Area Movement proposal - Help Please

[Last Hussar]

Good Morning Ladies and Gentlemen of this fine organisation.

And Orcs.

And Nobby.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MyFriendsAndZoidberg

Anyway, enough banter. I'm looking for views/help on the following proposal. Please keep an open mind, because I don't think I've seen any game like this.

For many years now I have been tinkering with an idea for a Company level WW2 game. At the heart of it is a 'Delayed fire resolution' - When a shoot action is carried out, you don't roll the dice, you mark the number of fire points against the targets. When a unit activates the player declares what he is going to do, then rolls for the FP, with a hit number dependent on what he is trying (Move, 4+, Firing 5+, Hunker down 6+, etc) Any hits are rerolled for effect; 1=miss, 2-3, pin etc. Thus no-one know what state a unit is in, until it tries to do something - your firebase may well have put loads of fire in, but until you try the close assault, you don't know if you suppressed them.

A Base represents 3-5 men. Ground scale is approx 1:200 (the idea is you can use 6-10mm at the same as vertical scale, giving a view of what it really looks like). Base widths of 30mm, some measurements are in Base Widths, so you can eyeball command radius, rather than fiddle with mm (if it looks like it's in command, it is.)

I put all this in case it is relevant.

I need a movement system. Have range bands for weapons (however see below), but wasn't sure how far to allow a base to move.  Then Friday my mind was off on a little wander* (work is really quiet during CoVid), and was musing on what I'd read many years ago about Kingmaker board game, in that it had area movement - the easier the terrain, the larger the area, so you moved further for one movement, roads being long and thin, forests small etc.

And I wondered - could this work on the table top?

I am thinking 3 types nominally called at the moment "OPEN", "ROUGH", "DIFFICULT"
OPEN is between 20 and 30cm in diameter (but not necessarily square/circular, it could be a oval 22 x 29)
ROUGH is 10-15cm
DIFFICULT is 5-10cm
ROAD is 30cm long, 2-3cm wide

A movement would be from one area, to any point of an adjoining area. Vehicles can move multiple times (2? 3?) on ROAD, tracked vehicles can move twice in OPEN.

Where terrain is classed BLOCKING LoS, you can see in, but not through. This includes from Blocking terrain into other blocking terrain. Thus a large, dense wood would be a lot of 7cm approx patches. Where appropriate OPEN and ROUGH can be smaller (eg, an forest clearing).

If you think about it, this isn't so far removed from gridded systems. The idea is I want players to think about the actual process of commanding, not the metagame of 'If I move 7.5cm I can fire, but he can't'.

Addendum - Firing ranges.
While typing, I wondered if you could use it for ranging as well, for the same metagame reason. MG fire 3 areas, rifles 2, SMG 1. There could be a query over things like marshes - a large marsh of numerous DIFFICULT would halve the range, but you just say 'This terrain is DIFFICULT, but only counts as half or third an area for purposes of range. (I would say always a third - troops moving is DIFFICULT are easier to hit due to concentrating on footing as well).

As I said, the whole purpose of all of this is to stop the metagaming (the delay fire stops perfect knowledge - how do you KNOW the enemy is pinned until you close assault?). Coy Commander 'Lieutenant, get your men on the flank"... "Smithy, take your section into those woods." Nobody actually goes 'Well, its 185 yards across there, but if I stay in cover its 98, but I will move slower, lets do the maths..."

Thoughts?

*Sunjester, bite your lip.

[fred.]

Interesting idea around the movement

The fantasy mass battle rules from Ganesha games (SoBH people) which is called Of Armies and Hordes, does something similar, with terrain being areas, but IIRC it limits the number of troops that can go in dense terrain, so slows down units that may.

But I think your approach should work - you just need to break up bigger woods in to multiple smaller areas. You will still get players counting areas, but it will be much quicker. I do like gridded games.

I'm not sure about the shooting - I'm struggling to visualise that. At the ground scale you are talking about weapon ranges will be pretty much the table. But there will also be a lot more cover present than is shown on the table. I'd just perhaps allow shooting into a single area of terrain.

[Last Hussar]

Yes, I see woods as being multiple  areas. Where type of terrain is 'blocking', such as trees, you can fire into or out of but not through so if you have
Field - Wood1-Wood2-wood3, you can fire from or across the field into Wood 1, but not Wood2. Someone in wood 1 can fire out into or beyond the field, or into wood2, but not wood3.

Someone on TMP pointed out that crossing roads is really slow - I've sorted that now I think.

Under the 3 area range idea MGs in the example would have a range of 60-90cm across the open (depending on the layout of the areas)  Now that is only 180m, and pedants will point out MG34 had a 3500m range. But then I found this

In the early 1950s, the American Operational Research Organization (ORO) compared British AORG WWII studies of the European Theater and ORO studies of the Korean War and found:

The agreements of the two independent studies is striking. For attack and defense in European actions, it was found about 80 percent of effective rifle and LMG fire takes place at less than 200 yd and 90 percent at less than 300 yd, according to the estimates made by the men interviewed. About 90 percent of LMG fire was at less than 300 yd.

The '3' area was an initial idea I chucked out while typing, I can make it longer, I'll check what I wrote in cm. Its a bit like tank ranges in Modern spearhead - most of them outdistance actual spotting range. If you walk cross much of western Europe the chance of you having LoS to see someone 400m away is pretty low!

...map studies of Canada, France, Germany, Korea, North Africa, and the US ... showed that 70 percent of the ranges at which an erect human target can be seen by a defending prone rifleman are less than 300 yd (and 90 percent are less than 700 yd).

[fred.]

Good points about the difference between spotting range and weapon range. And something often abstracted in rules.

But reading It Never Snows in September the other day, the chapter was pre-Market Garden about the retreat from Normandy and discussed in some detail the SS Pz Div using their 88mm Flak guns as the rear guard and opening fire at 3km to slow down the pursuing Americans. Not something many rules would let you do. But they had clearly been sited to give long lines of sight.

Which is a long winded way of saying that separating LoS from weapon ranges is no bad thing.

Good point about crossing roads.

[Orcs]

Why not just adapt movement rules from another ruleset that uses squares, hexes?

Then use your own fire/activation rules. Or are you just trying to make it difficult for yourself?

Actually that's probably what Sunjester said. 

[Last Hussar]

Those are some carefully sighted guns!

Checked my draft rules, found I had 10/20/40/80/150 as range bands. That will go to Close/1 (open) area/2/3/4/5

Terrain that is LoS open, move Rough/difficult will count 1/3 of a range. If it's not LoS open, you can't see through it anyway!

[FierceKitty]

I keep reading this as "Arab Movement proposal"!

[Orcs]

I keep reading this as "Arab Movement proposal"!

Yes perhaps we should give the Palestinians their own state, Where can we find some spare land??

Actually I think that this has been done before, and it caused a few issues 


P.S.  As Germany had caused the displacement  and loss of their homes of millions of Jews, surely we should have annexed part of Germany and given it to the Jews?

[Lord Kermit of Birkenhead]

Better delete the last one.

Orcs your idea is correct, at section/platoon level the British army would move by tactical bounds from cover to cover - suspect that was doctrine in 1914 with the BEF, certainly it's built into the 1942/3 Battledrill, with always "one foot on the ground" so that the rifle group would advance, covered by the Bren group, then halt and the Bren would catch up. USMC did similar in the later Island actions, with two rifle teams and an assault team with Bazookas and possibly a flame thrower.

Your major problem is writing it so that people will use it. 

[hammurabi70]

P.S.  As Germany had caused the displacement  and loss of their homes of millions of Jews, surely we should have annexed part of Germany and given it to the Jews?

I believe BAVARIA was suggested at the time. 

[Westmarcher]

I'm with Ian on this. This has nothing to do with the subject matter of this thread and has the potential for argument that will disrupt the peace and harmony of this forum. We often derail threads but always bring it back on subject. I vote we do so now. 

[Norm]

Some of your combat ideas, with delayed resolution, sound similar to those found in The Last Hundred Yards board game. here is a link, there are videos there, which may help you in the practicalities of application.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/202721/last-hundred-yards

As for areas. The idea is good. There is a similar way of dealing with things in Peter Pig's Poor Bloody Infantry, which is square gridded. I think they may a starter document that you can download, which lay out the basic principles.

For your more 'natural' non-grid terrain look, you may have to break some areas into small pieces for movement / fire ranges and holding capacity. Where I have seen the application in boardgames something like a marsh, which is a problem for movement is handled by having smaller areas, so that when you cross a board via marsh, your progress is naturally slower because the areas are small - in contrast, open ground tends to have bigger areas that allow fast movement / progress.

For a tactical game, how you resolve facing for armour values is a sticking point. You could give a tank a generalised value and ignore the potential of flank / rear manoeuvre against it .... a problem when it looks obvious. When I attempted this once and can't remember exactly what the formula was that I used but it was something like, if a vehicle is fired at from two different sources and there was a 4 area distance between the firers, then the second firer would get a;attack flank' benefits, anyway it was something like that, but that was for a boardgame, at least with figures, you can declare that an extendable imaginary line exists immediately in front of a vehicle and any fire that come from behind that line counts as flanking fire.

Boardgames are a good place to look for how area movement style processes have been implemented.

For boardgame areas, I have also seen an area get a defensive value. I have seen this in two methods. the first is effectively a modifier to the fire dice, in the second way, I have seen it that the terrain value does not modify the attack itself, rather after hits are made, the terrain value then reduces the number of hits.

[Big Insect]

Someone on TMP pointed out that crossing roads is really slow - I've sorted that now I think.

But crossing roads in the face of an unknown enemy was really slow - especially for infantry or soft vehicles. All the real-life memoirs state you do it with extreme caution.

[Last Hussar]

For your more 'natural' non-grid terrain look, you may have to break some areas into small pieces for movement / fire ranges and holding capacity. Where I have seen the application in boardgames something like a marsh, which is a problem for movement is handled by having smaller areas, so that when you cross a board via marsh, your progress is naturally slower because the areas are small - in contrast, open ground tends to have bigger areas that allow fast movement / progress.

This is basically what I am thinking.

(the largest areas I am renaming 'Easy', as 'Open' describes LoS)

Thinking about this today I am going to do 'RANGE BANDS'.  Each ROUGH or DIFFICULT crossed is 1 range band. For EASY it will be divided notionally in quarters for each shot, a NEAR half and a FAR half, thus 2 BANDS.
Its not as difficult as it sounds once I have a diagram:

Basically draw a square. it has North South East West boundaries. The left of the NORTH boundary is NORTH (West), The bottom of the WEST line is WEST (south), and that borders SOUTH (West) (names are for this non diagram talk through)

Firers and targets are outside of this area, in the next one

A unit by WEST (south) fires at a unit at NORTH (east). That takes it through 2 quarters,  Bottom left, Top left and top right - 3 bands
A unit SOUTH (west) firing at a unit NORTH (west) goes through 2
A unit firing SOUTH (west) to WEST (south) is 1

If someone manages to get a shot diagonally through the very centre point that is still 3!

[fred.]

The delayed combat resolution is also seen in Warhamer 40k Apocalypse. You allocate hits to units (and big hits) but only evaluate their effectiveness at the end of the turn. This is very good for limiting the impact of alpha strikes taking out units before they do anything. It also means you have to judge the amount of fire power you put on a unit, you want to put enough on to kill it, but not too much.

We borrowed this for our home brew epic rules and it works really well.