Tank Destroyers in Flames Of War

Flames Of War

Tank Destroyers in Flames Of War
Phil’s been rather busy lately, but we managed to get him to write down his thoughts on the tank destroyer rules (amazing what a little bit of encouragement from the Komissar can do!).

Greetings all, Phil here. Tank destroyers have been generating a lot of talk on the forums lately! After reading and thinking about things for a while, I thought it was time to chime in with where I’m at. The first thing to say though is that, while I’m still listening to the feedback and pondering their future, I’m in no rush to change things on the tank destroyers just yet.

Perhaps the best place to start is a history of tank destroyers and their rules in Flames Of War. Unsurprisingly, the tank destroyer rules go right back to the start of the game. One of the unusual things about the structure of the US Army in the Second World War was the creation of a tank destroyer branch on an equal footing with the armour and infantry branches, so there was no doubt in my mind that the tank destroyers would have their unique doctrine reflected in the game.

The key thing that stuck in my mind from reading accounts of tank destroyer crews is they times when their doctrine worked, the times when their scouts enabled them to work their way unseen up the flanks of a German counterattack and engage the attacking tanks in the flanks. To me, the obvious way of making this possible was to keep the tank destroyers themselves off the table and only deploy the scouts, bringing the tank destroyers into the game when they revealed themselves to engage the enemy. While this has brought about jokes about tank destroyers decloaking off the starboard bow, it does keep their opponents in the dark about their real location (as they were historically) until they reveal themselves — and equally importantly, doesn’t require maps or other tedious record keeping.

The first version of the rule, way back a decade ago, was very simple, just a single paragraph. Unfortunately, such simple innocence couldn’t last. In Version 2, the rule grew to the length it is today as it tried to answer the questions that kept cropping up. In its current, third version, the rule has changed again. This time in response to players complaining that tank destroyers weren’t really worth it as their special rules were too limited. As a result, making tank destroyers more worthwhile was one of the design goals for the third version of the rules.

Tank Destroyers in Flames Of War

The main focuses of the design changes were to make it harder to assassinate tank destroyers by shooting up their jeeps, clean up the organisation to keep the security teams in their jeeps, and to align the placement rules for the tank destroyers more closely with the rules for ambushes. These rules were changed early in the development process and playtested for the best part of a year during the development.

The changes have generated a lot of discussion that the design team has been following with interest, and some concern that tank destroyers are seemingly overpowered, particularly in the US tournament scene. We are always concerned when players perceive that there is a significant problem with Flames Of War, but at the same time we try not to rush in to fix things until we are sure that we know what the answer is and will not do more harm than good. After all, I doubt that anyone really wants to go back to the other extreme where the complaint is that tank destroyers are useless, especially not those who’ve just spent their hard-earned money on a new tank destroyer company! At the moment we are still in the listening, considering and pondering stage of things.

Tank Destroyers in Flames Of War

One of the interesting things about Flames Of War is how it is played slightly differently in each place it is played. Tank destroyers are a good demonstration of this.  For instance, every area has a slightly different style of terrain, and to a degree, it is not surprising that tank destroyers are doing well in denser terrain. After all, there is little to limit the movement of the jeeps and scout cars of the security sections in this style of terrain, and at the same time only a very limited part of the enemy force can engage them, no matter where they go. Likewise, it isn’t too surprising that tank destroyers are doing less well in places where the terrain has longer lines of sight and more linear terrain limiting the options for the security section’s movement.

In terms of tournaments, tank destroyers have done well at some tournaments, but not all, and the mix of forces that players are fielding is changing in response to the Battle of the Bulge series of books bringing a new generation of American tanks to the game as well. This process will no doubt continue over the next few months with other books adding more new equipment to the game and further destabilising the old patterns and assumptions. However, the same players are placing in the top tier of the tournaments as were before, some of them now fielding tank destroyers rather than their previous preference for the most competitive forces. What we are not seeing is a radical influx of new players fielding tank destroyer forces and beating the usual tournament leaders with them. That would be a sure sign that they were way overpowered. We seem to be seeing more a shake up in the type of force that does well in that environment.

Tank Destroyers in Flames Of War

Let’s go back and look at the changes in the latest version in more detail, starting with increasing the survivability of the security sections. One of the ways we did this is to make them expendable. No matter what happens to the security section, the tank destroyers will still turn up, ready for a fight. There are several aspects to this. Firstly, we changed the way unarmoured reconnaissance worked in general (a big boon for all American reconnaissance as it is mostly jeep-based), and allowed the security section to appoint new command teams as needed to keep them moving. At the same time we took away one of their other roles by getting rid of the carbine teams and removing the security sections from the table when the tank destroyers arrive.

Tank Destroyers in Flames Of War
This pretty much achieved what we were looking for, in that it’s quite difficult to prevent the tank destroyers from turning up. As is the nature of changes, this generated two new complaints. The first was that their tank destroyer sections were no longer relatively immune to platoon morale checks as they no longer had the security section carbine teams hiding at the back of the table to prevent them falling below half strength. Since this was intentional, after all, the security sections were there to locate the enemy, not act as commissars threatening to shoot tank destroyers that retreated.

The second concern is around the ability of the security section to appoint any team as a new command team if the command team is destroyed. Some people have suggested that this should be limited to teams within command distance (similar to the German Mission Tactics special rule). The main effect of this would be to prevent teams from the security section held in a reserve position from becoming the command team and attempting to continue the advance if the lead element is destroyed. As I’ve said, I’m still pondering, but for the moment I’m not really sure that the difference is worth making the change for.
A related concern is about the rule that has the tank destroyer section turns up where the command team was destroyed if the security section gets wiped out. Again, this is a result of the design team’s desire to avoid having the tank destroyers vanish if the security section is wiped out. But, you say, that puts the tank destroyer section right where the player wanted it anyway, why not make it come on from reserves instead for instance? We experimented with a wide range of solutions to handle this situation, including just that suggestion. What we found was that most of the other solutions added a lot more rules, and potentially made tank destroyers even more powerful. In the case of the reserves suggestion, for instance, it allows the tank destroyers to redeploy right across the table and come on wherever is best for them, almost without restriction, while having to deploy around the command team is often quite restrictive as the opponent often the opportunity to block off some deployment options around the command team, forcing the tank destroyers to appear where they would rather not.

Other people have asked why things like Air Observation Posts using the Column Security rule or Skorzeny’s Commandos can’t stop tank destroyers from appearing. One of the answers is that, since they can follow the security section around (either with unlimited movement, or by moving immediately after them), they would make it very difficult to bring the tank destroyers on. Sure, there are ways of getting rid of them, but the resulting game would bear little resemblance to reality and push these teams into roles they never undertook in reality. Normal reconnaissance teams can already restrict tank destroyer placement and they do have this type of role in reality.

An area that we do think is clear that the tank destroyer rules could do with being tightened up is the ability of the security section to move at the double or disengage, and then hand over the baton to the tank destroyers that then suffer no penalties at all. It would make much more sense to transfer the penalties across to the tank destroyers, after all, they presumably had to double or disengage to get into position as well.

Tank Destroyers in Flames Of War

Before I wrap up, I’d like to address an interesting assertion that has been made that the tank destroyers didn’t use their doctrine anyway, leading to the question: why do they have it in the game? While it’s true that tank destroyer doctrine didn’t work in the way it was originally expected, with battalions and even brigades of tank destroyers rushing to cut off and destroy German armoured breakthroughs, there are plenty of accounts of tank destroyer tactics being used on a smaller scale. Unfortunately for the tank destroyers, neither the Normandy battles, nor the Battle of the Bulge were fought in terrain that suited mobile tactics, forcing the tank destroyers into head-on battles with enemy tanks. In between however, in the race across France and Belgium, the tank destroyers had a field day, with the recon elements locating enemy counterattacks, and the tank destroyers manoeuvring to engage them from the flanks.

For those interested in the history of tank destroyers, there is an interesting site at http://tankdestroyer.net that has a number of historical documents and papers on tank destroyers and the units and men that used them.

Last of all, I’d like to say that the Battlefront design studio likes to receive your feedback and does read the forums, even if we can’t reply to every suggestion or question. The last two years have been particularly busy with developing Version 3 (which ate up many thousands of hours), and we are still catching up, so we haven’t been able to be as active on the forums as we would like. However, it is your feedback that has made Flames Of War the great game it is today, and we are committed to listening to your suggestions on how to make it even better.

I have opened a thread for discussion on this here:
Phil Discusses Tank Destroyers...

Please keep the discussion on topic and constructive. Thanks.

~ Phil.