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12/12/2015

Wojna Światów tournament - final thoughts

Ok, so I am through my first Mid War tournament playing Romanian cavalry (PDF). I have gathered some first experiences and have some new improvement ideas. But before I dive deeper into these considerations, I would like to share some overall thoughts. First of all, I think that I completely deserved the place that I got (11/27). I am not entirely satisfied with the result but there were some list design issues that I did not predict before the tournament - more on that later.

Secondly, I really like this Romanian list. I think that with some improvements it can be a really competitive force for the ETC. Considering that the team I will most probably be playing for already has the German mech slot occupied, the only choice I can field in terms of models are Romanians. This means that I am in a way bound to my first selection and my course of action for the upcoming months is rather to master this army than to focus on getting a new one. It does not mean however, that I am upset by this fact. Quite the opposite: I have a good feeling about getting enough practice before the event and making sure that I do my best during the tournament. I am convinced that Wojna Światów was the experience I needed to optimize my list.
 
Now on to the description of the lessons I learned :)
The obvious place to start is: what went wrong. Well, there are several things that I did not like about my list. I will go through them one by one:

1. Not enough meaningful anti-tank! This was a big issue when I faced the KV tanks. Out of 3-4 lists that had KVs in them I had to play against 2. I was a bit unhappy about this during the tournament, but now I look at this as a good thing as a glaring weakness in my list design has been revealed. The main problem I had in this area was that once my Pak40s were gone, there was nothing else there to stop the rampaging behemoths. Even though my brave Vanators de Care did their best to destroy the KVs, single hits every now and again are not enough to get rid of them in a reliable manner.
2. I never thought I was going to say this but I am convinced I had a bit too many guns :) In essence, I did not really need the 45mms. I think all they did during the tournament was: destroyed 1 Pz IV tank and 1 HMG. In all other cases they were the unecessary duplicate for the 75mm battery. For this list, 4 Pak40s, 12 75mms and 4 81mm mortars should be enough in all cases.
3. Pz35s were crap. They may be a good infantry/armored car harrassment tool but that is about it. They did help me to win the second battle a bit but this was mainly due to them being very lucky avoiding real tanks' fire and posing not enough threat for the enemy to direct any meaningful units against them.
4. I still need to work on my deployment. There were cases where better deployment could have won me the game. Specifically, in the 4th battle if I concentrated my HQ units around where the KVs were about to hit, I could have eliminated more of them during the hand to hand that ensued.
 
I do not have a point by point description of the good stuff but still, there are some positive things about the Romanian cavalry. The big and obvious strong part of the list is the combination of firepower and survivability. Just like with the KVs, I can dish out a lot damage and absorb a good amount of punishment in return.
What I really love about this kind of lists is that (barred breakthrough guns appear on the horizon) I always get my saves. Be it 3+ or 5+ if the enemy is targetting my guns, I can always limit the number of casaulties taken by at least 1/3. Combined with huge platoons this means that it takes a lot of time before I start rolling my morale checks.
I also love the direct smoke on the 75mms. They are the type of guns that is always useful - even when they are faced with a threat they cannot deal with using HE/AP rounds, they can always smoke it and force the enemy to move and reduce their rof while the other parts of the company do their job.


So, here are my initial thoughts on how I and my company did during the tournament. There will be an update coming on what are the changes that I will test in my list next time. Also, there will be another tournament report coming in soon + my first impressions of TY rulebook (I might even post some pictures of the models too :P ). Stay tuned!

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