OGRE: BreakThrough (Round 1)

Sometimes teaching is hard.  To shake things up a bit and get my new(er) players out of the ' rush forward and kill everything' mentality, I put CinC and 4PA against each other in a classic 'BreakThrough' scenario w/ the G-1 map. I even had them use the 'Classic' counters just for fun. 

The object: A fast moving attacking force needs to break through a weakly defended point of the line.  Attackers need to get as many units off the North side of the board as quickly as possible.  The Defender needs to stop/delay them as much as possible. This was clearly (and regularly) explained at the beginning.

CinC took the attacker's role:  12 GEV's.

4PA as the defender.  6 armor units and 20 pts of infantry
2 Howitzers (2 au ea)
2 Heavy Tanks
16 Infantry (5 units of three squads and one 1)
2 Heavy Weapons Teams (2 pts ea)

Defender sets up w/ his pieces 'camouflaged' before attacker enters on the South end of the board.

Obviously thinking 'defend these units' and not 'stop the enemy from getting across'. 

Turn 1:  NAC forces (black) move in in 2 groups of five along the SE road and river and one group of two along the Western road. 

PE forces (white) revealed.

PE shifts a few infantry into the woods but otherwise no action:

An experienced attacker at this point would have redirected the Eastern forces all along the streambed and to the Western road, completely avoiding the poor howitzer placement. This is not what happened however.

Turn 2: NAC western GEV's continue up the road.  The two Eastern teams split up, some continuing North, some heading NW.

A PE Heavy Weapons team gets in range and disables a GEV.

Turn 3: NAC gets two GEV's off the map. Three others make a dash for the road. The remaining 8 run straight into the range of the Howitzers and infantry. They do manage to take out the two Heavy Weapons teams.
The PE forces kill three GEV's and disable two others.

Turn 4: NAC maneuvers, the three western GEV's trying to get off the board, the others trying to get out of range of the howitzers.
PE Heavy tanks take out two of the Western GEV's. An overrun by infantry kill the two disabled GEV's w/ a loss of two squads. 

Turn 5: Endgame.
NAC gets a GEV off the board.  The last two fall to a Heavy and a Howitzer. 

Total points: NAC 36  PE 54.  Marginal Defender Victory

Afterwards I explained how to improve their game.  Next time I'm thinking of switching their roles and/or the map.  The boy wants a 'Train' scenario so that is another option.