Air Cav

> On Sun, 13 Sep 1998, John Atkinson wrote:

> You wrote:

> remember? The line for the line they never crossed, the horse for the

> horses they never rode, and the color speaks for itself.
Not a 1st Cav fan, John?

Anyone actually run air cav in a DS2 battle vs. conventional forces? How'd
they do? And does anyone find, as a friend of mine does, that VTOLs just get
swatted at Low Mode, esp. by GMSs?

Not only that, but whenever I use them I get the "firer systems down" result.
If I don't get that, then I will roll ones. Statistically, this is impossible,
but there you go.

I have heard that VTOLs can be effective, but it never happens to me.

They make good forward observers, though.

> You wrote:

If you're asking why anyone would run air cav, then the answer would have to
be to have the mobility to take advantage of your opponent's errors.

A friend told me about a game he had where he was given a cpy of airmobile
infantry plus a platoon of air-lifted light (size 1) armor armed w
lasers. His side's objective was to take out the opponent's HQ emplacement.
From what I remember, the bad guys left a couple of platoons of infantry & a
few GMS vehicles for defense. All the AAA was at the line of battle protecting
the defending armor. Everyone else was focusing their attention on the big
armor clash while he dropped in on the HQ unit. He ended up losing his
vehicles, but while they were dying, his infantry was not getting chewed up by
APSWs. The HQ unit was destroyed, the game ended, and his sides armor guys
stopped wondering where their infantry support went.

It wasn't an easy fight. He lost a number of VTOLs on the way in, but
fortunately, he had more VTOLs than they had launchers. He also had more than
his fair share of lucky die rolls vs his opponent's unlucky rolls. However, he
never would have got there without the VTOLs.

Jim Yonemura

> Brian Burger wrote:
How'd
> they do? And does anyone find, as a friend of mine does, that VTOLs

I once had 3 VTOLs come in on my flank, and just hover, ducking in and out of
cover, blasting holes in soft skin vehicles. Had trouble getting stuff into
position to take them on, and when I finally did, I couldn't hit the damn
things. Really, really annoying; it's really hard to setup a
counter-attack when your initiative keeps getting robbed by those things

(hammering home the lesson that you need at least air parity to have a decent
chance of winning, at least in the longer scale.)

I also once played a DSII game where I hit with a Class 5 DFFG, and managed to
draw three zeroes and two ones. ARRRUGH.

And Mark Kochte thinks he has it bad with P-Torps.  (8-)

J.

> It wasn't an easy fight. He lost a number of VTOLs on the way in, but

If you are basing your tactics on the enemy running out of ammo then the co
who came up with that plan should be shot or at least have an `accident` set
up for him. Casi in point, the british only really made headway at the battle
of the somme when the germans ran out of mg ammo. Not something I would like
be told to repeat.

Shoot the officer that spotted the flaw in his opponent's defenses and then
took advantage of that flaw because he could, and then won the fight? Now why
would you want to do that?

Look, I wasn't there, so details of the fight are lacking. This lack of detail
may have caused a misunderstanding. He did not go in blindly, expecting to
have more things to shoot at than the other guy had things to shoot with. He
deliberately maneuvered his forces so that he minimized the number of weapons
that could get an effective shot at his forces. He took losses on the way in,
which gave the defender a better chance of fending of this
raid. However, poor rolling/draws on the defender's part coupled with
good
rolls/draws on his part caused the destruction of the HQ unit before
reinforcements could arrive. The air cav troops evac'd out to "safety" once
they had accomplished their mission. Meanwhile, nearly everyone else was
caught up in a big tank vs tank fight.

I think he demonstrated maneuver warfare theory pretty well here. I think he
should be shot if he had fallen in with the "let's bash heads" line of
thinking and stuck his troops into the main line of battle as regular
infantry. I think that would have been a greater waste as his troops would
have sacrificed their mobility (& ability to have an effect on the game) to
get chewed up fighting tanks.

Which role do you think would be more fun?

Jim Yonemura

I've played an interesting game using Air Cav..basically an airmobile delaying
action against an large armoured column with Mdm Arty Spt and 3 AD vehicles. I
had 2 Airmobile INF Platoons in Battle Taxi type VTOLs, A gunship troop a 3
VTOLS with Hvy GMS and a troop of light recon type vehicles.

It was a great game for me as the VTOL player. The board was littered with
burning armour. As we use limited visibility rules, the airmobile INF could
land, move forward, engage and withdraw very quickly, leapfrogging eachother.
The gunships established a nice position behind a feature from which they
could "pop up". They were eventuallyforced out of there by Arty, but by then
the damage was done and victory was assured. Total VTOL losses...1 gunship and
2 transports (unfortunately they were loaded with grunts though).

Very different using VTOLs to attack and disembark troops into a hot LZ though
!