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.
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