From: Allan Goodall <agoodall@a...>
Date: Wed, 06 Apr 2005 09:00:01 -0500
Subject: More Stargrunt-SL (was Re: SG2tweaks)
> Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 13:08:27 -0500 I will put it on my web site. The rules are done. What's slowing me down now are the counter sheets. I did counters in Visio, and they aren't too bad, though I need to tweak them a little. Some of the information is a little too close to the edges. There are a _ton_ of counters. In order to make the game play more smoothly as a board game, and due to the fact I adapted the rules to _Squad Leader's_ scale, I decided to put small arms weapon ranges on the infantry counters. That meant having counters for every combination of armour level _and_ Quality Level. That's 25 combinations of counters. Each combination has enough counters for a full company, including medics, snipers, "teams" (you decide if they are weapon teams or whatnot), ECM and individual figures. Oh, and in case you want to use fire teams or detachments, each squad comes in a squad sized counter (three figure outlines on the counter) and two half squads (two figure outlines on the counter). That's a lot of counters, but of course you don't have to cut them all out at once. Lord knows _I_ didn't. Anyway, there are different outlines for the different armour levels, too. For instance, the outline for D4 infantry looks far less armoured than the D8 figure. Power Armour have their own outline. Although I haven't done many of them, I also have counters for vehicles and heavy weapons. There are several different heavy weapon counters, so a mortar counter looks different from a DFFG counter. I haven't finished the vehicle counters, but there are tanks and APCs, with different "hulls" denoting the type of mobility. One thing I haven't bothered with were things like civilian vehicles. If there's a demand for them, I could do that later. The counters are double sided, and will be black-and-white and available as PDFs. At least, that's my intention. Right now they are in Visio. I have an old version of Visio (version 5) that doesn't do a great job of creating JPEGs. I'll have to see if I can get it to run through distiller properly to produce PDFs. I will include instructions on making the counter. It's pretty simple, though I recommend you have a can of spray adhesive available. For humans, I simply printed out counters on two different colours of light card stock paper. This gives you two different forces. I also created a set of Phalon counters to go with the Phalon playtest rules. The reverse side of the counter is its activated side. You don't use the Quality or Confidence Level counters. This information is marked on a squad status sheet, which I will also include. After a unit is activated, you flip it over (and, if more than one squad is in a hex, you move it to the bottom of the hex stack). The squad status sheets can be used in regular SG2 games as well. All I have to do is compile the rules into a coherent whole (they are in pretty good shape as is) and fix the counters. Oh, and complete the vehicle and heavy weapon counters. I would also like to include a couple of scenarios, but that can wait. One question: I don't use any colour on the counters themselves. They are intended to be printed on coloured paper. I wanted them to work with the widest range of printers possible, so the counters have black text and black figure outlines. I could have easily generated colour counters, but I thought this was safer. Now, I prefer the more modern counters with colour, but these are more easily used and have a retro, Squad Leader look. So, here's the question: should I "pretty up" the counters and use colour, or should I stick to black-and-white counters? I originally ran mine off on a laser printer, which is why I stuck with black and white.