Add your suggestions / feedback / input!

[FierceKitty]

Thomas was always "too impatient", as I remember it.

[petercooman]

Actually an "official" set of stats/rules for armoured trains would be a good addition now I think about it...

What's the CV of the Fat Contoller?

I'm guessing 4, as those trains never listen.

Thomas was always "too impatient", as I remember it.

I try not to remember 

[old smokie]

the Battlegroups Online should be free to use if you have bought the rules, I don't see why you should have to pay a subscription every year to use it

[Last Hussar]

Make sure every copy has a hole drilled top left corner, so they are easy to hang in the privy. 

Not a fan...

Seriously, I've tried to stay out of the conversation, apart from my one (serious) post, because I am unlikely to buy them, and even will not really want to play them because of the 'Troll unit' issue, as the "remove all hits at end of turn" has been termed.  Given that please don't yell at me for making a second post (I am excluding my Pendraken forum style Trains joke!)

I have two issues with the rules, and I see them as connected.  The Troll unit one, and the any scale claim made above.

I know this is just playing with toy soldiers, and civilian games will never be a simulation, but if your rules don't at least ground in reality, you might as well paint up your favourite vehicles and play chess on a landscaped board.

Sections act differently to platoons, which act differently to companies, which act differently to battalions, which act differently to brigades.  To say the same rules cover them all is wrong.

I feel the basis to a set of rules has to be ground scale.  You don't have to define it precisely, but there has to be some sort of relationship between move distance and weapon range and unit footprint. 

Say you have a few (Pendraken, obviously) infantry on a 30mm square base.  That could feasibly be a platoon at 1mm =Yard.  At that scale it cant be a battalion.  Scaling up to battalion means the weapon ranges need shortening or they become ridiculous - I don't buy that its just the centre of operations and people are actually in front of it - you'd have to define a zone around the unit to check for co-locating with other units because attacks would actually hit 2 or more units, and artillery LOVES a clustered target.

As you increase the game scale you increase the time scale.  You also lose all the individuality - brigades are a mixture of weapons, an amorphous blob almost, and you are in SPI/Avalon hill terriory.  You don't even SEE the pill box, let alone deal with it - As brigadier that is all happening at company/platoon level.

Which leads onto Trolls. 

Yes - suppress is the short term "Bugger! keep your heads down", and units do keep fighting after taking casualties, but a Tank company reduced to 7 tanks is going to have reduced fire-power compared to a fresh one at 16.  (There is also the 'Firefly Problem' specific to the British Sherman troops.  If an individual 76mm Sherman has, for example, Fire-power 5 in a set of rule- I can't check BKC, as my son has his copy in Cardiff- and Fireflies have, say, 8, the relation ship between a standard and a Firefly troop is not the same, because the Firefly is only 1 out of 4.  If your troop is fighting 2 panthers, and only the Firefly can hurt them, you are outnumbered 2:1!)

Individual sections may disappear, but companies don't with that level of frequency - larger units can be thought of as having more 'Hit Points' and although their opponent will do incrementally more damage, it is over a time period where the company can pull back or react in another way.  Hit the flank of a section and you will possibly get them all.  Hit the flank of a company and you hit one platoon, allowing the other 2 to turn and face, which will be helped by the fact they will initially be out of combat.

I realise as I'm not a potential customer, and lots of people like BKC, my comments may be irrelevant "Don't care, Hussar's game isn't what I want to play".  However if there is a good set of Stand=Company rules, those I would buy (and NO, NOT "But just call the stands companies")

[petercooman]

.....

I have two issues with the rules, and I see them as connected.  The Troll unit one, and the any scale claim made above.
.......

I agree with your post about the scale, And i must add we always play at 1 stand=1 section. I have never tried to use them as companies, and don't feel the need to.

But about the troll units, i think that for infantry it works fine, and it acts as schock, but for vehicles it acts more as a 'warning'. I see a hit on a vehicle as a near miss or a non penetrating hit (a big CLING heard on the inside). I see it as level of danger awareness, crew status and the like. Crew get dazed by non penetrating hits, receive minor injuries and are kept of their duty to make small in the field repairs, plug an oil/fuel leak. Alse near miss shells kick up dust, throw debris in front of viewports, and all that stuff.

All that slows a crew down, slows the vehicle, and enlarges the time to response to threats. So when they reach their total hitpoints and are KO'd,  i see it as the crew bailing because there is damage they can't repair, they ar stuck or they are taken out.

This is not an ideal way to look at it, but for me it makes sense. Theres a lot of stories around about vehicles taking hit after hit and surviving, or who just need a new crew and can go on working.

[Last Hussar]

Its the vehicles that really annoy me.  A hit on a tank is either kill or non kill.  With BKC the 'x' numbered hit kills it.  If you are playing 1:4 what happens to the platoon that is under constant fire, but the enemy can't quite get that last hit over the course of 4 or 5 turns.  I find it hard to believe all 4 tanks are fine.

[fred.]

The default scale for BKC is one stand = 1 platoon.
There is an option to play at 1 stand = 1 section, where vehicles are 1:1.

I don't think it has ever been officially suggested that the rules work for 1 stand = a company, or even higher.
Therefore saying the rules don't work for 1 stand is a company is rather irrelevant.

I think Peter has explained the rationale of the multiple hits fairly well. I think it is also to represent that units can shrug off multiple low level of attacks, but a sustain attack will break them. It may simply be a terminology thing, by calling them hits it immediately makes them look like wounds or something similar directly related to physical damage. But most modern combat is a lot more about perception of damage taken then actual damage taken.

[Ithoriel]

A hit on a tank is either kill or non kill.

So not true I'm not sure where to start!

Even a non-penetrating hit may stun, wound or shock the crew temporarily taking the vehicle out of action. Machine-gun and rifle fire may rattle the crew to the point they bug-out before something heavier can hit them. A vehicle may suffer anything from an engine stall to complete obliteration.

I do feel that gradual removal of hits is a better fit for my view of how combat in the period worked than instant recovery but I have no real problem with the mechanism as written, if people prefer that.

As to the Firefly problem, pretty much all of our games require a certain amount of fudging to make them playable. Most of the games I've played have been Eastern Front but the couple of post D-Day games I've played in we just gave troops with a Firefly one extra dice when firing AT and boosted the points value a little. Realistic? Possibly not but it seemed to work for the games we played. The exceptions to the rules will always need a little ingenuity to model.

For me BKC gives believable results, even though it's sometimes for what seems the wrong reasons, which is why it's my favourite WW2 non-skirmish system. I'd sooner the right result for the wrong reason than vice-versa

[petercooman]

  A hit on a tank is either kill or non kill. 

These guys don't agree:







I can understand your point of view, but there's so much that could happen, it's unpossible to represent every effect in a game, so hitpoints are the best option.

Don't forget that a lot of tanks were left behind instead of destroyed too, So you could see constant hits as a sign of being in combat and spending ammunition and fuel, and running out of it too.

[sane max]

I remember Last Hussar's attitude to the rules from another forum, LH, if you don't like the fundamental concepts of the rules, and calling them bog-paper is a fairly definitive 'don't like the rules' position, then you can hardly contribute anything constructive to a thread discussing how to amend them. You bang on about scale, but then start from the (incorrect) assumption that a model tank = 1 tank.

It's not a troll rule. There is in fact only 1 'Troll Rule' I know about and that is 'Obvious Troll is Obvious'

Thanks for your contribution.

[toxicpixie]

On the Firefly question - it's the same with any mix of kit at the lowest level you model. With a platoon level game where someone has mixed vehicles you have to fudge somewhere. 

Either you separate out the variants into separate stands, or you fudge factors to make a hybrid. Either works, neither is perfect. If you don't want to do that then you need to go to a lower level of rules where one model is one vehicle (or maybe two, but at any rate is where a single model represents a single type of vehicle).

Numbers are similar - if one force has a three tank platoon With three platoons and a command tank per company, but another has three, four tank platoons plus a two tank command section do you go with three platoons each? Are you strict on numbers and say "five real vehicles = one stand, no more, no less", do you fudge a little according to book doctrine, actual usage, perceived effectiveness? What about systems that were deployed in awkward numbers? Lots of infantry guns or support tanks/armoured cars deployed in twos, so do you combine them and use one stand at a higher level, depriving the platoon/company of their support at real world levels, or do you potentially massively overstate their effectiveness by making them equivalent to a full size unit?

Ground scale is always awkwar with that as well - mortars should have a blast area! Well, no. One quick fire mission (successful order in *Commander) probably isn't enough to warrant that - if you get to hit a single stand that's a 100m by 100m ish area already. Pretty good for a few quickly lobbed rounds. Now, you get three orders in a row and you're well away - that's a *real* stoked on the money shot of a barrage. And if you're off table you're firing like that all the time.

Others have answered the hits question, I think, in excellent detail for the level the rules are pitched at, but I do these days quite like playing hits stay on for vehicles, or at least the last hit does. Makes infantry much more resilient in comparison, as otherwise they get a raw deal by mid war! It's not too complex and doesn't require much extra book keeping (we use tiny dice, and are quite good at not sneezing/rolling them these days ). I especially like that at what *I* perceive as one to one scale. Using 6mm as written at one platoon to one model (ish) looks and feels fine with the ground scale; in 10mm it has a better feel to my mind at one to one. I'd suggest using the "fighting commanders" optional rule with that as well. The FWC skirmish level vehicle damage chart might also give the deeper detail you want but will slow things up - all you really want to know as the commander is "are they running, firing or hunkered down" after all!

Al this said with the provision that for the level of game *Commander is pitched at I actually prefer Spearhead and use 6mm, but I do like the *Commander series' higher granularity and smaller focus at sort of one to one 1cm =20m for larger scale 10mm models which is nicely pitched AS IS for speed versus realism versus overall result for period feel.

[Last Hussar]

Peter - I assume those photos are shot up tanks that continued fighting - definitely a Not Kill.  Likewise a frightened crew who abandoned a tank that was undamaged = Kill!
The thing I don't like about 'IABSM' is the wounds that rack up on an individual tank: I wonder if a generic 'Damaged -1 to each dice' would be better to represent a tank that isn't quite bad enough for the crew to run with, but is having problems (it could be the COMMANDER is staying, but the crew are scared, so not doing their job.  I also think any tank that loses its main gun should be forced to run - tank crews rarely decide to trolley around acting as a mobile pill box when they can't hurt the thing that can hurt them!

I remember Last Hussar's attitude to the rules from another forum, LH, if you don't like the fundamental concepts of the rules, and calling them bog-paper is a fairly definitive 'don't like the rules' position, then you can hardly contribute anything constructive to a thread discussing how to amend them. You bang on about scale, but then start from the (incorrect) assumption that a model tank = 1 tank.

It's not a troll rule. There is in fact only 1 'Troll Rule' I know about and that is 'Obvious Troll is Obvious'

Thanks for your contribution.

I've listed the reasons I don't like it, and why- what I see that could fix them; as far as I can see minor tweaks.  I haven't assumed 1:1 - I quoted other people, including the rules.  I actually think they have a core of a decent set of rules, but are let down in being too vague in what they are modelling.  I truly believe with the correct tweaks they could be a really good set of stand=company rules, a gap in an overstuffed market.  I can see that this would have to be a 'new' set, and probably not what BKC players are looking for.

The problem is people who play are pretty happy with what they have, and asking those people what they want is going to only result in a few tweaks eventually after all the attempts to get their favourite house rule in.  In that case, Leon, Get them on the market as soon as possible: waiting possibly isn't going to add anything significant, and every day is a day's lost sales, and I don't see you picking up extra sales because of any tweaks.

As regard the 'other forum': Those moaning people have a demographic among them who refuse to play TFL rules for no other reason than 'They have a silly name'. When they are called out on this, I am effectively told to stay away, that is their right.  And yes it is, if they want to judge rules based PURELY on the name, then that is their prerogative, but questioning that apparently isn't mine.

On the other hand I have read and played BKC and CWC, and found a number of mechanics I do not feel work.  That is my feedback.  My suggestion is 'Define what the game is modelling- what does one stand represent'  Once you have done that, tighten the rules up around that.

Some input:
Someone pointed out different nations used different platoon strengths.    Publish the army lists to reflect that, so a country that uses a 3 Sherman platoon has different stats to one that uses a 5 Sherman platoon. Likewise a 1 Firefly-3 76mm sherman platoon would have SLIGHTLY higher stats, but not "Firefly" stats (were whole firefly troops ever fielded? That would be a frightening Shoot value!)

[sunjester]

It's not a troll rule. There is in fact only 1 'Troll Rule' I know about and that is 'Obvious Troll is Obvious'

You obvious haven't met many trolls!

It is in fact The Troll Rule. It refers to the fact that many BKC players are old grown ups like me who remember AD&D in our youth, when the troll regenerated hit points every turn. If the hits come off every turn then the unit has "regenerated", hence it's a troll!

[toxicpixie]

The way BKC models mixed units is that it doesn't even attempt to (barring infantry with integral AT weapons as upgrades), really. Pete went for the same approach most rules do, which is simplicity and modelling them as separate in game stands to move their differing capabilities out. So you can actually use your Fireflies to over watch your normal Shermans, or your flame tanks to conduct the really dangerous close range bunker busting whilst your gun tanks shoot them in instead of kludging them all together as a mess of multiple different stat lines all representing marginally different numbers of actual vehicles with potentially wildly different stats in one model tank.

If you go the latter route then people inevitably get annoyed at being able to use the two Fireflies in a troop of five at 1000 metres effectively or that the stand is just too effective with HE when they should be reserved for hard targets, and you end up with five stat lines reflecting no "specials", one special, two specials, three/four/all in a five tank platoon.

Whilst making them a separate stand might not quite sit right from a micro view point, it actually works BETTER from the macro view point of getting the simulation right from the commanders POV - I do not regret moving past the days of micro, ground up, every subsystem modelled "correctly" games where the end result was always long winded and usually wildly out of step with history or practise It's not always ideal, but it does work and it does produce something that's simple and playable as well as approaching "reality" more often than not.

I meant to mention the Troll Rule was likely a D&D regenerating monster side swipe, as opposed to an Internet trolling for arguments sake - perils of phone typing! But it's not unreasonable in practise - the turns fire represents that cluster of time where Stuff Happens, and something actual people from actual fire situations tells us is that you either get categorically knocked out (surprisingly rare as a one shot), suffer enough to make you keep your heads down or scuttle back a bit, or the fire is simply shrugged off no matter the damage as the crews keep their nerves and then keep fighting.

I prefer Spearheads "fine/suppressed/dead" approach myself, but as BKC is a lower level game (tending to a ate down from Division-ish to Regiment/Brigade, though i'd argue both work better a step further - Spearhead at a Brigade/Regiment per player, BKC at about a reinforced battalion), it's not a bad abstraction, trading ease of use and speed for a bit more depth.

Edit: balls, perils of phone posting II - meant also to say even if you don't play, the input as to WHY you don't play is valuable. I wouldn't suggest a major rewrite, as I feel the rules work fine for about where they're pitched but that might not be what Leon & co want or need so the views of people who have played but now don't could spur something useful.

[Last Hussar]

TP- Sorry if I sound over negative.  It's frustration.  I know a lot of people who play them, and SunJester and I have had a difference of opinion over more than one pint about them.  I'd like to thank him for not taking the piss up there.

Hopefully my posts are helpful.  I realise that a full rewrite is probably not going to happen, I wasn't going to comment, but I couldn't see people saying anything about what I saw as the major weakness, which is it doesn't seem sure what level it is, and because of that it is too 'flappy'.  I just got annoyed with the fact that 3-4 tanks were required to inflict enough damage to kill it, and frustrated that you would get to 3 out of 4 needed, but there it would be next turn like nothing happened.

Think of me as the court jester in the crowd of Yes Men!

I like the other Warmaster derivatives, (not done HC yet, read the rules for P&S, need to get my head around the way the two different arms work together; think it could be a bit loose, rather see them as a unit, but we'll see how it goes).  What BKC suffers from is the the problem I never played ACWMaster - it hasn't divorced itself enough from the original to make its period work.  When BP came out I read it, and how it handled hits and went 'That's brilliant'.  It was still, at heart, WM, but had a simple and elegant mechanism for resolving combat: you don't track casualties any more, but the morale of the unit.  Possibly BKC needs that sort of revolutionary thinking, though I think a well applied 'wound' equivalent would work well.  I was also a little annoyed when over-running with a tank turned out that bog-standard infantry in the open are more deadly to the tank than the tank is to the infantry.

I have accidently misled us all, I've just realised, including myself.  While I am unlikely to buy BKC, if I was convinced that the mechanisms worked and was applied to sister games, I would consider CWC:  I have a load of 80's 6mm in the garage, and while I have MSH, it can be a little involved.  And I do think that BKC is really more suited to Company units, though I realise that won't happen.

[Luddite]

Sections act differently to platoons, which act differently to companies, which act differently to battalions, which act differently to brigades.  To say the same rules cover them all is wrong.

I feel the basis to a set of rules has to be ground scale.  You don't have to define it precisely, but there has to be some sort of relationship between move distance and weapon range and unit footprint.  

I think this is an important issue to resolve.

BkCII and CWC both take this approach.  However FWC comes down firmly on the 'unit is a squad/single vehicle/single gun' representation.

What do people think about formalising the three rule sets around the FWC representative scale?

[Fenton]

I am still in the 1 stand or tank is a platoon. It makes playing larger actions playable on a 6x4. I think FWC went for the stand equals squad or one tank was to drag in the Epic40k players

[Lord Kermit of Birkenhead]

Played BKC at both levels. It works best at 1 base = Platoon level. Also I'm reasonably certain that FKC is the same approach. If I want to do 1-1 I'd chose several other sets before BKC etc. where there is more vehicle detail and type differentiation.

DO NOT CHANGE THE REPRESENTATION.

Other people can use it for 1-1 if they wish, and I probably will again, but it was NOT designed for that.

IanS

[petercooman]

Peter - I assume those photos are shot up tanks that continued fighting - definitely a Not Kill.  Likewise a frightened crew who abandoned a tank that was undamaged = Kill!

YEs, but like the second picture, a hit on that spot (turret ring) can reduce the capability of the tank. Is it destroyed? no, but if that turret doesn't turn untill it's solved, Your crew will be hampered in combat, turning the vehicle instead of the turret.

Last picture has several hits on the gun mantle, again, not destroyed, but i can imagine if you take a hit there, I think Your aim will be off. (don't know if this is correct, anybody care to explain)

We can argue all day, but i don't think we'll find a middle ground we both accept 

[Last Hussar]

[Walks into middle ground with two folding chairs, unfolds them, puts them down, sits in one]

While I accept that these tanks can go on fighting in a reduced capacity, in my mind that is probably the sort of stuff you don't want in a table top wargame where you are the Battalion Commander or above.  Colonels can't worry about where the Section LMG is.  I also posit these are the exception rather than the rule.

[Invites Peter to sit in the other]

It happens but not worth modelling in a battalion game.

[Offers Peter a beer]

Fair?  Just out of interest do we know that those damaged tanks continued to fight rather than the crew go 'Fook' and run?

I believe the rules SPECIFICALLY SAY 1:Platoon OR 1:1, which is my argument re 'Troll Tanks' (and, I suppose, "Zombie Infantry")

I want the rules to work - it means I'll be able to get higher level games. It's no good finding the perfect rule set if I can't get an opponent.  But at the moment I just don't enjoy them.

I agree with Luddite (Take a screen shot, folks) who is agreeing with me(!) Decide on a representation/scale and tighten the rules up around that.

This would allow two things
- a casualties/damaged rule that degrades performance once a certain amount of damage has been received
- Stats based not JUST on vehicle type, but platoon (as I believe we are heading to) nationality.  For instance, the UK used 4 Sherman troops, the US 5 Sherman platoons, so the US platoons have more firepower (more guns), and more resilience (more tanks), though the same defence (same vehicle).  You can also do mixed (gun) platoons by adjusting firepower, but to resilience or defence.

I don't know if this is a step too far, too much of a change.