Monday 28 September 2015

Team Yankee - Formation Cards

Hello all and welcome to another Team Yankee Monday update.

Today we are going to look at the Formation Cards for Team Yankee.  These are the equivalent of the briefing books for the WW2 version of FOW.
Anyone who has played Flames of War will see that these are very similar to the current ones, but there are some small differences.

The pictures really tell the story here but I will add a few points.  The Soviet card above shows your list options, you can either run Infantry or Tanks companies and both have the same support options available to them.  To me this looks like a "series one" list, I think it will get bulked out at a later date.

One point and to put a few peoples minds at rest, there is a Recon option for the Soviets as shown by the BMP-1 or 2 Recon platoon.

You will notice that the Battalion Commander is only 5pts, so either Team Yankee uses a different points system or you will get a lot of tanks in your 1750pts games!  I'd lean towards it being a 100pts game now. Also notice the how Battalion Commander has a better skill rating than the bog standard T-72's we showed you last week.
The American card is similar to the Soviets, again the card shows it's both a Tank list or an Infantry list.  You may also notice that they have made it really easy to work out the models you need to purchase by including the product codes.

Next week we are taking a week away from Team Yankee to go back in time by about 70 odd years to 1918 to have a look at the new Great War briefing book.

But fear not Team Yankee fans, we will be back the week after and there is still lots to chat about.  We have a podcast interview with Phil in the works, a look at the rules and the army deals and much more.  So stay tuned.

Thanks for reading

Ben
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12 comments:

  1. Anonymous28 September 2015 at 08:40

    Card system...reminds me of Epic circa 1994. I loved Epic :)

    Also recon...woohoo.

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  2. James MacCraggs28 September 2015 at 10:59

    'At least one formation' seems to indicate you could mix and match? Like 2 tank battalions and a mech inf battalion. The book is certainly focused on an Americal unit that is 3 tank platoons and a mech inf platoon.

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    1. Skills28 September 2015 at 13:33

      I thought that too, for instance you could take 1 tank formation, 1 infantry formation and then 1 of each of the support units in a force....guess will have to wait and see...

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  3. MillitantGuerillaCommunistHippie28 September 2015 at 11:13

    I'd have liked to have seen the equivalent formation card for the Armoured Combat Team here as well as the T-72 battalion if there are pictures of it available. I know it's listed on the unit cards shown in last week's extra, but it'd have been nice to have another copy in the same place as the division formation for quick reference between the two. I suppose putting it in might have made the blog post too long?

    At any rate, I have to say that it looks like I'll be pleasantly surprised and glad to be proven wrong in regards to the Soviet playstyle - going from a cursory comparison between the two formations and the unit cards presented last week it looks to me like the two sides will be balanced by the Americans having better individual tanks, but the Soviets having better access to support units, with heavy artillery and AA units directly integrated into their lower-level formations (battalions in this case) as opposed to the Americans who seem to only be able to take them as divisional support.

    If that's the case then it seems to me as though combined arms will be the name of the game with the Soviets, with different units best used by working together as a team to form something greater than the sum of its parts. If that turns out to be true then I can definitely live with that.

    Now I just need them to put out an air-assault/helicopter list for the Soviets along with some models for Mi-8/M/Ts and Mi-26s and I'll be in business. In the meantime I can't wait to see the infantry stats later this week, especially since they're something I'm really interested in (along with those very tasty-looking Hinds...). Fingers crossed for some rules for Shmel launchers - blasting enemy infantry units with thermometric rockets sounds like a very fun trick for the table-top.

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  4. Sparker28 September 2015 at 11:49

    Thanks guys - looking good and accurate if memory serves! Really looking forward to the podcast!

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  5. Safety Stick28 September 2015 at 12:55

    So each Soviet "battalion" is bringing its own artillery battery to the game, in addition to the one that is allowed to the larger division. So I guess each formation really encompasses the Combat and Weapon platoons (plus the "regimental support") in the traditional WWII version sense.

    I'm guessing that the idea of multiple formations in a force is to allow it to scale to larger games.

    All very interesting stuff!

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  6. Panther-Fan28 September 2015 at 15:36

    Ben, didn´t you look at the stats last week? The T72 is 4-5 poins in the "company", so why do you mention this for the HQ? This is well known already.
    And it´s not relevant in a standard game if you buy your artillery on regimetal or divisional level. As the US tanks are expensiver, you will hardly be able to put two artillery units in your lists.

    So i can´t see such exciting news. I supposed before that i can put all the toys which are already previewed in a list, the only good news is soviet recon. A Soviet Minimum Force are 29 points and 7 tanks. What do you think how many tank battalions do you field? Otherwise, the first three T72 in each company are cheaper....

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    1. Panther-Fan28 September 2015 at 15:52

      and 100 points would mean that the US player can field 12 M1. For each other option he has to reduce his tanks...and 40 is the minimum on 5 tanks.

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  7. Ben28 September 2015 at 18:03

    I brought up the points as I did this post before we decided to do the second post on the tanks and I forgot to edit this post.

    My bad

    Ben

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  8. Unknown28 September 2015 at 23:15

    Minor knitpicking I know but I'd rather not have had Nato codenames (eg. Gopher and Hind) in the Soviet briefing. I know they're easier for us westerners to understand, but I certainly doubt we'd see Soviet nicknames for Nato weaponry if such a thing existed.

    None the less, liking the list of Soviet support a lot better now.

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  9. erion29 September 2015 at 01:17

    I noticed that there are product codes missing from the cards. For instance, the Abrams platoon is TU101, the M113 Mech Combat Team is TU103, but none of the support units are TU102. TU103 - TU 106 are also missing from the force lists.

    More goodies are more better. They can't show us everything up front, now can they?

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  10. TheColonel8 October 2015 at 00:48

    TU102 is undoubtedly reserved for the M1A1 Abrams. I expect TU 103-106 are the M2 and M3 Bradleys.

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