Chain of Command: Fight for the factories AAR

Just a quick summary of a late war Chain of Command game against my friend Daniel and his Soviet force. Like in our previous game it was a regular German infantry platoon vs a Soviet rifle platoon. In this battle however I was a lot luckier deploying units on the table with the Soviet "turn 1" artillery barrage going on.

This time we also used my factory complex as the main setting for the fight.
This was a fairly quick game where I as the defender managed to move into both factories before the Soviet troops got there - and set up a nice overwatch.

Attempting to capture the left side factory by force the Soviet troops barged in and charged my German squad which at the time was involved in a firefight with another Soviet unit inside the building. The charge was a massacre due to the German defensive fire and poor Soviet dice rolls. An entire unit of Soviet troops was wiped out at the cost of only two Germans.

This took the wind out of the Soviet attack, and the Germans managed to keep control of the two buildings and wore down the remaining Soviet units with prolonged firefights (we counted firing room to room as being in hard cover, and firing inside the same room as being in soft cover).

The only thing that really got to the Germans was the appearance of Soviet support teams, two light mortars and a heavy machinegun which combined their firepower and began chewing up a German squad attempting to flank the Soviet line. Things got quite bad and in the end a badly beaten German squad had to be moved back and out of line of sight.

Only the timely arrival of the Panzer III mopped out the remaining opposition - bouncing rear hits from an ambushing Soviet AT rifle.

As said earlier, the game was quite fastpaced and over relatively quickly. My opponent made a accidental charge with his troops against a fresh and unsuppressed full squad which was the turning point of the battle. Had that Soviet unit advanced alongside the other squad inside the left factory the Germans there would had been overrun and the German deployment locations would be easy pickings.

Also, the Soviet side lacked any proper AT assets in this fight, though honestly, the PzIII did little for most part of the battle and it wasn't until the very last couple of phases that it bit back at the Soviet support troops.