I completely agree with all previous posters who state that rules mechanisms, like so much else in life, are very much about personal preference.

That said I (personally...) think the very clean and quite abstract mechanisms of BKC/CWC/FWC are exceptionally well thought out, and that includes the "removing hits" rule. Some of my reasons:

No need to track "damage" on each individual element from turn to turn, it is either effective, suppressed, or dead - which reduces clutter (on & off table).

It "abstracts away" a lot of information that isn't relevant to the battlegroup commander. Remember the old days when some rules would track whether an AFV was open or closed, what direction the turret was pointing, possibly what gear the driver had just selected – all for about 50 vehicles...

It avoids the requirement to model "every fold in the ground" i.e. tabletop terrain can be reasonably simplified.

It rewards concentration of combat power in time & space (I must have read that in a US publication...)

The "hits/saves" dice rolling keeps both sides involved in the "game" part.

I think the terminology of "hits" is a little unhelpful – in my visualisation nothing is (necessarily) hit or damaged, no pieces are being knocked off vehicles etc. Within each base "engaged" by an enemy, some vehicles move slightly off-track to take up temporary (notional) cover, the platoon commander gets shaken up and issues a few confusing orders that takes a while to sort out, maybe a couple of crews lose a bit of morale due to nearby impacts, etc etc etc. This briefly makes the platoon more vulnerable to being hit again from another direction - but if you give them a minute or two they can sort it all out & continue. Similarly, when a unit is "KO'ed" that doesn't necessarily mean everything is blown up or burning – maybe the only "gung-ho" crew just had their beloved driver slightly injured and are no longer interested in the bigger picture until he is evacuated – and the rest of the platoon are happy to assist if it means no more shooting today...

Just my 2 cents of course – but I couldn't resist as I find this type of discussion about rules mechanisms to be an extremely interesting facet of the hobby (and it's been going on for at least 30 years or so!)

Cheers,
Pete

Well said Pete

If Ithoriel hasn't said this already, BKC is a top down set of rules. The overall result and feel for a game feel right. Sometimes if you drill too much into what happened to a specific model turn by turn it can feel a bit odd, but pull back out to the overall battlegroup and the flow feels right

But I get that this isn't for everyone. And to be honest it's not always for me.

We found the hits staying on stopped the, in our view, unrealistic cases of infantry advancing across the open in the face of the enemy and rarely being KO'd, despite all the 'guns' focussing on one stand, then another. Also infantry dug-in or in entrenchments were nigh on impossible to KO, even with the Russian God of War bombardments.

So in the end for us, and it is of course only our view, the hits staying on felt more realistic and gave us a better game.

Really enjoy keeping the hits on. It adds that tension through the game as the hits accumulate.

Sadly, the little band of us who, before the pandemic, met at my place of a Sunday afternoon for games that included BKC has whittled away to only me, with the rest scattered to parts distant or, in one case, to the Great Beyond.

We played partial removal of hits. Green and Fanatics removed none, Veterans 2, everyone else 1. The final hit could never be removed so once damaged, a unit was never fully recovered.

Worked for us. We tracked the hits with tiny dice placed on the base so no chance they were rolled by mistake!

The up side of playing solo is my opponent is always happy to play any house rule I choose