Advanced Squad Leader Practice.

An earlier game to learn about High Explosive fire from guns

In anticipation of the soon to be reprinted Advanced Squad Leader Starter Kits, I have set about doing something small every day with the game that will re-build my knowledge of the system, whether by simply reading a few sections of rules or creating some incidental minor gaming situations with a few counters to embed the rules to memory via play.

I have mostly been commenting about this over on the ‘Commanders’ pages (link below), but a recent contact from a visitor to the Commanders site, who is doing something similar (Hi Mike) set me thinking that a fuller article might be enjoyed.

Advanced Squad Leader is a complicated system, due mainly to the volume of rules and the number of rule exceptions that it carries. The starter kits are meant to slowly introduce the player to the system bit by bit.

I have now hit ‘vehicles’ and suddenly the grey cells have decided to go on strike! So these mini situations that I am playing are helping and through the ‘repeat process’, they are slowly getting me over the vehicles hurdle.

With small chunks of game, it is easy to spend a bit of time absorbing a particular mechanic or two.

Today, we are somewhere on the east front, probably in early 1944. A German Panzer IV platoon is leading an advance and approaching a low hill, which promises to give a narrow gateway through the woodland for the rest of the company to follow ….. but what lays ahead!

At around 350 metres beyond the hill is a small orchard and if you look closely through your binoculars, there are two Soviet SU 85 Assault Guns (brown counters) amongst the apple trees, their guns trained on the hill, ready to ambush anything that moves into view.

Oberleutnant (1st Lieutenant) Otto Müller the German platoon leader (Vehicle A - lowest blue tank) has halted the platoon on the reverse of the hill while he edges ahead for a closer look.

For this ‘incident’ I have set up the SU85 seven hexes from the front slopes (crest) of the hill. Moving up from six hexes just adds a bit of stress to the Soviet ‘To Hit’ number. At this range the 85’s have a penetration value of 17, while the German frontal armour is a 6 ….. so any hit is almost certainly going to see a German tank off!

Going the other way, the German 75mm gun at this range also has a penetration value of 17, but the SU 85 armour is rated at a much more impressive 11 factors, so (11 from 17 = 6) if the Germans get a hit, they will only go on to harm the SU 85 on a further score of 6 or less (2D6).

This is an engagement directly to their front, so the fact that the SU 85 is not turreted is unlikely to be of significance.

In this action we will meet the To Hit / To Kill process, bounding fire (fire on the move), motion rules, bog tests when moving through woodland, machine gun effects on target vehicles that have their commanders heads popping out of the turret, target acquisition, gun malfunction, rate of fire and possibly intensive fire - so a nice sprinkle of rules.

As gamers, we generally want and generally get a good grip of the rules from a once or twice reading of the typical  game, but here, there is a lot of depth and I think it is a game that if you are learning alone, you have to be happy initially with roughly knowing it and just get on with it, getting some things wrong along the way, having some things not fully understood, but going back to the rules and tightening your grasp over a number of plays. You have to embrace that you may initially feel a little overwhelmed and work past that, because in the end, it is the nuance of the game that delights.

A sticking point for me has been the thing of vehicle ‘Motion’. In this game, if a vehicle moves it has to use its entire movement allowance. So what do you do with 16 points of vehicle movement! This might mean creating ‘delay’ by spending more movement points in a hex than you need to, but you can see where this starts to matter when a gun fires on you and their die roll modifier takes into account how many movement points you spent in their view etc.

Another thing you learn (after repeatedly doing all the calculations!) is that it is very hard to hit something if you moved or are moving yourself (rightly so). By extension, it is hard for an enemy vehicle to hit you if you are moving, but the best chance of getting a hit on an enemy is to fire while stationary, so there is a bit there to unwrap in understanding how best to use vehicles.

It is all about progress, so today I played a little faster than yesterday and automatically remembered that if the Red dice is greater than or equal to the White dice on a To Hit roll, that the shot hits the enemy hull and not the turret …. tiny steps :-)

And so to play - Müller presses forwards, crests the hill and hove into view of the two SU 85’s. In most games, the assault guns might respond with opportunity fire now, but here there is a die roll modifier penalty of +4 for a target being in your view for just 1 movement point worth of movement, also there is +1 penalty for height advantage (the panzer is on a hill), so the Soviet To Hit DRM penalty is +5 and they need an 8 or less to hit on a 2D6, so they would need to roll a 3 (5+3 = 8). They decide to wait.

The German spends another movement point to stop. Then calls out the spending of some more Movement Points of delay, which will eventually help their own Bounding Fire …. but the impatient Ivan Sokolov in the SU 85 on the left, is trigger happy and fires. 

Müller has now been in view for 4 movement points worth of time. The Soviet DRM penalty is now reduced to a total of +3 (+1 for height advantage, +2 for time spent in the view of the firer). The shot misses, but allows the SU 85 to place an acquisition marker on the Müller’s panzer. This will help with future shots.

It is still the German movement phase and the other two Panzer IV’s move up. Both will have to enter woods, so will test for bogging down.

The panzer on the left has to come down off the hill to enter the woods. It is now on ground level, the same as the SU 85’s, so when it occupies the woods, the grain in front of the orchard will visually get in the way and count as a Hindrance to firing.

Next turn - The SU 85 that fired, fires again and thanks to that acquisition marker it placed last turn, it JUST gets a hit and that big old 85mm gun destroys Müller’s tank (flipped to white side - below).

The other SU 85 enthusiastically fires and rolls a raw Double Six ….Ooooh Noooo that makes the gun malfunction and for now at least, the Soviets are one gun tube down. They get a chance each turn to repair it each turn, but roll badly when trying and it will be permanently disabled.

Soon after, both SU 85’s are hit and destroyed.

Re-set and play again. 

After getting into firing positions, one of the panzers uses its machine guns against a SU 85. The Soviet commander commander has his head out of the turret for a better view! The machine gun fire is effective and the tank has to take a morale check, which they fail. The consequence is they have to immediately button up and are marked ‘stunned’. 

The other SU 85 fires and hits a panzer IV on the turret, destroying it. Then a second panzer is destroyed. 

The remaining panzer sees the writing on the wall and retreats. It tries to fire its smoke pots to cover the withdrawal, but they fail and then as they retreat through the woods, they fail their bog test and become bogged.

Next turn they try to un-bog, but they roll badly and it becomes worse and they ‘Mire’ instead and then on their next attempt in the next turn it gets absolutely worse as they become immobilised for the rest of the game!

Well, that was two shortish sessions and quite a lot of different rules were touched upon. I picked up a few things, such as don’t fire unless you need to, as a shot with a very poor chance of hitting might just well roll 12 and malfunction the gun. Also try spending more movement points amongst trees to reduce the risk of bogging.

Since doing these mini situations, that was the first time that I managed to Stun a vehicle, so another rule is explored in practice. The effect of Stun is that it can’t do anything for the rest of the turn and then for the rest of the game, it suffers a +1 DRM on all of its ‘To Hit’ attempts.

If they can land a hit, the SU 85 gun tubes are deadly to panzer IV’s. Their weakness is that they are not turreted, so pulling them out of position by threatening a flank forces them to turn and they get a penalty on shooting. That could happen in a more wide ranging situation than this one.

Tomorrows task is ‘rule book’ day. I want to re-look at that whole thing of vehicles using their machine guns in the movement phase (bounding fire) and their impact on ‘crew exposed’ vehicles.

Every day is a learning day.

Anyone on an ASLSK journey will benefit from a short series of 7 YouTube videos by the ASL Academy - link below.

Resources

Commanders is my other bit of webspace that is a bit more magaziney than here. Link

https://commanders.simdif.com/dear_diary.html

ASL Academy, here is a link to the first vid.

https://youtu.be/Dy96qtLqAbI?si=fqGn793SkO9ooHAy