Modern Warfare: Alien Invasion, Chapter 3 - Milk Run

Milk Run
Carthage, Missouri
D + 9

In the early days, before they were openly raiding cities and leveling towns, the aliens emerged cautiously.  At first, much of their activity was to gather food.  Apparently, their crashed ships didn’t have sufficient food stores on board. 

They also like beef.  This raised a lot of questions about whether the stories of cows being mysteriously eviscerated before the invasion were from advance parties or not.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter.

There I was, getting some gas on the way back in town.  This was at the station across from the Parsons farm.

Then things got weird.  Like call 911 weird.

***Operator:  911, what’s your emergency?

Me:  Hey, you should get some cops out here.  There are – I’m not crazy or making this up – aliens trying to take a cow from the Parsons place.  Route 93.

***Operator:  We already have city and county units on the way, and we think the National Guard is coming, too.  Please stay on the line.  Some of our radio connections have been jammed, we may need you to provide an update.

Me:  Sure, whatever…  Okay, there’s a bunch of cops pulling up. 

Me:  Oh, man, things just got sporty.  Old man Parsons and his kids are taking shots at the aliens from their barn!

***Operator:  What’s going on?  I can’t reach any of our units?

Me:  Well, never mind about old man Parsons.  The aliens didn’t care for that at all…

***Operator:  Okay, I’ll dispatch EMS.  We’ll have medics there in a few minutes, hopefully.

Me:  Oh, man, a helicopter just flew over and fired at the aliens!  Are you doing this?  Please tell them to keep it up!

***Operator:  No, sir.  Like I said, communications are tough.  I’m surprised I can talk to you.

Me:  Oh, one of the cops is down.  Definitely send the ambulance.

***Operator:  Thank you, sir.  I’ll make sure EMS is on the way.

Me: Better hurry up with the ambulance , things are getting nasty out here.

*** Operator:  I'll see what I can do...

Me: Thank goodness that cop is okay.  And the State Troopers arrived with the National Guard.

*** Operator:  Good, the ambulance is on the way.

Me: The aliens are on the move, but our boys are too. 

It turned into a mad rush at that point.  Our boys were spoiling for a fight.  And the aliens were trying to abscond with Old Man Parsons' cows.

Me:  The aliens are dropping!  We've got 'em on the run!

Me:  There's just a few of them left!  Our boys are winning!

Me:  Hooray! The boys did it!

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This was the third game in the Modern Warfare:  Alien Invasion series - here's posts one and two.  This is the first using Tomorrow's War, the Ambush Alley sci-fi wargame.

If you browse this blog at all, you'll note that I've probably played and posted more Force on Force AARs than anyone else on the internet.  The commonality between the two systems is strong - Tomorrow's War is basically Force on Force with some technology-specific tweaks to account for a sci-fi setting.

We'll be sticking with Tomorrow's War.  The game flowed well and we were all used to how the Ambush Alley system is supposed to play.

As for the gameplay, the Tech Level advantage of the aliens worked for them until it didn't, and then they were overwhelmed by numbers and some bad rolls.  A good time was had by all, and we plan to get some non-40k aliens and start a campaign using the Tomorrow's War campaign system.

Battles of the Week, 9 August 2016

Sorry, no games to post over the last couple of weeks.  Been busy, but I had the chance to finish painting a few minis:

The minis are from Enfilade Figures' insurgent range.  It's good to have some dudes with AKs that aren't too Middle Eastern-looking and could probably be tough guys from anywhere.

I was delighted to find someone else playing a game somewhat similar to my Modern Warfare:  Alien Invasion campaign.  Dust, Tears & Dice has a game posted with near-future Russians fighting off alien battle droids.  Very cool.

Bob in Edmonton has a Black Ops game up set in the Prohibition Era, with G-Men and gangsters facing off over an illegal liquor still.  I may need to pick up that rule set, if just for the stealth infiltration aspect.

World War II roundup:  some Battlegroup Overlord at This War Without an Enemy, Sound Officer's Call has a Historicon game of Battlegroup:  Kursk posted, and Craig has a whole tournament of Flames of War from Panzershrek 2016 posted - Game 1, Game 2, Game 3, Game 4, and Game 5.

Big Lee has a massive Romans versus German barbarians game up, you should check it out.

Sediment has an ACW game and a Cold War gone hot game posted, both good reads.

Rabbits in My Basement has an old-school Afghanistan game up, and there's some WH40K over at both Fawcett Avenue Conscripts and Tim's blog.

Fantasy battles:  Fencing Frog has some Dragon Rampant posted, here's a Frostgrave battle from two perspectives - Stanley's and Mike's, and a very positive review of Age of Sigmar from Little Wars VA, a Games Workshop skeptic (I'm in the same boat).  I doubt that I'll get into the game, but it's promising that GW appears to have made an effort to fix chief complaints about overcomplicated rules and being unresponsive to player input.

Alien Invasion, Chapter 2: Hold the Line

This is the second installment of my modern alien invasion campaign, using homebrew rules that will ultimately also be used in some superhero games.  The first battle can be found here.

After-Action Report

D+9, 1722 Hours

SSG Paul Barbour

B Company, 1st Battalion, 67th Armor Regiment

3d Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division

Kuwait City

It all went to hell pretty quickly once the suits and the lizards got into the city proper, trying to drive from their crash site to the oil terminals and the port.  We had trained with the Kuwaiti National Guard unit a fair amount – heck, that was our mission before the ships came and we started knocking them out of the sky.  But there weren’t enough Kuwaitis to go around.  We got plugged into a gap in the line to try and hold them.  We did, but at a cost.

Initial Setup.  US forces on the near side of the table, aliens on the far side.

View from the US right flank.  Aliens are already crossing the road to the nearest covered positions to the US line.

From the US right, able to see aliens advancing toward the middle of the human lines.

Aliens on the opposite side of the same position, using buildings for cover.

View from the alien headquarters element, with the alien section leader giving directions.

View across the lines from the alien center - Bradley Fighting Vehicle peeking around a corner.

A human Gustav Recoilless Rifle crew spots alien movement as the fight starts.

US Army HMMWV gunner spots alien forces across the field.

The onslaught began, with the lizard men advancing in front of the 'suits' - the leaders in armor that shrugged off most of our fire.

The dismounts on our right were lucky and landed both some 40mm grenade and small arms hits on the lizards in the center.

Unfortunately, the bits of lucky fire we had at the outset were soon offset by the charge of several aliens in the center - they penetrated our lines by rushing into a building that one of the fire teams and a squad leader held.  It was brutal.  They wiped out our guys to a man.  I went into the building with the mortuary affairs platoon afterward.  It was horrible.

Aliens defeat humans in a close quarters fight.

Good thing that the rest of the line was keeping up a good volume of fire.  Between grenades and small arms fire, we had some of the enemy positions in tough spots.

US grenade and small arms fire take their toll.

While this was going on, one of the alien drones was still hovering above the fray, and zapped one of the two uparmored HMMWVs that had reinforced us.

A US Army HMMWV goes up after an alien drone engages.

Things went our way as soon as I edged my Bradley around the corner and picked up several shapes on the roof of the mosque in our thermals.  We didn't mess around - I told the gunner to fire a TOW at them.

 Effects on target.

Little did they know - the US TOW missile wiped out the alien command section.

We had some other lucky strikes along the line - the Gustav crew wrecked the building opposite them that had served as a fighting position for another fire team of those lizard men.

"Johnson, good hit!'

It was a great hit, in fact.  The building partially collapsed after some secondary explosions.

"Johnson, great shot!  I'm putting you in for an award!"

Over on the right, the dismounts on the roofs were laying it on pretty thick to prevent a breakthrough like we had in the center.

Orange tokens note actions, red tokens note wounds.

The other Bradley on the right was laying down some good fire, too.

Overview of the action at the end of the first turn.

State of the battle at the end of the first turn.  Effective US fires observable at the far center and left, destroyed HMMWV on the lower right side of the picture.

View from the alien lines.  This position put some rail gun fire on the humans that caused some casualties.

As the aliens continued their advance across the lines, the right was able to hold their positions even though the lizard men continued their rampage through the center of our lines.

Alien team all wounded as they close the gap with the human right flank.

Alien team assaults from the center of the US position to the building holding the US Gustav team.

The other side of the rush across the alley to assault the Carl Gustav recoilless rifle team.  The Bradley Fighting Vehicle let loose at close range, but not quick enough to catch all of the enemy.

Outcome of the alien charge into the Carl Gustav recoilless rifle position - win for the aliens.  Johnson never gets his award.

It was pretty ugly.  The same small group of aliens that hit the middle of our lines continued its rampage and wiped out the recoilless rifle team.  Another episode with the mortuary affairs team I'd rather not dwell on.  Meanwhile, an alien element that we hadn't been tracking jumped the far wall in the compound on our left.  The dismounts in that compound laid down a hellish amount of fire, and a nearby uparmored HMMWV pitched in.

Trying to prevent another close encounter of the worst kind.

About this time, the aliens made a big push on our right.  The guys over there put down a hell of a lot of fire.

A trio of wounded alien on the human right push their luck.

It ends poorly as all three take additional wounds and go down for the count.

The Bradley Fighting Vehicle on the US right pitches in with some additional fire.

End result - the aliens lay dead just as they were about to crack the US right.

At this point, it looked like our right flank was okay.  But we had some fighting to do on the left-center of our line.  The infantry position to my left was about to be outflanked and overrun, but we laid down some critical support fire that prevented that from happening.

The alien rush from the Gustav recoilless rifle position to the last US infantry on the human left failed, at least in part, as shown above - gunned down at point blank range by a Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

And the boys we were helping did a pretty good job themselves at not getting overrun...

The infantry on the US left successfully put down the alien close assault.

View of the field of battle from US lines as the game wraps up.

Though we hadn't really hurt them so much, the armored aliens fell back as soon as we broke the momentum of the assault.  At least for the moment, we had held the line.

The armored aliens beat feet as their momentum stalls.

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This was a much closer game than the last one, and showed the danger that the lizard men pose when they get into close combat with humans.  I'm still finishing up the vehicle rules and stats.  Look for more development in future installments.

Modern Warfare: Alien Invasion, Chapter 1

After-Action Report
D+23, 2143 Hours
SGT Ray Parsons
A Company, 1st Battalion, 138th Infantry Regiment
Missouri Army Reserve National Guard

We got lucky, I guess.  We went out to a roadblock that the county had set up before things got real bad.  One of the sheriff's deputies had gone out to an intersection out at the edge of friendly territory.  We'd relieved the guy after he'd been out there for a shift - he left his vehicle out in the intersection so that folks wouldn't head out into no-mans land - and the company had kept a squad out there ever since.

Our position - a fire team on the roof of the store, another out at the police SUV with the squad leader.

The lucky part is when the attack happened.  We were in the process of changing shifts, so we had two full squads on site when the attack came.  It was a good thing.  I was in the parking lot outside the store that we were using as an overwatch position along with the rest of 3rd squad.  That's when one of the guys on the roof started yelling that we had some of those lizard men approaching the position, and fast.

Shift change in the parking lot, interrupted.

So I got my fire team shooting at the things approaching the roadblock, and Staff Sergeant Johnson and the guys out in the intersection started banging away, too.

We've got company!

We laid a lot of fire into those things, and I swear that I saw them jerk a bit when they got hit, but they kept on coming.

Grenade launcher scores a hit on the approaching aliens.  Didn't stop them.

About to have a close encounter.

Up on the roof, the rest of 1st squad was pouring it on while my squad leader, Staff Sergeant Kovach, ran around the back of the store to protect our flank.  Good thing he did - more on that later.

The boys of 1st squad spot the enemy.

Those things kept coming, in spite of a hail of gunfire.

We finally got some lucky hits with the aliens charging the intersection, dropping two of the three lizard men coming from that direction.  The third ran back to the trees to find some cover.  The fire from their guns hadn't been effective up to that point.

The roadblock position finally scores some good hits.

Then, Specialist O'Reilly out at the roadblock got nailed.

Specialist O'Reilly gets hit.

Some of the other aliens - the ones that wear suits and have the bigger guns - showed up in the woods down the road.

More aliens show up.

At this point things got hot on the right flank.  The three lizard aliens got closer to the shop we had garrisoned.  Good thing Staff Sergeant Kovach and the rest of the squad went over to secure that side of the building.

Staff Sergeant Kovach rounds the corner just in time.

Midway through the fight.

We started to get lucky with our fire here.  The M203 gunners kept dropping rounds on both the lizard aliens and the ones in the armor suits.

Grenade launcher drops one on the alien position.

We kept up the fire on the right, too, hoping to keep the lizard aliens from getting on top of us.  We knew that if they reached our position it was going to be a bad day.

Fire from two US positions lays wounds on the lizard men approaching the American right.

At this point, the guys at the roadblock grabbed O'Reilly and moved back to the building as we provided covering fire.

Carrying O'Reilly back to the parking lot for MEDEVAC.

At this point, things shifted.  Someone scored a lucky hit on one of the aliens in the woodline, dropping him.  The other two armored guys picked him up and carried him off.

Parallel alien MEDEVAC.

Around this time, the guys on the roof and the other side of the building really picked up their fire.  They had three of the big lizard aliens approaching fast through a copse of trees.

Aliens break through the woodline.

As the aliens got close, though, they were exposed to two full fire teams' worth of firepower, right up close.

The US right fends off the alien advance.

So we fought 'em off on both flanks.  Shame that O'Reilly didn't make it, but at least we held.  The company commander increased the detail at that intersection to two full squads after that.

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This is my new campaign (campaign page to follow) - modern warfare against an alien invasion.  I'm writing the rules for this as I go (working title is Heroes, Heavies, and Hordes, and is intended to allow mixing modern forces up to platoon size with superheroes, aliens and the like), so the first game focused on infantry alone.  More posts to follow.