Ok, so today is day 2 of the tournament. As you are reading this message, I am probably being beaten mercilessly by some kid who plays the game for the first time :) There will be reports of the tournament coming in pretty soon and if everything went according to plan, I should have already posted some pictures!
In the mean time, this is the second and last post of this tournament preparation series. For those that are not familiar with the first post, my aim is to shortly discuss the lists submitted by other players and that I found interesting gaming-wise.
We are playing the following missions:
Encounter
Breakthrough
Counterattack
Surrounded
Fighting Withdrawal
The list I am using: Romanian Cavalry
Hungarian Harckocsizo
Confident/Veteran
HQ: 2x Pz38
Platoon 1: 3x Pz38
Platoon 2: 3x Panzer IV F2
Platoon 3: 10x Pioneer Rifle
Platoon 4: 4x Marder II
Platoon 5: 4x Toldi I
Platoon 6: 4x Skoda 100mm guns (trained)
I like this list for the fact that it is all about concentration, agility and hitting hard where it hurts the most. It has a good amount of high-end anti-tank (probably prepared to take on the flood of Mixed Tankovy lists) as well as plenty of high mobility and assault capability (Pz38s or the assault pioneers). There are 2 main weaknesses in this list that seem obvious to me:
1. Not so much staying power. There are only 16 tanks in total and their armor for the most part is not so good. Defense in this list mostly comes from the veteran rating and the tough infantry platoon.
2. There is no smoke to help to mitigate any possible return fire. This is maybe not crucial, but gun-heavy companies in scenarios that do not require them to move might be a tough nut to crack by the Hungarian Tanks.
Overall I feel good playing against this list in Surrounded, Breakthrough and Fighting Withdrawal whereas I am not so positive about Encounter and Counterattack (I can be easily outmaneuvered and shot to pieces unless I can take care about the light tanks early on).
Motor Company (8th Army)
Confident/Veteran
HQ: 2x Rifle w/ sticky bombs + White Scout transports + 2x 3" mortar
Platoon 1: 4x MG + 3x Anti-tank rifle + transports + sticky bombs
Platoon 2: 2x Vickers HMG + transports
Platoon 3: 3x Universal Carrier w/ 0.5"
Platoon 4: 3x Churchill III (trained)
Platoon 5: 3x Grant (trained)
Platoon 6: 4x Deacon
Platoon 7: 3x Marmon Herrington III w/ captured weapon and AA MG
Air: Limited Hurricane (cannon 3+/11/4+)
This is an infantry company, yes :) It is a funny way to put together a mobile force that would defend more often than not. The big advantage of this list is that it has a lot of mobile anti-tank and tons of mobile mgs. It will struggle a bit against the KVs because it mostly has AT10 but should do pretty well against medium tanks. I think its main weakness is the focus on firepower and almost zero capability to assault. The only unit I can see that is able to perform an assault are the Churchills. They will not do so good in the end I guess, since they are only trained. It means that they will get only 1.5 hits per turn, provided the platoon makes it to the enemy lines intact :L Also, it will have a hard time defending in missions with mobile reserves as the only deployment setup I can see working for it is Churchills + one other unit (plus maybe the hmgs if the other unit is the infantry). This means that the enemy can hunt down reserves and not even care about the heavy infantry tanks.
Against this force I should do pretty good in Counterattack and Encounter. Surprisingly, other scenarios might be a bit of a challenge.
Ok, so these were the interesting builds that I wanted to talk about. To summarize the topic, I will mention that in this tournament we are having ~30 players and the distribution of forces that have had their rosters submitted on time is:
Most popular company types:
10 tank
9 Mechanized
7 Infantry (surprise!)
Most popular nations:
12 Germany (everybody complains but still a very popular choice)
5 Soviet
3 US (haha, no confident/veteran option = not so popular)
2 British
2 Romanian (go Romanians, go!!)
1 Hungarian
1 Italian
Will post more details about the tournament soon. Stay tuned!
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