"FOW vs. Gear Krieg : Compare Mechanics?" Topic

Hi All-

I am interested in increasing the utility of my
vast British & Italian collection in between games of
Chadwick's "Command Decision"
and I noticed this:

link

The new Gear Krieg army deals look to be
just the thing to get my painting again, but:
I'm not sure about the rules.

It'll likely be a bother to translate Gear's into FOW terms,
and I'm not thrilled with the 'rock-paper-scissor' game play.
Can any body give me a sense of Krieg's mechanics,
and its relative subjective 'fun factor' vs. FOW?

Not looking to start a fight:
Just want to find some silly fun w/ good rules.

Alternative suggestions welcomed!
(…as long as they don't involve which orifice
this topic originates from,
or to which I should move it too…)

There's a yahoo group with conversions from GK -> FoW:

link

Alternatively, I just use my British walkers as armoured cars, because it annoys the grognards.

DP9's Gear krieg rules are more detailed than Flames Of War; vehicles can be undamaged, suffer light damage, heavy damage or be destroyed. If you're using the more detsailed damage rules, you can individually damage weaponry, movement capability, fire control, crew, ammo, etc. Infantry squads represent the damage points of each soldier separately – the squad MG trooper can be taken out while the riflemen survive (or vice versa). There is, consequentially, a lot of record-keeping required.

Mechanics-wise, a unit rolls a number of D6 depending on their quality (usually 1 or 2, but very high-quality troops can get 3 or 4 dice) and add a modifier depending on their skill (-1 for unskilled, 0 for normal, up to +2 for elite). There are then other modifiers for range, cover, weapons, etc. As long as at least one die, after modifiers, equals the required target number, you succeed. For shooting, it's an opposed roll – the firers add modifiers for skill, weapon range, accuracy, RoF, etc, and the defenders add modifiers for skill, cover and the like.

Most die rolls ask for a Margin of Success (or Failure, if you've missed). In the case of an attack, you multiply the weapon's damage rating by the MoS and compare that value to the target's armour rating. Over the armour = Light damage. twice the armour = Heavy damage. 3x the armour = Dead. 2x Light Damage = Heavy, 3x Light = Dead if a vehicle takes multiple damaging hits.

Gear Krieg's morale rules are very rudimentary. In fact, they're not even part of the core rules.

The Silhouette system is one of the few systems I know where troop quality is multiplicative rather than additive. For example, poor-quality crew make a vehicle cost 0.25 x it's "nominal" cost, while elites are 2.25x normal. SS panzers vs Russian conscripts will end up with a lot of T34s against not many PzIV.

I wouldn't play Gear Krieg as written with anything more than a squadron of vehicles and a platoon of infantry. Certainly not anything like a FoW Soviet batallion.

Now that I check the link you provided, my last post is irrelevant. The "World At War: Gear Krieg" rules are using Mongoose Publishing's Battlefield Evolution engine, as seen in Starship Troopers, the Battlefield Evolution modern/near future game and Battlefield Evolution: World at War. That was originally designed for 20mm+ figures, so I would suspect it uses individually-base miniatures rather than fireteam bases like FoW.

The Mongoose Gear Kreig conversion for BE:WAW has a section on using multibased figures aimed at FoW players who already have a WWII force and want to try some pulp gaming.

A lot of the pictures in the BE:GK books are Battlefront FoW minis with DP9 GK mins.

G.

Excellent!
Didn't realize it was BE:GK;
I only remember 'old school' GK.
Everybody I know Loves BE (…and hates mongoose; miniature players, all!)

Thanks for the Pocket Reviews!
Looks Like I got me a New game!!

World At War plays well with individual basing, though it is rather deadly. The Gear Krieg conversion book for it does include rules for using team basing as seen in the original Gear Krieg and in FoW, and the author claims that individual and team basing will mix fairly well. Haven't tried that myself yet.

The main book is solely Late War Europe. The Vehicle Compendiums for World At War (published as PDFs by the author) include most of the stuff you would need for their respective nations. The Italians are not yet covered except by a playtest document.

World At War is also one of the few to cover the Far East and Pacific theaters. The Japanese don't have a compendium yet, either, but they didn't have enough variety to need one, and most of their equipment is in the Pacific War book.

The Pacific War book has Early-Mid British (for Burma, etc) that will do for North Africa in a pinch, and Early-Mid Germans are in an issue of Signs & Portents (Mongoose's free online PDF 'magazine'.

one of the other major reasons for the FOW-style based unit rules ini BE-GK is that the GK units are currently only available in 15mm, and not many WW2 players use individualy based 15mm minis… I, personally, don't like the GK-Silhouette rules because the "exploding dice" system it uses can(and usualy would) lead to silly-stupid situations like an officer destroying a heavy/super-heavy tank AT RANGE with a pistol; for those unfamiliar with it, the exploding dice rule is if you roll the max on a die- whatever the die- you roll another, until you stop getting max scores, on any maxed die; potentially leading to a 2D6 weapon scoring a massive 30+ armor penetration roll! After the 3rd time I saw this happen, I decided to stick to trying to translate GK units to FOW rules…

I actually did a conversion of the Gear Krieg vehicles to Command Decision, but I'm unsure of how to approach the CD forum about it.

Despite appearances and the amounts the company would like you to buy, the three games under discussion are aimed at different organizational levels.

FoW says it is a "Company" scale game, but really you start at a Company and go up from there, often quite rapidly.

BFE:World at War is a Platoon-to-Company level game, depending on the scale of minis you use. Played as written but with 15mm its a Company+ on the table, while at 25-30mm a reinforced Platoon is probably a better fit unless you have a BIG table.

Gear Krieg is a Squad/Squadron-to-Platoon game, despite some of the scenarios asking for entire Companies of walkers.

Gear Krieg looks really cool and I have friends that play it alot but the game mechanics hurt my brain. It just doesn't feel as playable as FoW in my most humble opinion.

Hell I was looking at doing with BGWWII as they would be awsome in a skirmish game.

I have some of the Gear Krieg figs, and am working on doing some stuff with BGWWII. I think that a small action with these walkers and stuff would be cool. I can only do small actions (2-5 vehicles per side) because the GK stuff is pretty expensive!

Sorry for chiming in that late!
If you want to know more about World at War Gear Krieg, please check our FAQ!
link
If you have any further questions, do not hesitate to ask!