SMOKE

Roger said:

I have 6 soldiers: FP3. I have four fire (d12) and, as my second action have
the remaining two drop smoke. Any less abusive than the "not a firing action"
scenario?

[Tomb] No, moreso because I think it violates the rules. By my
reading of the rules, you've used two actions for your squad (something and
fire, or something and smoke). So you can't have two
wait and pop smoke after the others fire. Legal, and ugly would be "N-
1 squadies fire, the Nth pops smoke -- spend 2 actions for the
squad".

How do you defeat this? Smoke becomes soft or hard cover instead of
blocking LoF. Quality die required to get good placement/thickness.
And of course a windy day just blows this to hell.

Of course, overwatch and reaction fire tend to discourage this. You fire at
one of my units. Before you pop smoke, I reaction fire or OW fire your unit.
Then maybe you can't pop smoke.... (or not until next action anyway).

Smoke in the game tends to be a magical wall - instantly erected,
entirely effectual. Smoke in real life tends to be patchy, incompletely
covering, obscuring to your fire and information gathering, and not known to
stop bullets. It is useful, but not a panacea.

You need to limit it in the game or cheesy moves become the norm.

T.

> On 1-Nov-02 at 16:41, kaladorn@magma.ca (kaladorn@magma.ca) wrote:

> Of course, overwatch and reaction fire tend to discourage this. You

I thought OW only occured at the midpoint of a two-action move and
Reaction Fire isn't in the rules. Or reversed, I could be backwards.

On Fri, 1 Nov 2002 17:07:30 -0500 (EST), Roger Books
<books@jumpspace.net> wrote:

> I thought OW only occured at the midpoint of a two-action move and

Reaction Fire happens in the midpoint of a two-action move. OW isn't in
the rules (though several of us invented house rules to cover it).