Artillery in WW1 and WW2 Spearhead

One of the key elements of both WW1 and WW2 Spearhead is the use of artillery.  In WW1 the sheer size and scale of artillery use is incredible (including dropping railway guns and 60lb shells on units for a virtually guaranteed kill).

In WW1 Spearhead the use of preliminary bombardment is key - dropping shells in key areas to (hopefully) obliterate strongpoints, turn the morale of units under fire to mush and (although it never seems to work for us) cut the ribbons of barbed wire that festoon the battlefield.  After 1917 certain mortars can be used and are more effective against wire, for example - but I've always found that as my troops struggle through the mud, all the wire facing them seems to be intact.

I digress - the issue about pre-bombardment is that you are supposed to measure and mark down on a gridded sheet what you intend to drop on what area and when (e.g. 60lb battery onto a pill box on Turns 1 and 2).  The problem with this system is that pretty soon (for more than 1 day's bombardment) is that the sheet is reduced to a mess of pencilled scribbles (often meaning that some shots were missed off in the confusion), that the measurement was never accurate (and in the case of a planned bombardment just 1-2" can be crucial) and - worse - it all took a long, long time to action.

Therefore we (when I say we, I mean 'I') came up with a solution.  The attacking player determines what he's going to shoot at, when and what with by laying small 'tiles' next to the units / strong point / town sector they intend to hit.  Each tile has the type of gun (e.g, Rail Gun) and the Turn it's hitting on (I suppose to speed things up further you can include a 'to hit' and damage stat as well.  These are then laid out next to the targets that they want to hit.  During the bombardment phase the tiles along the line are referred to and actioned (i.e. the shot takes place).

WW1 artillery in action.  The zig-zag denotes French trenches .  If you click on the pic you'll see the artillery tiles more closely.  The spinner shows in which direction the deviation goes.

This is quite simple - the attacker gets a +1 to hit if the shooting is observed (i.e. by balloon and / or observation aircraft for later war).  The same can be applied for WW2 I'm sure - so having aircraft in the skies makes your artillery much more effective.  The shooting deviates on a 1 or 2 on a d6 - deviating in a random direction (determined by a simple spinner) to go either 1d6 for small to medium artillery and 2d6 for larger pieces.  The logic of this is that smaller pieces will have shorter range and so will deviate less than pieces being fired from miles away.  On a hit, a square template (perspex) is placed on the targeted unit and all units 'caught' by the barrage is deemed to be subject to a hit and rolled for seperately.

Artillery in action.  The perspex circle with greeny smoke is gas (easier to see  underneath to see who its killing).  Explosion markers denote suppressed units.

In practice this seems to work quite well.  Rather than use a grid the attacker determines the units he wants to try to hit using his tiles.  We found this a lot quicker and easier and kept track of activity a lot easier.

For WW2 we might experiment with smaller templates for smaller caliber pieces (such as mortars) as well as round templates (which may be a bit fairer as less units may be caught as a consequence.  But the idea of deviation does appeal - it avoids the 'laser targeting' of specific units (i.e. knocking out MG's and Engineer stands only) by adding an element of randomness to proceedings.  In our WW1 game on Sunday, Russ managed to catch his own FOO with the very barrage he was calling in and Ian wiped out a couple of his own entrenched troops with a misplaced railway gun shelling.

So for WW2 Spearhead we'll use similar tiles for artillery shooting with smaller perspex templates for gauges of weaponry and see how we go.