[SG] How to do a "bounding advance"

SG2, to one extent or another, represents fire an manouver. I've recently come
upon what I think is an annoyance or shortcoming since I haven't found a way
to properly represent it without some extra rules (specifically Overwatch):
Bounding Advances (Fire and Manouver).

Why is this a problem? Well, when I trained to do this, our bounds were short.
If our buddies chose to fire to cover us (or to engage targets of
opportunity), they were often only a few
meters (5-15m) away. Sometimes a bit further,
but never 75-150m!

However, simulating this in SG2 is a bit tough I find. If two manouver
elements try to do this style of advance, it doesn't quite seem to work.

This is because the first unit activates, and takes two actions, then the
second does. If the first unit moves twice, it will end up an average of 140m
away! If the second unit has to fire at a threat, it is one or more range
bands further out (possibly out of range). This is way more
than the 5-15m I recall.

I guess you can live with a bit of abstraction. In thinking about it, I think
in order to do this, you need an Overwatch of some kind. It must require only
a single action. The implementation then looks like this:

Squad A activates goes on OW.

Squad B activates, bounds past A in one movement, then goes on OW.

Next turn, Squad A activates, bounds past B (on OW) and then goes on OW.

Then B activates, bounds past A, goes on OW.

True, this will often result in firing from a distance of 35m or so from the
other unit (assuming each unit is bounding about 7" on average, leapfrogging),
but this is far better than what would happen otherwise.

Just thought I'd toss it out to see if anyone disagreed or had an alternate
implementation that does not require Overwatch. (Not that I think OW is a bad
idea.... to me, it just makes sense and prevents the "jump out from behind a
tree and shoot you when you can't stop me")

Tomb.

> SG2, to one extent or another, represents fire

You could just say that the squad using two actions to Move and Fire represent
a leapfrog advance. Granted, the fire is resolved at the end point of the
movement instead of being distributed along the whole route, but that's the
granularity of the system.

I think 3-5 second rushes are built into the Combat move.  Your
description, and the way I see to do this is "Bounding by Squad" Classic small
unit fire and maneuver. If you move for only 1 action, this has some of the
same effect (fire then move, move then fire).

Michael Brown

[quoted original message omitted]

> You could just say that the squad using two actions to Move and Fire

Yeah, this is the way I'd see it. I guess its a granularity issue, though that
does seem to be a good way of explaining away any fault in the
rules...

Just my thoughts

On Sat, 2 Nov 2002 20:40:36 -0500, "Thomas Barclay" <kaladorn@magma.ca>
wrote:

> Why is this a problem? Well, when I trained to

I think you're looking at SG2 at too fine a scale.

You already have "bounding fire". It's in the fact that you can move and fire,
or fire and move, in an activation without penalty. If you look at what
happens in an SG2 turn (and not individual activations) you will see that you
had troops that fired and moved, and they moved half as far as the troops that
didn't bother to fire.

I made this comment as to FMAS: you can't look at individual activations in
SG2 and think that is what happened at that particular moment. You have to
look at the result of an overall turn and see how realistic _that_
looks.

What you are suggesting doing is, IMHO, above the level of detail found in
SG2.