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"Assault Gun - Any other enthusiasts" Topic


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Steve Holmes 1102 Aug 2007 4:09 a.m. PST

I have found these rules on line and really like them.

The Yahoo group has regular traffic, but from a small community.
Are there any other closet players out there?

Thanks

Elianto02 Aug 2007 4:47 a.m. PST

Never heard about it. Can you post also the link to homepage and yahoo page?


Elianto
mondialterei.wordpress.com

delta6ct02 Aug 2007 5:40 a.m. PST

Elianto-

They are on the Free Wargames Rules site:

link

Looks like you have to join the group to get them.

Hope this helps,
Mike

theterrainguy dot com02 Aug 2007 8:50 a.m. PST

I found the rules interesting, but unplayable as written. Many holes in the rules, requiring answers from the author which are nearly impossible to get.

Martin Rapier02 Aug 2007 12:05 p.m. PST

There were a lot of similarities to Megablitz.

I liked the integral recce on the units bases as the MB recce system can become a chore.

I didn't like the difference in representation for infantry and armour (regiments vs battalions) for all nationalities and the lack of any apparent differentiation between unit postures e.g. travel mode vs combat mode or whatever.

Steve Holmes 1105 Aug 2007 7:51 a.m. PST

Not quite the hordes of potential opponents I'd hoped for..

Allan, I think we've exchanged mails already on the Assault Gun board.

Martin, interesting comments.

I personally prefer the representation in Assault Gun with items like engineers, trucks, command and AA abstracted.
Of course it's instructive to line up a Megablitz Corps and see just how long the tail straggles along any road, but once instructed I prefer to deal with just the teeth on table.

I also don't really miss the different unit postures.

They're free – which is excellent.

My final vote of confidence is the neat way in which guns Vs Armour, and attacks against cover are handled.


Of the downsides..

Well the rules are concise, but hide a lot of detail.
Allen and I have both debated precise orders of actions – which suggests that extreme care is required in applying the rules.

Various bits are also left to the whim of the players (How many units can attack against one, must contact be edge to edge, or is corner to corner sufficient? Are here zones of control. Common sense can take care of these items, but I know many players like these things spelled out before they start a game.

A few more scenarios would be good. Of course the rules are free, so it's up to us to provide our own. This was another of my motivations in writing here.


All things considered, the biggest problem seems to be the lack of a flourishing community interested in supporting the game. There appear to be 5 or 6 of us posing a few articles each month.

Thanks for the replies.

kerpob13 Sep 2007 3:05 p.m. PST

Hello – I am the author of the Assault Gun rules.

Apologies for not being available to respond to queries but I have a young family (including twins) so don't get very much time. I have been planning for a while to re-write the rules to clear up any ambiguities – but this may be a year away yet. They will remain free.

There are about 4 new additions to the site every month – a lot of Italians recently for some reason. So a community is building up.

Assault gun was based on Megablitz, but eventually re-written so much that the only similarity left is rolling dice in combat per strength point, and the scale. Essentially my group didn't like megablitz's extreme level of abstraction (e.g. a tank battalion is exactly the same as an infantry battalion, it just moves faster), but liked the scale.

My favourite bit of Assault gun, or the bit I'm most proud of designing, is the use of recce (integral to all units, although some are much better at it than others, e.g. armoured car units) to build up attacks, with poor recce leading to incomplete attacks going in and good recce leading to the ideal combined arms assault.

The yahoo site has oobs for all nations, plus 3 scenarios (wintergewitter relief of Stalingrad, Hannut – tank battle 1940, and Kasserine Pass – I hope to also add my Operation Kathleen scenario some day). There is also a conversion utility so that Megablitz scenarios can be converted into Assault Gun.

mouser9806 Jul 2009 9:40 a.m. PST

Hi, I just found these rules and really like them a lot. Most operational games I have seen force units to move way too slow, like infantry moving 2" per turn, which might be 1-2km depending on scale. Assault Gun allows even leg infantry to move 6 km cross country and 9 km on a road. I remember reading some advice for wargame design where the guy said "You can never have too much movement" and over the years I found that I agree with him.

The unit scale is 1 Inf figure on a 3 cm base = 1 Regiment and 1 Tank or Gun figure on a 2 cm base = 1 Battalion. Ground scale is 2 cm = 1 km. You cannot move closer than 2 km to an enemy unit without attacking it (or attacking something) so this allows a division of three regiments to cover 16.5 km of frontage. Thus it would take 4 divisions to cover the width of a 4'x6' board. Time scale is about 3-4 hours per turn.

The mechanics are very elegant and the recce procedure is pure genius (although I guess the designer of Megablitz gets a lot of the credit for that). Logistics and fog-of-war are nicely handled. Air, engineering, and AAA are handled abstractly but it wouldn't take much to flesh these out if one were so inclined. Some people complain that the differences in tank types is not well portrayed but I disagree, at this level IMO these rules give exactly as much differentiation as one needs. If you want more, then you need to be playing a more tactical game.

One of the best features is it won't break the bank. A 1941 Panzer Korps would have around 20 stands altogether and a Russian infantry division can typically be represented by 3 infantry stands, so you could give the Russians 10 infantry divisions and a few tank divisions and still only have about 60 stands on the table, most of them in infantry.

The rules can use some more refining, there are a lot of ??? that just aren't answered by the rules in their current form. Hopefully Kerpob can give us a revision soon. And hopefully, interest in this set will pick up and we will get some new scenarios :)

I strongly recommend that anyone looking for Operational Level miniatures ruleset give Assault Gun a try.

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