Altar of Freedom - Setting the scene

I got the game table set up over last weekend and, this being me, I promptly ignored the Dark Age and WW3 campaign games in favour of trialling the Altar of Freedom bidding spreadsheet. I chose to go with a fictional game but used the game OOB for First Manassas as that was the game I designed the random bidding spreadsheet around. The game was played on a 4x4 table as I don't yet have enough terrain for a larger table! I also used a fictional battle to allow me to concentrate on the game mechanics rather than being influenced by knowing what the actual tactics used were.

The key to Altar of Freedom (hereafter AOF) is that the two sides have a number of priority points to bid each turn.  The points are used to determine the order that divisions activate in and control of the turn time clock which determines how many activations there will be each turn.  After each round of Divisional activation is completed the turn clock is reduced by the result of a D6 dice throw.  The player with control of the clock has the choice of which of two dice to use for this.  The point being that the divisions with the higher priority points are more likely to activate then those with less as the turn clock may hit zero before the latter divisions get to activate.

Generals are represented at Army and Corps level.  These have traits based on the actual historical counterpart's performance at the actual battle being fought or random traits for a fictional action.  There are around twenty of these traits many of which have an impact upon priority point allocation or even the number of points available to them each turn.  This is something I have struggled to represent within the random bidding system and it means that some aspects of it will need to be redesigned before the next game.

The Federals
For this game the Federals are commanded by Irwin McDowell.  He has four divisions under his command:

• Tyler's of four Infantry Brigades and one Artillery Battery
• Hunter's of two Infantry. one Cavalry Brigades and an Artillery Battery
• Heintzelmann's with three Infantry Brigades and one Artillery Battery and
• Miles' Division of two Infantry Brigades and an Artillery Battery.

McDowell has the Inept and Quartermaster traits.  Inept means he cannot bid the same number of priority points for any divisions (other than a bid of zero which means no activation).  This prevents attack co-ordination between his Divisions.  The Quartermaster trait means that he has two HQ elements rather than the usual one and he can move these at the end of each turn by up to four inches.

The Confederates

The Confederacy is fielding two armies (as at First Manassas) although for game purposes these are treated as two grand Divisions.  There is are smaller subdivisions for point bidding purposes.  Pierre Beauregard is in overall command and also commands one grand division.  Joe Johnson has command of the other grand division.

• Beauregard has eight Infantry Brigades and three Artillery Batteries.
• Johnson has four Infantry brigades, a Cavalry Brigade and a single Artillery Battery.

In terms of traits Beauregard has Revered, Grandiose and Micromanager.  Revered allows an improved chance of rallying a broken brigade , Grandiose creates a variance in priority points upwards or (mostly) downwards each turn and Micromanager requires him to hold back half his points for end of turn adjustments.  Johnson has Disciplinarian and Shrewd Tactician.  Disciplinarian allows a reroll of one shooting dice result each turn and shrewd tactician allows him to reserve priority points for use in the following turn.

The Battlefield

I created a battlefield with a shallow creek crossing the Federal front  which turned out to have no impact on movement or combat (using a house rule for testing it's impact) a number of dense woods which had a variable effect on movement (using one of AoF's optional rules) a small town (rough terrain) and some minor hills which create an advantage for line of sight but no other effects.  Essentially I was keeping things simple(ish) for my first game.

The battlefield.  Federals will deploy to the left and Rebs to the right

The Battle

The game mirrored the First Manassas AoF scenario limits, eight turns duration or first army to break.  Both armies have a break point of five, that being the destruction of any five brigades, batteries, HQ units or generals.  I was controlling the Confederates with random bidding for the Federals but my playing them to the best of my abilities within the constraints of the bids.  Both sides deployed within the boundaries of the roads crossing their fronts and had the objective of destroying the other side.

The initial deployment

As you look at the image above Beauregard is on the Confederate left and Johnson on the right.  The federals have Heinzelmann on the left wing, then Hunter, Tyler and lastly Miles.  The basing is very basic for this trial run as I'm using home made match stick and card armies, apart from the artillery and HQ's which are Irregular Miniatures 2mm items.  As I'm posting this I have finished six of the eight turns and neither side has reached their break point, full details of the battle and some thoughts on the rules and my random bidding spreadsheet in the next post.

So where were we?

I'm about ready to resume gaming now as I am able to lift and carry playing boards and banqueting tables again.  Which means I can set up a game and restart the Dark Ages and World War Three campaigns.  I might even be able to try out the Altar of Freedom Random bid spreadsheet once I have created enough terrain (my collection needs to be extended to include more roads, rivers and a lot of woods).  As it's been a while since I was able to move any of the campaigns forward I thought that a short catch up post might be in order.

Dark Ages Campaign
It's still 799AD in dark age Great Britain.  The last entry for that campaign was way back in February and can be found here Small but Perfectly Formed: The Dark Ages Campaign (elenderilsblog.blogspot.com) and details the forces about to clash in the South West of modern Scotland where Strathclyde and Northumbria are about to fight.  The Northumbrians have the advantage of numbers and are intending a straightforward line 'em up and let 'em go approach to the battle.  The Strathclyde Welsh are hoping to use the terrain to narrow the battle lines to off set the Northumbrian numbers.

Cold War Gone Hot 1982
The second encounter between BAOR forward elements and the Soviet assault formations is going to be a tad unbalanced.  You may recall that a BAOR recon formation is facing probing Russian Motor Rifle and Tank battalions in sector D8 of my campaign map.  Details of the run up to this game are at Small but Perfectly Formed: Cold War 82 - further information (elenderilsblog.blogspot.com)  The big question is should NATO funnel armoured formations into the table from adjacent map sectors or hold the line until all Soviet lines of attack have been identified.

Altar of Freedom
The most recent thing I was working on was the semi-random bidding spreadsheet.  I think this does what I want but I need to trial run it in a game.  My big issues is that the PC with the spreadsheet software is not in the same room as the gaming table.  So I came up with the idea of generating several turns' bids (actually more than the game will need) before the game and recording them on cards.  Each turn I shuffle the cards and draw one at random so that I have no solid idea what that turn's enemy bid is going to be.  It means that I'm not running from room to room every turn which will let me get on with the game with minimum interruptions.

So that's where we are.  Normal (or at least what passes for normal around here) service will be resumed in the next day of two.

Supreme Littleness Design's 3mm scale buildings

The hunt for small scale buildings to use with my 3mm O8 Cold War armies and my Altar of Freedom home made troops has continued. Brigade Models stuff is lovely but slightly too small as is the Irregular Miniatures range. Both are more 2mm so are around a third too small for what I have in mind. I continued to search Google and recently came across Supreme Littleness Designs' offerings. The 3mm range is aimed at European Napoleonic gamers but a fair amount of it is generic enough to work in an ACW setting or a modern European one.

The range is inexpensive for the number of buildings in each set at around £1.50 - £2.50 with there being 2 - 4 buildings per set.  They are made in laser cut MDF which comes as a kit to be assembled (As an aside; am I weird in quite liking the smell of freshly lasered MDF?).  Now the idea of a kit for a 3mm building may seem to be a stretch but trust me it works and has some advantages.  For a start the method used to create the buildings creates great texture for the roofs, which as we look down from a playing vantage point is the main thing we see.  Secondly it allows some customisation of buildings.  Chimneys can be moved around and lean to sheds added or not as the whim takes the modeller.  This is possible due to the design of the models.  Think of the design as a sliced loaf of bread approach.  Each building consists of  vertical slices, mostly shaped like squat arrows.  The arrow point forms the peak of the roof, and the laser cutting creates lines along the edges of the vee of the arrow head that create lines of tiles when the slices are put together.

This how they arrive.  

The two gable ends have some detail laser etched in, windows. brickwork and similar things.  Each building has a number of these vertical slices and two side walls that go along the length of the 'sliced loaf' creating the long walls of the building.  Again these have etched details and they also hide the layers of the core of the building and tie the whole thing together.  It's really rather ingenious.

Examples of two of the completed kits. 

The downsides are that troops cannot be physically placed inside buildings, but that isn't really a thing at this scale anyway and that the fit of the parts does have some natural variation in thickness of the MDF sheet the parts are cut from.  This means that the slices of the building core and the sides may not be a 100% match.  This is easily rectified by either using paper of thin card shims between the slices to lengthen the core or filling the corners with a bit of modelling putty or Milliput.  Don't let this slight issue put you off the buildings are very, very nice indeed.  My only real criticism is that the building instructions are not always as helpful as I might have liked, but I have been able to work out what I was doing by dry fitting the parts and looking at the images of the completed buildings on the website.  The order is accompanied by an email with PDF instructions but these are often just an image and a description of the finished building.

The manufacturer also does buildings in other scales and covers some areas I haven't seen else where in the larger scales like the city walls and buildings of Troy!  Their website is here >>Supreme Littleness Designs Home

Return to the Altar of Freedom rules

You may recall that around this time last year I was waxing lyrical about the Altar of Freedom ACW rules.  The only issue with them is that they are definitely not solo friendly, which is a bit of an issue in times of Covid isolation.  This has meant that I haven't been able to play a game since I bought the rules.  Which of course really annoyed me as it was an itch I couldn't scratch!  So I built a back scratcher to solve the problem.  If you don't know the rules the heart of the system is a bidding process where a player bids points to allow a division to activate.  Generals have a set of traits which impact the total number of points and in some cases how they can be used.  Points can be saved for a reserve action phase but cannot normally be shared between commands or passed on to the next turn.  Divisions activate in highest bid order but here is the thing.  The Army commander can use his points to control the turn clock.  The turn clock runs down by an amount determined by a dice roll after each set of activations and when it reaches zero the turn ends even if some divisions have not yet activated.  both sides roll a dice after the end of each activation and the player who controls the clock decides which one to use.  Its a neat system which simulates a general's limits to command and control his forces.  So how to make it solo friendly?

For those who don't know me, in real life, I work as a tax consultant which means I have more than a passing familiarity with Excel spreadsheets.  So I built a spreadsheet to generate semi-random action bids for the non player side in a solo game.  I say non random as I built in a bias based upon which division I determine the non playing side needs to prioritise.  In brief I enter the number of points a general has to bid for the turn, the number of points the Army commander wants to add to that total and the level of priority a division will receive (as a percentage).  At the start of the game I allocate a number of points to be bid for each priority every turn and set a minimum and maximum range for the random bid that will be added to that value.  There is some jiggery-pokery in the formulas to ensure that the maximum bids are not exceeded and each turn the spreadsheet churns out semi-random bids made up of my pre-set manually entered amounts and the spreadsheet's random additional bid.

It looks like this, sorry I can't show the formulas but if anyone wants to play with the Excel let me know and I will send a copy by email.  The yellow and green cells are where I enter values.  Green at the start of the game (these will not then change) and yellow for any changes during the game (although my current thinking is that the player bid for each divisional priority level will stay the same throughout).  All I have to do in game is allocate each division a priority level each turn and get the spreadsheet to update the random bids.  The screen grab above is the initial version,  I'm up to version 2 now having ironed some bugs in the way it totals up the points.  It looks the same but some of the formulas have been refined.

The only thing this spreadsheet doesn't do is focus on combined attacks by more than one division.  A player could allocate the same bid for two divisions so that they activate together this spreadsheet doesn't have an option to do that.  The current version is rather clunky as the total in the check box is calculated in a different way to everything else but I'm pretty sure that it does what I want.  All I need to do is test it to destruction to find any errors which needs me to actually play a game.

Real Life - The beat goes on

 The heartbeat that is.  I am almost four weeks the other side of the coronary bypass surgery and the recovery is going well.  I'm up to two 15-20 minute walks a day and my pace is picking up to what I consider my normal walking pace.  I have been given the OK to take a partial shower which means I can get everything wet except the chest scar.  Up until now I have been having to make do with a rub down with a damp copy of the Radio Times!

The wound on my leg where they harvested a vein is healing well and the hope is that the application of warm water will soften the scabs and let them come off naturally.  The chest wound is progressing well but one section needed to be redressed as the dissolvable stiches didn't!  Overall I'm very pleased with the way things are healing, it seems that my body is smarter than I am about these things.  A couple more weeks and I should be able to set a game up.

Cold War 82 - Identifying the Soviet attack avenues

 BAOR Brigade HQ - 05:30hrs 6th June 1982

"We are definitely in to a shooting war Gentlemen.  Warsaw Pact armoured formations have crossed the internal border at multiple points and large scale air raids are hitting our airfields and port facilities as we speak.  Battle Group Bravo fought an engagement over the last hour with what they are tentatively identifying as lead elements of 2nd Guards Tank Army around Ingelund.  They have badly hurt the Russian advance guard but are now withdrawing to the west to avoid being outflanked."

"We have two other Russian axis of advance within the Brigade area to contain but we have no positive contacts with them as yet and I have some concerns that they may have bypassed our recon formations.  We will know more once the AAC helicopter recon flights report in.  For the moment our trip wire units are pulling back to pre-planned defensive positions where they will make a further defensive stand.”

Soviet command post 1st Division, 2nd Guards Tank Army

"We have pushed the British back around 7Km all along our main axis of attack.  Our third tank regiment has dislodged heavy armoured formations at the cost of two battalions having to reform their units which will prevent them from following up immediately.  This is of little concern as the Regiment’s remaining two tank battalions have closed up and they will launch a regimental scale attack as soon as their lead battalions are ready to engage.  Lead elements of 2nd Tank Regiment are reporting contact with a British Reconnaissance screen.  1st TR advance guard has not made contact with the enemy yet."

In game terms the BAOR units are mostly withdrawing one table west to cover the crossings over the first river line.  Soviet 3rd TR faces an hour’s delay while it regroups the advance guard which was roughed up at Ingelund.  This has allowed it’s second echelon to close up.

If you look at the game map below Soviet units are orange circles and BAOR yellow rectangles (they show up better if you open the image up and zoom in).  The markers show which tables they occupy but not the exact locations on those tables.

The situation at around 0530 hrs 6 June 1982

There is a situation developing in the far north of the brigade area where one river crossing is unguarded.  BAOR needs to redeploy units northwards across the entire front line to balance out defensive duties.  Remember the BAOR battle groups are pairs of companies/squadrons and the recon units (noted with an R prefix) are troops with attached specialist units, while the Soviets are pairs of battalions so things are not as clear cut as they appear.

The turn process is to move the BAOR formations then the Warsaw Pact ones.  There is no fixed turn length, instead I set a time based either on the end of the last engagement and any regroup time and see how the other units have moved during that time.  Once I had moved the Soviet units, using a semi random system, I diced for air superiority for the next set of encounters and got a pretty substantial pro-NATO result so Soviet air support may be 'delayed'.  The next fight will be to try to extricate the BAOR Recon formation from table D8.

I'm beginning to wish I had used an actual set of locations from the BAOR area of operations rather than fictionalising things, mainly because I wouldn't have to try to invent names for places!  Lesson learned for next time!

Meanwhile back in the real world, I'm healing well following my surgery but still can't lift or carry anything over 5Kg in weight or stand for more than 15 minutes at a time.  The surgical scars are healing well and I'm not in any real pain more a general discomfort where my chest was cracked open!  All of which prevents me from setting up the large table required for the cold war games for a while yet.  It's probably going to be a couple or three weeks before the next game is played. 

Real Life - which is better than the alternative.

 I have had a busy few days going into hospital for triple cardiac bypass surgery.  I went through the procedure on Wednesday last and I’m back at home recovering now after my stay with our wonderful NHS.  The operation went well and I should be fully recovered in around six weeks.

I’m not up to full on blogging yet as I can’t stand for long enough to play a game but normal service will be resumed in due course.

As for better than the alternative, I just deleted the ‘if you’re reading this then I’m dead version’ of this post.  Personally I prefer this version.