From: Thomas Barclay <Thomas.Barclay@s...>
Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 12:04:13 -0500
Subject: SG2 terrain
Brian said: I have played in about 5 SG games and all of them had a _lot_ of terrain. I would estimate that 75%+ of the board was in forest or hills of some type. This seems a little overkill for most areas in the world that I have been in. Most areas (except national parks, forests, etc.) have less than 25% of their area covered by plant terrain. Tomb: Do you live in a midwest state? This statement matches most of Alberta/Sask/Manitoba, but not Northern Ontario. Northern Ontario is largely forest and hills. Southern Ontario (not Urban) is largely forest, hills, and cleared fields (I'd guess at 50% clearance, accounting for rock upthrusts, trees, sloughs, swamps, lakes and ponds). In Alberta, you could do a whole game board with one yellowish felt and NO other terrain in some places. Even in Southern Ontario, cleared regions are likely to be hilly (Welcome to the Canadian Shield). Depends on your geogeny. If you're on a sedimentary plain, then you tend to not have hills. If you're on Canadian Shield or somewhere near a plate boundary, you tend to have hills and mountains (continental collisions also produce these). Lots of offworld sites with thin atmosphere have loads of craters from meteoroid impacts. Go to some of these online sights and take an area about 1km x 0.5km. If you picked it from some areas, this would involve multiple hills... (use the orthophotos as other models often obscure details by picking limited # of altitude levels). In cities, it may be different. Downtown would have a _lot_ of building terrain. But it would also have _long_ corridors and large areas of empty space. It would be interesting to see a SG game in an urban setting (anyone willing to take up the challenge for ECC?). Tomb: Considered. But moving large volumes of foamcore buildings seemed to be space expensive. And wood is too heavy. I've got hardboard, but I'd need to make breakdown buildings. Coming from Canada, this is a bit of a challenge. Grey day required an entire stationwagon plus whatever Los came in. But in a suburban/rural setting, how much ground cover by plants/trees is necessary for a good game? 10%, 25%, 30%,...? Tomb: Depends on taste. SG2 has infantry fire ranges up to 40-60". Vehicle fire longer. If you have clear fire lanes... people will shoot. Infantry tends to move 6-7" per movement. Cover spaced further than 10-12" tends to allow shots at infantry in the open leading to more losses. PS: For the record, we ran Change of Orders in about 4 hours and it was using a platoon on each side split into fireteams, plus some individual figs (Sgts/officers/snipers) and then later some vehicles. It seemed to work fine. Ultimately, for a con game, I'm not in favor of players having only 1 manouver unit as suppression or bad luck can ruin the game. I think 2-4 manouvre units per player is good.