Flames of War games

Had my first "real" Flames of War games yesterday playing two 1250pt games with my US Paras. I've tested it quickly before with the Open Fire box contents, but these were really the first games with someone who knew the rules. And I pretty much got my ass handed to me by both opponents.

First game was Fighting Withdrawal against Germans with a armored recon, 2 King Tigers, scout cars, tracked arty and a small infantry platoon. Started out quite nicely with one para platoon destroying two of the recon vehicles and the mortars pinning the infantry down. However after that everything went pretty much south with me first failing a skill test rolling a 1 to dig in followed by losing the bazooka team of the platoon. This was followed up by the King Tigers attacking and again I failed a skill test to counter-attack rolling another 1. Finally being pinned I rolled another 1 and couldn't move the platoon to contest the objective ending the game. Fearless Veteran Paratroopers fighting bravely against all opposition...

As the first game ended in less than an hour I played another one against a Hungarian armored company with two platoons of assault guns, some recon tanks, nebelwerfers, heavy arty and three german tank destroyers. This time we rolled Surrounded and I decided to sit at both objectives with the paras and try to hurt them with bazookas and the Guards armored platoon. I lost my Firefly straight into the game and after that I wasn't really able to hurt the assault guns only bailing them out with the bazookas. My lack of knowledge of the rules started heavily kicking in at this moment as I didn't realize I could have assaulted the bailed out tanks being able to destroy them quite easily that way. In the end after 7 turns of grinding fire one of the platoons went under half strength and I promptly rolled 1 on a motivation test again losing the platoon. I wouldn't really have been able to move anything useful next to the objective anymore so we decided to stop there.