Heroes Have No Fury

I had the day off Wednesday and was thinking about playing a game. I considered starting my Age of Heroes campaign, but just wasn't feeling it.

What kind of game was I interested in? I had this idea of running a platoon of tanks against random enemies. Were there any rules out there that would work for such a game? Thoughts turned to this:

Hell Hath No Fury, by Two Hour Wargames, is a set of mini rules for World War II tank skirmishes, where each figure is 1 tank. As is typical with THW titles, HHNF is designed for solo or co-op play. Sounds perfect, except that I am not a fan of THW's combat rules.

Nevertheless, I picked up HHNF, primarily because I was interested in its system for randomly determining enemy forces. In this respect, I am pleased with my purchase. The system for placing PEFs (possible enemy forces) and then generating the encounters seems very sensible. And it also includes 10 scenarios, perfect for campaigning.

Of course, I am an inveterate tinkerer; I am not going to play HHFN as written. First off, I don't have any WWII figures. Instead, I plan to use my sci-fi tanks, like these on the left:

And as I mentioned, I don't like the THW combat rules. So I spent much of Wednesday afternoon trying to decide what rules to use. Ultimately, I came up with a quirky thought - modify Age of Heroes for vehicular combat. Let's see how that works out.

First Light

First Light is the first scenario from Hell Hath No Fury. It involves a tank platoon on patrol; its mission is to reach the enemy baseline and spend a turn in each of 3 sectors.

We now take you to the planet Zirconia, where the robotic Dominion has overrun the human colony. The Federation has sent reinforcements, including Tex Pearson's tank platoon (known as Tex's Tigers).

The Tigers on patrol (bottom). Tex is in the middle with Tiger 2 on the right and Tiger 3 on the left. There are 3 PEFs (possible enemy forces) behind the hills and woods.

Purple are the alien woods (3 copses = heavy) and orange are hills.

The Tigers move forward and spot 2 of the PEFs - a squad of infantry and a lone tank.
HHNF does not include infantry, but I don't have enough variety of tanks. I assumed that the infantry has power armor so I decided to treat them like light tanks.

Tex takes a shot at the enemy tank but it bounces off the enemy armor.

The third PEF appears - artillery (treated like a medium tank). It fires at Tex and scores a hit.
Tex counts as a 'hero' so he can take 3 hits.

While Tex backs off, his mates push forward on the flanks. Tiger 3 wipes out the infantry.

Artillery fire bounces off Tiger 2's armor.

Then Tex wipes out the artillery.

The platoon converges on the enemy tank. Tiger 2 damages it.
I gave tanks the Tough trait from Age of Heroes, this gives them 2 hits.

But the enemy ultimately succumbs.

The Tigers are now free to complete their patrol.

Evaluation

Ever since I decided to try out Age of Heroes for tank skirmishes, doubts began to creep in. Would AoH be too simplistic for mechanized combat? I began to think of modifications to add "realism" - a result table to determine if a hit destroys or only disables the target, limitations on a tank's ability to turn, etc. I finally scrapped all these ideas and decided to play it fairly straight. I made a few modifications.

• The standard Defense (Armor in AoH terms) is 4 instead of 5
• As noted earlier, tanks received the Tough upgrade, giving them an extra hit
• Tanks also received the Extra Armor upgrade, giving them +1 on defense rolls
• Vehicles rolled -1 for Defense if shot from the flank and -2 from the rear

The last modification really helped with the feel. Shots were bouncing off frontal armor. Tanks would then maneuver into position to get off a flank or rear shot. In the end, it gave a fun game.

I have a more mixed reaction to the pieces I took from Hell Hath No Fury. I liked the fog of war of the PEFs. I modified / simplified the encounter charts (even odds of facing D3 infantry / artillery / armor) and have no complaints about the opposition. I just realized that there should be a chance of the PEF being nothing; a change for another day.

I have some doubts about the scenario, however. It seems that the PEFs will appear between your platoon and the objective. Thus, you will generally have to defeat the PEFs to accomplish the mission, but then the mission essentially becomes one of eliminating the opposition rather than patrolling. 

I began having ideas to spice things up a bit. Instead of the PEFs being on the board at start, roll each turn to determine if enemy forces appear (randomly moving onto the board). I envision a game where the platoon battles to reach the objective then gets ambushed by randomly appearing forces on its way back to base. Hmmm.

Anyway, I feel that this experiment was a success and will warrant more skirmishes. Stay tuned for more Heroes Have No Fury (although actually they do).