background reading, a nice link can be found HERE
As can be seen, no level of epic epicness has been held back by Mr Fuller in this plan and, contrary to what AWB used to think, this is not a suggestion for new tactics, but a grand war winning masterstroke of a plan all in one go. For those not able to read the link here is a brief summary:
- Find about 5000 tanks
- Select a 90 mile section of front and 'by the inducement of visible preparations' invite four or five German armies to set up in this area.
- Without warning, unleash fleets of a tank type yet to be invented that will drive top speed some 20miles into the rear areas to disrupt the various German HQs whilst bombing anything that moves with the airforce.
- Then, once confusion has set in, have the rest of the Allied armies, with massive tank support, attack over a 50 mile front.
- Advance 20miles a day for seven days.
- Crush enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women
- Win war
- Receive Knighthood
Pretty straightforward really, why didn't people think of that in September 1914?
Ignoring for a fact just how a barbarian like Conan actually managed to get a word like lamentation into his casual day to day vocabulary, why have very few people ever sat back and considered that Fuller was ever so slightly barking mad?
Let's have a quick look at some of the more important points here shall we?
First up, this plan calls for some 5000 tanks. As these are just the numbers envisioned for combat, you can probably assume the staff doing the more detailed planning would probably request a tad more to allow for training as well as replacements to maintain the tempo of a seven day advance. Let us say an extra 10% for want of a number to give us 5500.
Now to give us a bit of an idea, British tank production during the entire war was roughly 150 MkIs, 50 MkIIs, 50 MkIIIs, 1220 MkIVs, 400 MkVs, 1 MkVII and 200 Medium A 'Whippets', or about 2100 or so. Now while Plan 1919 was considered to be an Allied offensive and some of the production was to be shared by the French and Americans, that is still a mildly large amount of tanks to be built in the 12 months between when Fuller wrote his first proposal to the time when one assumes the attacks were going to go in.
Okay, a production problem. No doubt the wheels of industry can provide so let us move on.
Next, a 90 mile section of front. To give a sense of scale the BEF sector of the front in 1918 before the August offensives was about 50 miles, so when one talks about a 90 mile section of the Western Front, they are effectively saying 'most of it'.
Not in itself that stupid a sense of scale, but needs to be taken in context with the claims that Fuller is the father of 'Blitzkrieg'. Now in Fuller's defence, 'Blitzkrieg' is such a vaguely defined concept that some historians dispute it even existed as a stand alone tactic, but in general (vague) terms it is accepted to involve punching deep into the enemies rear areas with mechanised forces on a narrow front using speed and firepower... not advancing with your entire army in a 90 mile wide mass.
Anyway, Fuller is aiming big as you don't get to hear lamentations by aiming small. What is interesting is the casual assumption that the Germans will politely agree to form up on their side of the field, an, one assumes, then do nothing while these 5000 medium and heavy tanks set up.
Now before we get too far ahead, we need to have a basic look at just what was a 'trench line' at this stage of the war.
This is a slightly tricky subject as each major nation had a different style of digging in that of course evolved as the war went on. In general terms in about 1916 the German lines were relatively shallow but densely held. The down side to this is this placed large amounts of troops on the front where they ran the realistic risk of being grown down and destroyed by massed artillery. German defensive tactics (again generalising) evolved to having less troops in the front and having more available to counter attack. As a result the positions started becoming very deep. As in 9 or so miles deep.
They weren't constant wall to wall pill boxes and endless barbed wire and during the 100 Days Allied troops discovered that once you were in the defensive belt, there was actually a reasonable amount of room to tactically move around and British cavalry, despite expectations, managed to use their mobility to get out of the way of anything that had too much firepower and were surprisingly successful.
Which brings us nicely to another point. If equipped with a fast reliable tank like the planned Medium D (the new design that was going to do the surprise breakthroughs) then an armoured force could possibly be rather effective rampaging round inside this defensive belt, IF such a tank existed.
Hard truth was it didn't in 1918. It didn't in 1919 despite the best hopes of designers and truth be told, probably didn't really exist in 1939 either. Fuller's plan envisioned these Mediums driving flat out for about 2 hours to cover the 20 miles or so to trash the German HQs and mechanically, even before we allow for the fact people might be shooting at them as well, tanks could not do that in this period.
Remember these Mediums in the HQ hunting parties were to do so without warning, which we assume involves no pre bombardment and only the airforces for support. One assumes that Fuller was working on the idea that their speed would just allow them to run straight over the front line and be deep into the rear before anyone noticed.
Maybe just SLIGHTLY optimistic.
Remember this is a plan put forward in 1918 for next years offensive. Also remember there would be fighting, probably with tanks, in the remainder of the year and both sides were going to learn from this. Also remember stage 2 of the master plan involves encouraging the Germans to commit to this area of the front.
Is it not logical to assume the Germans may start constructing anti tank defenses as part of their overall defensive belt? Fuller allows no infantry in these HQ Hunter groups so if the Germans started to evolve their tactics into creating mini 'tank proof' fortresses in the towns and villages (and fighting in November 1917 implies that is exactly what they would do) then Fuller's Mediums might be in trouble.
Another interesting logic point is that Fuller, in describing the destruction his HQ Hunters and air support are going to be doing, specifically requests communications are to be spared. Once the chaos starts he wants the reports to be transmitted freely up and down the front for morale reasons. However since his plan is to remove the HQs, one does mildly wonder just who is going to be actually passing on all these messages of panic.
Once this has happened and the brains of the German armies have been removed (Fuller allows 5 Mediums for each German Divisional HQ and 20 for Corps and Army level HQs), the rest of the Allied armies were to attack across the 90 mile front in four separate thrusts each about 10 to 12 mile wide with the aim of cutting out the 10 mile or so chucks of German front between these four thrusts that is now completely out of command, unable to react and ready to collapse. Fuller mentions pinning them if required with artillery, which is never a completely foolish tactic, assuming you have enough artillery to go around after making all these new tanks of course which is a point we will get back to in closing.
Arms other then tanks are not we regarded by Fuller. 'Infantry on their feet will be next to useless,' and will need their own mechanical transport, which although it is not mentioned, may mean armoured personal carriers. Just add them to the 5500 tanks we need then shall we? Their role is basically to make sure the rear and new captured areas stay rear and captured while the Mediums advance off into the east watching their enemies driven before them.
Cavalry is described as useful, but only for the first few days as after that all their mounts will be dead. Spoken like a true tank man really as the results during the 100 Days proved this wrong and in many cases the horses were delayed by being attached to the slower moving armour. However since having a friendly unit perform much better then expected is always a good thing we will skip over the further horse based discussion and go straight to aircraft.
Aircraft in Fuller's brave new battlefield are cast in the role of replacement cavalry. They, as well as maintaining air superiority one assumes although it is not mentioned, will zip between the armoured units, transferring messages and commanders, scouting around providing close tactical fire support for the armour and bring supplies. While supplying from the air was used during WW1, the scale of supplying entire armoured thrusts, as opposed to dropping fresh machine gun ammo to advanced infantry units, does start to excite the imagination. Given the relatively small useful payload of your average period biplane, it is probably safe to say that to provide useful fuel, ammo and water (those radiators aren't going to top up themselves) for a single tank would require 4 to 5 aircraft. Now since the total HQ Hunters group, which would be the units most likely needing air resupply, includes some 790 tanks, even allowing for flying multiple sorties a day you are going to be needing about 2000 aircraft JUST to supply these tanks. If we are expected to supply the other 880 heavy tanks in the first assault wave then does that mean another 2000 supply aircraft? Plus another 2000 to supply the 880 heavy tanks in the second assault wave? Fuller asks for 90 battalions of tanks but wants aircraft to run messages between the unit commanders. Even at one aircraft per battalion that is another 90 planes and that is before the pure fighters and tactical bombers and the ones that are doing the deep recon, the contact patrols and spotting for the guns. True, the RAF apparently according to Wikipedia had some 20,000 aircraft when is was formed from the RFC and the RNAS. However, as the RFC is listed as 150 squadrons and the RNAS 17 (21?) and each of these squadrons was not 100 aircraft strong, it is probably safe to say that 'aircraft owned' compared to 'aircraft in operational service' were two completely different things and the 170 or so squadron RAF was unlikely to have been big enough to support this 1919 in the way intended without a significant upgrade.
Which sort of brings us nicely to the main argument that Fuller was just a tad loopy in his grand dream. Just exactly HOW much resources are we needing here?
That is some 5000 plus tanks, enough artillery to achieve sufficient density over a 90 mile front and maybe 7500 aircraft. That is a lot of stuff. So either your plan is completely unrealistic as the Allied industries would never be able to support that sort of rapid growth, or, if they could, then effectively any remotely conservative attack plan with that sort of massive material support is going to be successful anyway. Even if one was to lose half the assaulting tank force each day from combat and breakdowns (a not unrealistic assumption given the vehicles of the day), on day 4 you are still attacking with more armour then Cambrai.
Fuller, in short, was a dreamer and a dreamer with broad generalisations. He assumed his 1919 tanks would be magnificent new machines of impressive performance. He claimed motorised supply could operate without roads or rail. He wrote off the other service arms and assumed defensive tactics and weapons would not develop to counter his babies. Unfortunately for him very little of that ended up being true.
History has been kind to him over his 1919 plans. Actually considering how chummy he was with the British Union of Fascists between the wars it might be said that history has been kind to him over a few other things as well. He is claimed to be a visionary who lead the stuffy horse and musket era oldies into the 20th century, yet the concept of raiding deep into the enemies rear areas and forcing them to retreat or otherwise react without actually bringing them to battle is nothing new. He compares his ideas for HQ Hunting (which, just to clarify, is a AWB's term, not his) are heavily compared to shooting a man in the head instead of slowly giving him cuts. An interesting visual if one ignores they fact that unlike a man, an army can continue to thrash around violently after a bullet between the eyes as well as, if given time, having the ability of growing a new head. Considering Fuller intended full RAF support for his Mediums it may have been a better metaphor to have the bombers throw sand in the eyes and kept the Mediums for the more useful task of throwing their arms around the man's legs and pulling him to the ground.
Fuller was also one of the prime supporters for the all tank army. Visionary yes and looking ahead from the available tech into what could be happening in the future.
Pity then he was actually wrong and pure anything formations end up being significantly weaker then a combined arms group.
He was wrong as well on how the other arms could continue to advance on the then current battlefield. Tanks were used during the August offensives that gave the 'Black Day' of the German Army, but those numbers soon plunged as mechanical support was unable to keep up with damage and breakdown. It was the older service arms that did the bulk of the advancing in the 100 Days and it was the 100 Days that ended up convincing the Germans there was no coming back. Plan 1919 was never tested because the largely non tank armies Fuller believed were unable to advance had forced victory in 1918. Had the Germans held on through the winter it is extremely unlikely production of the Allies could have filled Fuller's Christmas wish list and while the renewed spring offensives in 1919 would have involved tanks, the simply logistical realities involved would have probably meant the grand plan owed more to the lessons of Amiens then the dreams of Fuller.

TV - Defiance = Fallout Lite?

AWB has been watching a bit of Defiance lately.
For those not in the know, Defiance is a SciFi tv show as shown on the cable channel Syfy and developed by Rockne S. O'Bannon, a man who lists the wonderful FarScape on his CV.
The premise is simple.
Alien arc fleet arrives and is embarrassed to discover Earth actually has a population.
Oops.
Tensions rise.
War breaks out.
Terraforming engines run out of control.
Peace stumbles along.
Cats and Dogs living together.
As you do.
The other gimmick is that the TV show is apparently linked in with the MMORPG of the same name where apparently actions in the game can effect story lines in the TV show. Ooooo!
AWB must confess to a LARGE amount of cynicism about this claim and seriously doubts a multi million dollar TV show will ever let itself be dictated in any way shape or form by a bunch of suicide gankers running around teabagging Noobs.
(Although, as a post modern piece of metafiction, a TV show deliberately set inside a MMORPG world may be amusing, especially if they make a few of the characters Korean based Gold Miners who are just in it for real world cash...)
So, AWB has watched a few episodes and to be honest, isn't really all that impressed. The feel here is that the show wants to be Fallout. Both have societies rebuilding between bouts of tribal factional fighting with mixtures of homemade, pre war and bleeding edge advantaged tech. The Bioman the show's lead hero fights in the pilot was so similar visually to a Super Mutant Nightkin, right down to the self mutilation scarring/serial number across it's chest that AWB was actually majorly disappointed when it didn't start arguing with itself and fire up a Stealth Boy.
Unfortunately that is about as far as it goes and there are not blue/yellow numbered jumpsuits or two headed battle cattle. There are also no aliens.
Okay there 'technically' are aliens, but they are either dialog less background dressing or latex headed humans with different hair. The major one are effectively what you would get if you ever decided to dip a goth in a hell of a lot of really strong bleach, and the others are rangas with latex nose bridges and funky contact lenses. There is also a semi cyborg race doctor character who you half expect to suddenly come out and rant "Dammit Jim, I'm an Alien, not a Caricature!" which frankly would make the character a lot more original and interesting.
Visuals aside, they are all humans, even down to the sweet little romantic sub plot between the son of the lead NegaGoth and daughter of the human mine boss.
Let's step back for a moment and muse on just how 'strange' that is. If, in the non sci fi 'real world', one was to hook up say with a sheep... well... we think we all know where that joke is going. However, at least it could be said that both humans and sheep are at least both mammals from the SAME planet. Love may conquer all, but most Xenobiologists agree that it does very little to ensure you and your new life partner from another planet have interconnecting dangly bits or even that you blood isn't mutually toxic.
On the plus side to this issue, at least the show is Syfy and not HBO or not only would we be seeing a lot of alien love, but a screenful of Alien Space Boobies each week as well.
In summary this show has clearly aimed high, and credit for trying that as the investment to set up a complete alien based SciFi show cannot be cheap. It is also a show that wants to be taken seriously. This is perhaps the biggest disappointment as to AWB at least the show has failed to make orbit. It is filled with humans with funny hair and voices instead of real aliens and mildly predicable plots (so far at least) that could be lifted and transferred in and out of just about any other TV show. Strangely, or maybe most disappointingly, O'Bannon's previous show, FarScape, a show that almost listed batshitcrazy as it's mission statement (as well as a ship, a living ship...) managed to provide us with aliens that we believed were aliens. FarScape gave us a plant as a main character FFS!
Defiance, however, just really comes across as a bit bland.

TV - The Boffin, The Builder and The 3pdr Muzzle Loading Smoothbore

With Dr Who FINALLY redeeming itself for the year after a string of frankly pretty bland offerings, AWB sits down again on a Sunday night to watch more liberties being taken with history in the name of light entertainment.
This ep of The Boffin The Builder and The Bombardier, which is apparently ep6 for those trying to follow the semi random screening order they seem to be shown in, has proved a slightly tricky one for AWB to review. On the plus side, the show finally shows some wargame figures, thereby completely vindicating AWB's decision to follow this little show for the last 8 weeks. A table full of 25s are used about mid point through the screening to give the new viewers a bit of an idea of what was actually happening in the battle they were describing, although points must be deducted as AWB is a firm believer that wargaming figures look silly with a gloss varnish.
More points are lost because the ep basically revolves around an obscure little period of European history at the start of the 19th Century that frankly is poorly documented, not very popular and of little interest to anyone. Napoleon? Never heard of him.
Okay, AWB concedes that some people MAY have heard of Napoleon, but would rather study tanks. That is the AWB mission statement and AWB will be sticking to it.
So, frantically googling to brush up on the background details, we push on with the review.
Basically our gang have got themselves a 3pdr of some sort to play with and are going to use the 1807 Battle of Friedland as an excuse to shoot it. Friedland, to paraphrase, was a battle between Russia and France that the French won and forced the Treaties of Tilsit and ended the War of the Fourth Coalition. The premise for the show was that Senarmont, then a corps artillery commander, established the principles of modern artillery by concentrating fire on a single target.
Now, as confessed before, AWB is not a shining depository of Napoleonic knowledge but some of the assumptions made here do seem very generalised and mildly misleading. A better informed description of what Senarmont did during this battle can probably be found HERE and since anything AWB is about to say was discovered from that website anyway, let us just give credit where due and direct people to the link.
What does seem to have been skipped over is the stage of the battle at which Senarmont did his party trick. The battle involved the Russians crossing over the river in order to try and smash an isolated French force and ending up being dragged into a major battle as the rest of the French army arrived. Towards evening the Russians were forced back into a constricted space with their backs to the river and it was then when Senarmont advanced his batteries and fired into the massed targets. Of minor detail not mentioned on TBCubed was the fact that Senarmont didn't do this alone, but had a battalion of infantry and four regiments of dragoons to cover him and from the accounts read by AWB, the Russians were unable or unwilling to actively counter the move forward. This sort of implies to AWB that the true conclusion to be made is not that massed firepower is a great idea (which AWB doesn't necessarily disagree with) but that aggressive use of artillery was possible or perhaps more importantly, aggressive use of a combined arms battle group was a very good and effective idea.
TBCubed rounded off the ep by showing in simple terms what happens if you break and attempt to run in the face of cavalry by having Will (the buttmonkey character) be chased across the paddock by a suitably dressed horsewoman with a big sword. (Spoiler - if you run, you die...). What did grate a bit for AWB was the casual way mounted troops were described as 'opportunists' of the battlefield and thereby reducing the reputation of an entire arm into some sort of casuals who rather then being able to dictate decisions on the battlefield, merely reacted to them.
Also rising a brief eyebrow was the attempt to explain the concept of Fog of War, a situation not actually done badly at all by our Boffin presenter, but by the war the phrase actually seems to have come full circle. Credited by most (or at least by AWB) to be a term invented by von Clausewitz to describe the literal fog produced on the battlefield by massed blackpowder weapons that reduced visibility and increased confusion, the term is so well understood by the current generation of computer/console gamers to mean limited intelligence that our Boffin had to explain that the fog of war was in this period literal in a strange case of the origin of the word coming full circle. Well, AWB was amused by it at least...
So, how much do we enjoy this episode?
Big points for showing how a muzzle loaded smooth bore cannon was operated and what a canister blast was like, points for showing the dangers of trying to run in the face of mounted troops and double plus points for the wargaming figures, but again, minus points for the massive generalisations that keep getting made that seem, to AWB at least, like they could have easily been tightened up without losing the attention of the intended audience.
Oh and massive points loss for the ABC for still not having a remotely useful supporting website.

Art vs Art

Being out for a while but only just starting to come to the attention of the English speaking world, but in April a group of flash mobbers did a live reenactment of Rembrandt's 'The Company of captain Frans Banning Cocq and lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch preparing to march out', or as most people know it, 'Night Watch'.
In a vain attempt to link this to wargaming, AWB would like to point out that as it was painted in 1642, Night Watch gives us a good reference to FoG-R army from Book 1, 'Later Eighty Years War Dutch.'
Anyway, the video can be viewed on YouTube HERE
This entire performance was funded by the firm IMG to promote the reopening of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam where the painting is displayed, which can give us an idea not only what the Dutch regard as art, but also what the private sector consider good value for artistic money.
As a comparison, if you wish to see what the Australian public sector regard as good value for $330,000 of taxpayer's money, you can have a look HERE
In a vain attempt to link SkyWhale, to well, anything, this Eldritch Horror will cost you 1d10/1d100 sanity when first seen, and, in a bonus attack vs Australians that cannot be saved or blocked, it will inflict a growing sense of despair concerning the national capital.

Tannenberg - Finally playing Twilight in the East

After some false starts, the Wednesday night group down at Club Dave have finally managed to get some serious counter pushing and actually start the Battle of Tannenberg scen in the GMT Games monster, '1914: Twilight in the East'.
As hard core blog fans may recall, some weeks ago an attempt was made to play this game using the training type scenario to blood the newer players. Unfortunately, real life got in the way somewhat, and Scen 1 was canned, cleared and Tannenberg was setup and started. This scen, as the name suggests, is the Russian First and Second Armies advancing into Germany at the start of the war only to be seriously mauled by the German Eight. It is a one map scenario, uses about a third of the counters and runs for about a third of the total game turns. In short, it is probably about a ninth of the total experience of the Grand Campaign(tm).
To recap briefly, the Twilight in the East system uses a turn sequence of A Moves, B React Moves, A Attacks, B Attacks, Swap sides. Reaction moves are at half movement points and the other big advantage is that during the 'A Moves' phase that player can spend MPs for units in position to declare a 'Prepared Attack'.
These 'black attacks' (as the markers placed are black compared to the white 'normal' attack markers) have the three advantages of a column shift in combat, VP to the attack (as at this time in the war everyone loved a brave attacker and engaging the enemy was the standing order of the month) and perhaps more importantly, it locks the target units into the combat.
This last bit is more important then it sounds. Remember the sequence is A Moves, B Reacts, so if B isn't ready to fight they may shuffle back. Alternatively if they are ready to fight they may bring up their friends as after A declares and resolves all attacks, B gets to do the same thing with anything still adjacent.
What this means in the game is a surprisingly interesting shuffling and feinting as the opposing armies approach each other. Unit scale for the most part is the division and for both sides the Army was typically eight or so infantry divisions plus some cavalry divisions. The Russians were not fully ready to advance at this stage and so are faced with the trade off between getting their supply train in order and getting stuck into the Germans while they are still somewhat spread out.
The other interesting thing that may differ for most boardgamers is the style of the combat system. The units are divisions and under the time scale, did not normally get smashed within the period of a game turn. Hence each unit has several steps, with most divisions having about 10. They also each have an off map tracking chart for their 'Combat Effectiveness' (think 'morale'). What this means is most divisions can go head to head for several turns until the unlucky one collapses, and when they do finally collapse, it isn't pretty for the owner. Judging just when to pull back to recover before this collapse happens is clearly designed to be part of the game and show all indication as to being tricky to master.
The group managed to get one and a half turns completely during the gaming night which included a full set up and minor counter sorting, a 'are we ready yet? Right, what happens now?' last minute rule re-check and a partial reset and remove after it was suddenly realised the Russians could and should have moved their army level supply depots during their first move.
Based on this play speed AWB predicts about 4 weeks of solid gaming to finish this scenario.

Other People's Publications - Medieval Wafare magazine

In a previous post, AWB happily poked fun and implied errors in a bit of free to air TV and in doing so managed to write a review that takes longer to read then the show takes to watch.
However in all honesty, and you readers do not really know how hard it is for AWB to actually confess this, the knowledge of the Medieval Period for AWB has to be at best 'passing.'
This in no way detracts from the interest in the period and AWB would like to name drop a few publications that may be of interest.
First is Medieval Warfare, a bi-monthly magazine published by Karwansaray Publishers in the Netherlands.
They have a website, http://www.karwansaraypublishers.com, also publish an 'Ancient Warfare' and a 'Wargames, Soldiers and Strategy' magazine and AWB picked his copy up over the counter for $A14 from his trusty local gaming shop.
The tone is more that of the scholarly historian and hence may be a heavy going for the casual fan but their production standards are very high and they include some very impressive painted art work of medieval types beating the snot out of each other.
Not attempting to be seen as shamelessly promoting what is after all a commercial venture, but AWB believes these magazines are not as well known as they could be and probably well worth a look for any serious historical gamers.
Second, and getting back to the previous post about Trebuchets, we have 'A History of the Early Medieval Siege c.450-1200' by Gareth Williams. Now AWB does not own this book and interest only comes from the review published in the magazine mentioned above. Indeed having re-read the review post publishing the most recent TV review, AWB may be forced to confess that some of the generalisations made in that post were, ummm, wrong, but hopefully those errors will soon be buried, forgotten and denied.
Again, sight unseen by this blog, but given the recent siege themes, a book that may be of interest.
Of completely unrelated interest, it should be known that the spell checking function of 'blogger.com', a software system designed so Mister and Misses Public can create and publish their own blogs easily, does not actually recognise the word 'blog'. Go figure.

TV - Boffins under Siege - The Trebuchet

Another Sunday and another night of light entertainment on TV as AWB current favourite free to air programming came and went. All good fun, unlike that rubbish Neil Gaiman wrote via twitter just before.
Curiously the ABC lists this ep as number 7 and last weeks (the Spencer Rifle) is listed as 8. No real idea what happened to number 6. Minor problems I am sure but if you are trying to follow at home good luck to you.
This week (or last weeks depending on numbering system) our three heroes from The Boffin The Builder and The Bombardier go all medieval on us and discuss the premier pre gunpowder siege weapon, the Trebuchet. The good news here is that like last week (or next week if you prefer) the trio don't try too hard by making bold statements they can't actually prove. The framework of the programme was that the Trebuchet evolved during the so called 'Dark Ages' and the so called much more clever Romans never used them. So, ignoring the slip that the 'Dark Ages' were actually before the 'Medieval' period where the Trebuchet was actually used, the question was raised as to was this actually an effective and well designed weapon or just a hack job a mere shadow of what the Romans could have built.
Having clearly blown their budget on all those 303 rifles, the team fail to build us a full scale behemoth and instead drag out what seems to be a commercial of the shelf working model about one metre high. Jokes aside that is fair enough, they clearly do have a budget to work within but one does have to wonder why they have 'The Builder' on the programme when he often doesn't actually seem to build anything. More on the 'characters' later.
They then fling some oranges and a toy cow at a small cardboard castle before blowing it up. As you do.
Conclusions, it was a very effective weapon that could do exactly what was said on the box.
Problems really are with the casual history. No weapon exists in a vacuum, and one of the reasons why there was an evolutionary break in the development of siege weapons from Roman to Medieval times was that for a great hunk of history people stopped building decent fortifications. It is often forgotten that it was the Normans that brought castles to the British Isles and those were the much smaller Motte and Bailey style and even then, most of the first ones were made of wood. Catapults in the Roman sense were largely forgotten because most defencive works could be more easily taken using a bunch of big hairy men with some homemade ladders. The other point of interest with the historical period was that there was no real 'Engineering Class' of skilled siege specialists passing down their skills from master to apprentice. Siege, while common, was more often a case of camping outside and hoping they surrendered before your own troops got bored and attempting to knock down the walls was actually relatively uncommon. The skills to make siege equipment it seems were no so much magically unlocked like a computer game tech tree, as rediscovered and forgotten time and time again over hundreds of years and it is most likely that the people knocking down the walls with siege engines were the same skilled master craftsman who had used their knowledge of levers, pulleys and woodwork to build the great walls in the first place.
Still, a lot of history to compress into 10 minutes so let us start to muse on the shows format instead.
This ep re-introduced the character of 'Big Mama', a woman 'in her prime' who has been used before to explain to these three overgrown boys the hard physics of their problems. One guesses that this character was introduced to play up on the 'men and sheds' social stereotype where no matter how many tools a man has, he is still just a big boy trying to impress his mates and only a woman really knows how to talk sense.
Which might actually be fine if this character actually got to talk some sense.
We are given a brief 'physics' lesson on how the Big T actually works by said Big Mama, and unfortunately most of what she says is crock. A Trebuchet is effectively a long arm rotating around a pivot. Now rotational velocity is the same at both ends and, if AWB remembers correctly from Uni days, is measured in radians per second. However, the further you move away from the centre of rotation, the faster the tangential velocity and in practical terms for us in this situation, the faster our big rock is flung. Of course the Trebuchet is also a balance lever. To get one end to go down, allowing for the mechanical advantage of the lever arm, it must be heavier then the other. So Trebuchet design is in reality a compromise between size of the counter balance, length of the arms, how far they are actually hoping to throw and how big they are prepared to build the thing in the first place. Having some mother figure sprout out some dross about ratios doesn't make it otherwise and is a small step away from technobabble.
This brings us back to actual dynamic of our trio within the show. Unlike say 'Mythbusters' where the hosts are effectively being themselves and just goofing it up, TBCubed are playing classic cliched roles. Why they have chosen to do this is open to ponder. A careful pausing of the credits has finally confirmed to AWB that the head writer is also the man playing 'The Boffin' and hence is must be assumed that he (John Concannon) does actually know a respectable amount of his history. However, instead of playing himself in a sort of Adam and Jamie Mythbusters dynamic, he instead takes the role of the bully. Tony, 'The Bombardier' is the thug enforcer character and Will 'The Builder' (who as we have pointed out earlier, often doesn't build anything) gets the role of the butt monkey the crueler pair keep around as their play thing. If 'Big Mama' is seen as the school teacher bringing the schoolboys back in line then the entire show develops a disturbing parallel to the worse of most people's schooling years.
Hmmm... Still an entertaining 10 minutes of TV that AWB has been enjoying the viewing of, and all attempts at making TV of military history must really be supported, but it does have the fault of being just a tad silly.

Pip-Boy Light's On - Musing on Fallout Projects

AWB of course has several projects on the boil at any one time and two of them currently revolve around the Fallout franchise of computer roleplaying games. First is playing Fallout as a miniature tabletop game using Ambush Alley Games 'Tomorrow's War' and the second a traditional pen and paper roleplaying using the 'Heavy Gear' rules published by Dream Pod 9.
Most of the ideas to make these projects work are relatively straight forward. Tomorrow's War is already a flexible open set of rules designed to be used in any setting, the main stumbling problem being the well know slow pace AWB takes to paint figures. Playing Fallout as a roleplaying game takes a slight more bit of ground work. All equipment and beasties that might be used in the campaign need to be converted from computer stats into the roleplaying system. Not really that big a deal; guns are guns, humans are humans and there is no magic system to worry about. After all, roleplaying is a group activity and as long as everyone has a reasonable idea how an object works then most groups can run with it.
Which brings us to the Pip-Boy.
Now for those readers who are not familiar with the Fallout Universe, and seriously, AWB is currently frowning at you in a concerned and angry manner, the Pip-Boy is the wrist mounted portable computer the main character wears that doubles as the game's main player interface. Think of it as a large smart phone with rubbish graphics and a few health monitoring aps. There is some implication that they are bonded for life to their user, or at least cannot be removed without the owner's permission (ref the Fallout 3 add on Operation Anchorage) although it is probably safe to assume they can be removed or none of our heroes would ever get in and out of those skin tight suits of stealth armour.
The problem is V.A.T.S.
Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System is a game mechanic that allows Fallout 3/Fallout New Vegas players (where the game is 1st person shooter for the most part) to conduct limited points based targeting in the same way that Fallout 1 and 2 (which were action point based 3rd person isometric style games) allowed the player. With a handy press of a key the game player could pause the action, carefully assess the tactical situation and target enemies for violent destruction. While never stated as such, perks such as 'Maths Wrath' within the game strongly imply that V.A.T.S. is controlled by the Pip-Boy, but how?
Clearly if V.A.T.S. and Pip-Boys really existed they would not be able to physically freeze time. If they could then, well, those powers would no doubt be used for evvvvvvillllllll(tm) and not improving your next shot with that 10mm pistol you are carrying. Within the game, the down side to V.A.T.S. is that weapons degrade faster. How this is meant to work AWB honestly has no idea. Let's just all assume the increased weapon wear is simply a play balance tool and move on. What is probably the best guess as to how the system works is that the Pip-Boys uses a combination of it's built in sensors and some motion prediction aps to track the immediate targets, calculate existing weaknesses based on detectable injuries and then offer up predicted travel paths and offset aiming points. Or something. It strikes AWB as to be similar to the predictor gunsights that started to come into service late in WW2. In theory they offered up a lot of useful targeting aids, but only after the user had entered in a reasonable amount of data first. In practise they seemed to make an average shot better, while the good shots who already knew how to judge deflection ignored them completely.
So, getting back to putting V.A.T.S. into other gaming projects.
The great danger is to make it a super weapon. In Tomorrow's War the scope is not the hero character but the movement of squads and fireteams. Tomorrow's War uses a buckets of dice type system where the higher the roll the better, and better troops get to roll bigger dice. Elites for example may roll D12s, while scum play with D6. Middle ranks get D8s or D10s. Since the system involves opposed dice rolls where one side must beat the actual number rolled on the dice, the difference in dice size can be very powerful.
So making V.A.T.S. increase dice size, which was AWB first idea on the subject, is probably not the way to go, especially since in universe the only people with Pip-Boys are Vault types and, player character excepted, most of them are pretty rubbish fighters.
The feel at the moment therefore is that V.A.T.S. gives reaction bonuses. Tomorrow's War has a reaction test mechanic where the side must test to see if they successfully 'react' to oppositions moves. In this a natural '1' is 'Bad' and the (non play tested) feel is to allow units with Pip-Boys to re-roll any 1s.
Which may work. Like we said, it is non play tested and a work in progress.
Our second project in the Fallout Universe is the old school pencil and paper Roleplaying game. Here the problem is both trickier and easier. First we can just solve the problem by ensuring all players never get to wear a Pip-Boy in the first place. If that fails, or we decided we do want to have our PCs wear the blue and yellow jumpsuits, the size of the problem will probably depend on how flexible the players are and if they are around your table to role play or roll play. A good role player could just state 'I am going into V.A.T.S.' and the skilled game master inform them, 'stuff happens'. A roll player would probably want to know the dice roll modifiers. Here we have some options - bonus to hit, bonus to crit chance, bonus to initiative or maybe just bonus intelligence about the target to be given to the players.
Personally AWB is thinking that 'if' the Fallout RPG campaign ever gets off the ground it might just be the easy escape with 'Plan A', but should the campaign start and RobCo's most famous wrist watch gets an outing, then AWB will keep you posted.

Other People's Webpages - Historical Maps

AWB, while definitely not procrastinating on other project, managed to stumble across this rather interesting site earlier in the afternoon.

http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/

While we confess not having spent massive amounts of time exploring all the gems of info hidden within this site's pages, the section of the most historical interest for the common or garden wargamer would seem to be the 'Historical Maps' section. The scales and coverage varies and is, with a few exceptions, only over the British Isles, but if you are looking for a 19th Century map of England and Wales at 1:63360 (1 inch to the mile) in order to plan your next time travelling adventure then this is probably the best (only?) place to look.

Tank Basing - Pt 3

As the slow march of painting does actually roll on we reach a stage where AWB can show the status of some of the projects currently being (slowly) worked on.
As you will remember, a slow effort to base some 10mm armour has been moving along at a speed not dissimilar to the actual vehicles themselves, and here, again thanks to the magic of Samsung SII phones (not that AWB doesn't have access to some fine F1.4 prime lenses and a DSLR camera or anything... cough) we can see how some of these attempts have been coming along.

All figures from the Pendraken ranges. All breakfast spreads from Kraft.

In the front we have some Austro-Hungarian infantry. Maybe not the best angle as it give the impression some of the figures are totting SMGs rather then the rifles they are actually holding. Still experimenting with how the bases will end up. Currently that is building sand over a dark green base coat with that foam style green flock glued in clumps. AWB is currently musing on choosing a different basing decoration for the other nations currently being worked on in order to help identify the stands from a distance. Not quite sure what will come of that plan at this stage, but may end up involve painting the edges of the MDF bases in the parent nations base uniform colours.
In the back row we have our Whippet on it's brick paper road, the MkIV looming over the sandbagged trench wall and a French Schneider CA1 showing the work with green stuff required to fix the worse of the models flaws.
Again, maybe not the best angle for the MkIV but the effort in making the trench out of green stuff does seem to have paid off. With a better viewing angle the model does successfully rear up in a very menancing 3mph sort of way. Putting that basing project down as a success.
AWB must confess to being a slight bit disappointed with the CA1 model. French WW1 armour has not really been treated well in wargaming models and AWB has yet to find a model in any scale that successfully capture the shape of both the CA1 (as shown in the photo) and the larger St-Chamond (this vehicle with the massive fore and aft overhang that kept getting stuck in trenches and shell holes). Green stuff here has attempted to restore the squarer corners of the hull and add some height to the roof ridge but AWB is still not completely happy with the model. It is however extremely unlikely any of us are likely to get a newer design on the markets. WW1 is still a bit of a novelty period and west front 'trench' combat tending to be avoided for the more traditional meeting engagements found on other fronts. (The Butchers of the Bell Curve group AWB games with does WW1 almost completely in the Balkans or Near East for example.) French armies therefore seem to be less popular and the demand from gamers for massive amounts of French armour is probably just a little low compared to, well, just about everything else. For a manufacturer to feel it worth their while to remake their Schneiders and St-Chamonds (or even get really exciting and offer different production versions of these vehicles) seems very unlikely.
AWB can dream though.

TV - The Boffin vs AWB - victory to the Boffin

Sunday night TV as we know it came to a crashing end just after the credits to Doctor Who this week. The Boffin The Builder and The Bombardier were back and for the first time ever have managed to crush AWB's ego by not giving your blog host anything to moan about.
This week our power trio left the 20th century and jumped back to the 1860s to play with the Spencer Carbine. Armed with some stereotypes of good old boys (whatever they actually are), a few lines from both the Battle Hymn and Dixie and some butternut pumpkin jokes that were probably way too subtle for even most history buffs, our heroes give us viewers a brief overview of the US Civil War to give us an understanding of the then current weapons and tactics before introducing us to the rather advanced Spencer Rifle.
The Spencer was of course a level action rifle firing rim fire cartridges from a tubular magazine in the stock at a time when the vast majority of troops were issued with percussion fired muzzle loading rifles. In order to show the massive increase in firepower our gang organises a 60 second shoot off between two of them with rifled muskets and one with a Spencer Carbine.
All good fun, especially with the add of visually pleasing water filled barrels as targets, before closing off with the claim that it wasn't so much the firepower weapons like the Spencer gave the North that lead to their victory, but the fact that the industrialised North had the production ability to make such equipment in the first place.
Roll credits and roll the AWB jaw off the floor for suddenly realising there is nothing much to whinge about in the next blog update.
Curse you TBCubed!!
AWB, being the quality and well loved blog that it is, will stand up regardless and find something to moan about. The Spencer was never shown to be reloaded, which is someone of a pity. Being a tubular magazine, pre loaded tubes from a Blakeslee Cartridge Box could be simply tipped straight into the weapon, an ability that complimented the relatively fast lever action. A comparison of effective range may have been of interest, although since the team clearly seemed to only have access to the Carbine instead of the longer Spencer Rifle, any test may have been an apples to oranges conclusion. Some discussion into the relative costs between the two weapons and hence the ability to actually raise units equipped with these weapons may have also been useful.
And... ummm.. as you can see, AWB is struggling a little to find faults. (Curse you AGAIN TBCubed!). All up this was a tidy little episode. Unlike previous eps, they avoided actually making claims that they were going to 'prove' something and instead settled for just showing the people at home the difference between the older and newer weapons. Having finished, with nothing actually being proved, there was no danger of coming up with the sort of broad and sweeping statement that has given AWB so much writing pleasure over the last month. Of slight disappointment was the insistence of showing the Confederate soldier as some sort of inbreed hick with bad teeth and the cringe worthy accents the three tried to put on while 'in character' but by and large a very tidy 10 minutes of TV entertainment.

Don't Starve

As a complete procrastination from doing things constructive, AWB has been playing Don't Starve.
Don't Starve is an 'indy' computer game available from Steam and is pretty much a sandbox type adventure game where your prime function is, well, to make sure you Don't Starve.
It's all rather cute. The game plays as a sort of isometric view scroller and while the world is 3D, you are more a 2D cartoon who hops around with cheery looking animation. Your world is basically mildly surreal. The game itself doesn't offer a huge back story, and basically your hero wakes up with a smug guy standing over you pointing out it will be dark soon and maybe you should go find something to eat.
Okay.... That is helpful...
Well, there is a prequel on YouTube where you get to see your hero was an unsuccessful mad scientist type who in return for forbidden knowledge was basically dragged down by shadow hands into another dimension. A moral there for all of us one would think, and that would basically be, "When your radio starts offering you forbidden knowledge, it's time to get an MP3 player."
Your hero bounces around this world exploring and all the while collecting anything that isn't tied down. Having collected a bunch of items, you then get to craft bigger items which do bigger things in an escalating item race. For example 'flint' can be found on the ground. 'Twigs' can be gathered by hand from saplings and crafted into an Axe or a Pick which can be used to either chop down trees (giving you 'wood' and 'pine cones') or mine rocks (giving you 'stone', more 'flint', and sometimes 'gold'). Wood is useful as then you can light a fire. Did you forget the warning about it being dark soon? Ummm... oppps.
The day cycle starts at day and eventually drifts into twilight. Twilight isn't really that bad although some of the more anti social creatures become more active then. However once night falls it becomes dark... and scary things live in the dark.
Scary? Yes, scary. The game has three values your hero needs to keep track of. Hunger is basic enough as is Health, but in the middle is your Sanity. Stray too far from the warm happy firelight and the scary things in the dark slowly sap your mind. Get in complete darkness and some honking great monster just smites you. Game over.
Losing your Sanity has an active effect. As it drops strange shadow creatures start to appear and your vision blurs a bit. Drop some more and the normally cute rabbits that hang around turn into scary black 'Beardlings'. Go completely loopy and the shadows become solid and actually attack you.
Which would be bad as if you die, you are fully dead. There are some touch stone areas you can activate which will respawn you if you die (at half sanity cause seriously, who wants to wake up inside some stone thing?), but otherwise the game runs in a sort of 'Ironman' mode where you can only save if you are still alive. Die and it cashes out your XP (to unlock new characters) and wipes all your saves.
The exception is if you manage to find 'Maxwell's Door' within your game. Entering the door takes you into Adventure Mode where you are questing against the smug git who trapped you here in the first place. If you die in Adventure Mode you find yourself respawned outside the door. Since you need to actually find Maxwell's Door before you can even start Adventure Mode, that is probably a good thing.
It's a tricky little game. After about 20 days surviving, the world turns to winter and you get to add the task of keeping warm to all your other problems. Food goes off with time, so it is the balance of eating while it is fresh or trying to manage it for the winter. Meat can be dried if you manage to build a drying rack and rabbits, if caught in the traps you can make, can be stored in boxes till the time you need to murder them.
Yes, the game term actually is 'murder', not so much because you don't then get to eat them, but just to mess with your sanity point rating some more. Cutting down trees can also be risky as if another tree sees you do it, there is a change a Tree Guardian will appear and follow you around like an unwashed 12 foot high hippy in a pine needle suit to try and kill you. To make things funnier, unlike other monsters, a Tree Guardian never forgets and doesn't loose interest if you manage to flee far enough. Just the thing when night is about to fall and you are trying to desperately gather enough wood to keep that life protecting circle of light going.
(and yes, in the middle of that he will walk though your camp fire, catch alight and then while blazing away manage to burn down half your camp as he continues to chase you. What joy!)
AWB have managed to survive 23 days so far (before freezing in winter) and unlocked the first four characters. Adventure mode still lays hidden somewhere and the joys of cooking Monster Lasagna are still unknown.
Good sanity draining fun, especially at meals times :)

Musing on Artillery

AWB has been doing some casual research into the multi model joy that is WW1 era artillery, and, as a result, has been musing on just what a significant development the French 75 actually was. The Matériel de 75mm Mle 1897, to give the weapon it's official name, can probably safely be called the first of the 'Modern Artillery' systems to go into service anywhere in the world, yet it's significance is probably mostly ignored by most casual students of history.
The evolution of tube artillery broadly went something like this;
- Muzzle loading smoothbore
- Muzzle loading rifled
- Breech loading
- 'Modern' weapons with recoil systems.
The progression wasn't smooth of course. Breech loading cannons of various forms date back to the beginning of gunpowder. Smoothbore cannons had some advantages over rifled cannons so both existed on the 19th Century battlefield for many years and even when breech loading had finally come up for consideration again, it was years before it managed to replace muzzle loading with some nations. The Royal Navy, having embraced the Armstrong breech loader in about 1860, decided the technology could go with a bit longer in the oven and went back to muzzle loading rifles. They stuck with such weapons probably a little longer then they needed to, eventually peaking with the RML 16 inch 80 ton weapons fitted to HMS Inflexible.
(Armstrong made an even bigger 17.7inch 100 ton weapon but even the RN decided enough was enough at that stage. The weapons were sold to Italy for some of her battleships or used on coast defence batteries in Malta and Gibraltar.)
The 75 however was a massive leap in weaponry. The key feature was of course the recoil system, a hydro-pneumatic system so advanced that it had taken designers nearly 15 years to get the idea to work successfully. This smooth and reliable system allowed the other advanced features of the gun; the automatic fuse setter and a rapid to operate breech system, to be used to their full effect. The gun could literally be fired at a rate of 30 shots per minute, a speed that was the physical upper limit based on the 2 second cycle time of the recoil system.
What is more, since unlike other guns of that period, the gun would not need to be significantly re-aimed after each shot and each of those 30 shots could be expected to go pretty much where they were intended.
Was this significant?
You better believe it.
Terence Zuber in his (cough) 'interesting' book* 'The Real Schlieffen Plan' goes as far as to claim that the German discovery of this weapon when they saw it in action during the Boxer Rebellion was enough to make them tear up their current strategic war plans and start again. Other nations, well aware of the massive rate of fire advantage this weapon had, rapidly developed or purchased their own equivalent weapons and, perhaps most significantly, the French effectively redesigned their entire battlefield tactics around it.
As we mentioned, the 75 had a very high rate of fire and a battery firing shrapnel shells was well equipped to place large areas of open ground under deadly barrages. A 1914 French Infantry division had no other artillery then this weapon and indeed a French Corps, unlike other nations which might be expected to have heavy field or howitzers, had more batteries of this gun.
However, while it was definitely a major milestone in artillery, it has also been argued that the French love affair with this weapon may have been a little unwise. Paul Strong and Sanders Marble in 'Artillery in the Great War' make the observation that in the opening battles of WW1 the superior French field artillery made a mess of the German infantry, right up to the time when the superior German HEAVY artillery suppressed and silenced the batteries.The go on to claim that a prime reason of the Allied success in the Battle of Marne was that the over extended Germans had finally advanced faster then their heavy artillery could follow and the French 75s were finally allowed to do what they were intended unopposed.
However, digressing as per usual, the point AWB really wants to muse over is how do we show these sort of technical advances on the wargames table. By the time we get to WW1 most armies, at least for their first line divisions, had quick firing field weapons. However, due to the rapid need to expand and find heavy artillery, a lot of obsolete guns were brought back into service or dragged out of distant fortresses for use on the front. The Germans were possibly an exception to this rule, but the British for example sent many 5inch Howitzers to France and used them all through 1915. These older weapons lacked recoil systems and had a practical max rate of fire of 2 shots per minute - slightly slower then the 15 or so shots most more modern guns can get off.
This brings us back to our gaming. How do our favourite rules show it, or more importantly, do we need to show it at all?
If we are modelling the slow grind of a bombardment, then probably not. While modern guns could fire faster, most work was conducted at a more sedate 1 or 2 shots per minute. There is also the very real consideration of the 'Shell Shortage' and the fact that many batteries simply didn't have enough shells to do rapid firing even if they needed to.
The really simple solution is to just ignore it totally and abstract indirect fire into an abstract where who or what fires it is not of importance. The slightly more detailed is to rationalise that shells fired x shell size = damage factor and roll against that. A simple enough concept but ignores the fact that the difference between a relatively small 'field' gun shell of say 5-6kg and the 23kg of the 5inch BL we mentioned earlier.
A field gun in many cases often completely lacked the ability to destroy entrenchments, where a heavy shell was going to collapse trenchwalls and smash firing positions. This was significant and part of the reason armies were willing to field and maintain so many different artillery types. Some guns were just better at some roles.
Each wargame system and indeed each wargamer has their own views on what makes a fun night pushing lead or counters, and each has their own view on what is worth including in a rule system. The point that AWB is trying to make is that a bigger gun/howitzer isn't just a stand with more firepower, it is a stand with DIFFERENT firepower. Field artillery can, will and did butcher troops in the open. It also can't, wont and didn't damage troops dug in. So, while your personally gaming experience is always your own, AWB would like to see games that note the difference between field and heavy shelling.
Of course AWB would also like to see game with a few less rubbish dice rolls so maybe we can't have everything...

* Interesting? Is AWB implying that they didn't really like 'The Real Schlieffen Plan'? Short answer? Yes. Zuber is an American who was posted for many years in Germany as part of his US Army service and does appear to have gone, as we say, 'native'**. While AWB has no doubt that Zuber has done a lot of research, reading his text did give the impression his book was one edit away from using the phrase 'gentle peaceloving Germans'. Zuber seems to have gone to great length to point out that Germany was forced into a defencive war against the overly aggressive Allied powers that tends to distract from his overall argument. The argument itself, namely that there was NOT actually a Schlieffen plan ends up becoming a bit moot. We all know and accept that Germany marched through Belgium so arguing if the plan existed or not unfortunately ends up a bit like claiming in your murder trial that you didn't stab the victim to death, you slashed his throat instead.

** Not that there is anything wrong with going native. AWB are big fans of Germany *** and German culture and happily pay credit to the success over the centuries of these people in both peace and war.

*** Except Hamburg