TY 6mm Lessons Learned 1

With four of us finally getting together to discuss our Team Yankee in 6mm Escalation League, we got to play some games of Team Yankee and here are a few things I learned from those games. 

It is a game, do not lose sight of your ultimate goals, and watch the turn timer. I played a learning scenario from the original, version one TY rulebook, The Battle for Hill 214. It is a great little scenario, more on that in a minute, and while it was a very close game, I can truthfully say I lost, not because the dice "turned on me", but because of my own decisions. I lost because my separate units kept failing morale checks, and my formation commander was too far away to help them stay on the board. Yes, with 3+/4+ morale stats, those units had an average to better than average chance of sticking it out, but they did not. And that is not my dice's fault, I should have, especially in the late game and after two of my units had already scampered, spent a round moving my commander into a better support position instead of merely sitting and firing. This is a game, after all, and keeping your forces on the field should be as important (if not more than) as killing enemy units yourself. Plus, as my opponent did not have any artillery, there was no need to disperse my units anyway, I should have grouped them closer from the beginning.

The scenarios in any of the books, version one or two, are great little teaching aids, and I highly recommend newer players dip their toes in with those to help learn the rules. We played, as I have already stated, one of the scenarios from the version one rulebook, which you can find the scenarios free to download here, and it showed off a lot of the rules - shooting at night, ambushes, pinning, assaults, and especially unit and formation morale, which is what finally did me in. I suddenly want to play through all of the scenarios from all of the books, both version one and two. Yes, I will have to substitute many of the models for the NATO countries other than America, but I think that is a small, achievable goal, and one that would be of great use to my opponents in the games and myself.

Assaults are grueling for both sides - as the attacker, you do not want to attack enough enemies that they Pin your assaulting force, causing an immediate fallback; as the defender, the Pin is crucial, more so than killing assaulters in defensive fire, as it causes the attackers to fallback, otherwise you will be losing many stands of infantry and vehicles. 

Night fighting is ugly and vision distance is not guaranteed, even for the advanced Thermal Imaging that most of NATO has and the Warsaw Pact does not. Sometimes refraining from shooting for one round and going "dark" while waiting for a better target to come along is preferred, as your opponent may not get enough vision range on their turn to spot that unit. If you are playing NATO and have Thermal Imaging, you should lean toward Attacker when picking the Mission, and if you are the Attacker, pick a night option. You may not roll it on the table in the Missions handout, but when you get it, you will have a distinct advantage over WarPact players. 

You do not have to put your Ambushing units into play away from the rest of your forces - if you are covering a broad front, you can use your Ambushers as a reserve type force to fill in any weak spots in your line when the enemy tries to exploit it. 

Make sure to read and follow all of the setup rules for your scenario, as I had one minefield given to me for the scenario, but I never used it. Would it have won the game for me? Maybe not directly, but making sure your opponent knows where you put a minefield is a good way to get into their head and make them want to bring their forces in from a different angle. And you do not feel so stupid after the game.

That is all I can come up with for our first weekend of the league, more games will be occurring in the near future, and I may even post up pics from the games, as well as painting and terrain tips.

Team Yankee 6mm Escalation League

My local group of Team Yankee 6mm players have formed an escalation league. That is not 100% correct, let me start over from the beginning. Several years ago my life changed pretty dramatically, but since this is my rant to you, the impersonal masses of the internet, that is all the details I am willing to give out. During this upsetting of life's apple cart, I decided that I wanted to get back into some hobbies that I had set aside for the job I no longer had, and also were more sedentary due to me getting older and my knees giving out. Namely, tabletop role-playing games and tabletop wargames. A good friend of mine as well as a coworker both introduced me to Battlefront's Flames of War and Team Yankee wargames, but the good friend let slip that TY was PERFECT for 6mm scale, to the point where even the main author of it had opined in public that he wished they could have utilized that scale instead of 15mm. And I have been trying to play TY in 6mm ever since, literally for a little over four years now. Oh, we got some games in last year before COVID came crashing down on us, but it was like a game and a half. Plus, I had multiple people express their desire in joining in, but never did anything about it. I decided it was time to be the catalyst in the mix, so after finding yet another person interested who also happened to have a smattering of 6mm models already in their possession, I declared that I was going to host an escalation league.

An escalation league, for those of you unfamiliar with the concept, is in your tabletop wargames of choice, you start with a low point total, give your players time to gather, build and paint that total's worth of miniatures, and then you go up a set increment, rinse, repeat. All while playing as many games inside the league as you can stomach. In my league, we are starting at 50 points, and increasing that by 25 every 4 weeks or so. Fifty points in TY is a good starting point - you get a good mix of units but you just can not squeeze everything into an army list. As a league implies a competition, we are also tracking overall victory points, average victory points per game played, and participation points. Those last are points awarded for showing up, bringing painted armies, bringing all your gear (tokens, smoke markers, artillery templates, etc), and bringing finished terrain. As we are currently playing at my domicile until we can get a local game store to rent us a table again (thank you, Global Pandemic! /end sarcasm), I am not cheating and counting my own participation points. Well, not so much cheating as enjoying an unfair advantage over everyone else. 

Onto my lists, and yes, I am building multiple forces because I already have a sizeable number of minis. At 50 points, I am running two lists in both the Americans and the East Germans. When I first got into 6mm TY, I had bought up a bunch of GHQ minis from the 1st edition TY army books, so I am trying to use those minis instead of going straight to the latest and greatest (ie: T80 and BMP-3 Soviets, and M1A1 and Bradley Americans). In all 4 of these lists I tried to include decent tank options (not high end and very point heavy, but also not low end and be too "horde-y"), at least some infantry in the tank heavy lists for flexibility and objective sitting, as well as some artillery and attendant observer, and some gun AA. I do not expect much in the way of fixed wing aircraft at this low of a point total, but there might be some helos, and gun AA is also pretty effective against APCs/IFVs and infantry.

For the Americans, I have built up an Army M60 Patton Armored Combat team, as even basic M1 Abrams are too point heavy and would restrict my numbers too much - a single tank HQ (4pts), 3 platoons with 2 M60s apiece (8pts per - I am experimenting with multiple minimum unit formations, see how this works for me), and a 3 M113 mech platoon (2 M47 Dragon teams, 3 M249 SAW teams) plus an extra M47 Dragon team (4pts for the platoon, 1pt for the extra team). The other formation is a M113 Mech Combat team - mandatory HQ (M113 and M16 rifle team, 1pt), a 4 M113 mech platoon (3 M47s and 4 M249s, 6pts), 2 M113 mech platoons w/extra M47s (5pts per), and a 4 tank M60 Patton tank platoon (16pts). Each of those also has 3 M106 Heavy Mortars (3pts) and 2 M901 ITVs TOW-1 (3pts) integral to the formation, and 3 M109 artillery (7pts), 2 M163 VADS (3pts), and a M113 FIST (1pt) from Divisional support.

I went with East Germans instead of USSR proper as I had a bunch of T72s and BMP-1s, and while I did not want to go straight T55 horde, I do appreciate the East Germans' lower point cost on both of those units. The first formation is the T72M Panzer Battaillon - mandatory HQ (3pts), 2 4 tank Panzer Kompanies (11pts per), a 3 tank Kompanie (7pts), and a 4 BMP-1 Mot-Schutzen Kompanie (3 RPG-7 teams and 4 MPi-KM teams, 6pts) plus an AGS-17 GL and extra BMP-1 (1pt). The other formation is the BMP-1 Mot-Schutzen Battaillon - mandatory HQ (BMP-1 and a MPi-KM rifle team, 1pt), 3 BMP-1 Kompanies w/4 BMP-1s apiece (3 RPG-7s, 4 MPi-KMs, 6pts per), plus one extra AGS-17 GL team and BMP-1 (1pt). Then, like the Americans, I have a 4 track ZSU-23-4 Shilka Flak Zug (4pts) and a 3 tube 2S1 Gvozdika (Carnation) Artillerie Batterie (6pts) integral to each formation, plus a BMP-1 OP (1pt) from Divisional support.

With the Americans, having your artillery and AA in Divisional support instead of integral to the formation means you can play them a lot further forward - if you lose them, they don't count towards formation morale. But then, with the East Germans, because they are integral to the units, they can be held back and help with formation morale. I'm not sure which play style I prefer, but it's going to be interesting to find out.

So what did all of this cost? I am not talking about the rulebooks, tokens, dice, measuring devices, etc, just the models themselves. From GHQ, which is the most expensive of the 6mm scale manufacturers, though we in the US do save on not having to pay import/export taxes and overseas shipping, the American forces were as follows:
2 packs of M60A3s
2 packs of M113A1s
1 pack of M160A1s
1 pack of M901s
1 pack of M109s
1 pack of M163 VADS
And for the infantry, 1 pack each of the Modern US Heavy Weapons, Modern US Individual Infantrymen, and to get some M72 LAW figures, 'Nam Era US Heavy Weapons.
At basically $12 per pack ($11.95 per), that's $108 for the Americans, but you are getting 3 extra M60s, 3 extra M106s, 3 extra M901s, 2 extra M109s (but the short barrel version that the Brits and West Germans use), 4 extra M163s, and a handful of extra infantry bits that I'm not going to list here. Considering just the M901s and M163s will run you $40 from Battlefront in 15mm, $108 for the whole double list force plus extras does not sound so bad.

For the East Germans, I picked up:
3 packs of T72s
3 packs of BMP-1s
1 pack of ZSU-23-4 Shilkas
1 pack of 2S1 Carnations
And for infantry, 2 packs of Modern Russian Infantry and 1 pack of Modern Russian Heavy Weapons - yeah, they're not specifically East Germans, but they're close enough to them and the Soviets of the mid-80s that at this scale it's not really noticeable, and you can use them between the Soviets, East Germans, Poles, and Czechs.
Again, 9 packs at $12 per for a total of $108. But in 15mm scale you will still feel the wallet pinch of the horde army even as less-horde-ish as my East German lists are, as you will need 3 packs of Battlefront T-72s at $50 apiece just to start. 

For the future, at least for the first "escalation" of 25 points, my plans are pretty much to add more of the same, plus air units - A10s and Hueys with airborne troops for the Americans, SU-25s and Hinds for the East Germans. I will, at some point, sub in M1 Abrams for the M60 Pattons, as well as add some missile AA vehicles, but until I am ready to put in a new formation entirely, I will be staying with the vehicles and units I have now.