One interesting point that Alan brough up:
The airport being occupied by Russian troops. As I understand it, the Brits
were ready to go with their tanks and Gurkhas and whatnot, and they got a
"STOP, WAIT 1" order from the UN command because for political reasons it was
expedient for the US to be the first force in. But they were slower being
ready to go. The Brit general apparently said all manner of unprintable
things. Meanwhile, the Russian area commander picked up on the situation, and
decided he wanted to be a player with or without Moscow's
permission. So off he went. Then when the US/UK UN force heard the
Russians were inbound, they said "GO! GO! GO FAST!" and it was a frantic
scramble which we know the Russians actually won.
A good example of how politics interferes with military operations under UN
auspices.
And FWIW, I totally concur that Navies and Air/Space units will
coordinate better than infantry. You can use online computer translators to
bridge language issues. And procedures may differ, but I don't think as
profoundly as groundpounder combat ops do. I think that'll always be a tangle
to coordinate unless the forces spend a long time training together. I hope to
simulate some of this in our Grey Day To Die scenario at Lancaster.
> Mark wrote:
to
> prevent this, we'd need rules about valid squadrons, which would be a
> Well, you could say that any two opposing squadrons fire
That could be interesting doing it on a squadron level. Some things to
consider:
1. Recording damage now becomes a pain. You need to indicate that damage has
been taken but will not take affect until the end of the combat between the
two squadrons. It seems this would also slow game play. This is a
potential spot for errors - e.g. A player might forget which damaged
occured this turn from previous damage, and not fire a weapon system. 2.
Another consideration is tactics. This approach will likely change the way you
pick targets as you are limited to firing at only one enemy squadron.
3. Lots of potential for wasted shots if all ships are required to call out
targets before firing. 4. What determines what ships are in a squadron (use of
minis)? Should they be limited in distance between each ship in a squadron,
something like the way fighter screens work? This might be simple and clean
and would help
visually identify a squadron versus a bunch a ships spaced out to get maximum
coverage versus maximum firepower concentration.
I played FT using simulatenous fire as a test a long time ago with a friend
and neither of us liked it much, but considering an option for playing at a
higher level this would warrant a good retest, especially since we didn't try
it with squadrons...just one big fleet against another. That was a real pain.
IDEA: A solution which might abstract the game further might be to just roll a
total damage from each squadron and resolve the damage by equally distributing
it to all ships. Use of specialized weapons like needle beams would be
abstracted to just a damage die and not worry about targeting specific
systems. Simplifying ranges will also help. All weapons uses 12" range bands.
For example:
Total damage dies to be rolled determined by:
Beam Batteries: No change. Needle Beam range: 12" (1D6) SMPs range: 12" (2D6),
range 24" (1D6)
SMLs/SMRs range: 24" (3D6)
Shields reduce total damage dies rolled by a specificed amount. For example:
Shield level-1: Reduce 1D6 for every 12 enemy dice.
Shield level-2: Reduce 1D6 for every 6 enemy dice.
CONS: Little ships go boom fast. Damage die rolls could be quite large.
PROS: Very fast play at a squadron level.
I'll work on this some more. You guys got me interested! ;-)
Mike