Here we look at the last eight scenarios appearing in Wing Leader: Eagles and examine some of their design features, rationales and special rules.

Scenario E15: Fire in the Sky

Setting: New Guinea, 15 August 1943

Featured Aircraft: (American) P-39, C-47; (Japanese) Ki-43, Ki-48

Situations matching Allied transports against fighters are hard to find, but in an effort to find a vehicle for the iconic C-47, we dug up this interesting battle, in which transports try to land during a Japanese Army air raid. This scenario offers the Japanese sweep force the interesting choice of whether to clear the way for their own bombers (a pair of Lily flights) or go for the transports. A challenge here has been in setting Victory Point incentives for each side so that they are torn between strategies.

As the game has no landing mechanics, we have had to cobble some together with special rules, which takes up a fair amount of real estate on the page. Though this is not a thing we talk about much, page space is a real issue with many scenarios, and I have to ruthlessly edit the special rules to fit. This means that some scenarios that are submitted to me may get cut up to make them work. Though we can accommodate two pages for a scenario, I tend to save them for ‘monsters’ with very large orders of battle.

Scenario E16: Battle Over Budapest

Setting: USAAF raids on Hungary, 13 April 1944

Featured Aircraft: (American) B-24, P-38; (Hungarian) Bf 109G, Me 210Ca

I get excited when we can include a minor air force into the game. It’s an opportunity for me to artwork great new colour schemes for aircraft. In Wing Leader: Supremacy we featured the Romanians, and in Eagles we give the Hungarians a run-out. Their kit may look familiar, but the badges and white crosses do not.

This scenario is a matchup against American heavy bombers. As in other strategic bombing scenarios in Eagles I’ve stopped rolling for combat results, as it makes scenario victory too vulnerable to random dice rolls. Instead, I reward the raiding force with VPs for bombing, based on their status (unbroken/disrupted/broken) when they over-fly the target. This refocuses the scenario on the air combat.

We even throw in an optional rule for the historical completist: the Hungarians were working on a bomber destroyer with a heavy gun. Though it never saw combat, we add this as a counterfactual option to the scenario.

Scenario E17: Kuban Meatgrinder

Setting: the Kuban air campaign, 20 April 1943

Featured Aircraft: (German) Bf 109G, Ju 87D, Ju 87G, Hs 129B; (Soviet) P-39Q, Yak 7B

Every air force seems to have its own epic narrative, based on a particular campaign or battle. For the RAF it’s the Battle of Britain, and for the Soviet VVS it is the Kuban fighting. In the narrative this limited theatre, with its narrow frontage and intense operations, was where the VVS of the late war was born. It was here that future aces such as Alexander Ivanovich Pokryshkin refined their tactics and learned to beat the Fascists. The truth can be hard to separate from the propaganda, but what we can say is that the fighting was incredibly intense, and the VVS emerged from the experience as a more capable force.

This scenario covers the fighting near Novorossiysk, where the Germans tried to blast the Russians out of their beachhead at Myskhako. There was bombing against land, against small ships, and regular clashes overhead. The Germans also got to use this as a proving ground for the gun-armed Ju 87G and the Hs 129.

For me, this was a great opportunity to create a scenario based around the second edition changes to the bombing rules; changes that allow specialist attack aircraft like the Ju 87G to shine. (As a summary, the major difference between the rule sets is that instead of halving bomb strengths for flights, we apply a modifier to the bombing roll. This allows attack aircraft that usually operated in flights to achieve good bombing results.)

With the bombing split between different targets (Stukas against land targets while the specialist attackers tackle ships) this scenario is, like Schlachtflieger (summarised in Part 1), frenetic and chaotic.

Scenario E18: Zemke’s Wolfpack

Setting: the Ardennes campaign, 23 December 1944

Featured Aircraft: (German) Bf 109G, Bf 109K, Fw 190A-8; (American) P-47D

This scenario doesn’t feature any new aircraft, but I really wanted to plug a gap in the scenario inventory and have a battle set during the Battle of the Bulge. This scenario concerns American attempts to prevent large formations of Germans from interfering with the Allied attempts to seal off the ‘Bulge’.

This is a rarity of a scenario: one that is entirely based around fighters. Without bombers to act as a focus for the action, these kinds of scenarios are hard to make work. However, here we give the Americans a positional advantage over larger numbers of Germans, with vastly inferior aircrew quality. They get to bounce many of the Germans on the first turn. The Germans are incentivised to run, by getting fighters off the left map edge, and so we have a race in which the Germans must decide what proportion of their force will try to fight the Americans, so the rest can get away.

A unique feature of this scenario, necessary because it is an escape scenario, is that we prevent German squadrons with tallies from leveraging the benefits of free movement and running away. A special rule preventing squadrons from increasing the distance from their tally targets does this.

Scenario E19: Operation Meridian I

Setting: British Pacific Fleet at Sumatra, 24 January 1945

Featured Aircraft: (British) Avenger, Corsair, Hellcat, Firefly; (Japanese) Ki-43, Ki-44, Ki-45

This scenario is something of a cheat, in that it is a remaster of a scenario that originally appeared in C3i magazine #30. It’s the same situation, but now we can rejig it with some of the aircraft were were missing when we made the original scenario: in particular the British Firefly and the Japanese Ki-44 and Ki-45.

There’s another cheat here. So far, the scenarios have relied only on ownership of Wing Leader: Supremacy, the late-war core game. However, to play this scenario also requires ownership of Wing Leader: Victories, to supply the TBF Avenger Aircraft Data Card. I have tried to keep these ‘hybrid’ scenarios (ones that require ownership of multiple games or expansions) to a minimum. However, there are simply some scenarios–in particular the late war Pacific–that cannot be made without doing this. In particular, many USN aircraft, such as the TBF and SBD, persisted into the late war. I’ve kept the number of ‘hybrid’ scenarios to four out of 22, and so hope I won’t needle those players who don’t yet own Victories.

As for the scenario, it’s an interesting mix of force arrayed against two Refinery targets, both protected by balloons. Here, the fighter sweeps have an important role in shooting down the balloons to give the bombers a clear run at the targets.

Scenario E20: Operation Meridian II

Setting: British Pacific Fleet at Sumatra, 29 January 1945

Featured Aircraft: (British) Avenger, Corsair, Hellcat, Firefly; (Japanese) Ki-43, Ki-44, Ki-45

In many ways this is a repeat of Operation Meridian I, a difference here being that the Fireflies, operating as anti-balloon cover, are better-protected as they run into the target. The defending forces are greater in number, though less concentrated than in the original scenario, lending a different dynamic to the way the fighting flows.

Scenario E21: Operation Tungsten

Setting: Attacks on the Tirpitz, 3 April 1944

Featured Aircraft: (British) Martlet, Corsair, Barracuda; (German) Fw 190A, Bf 109G

Some scenarios exist purely to indulge the designer, to serve as a vehicle for a new aircraft that would not otherwise get a scenario. The aircraft in this case is the Barracuda torpedo bomber, here serving in its dive-bombing configuration. It’s also an opportunity to provide counters for American fighters (Corsairs and Martlets/Wildcats) in Fleet Air Arm colours.

This is a counterfactual scenario, though based on an historical raid. Historically, the Fleet Air Arm were able to maintain security and approach the Tirpitz undetected. The alarm wasn’t raised until the strike force reached the target. However, it would have been very easy for security to slip, for a navigation error to give the Germans a tip-off and for JG 5 to arrange a hot reception. That’s the assumption underpinning this counterfactual offering.

So not only do we have a bespoke new counter for the Tirpitz, but we add a special rule for British armour-piercing bombs, able to cancel out the armoured defences of the battleship.

Scenario E22: Mediterranean Melee

Setting: Tunisian Airlift, 5 April 1943

Featured Aircraft: (American) B-25, P-38F; (German) Bf 109G, Me 110G, Me 210A, Ju 52

A chance to showcase the Me 210 in Luftwaffe colours, this scenario is a curio in that it’s in reality a double-raid scenario. Here we have a B-25 raid on a German convoy, with CAP, that crosses with a formation of escorted Ju 52 transports. The result is a messy collision of forces. The challenge here is that each side has two separate battles – the convoy and the transports – and forces can bleed between both. This has made it quite hard to get the historical result, though at the time of writing we are playing at separating the two encounters in space to try and achieve the result we desire.

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Articles in this Series: Part 1  Part 2  Part 3