Droning On

We were back with Chris' space men and ultra-ultra-modern experiments this week. The younger members of our group turned out to be unavailable, so the Grognards (Chris, Phil & I) had to make do.

The Paprikans are up against it again, under attack from the Orange Meanies who want to take control of the roads between their border mega fort, and the rocky bluffs. I was the Paprikans. Chris is trying to fit drone warfare into NQM and I regret my general ignorance of exactly how that works didn't really help. I was given three groups of drone operators and associated drones. Chris had some ideas on how these would work on the tabletop, some of which survived contact with the enemy. The brown blobs are the piles of rubble where the drone operators can hide and from where the drones pop out.

The drones - you can see one in the building and one in front of the Stompy Thing in front of the Titan Terror Tank - are a recce/attack combo unit. They move in the recce phase and then explode in pre-movement shooting. Given the discussion we had about drones causing an empty battlefield, I don't think three in a game this size are going to cut it. Phil had recce anti drone units with which to repel my drones. These are the single based figures like the one in the middle of the picture.

Drones always fight on parity, which is helpful, but the first lesson was don't penny-packet them.

If you get lucky in a couple of waves you can overwhelm a unit and destroy it.

Whilst Phil was distracting my attention by attacking the fortress, Chris started to sneak some chaps across the river. I chucked in a drone or two to slow them down.

I put some assault pioneers in a strong point on the hill top to protect the drone operators and overlook the road. They have already survived and driven off one concerted attack.

 Phil was now trying to break into the fort. We had an interesting discussion on the post-combat outcomes rule, when dealing with something like this. Chris decided you could only break in once engineers or the Terror Tank had made a breach.

So Phil brought one up. I assailed it with drones, and held it off. Then we had tea and coffee.

The game was based on the Soviets & Germans fighting round Sebastopol, but we talked drones a lot. I have said elsewhere that as far as I can tell what the cheap drone has done in terms of recce and "bombardment" is deliver that capability to the lowest level of the army possible, as they can be operated by a four man section. They give recce capability previously only dreamed of at battalion level or even higher, delivered by planes or satellites. The suicide drone used en masse is like close support off-table  artillery. Nothing is safe when moving and the modern soldier must assume he is being observed at all times.

Bizarrely in a way this means that the time of the completely open game with everything visible on the table top may have come at last. Whether the drones need to be modelled on the table is another issue, and a drone v drone game is quite unlike anything we've been gaming before. Chris said that the Ukrainians claim to use four men to hold a kilometre of frontage, and fly drones in waves of 20 or more. I'll take his word for it. In the post game discussion I started using phrases like "there's been a battlefield paradigm shift", and it did occur to me that perhaps what we are seeing is what happened in the First World War, where the importance of  artillery and the all arms battle emerged in a way no one foresaw in 1914. The sheer consumption of drones in Ukraine is akin to the massive increase in artillery shell production that occurred in 1915-18. A new warfare is obviously emerging and it is important we learn the right lessons from what is going on. Unlike the conclusions drawn from the Russo-Japanese War 1904-5.

I fear working out what is happening is completely beyond me.