Lislet

Some very nice battles there the last few days. Monday night I found myself the German Target of Choice in my Mathildas, and then Feld Marshal ‘greatone’ turned up and it became a true prize fight :)

There was one awkward moment where I had rolled out southeast during the initial Axis armor movement and flanked a bunch of Panzers moving along the road to guard the eastern depot. More tanks were arriving and I’d gotten tracked. I had some 6 or 7 panzers firing at me. Unable to do anything to them myself, I was working my way around them marking the contacts and then trying to pick off their right tracks: if I got lucky this would turn then and give me a nice left-flank shot where I know how to kill a couple of the panzers, but only one of them played dice.

So we sat like that for a good several minutes, with them bouncing round after round off me. Finally, a new Panzer was approaching, but before I could get my first shot off one of the others finally degunned me. The other tanks were mostly positioned infront of me. This guy was moving towards me and would soon have a nice side-on view of my left flank.

So, since the other Panzers had switched to HE, I tried to turn towards this new panzer. With my track missing, I didn’t manage much but it made him turn and kept me alive a little longer to pick off troops.

The new arrival scanned me briefly with his turret but didn’t fire. “Crap. Got a live one here”. He took a moment to check his surroundings, and moved another 100m and I turned again. He turned north towards town. Rounds from the other panzers continued to plink off my turret. I could keep turning with this panzer and eventually give one of them a real easy shot to my rear or I could turn back to them and use my remaining mg to kill infantry from a nearby mobile spawn… I turned back to the earlier panzers and, when my view wasn’t shaking from HE explosions, mowed down a couple more infantry.

And then boom one shot from that newer panzer and I exploded. Dangit.

Uh oh, Sparky‘s playing Axis. (48Mb WMV version here)

KFS1, GreatOne and sparky as potential victims… Yeah, the fight picked up fairly fast :) 

I waited a few minutes for another Matty and spawned back in, charged out of the armybase onto the road and my gunners head came off – first shot.

One thing some of our players have a hard time getting their heads around… Critical Components don’t have health bars. They have a threshold, that says “You must hit me with X many joules to kill me” – but that isn’t cumulative. If you pass that threshold, you kill the component, if you don’t pass that threshold, you don’t do anything except generate spalling that might hurt crew members or might have enough energy to blow up some ammo.

When you kill a tank, that shot was one shot. It doesn’t matter that you fired 50 rounds at it first, if you had fired that same shot first it would have killed the tank there and then. If you can kill a tank you can kill it with one shot.

I lost a few more Matties before having to resort to Daimlers (the Crusaders were going before I could get them off the list). Sparky had his squad bring up Flaks which I seemed destined to find … but not in a good way. But the neither the Axis or the Allies could reform their perimeter around town and the Axis smartly paced themselves rather than draining their armored brigade. As the fight turned to boots on the ground, it was time for me to call it a night :)

It’s a very unusual town, a small layout but not many easy exits from the armybase area…

S! to friend and foe, see you in there later this week. I might be wearing grey this time tho ;)