"Building Destruction in a Game #2 - Rules?" Topic

1) I don't know how most folks do it but it is the way I do it.

2) No, but they are less likely to damage a building.

3) Troops take damage as the building is damaged or can, if it is destroyed they take damage.

4) Break large buildings into sections that can be damaged individually. Allow units to move from one to another without exiting the building.

DzC, a sci-fi ruleset admittedly, gives buildings a difficulty to damage rating and a number of hits. When the building takes damage there is a chance that occupying troops could be damaged by falling parts. When the building has lost half of its hits that chance increases.

Sometimes the best way to take out dug-in troops is to take out the building they are in.

For what it's worth, I don't worry too much about the destruction of buildings, only what happens to units inside of them. For me, the issue of the building being destroyed isn't much of a factor; a standing building offers cover and concealment, as does a a destroyed building (I play historicals, so there are no space demodulators that totally obliterate buildings and remove all evidence of their ever having existed).

Having said that, I play squad to company-sized games, which don't feature giant buildings or the size/caliber of weapons to destroy them. I could see this being an issue if you're talking about a four-story apartment building that gets totally levelled; it still offers cover/concealment, but only at the first level, no longer at 4 levels, but I just don't have that type of stuff happening in my games. Similarly, you could have a wood shack get totally obliterated by an infantry gun, but (in my simplistic world) my building tend to be pretty robust, so a tank pumping rounds into it will attrite men inside, but not eliminate the building for game purposes of cover/concealment.

V/R,
Jack

20mm cannon vs brick or cinder block – my money's on the cannon. :)

1) Depends on the rules I'm using. In Bundok and Bayonette there's a point system. When playing 15mm WW2 games it depends on there being a 'kill' result from fire. Then a further die roll to see if a fire is started.

2)No such small gun consideration except in WW2 system. Then yes, such small caliber guns can damage/destroy a building.

3)If troops are in a building that is damaged/destroyed they suffer along with the building.

4)Fortifying the building is still worthwhile because it helps the defenders withstand small arms fire.
The film showing an SIG auf PzI doesn't show 'after the dust cleared'. As you know, such blasts generate great amounts of flying debris. I often wonder just what the target looked like after the dust cleared.

5)Damaged buildings give the same cover value they gave when undamaged. But there may be no second story to use, etc… Buildings truly 'blasted off the face of the earth' tend to be rather small structures to begin with. Thus they no longer offer any protection. At least that's how I play such…

Hope the above is helpful.

Robby

I play Quick Intermediate Level Skirmish and treat destructable buildings as regular figures, though with lots of defensive capability.

1) Just give 'em dice, like figures.
2) Nope. Weak weapons end up with very low, low chances of destroying a building.
3) Troops on upper floors or roofs fall. Troops under stuff have it fall on them (which they can survive).
4) Don't do cascading casualties. Have done scenarios where a building is a whole entity to be attacked and other scenarios you have to attack it in parts.
5) "Replacable" terrain. When X is destroyed, it is replaced with Y. Nice for bridges and walkways. Also for buildings/structures that take multiple hits to totally destroy.

20mm cannon vs brick or cinder block – my money's on the cannon. :)

Dude, SMALL ARMS versus cinder block and the cinder block will lose, horribly! You need 7.62Nato to shatter bricks, though.

I give buildings a level of cover, specified before the game. I ignore the effects of fire on the building, only on the troops. Whether the casualty is from shrapnel or falling masonry is too granular for a company-on-a-side game. Hadn't thought about setting fire to a building, I'll have to work on that…

In Chain of Command, you fire at the troops inside the building or the building itself. If you roll 3 6's, the building is damaged and troops in it must evacuate. If they fail to do so by the end of the turn (which can be a while or happen quickly) you roll 1D6 and a 6 kills. The survivors are placed outside of the door of the opponent's choosing.

4 6's and the building collapses immediately. A 5-6 kills and survivors are placed as per above.

a sIG33 with 13 dice has a pretty good chance at damaging the building and a reasonable chance at collapsing it. The short 75 on the early PzIV has 6 dice.

Tomorrow's War gives buildings a basic strength (3 dice for weak, 6 dice for average, 9 dice for reinforced, and even a level for "completely invulnerable to human tech"), which can then be fortified to various levels (+1 die for light, +2 dice for medium, and +3 dice for strong fortification). Which die type varies with construction quality (shoddy gets d6s, decent/average d8s, quality d10s, and exceptional d12s). So, you could have a sheet-metal aircraft hangar (weak strength) that's been well-made but unfortified, and would roll 3d10 for the building's defense dice. Or you could have a shoddy, heavily fortified, reinforced building and roll 12d6 in defense.

Only explosive weapons can damage or destroy buildings. small arms or kinetic weapons can affect infantry or vehicles inside, but won't do enough damage to the building on the way through to harm the building itself.

To destroy a building specifically (as opposed to shooting at troops inside it), attacker rolls however many Firepower dice in the attack that his weapon gives and the defender rolls however many defense dice the building gets. Discard any dice rolling less than a 4, and if there are more firepower dice than Defense dice, the building collapses. If not, that building will roll one less die the next time someone tries to destroy it.

If the building is destroyed, any units inside take an attack equal to whatever the firepower of the attack that destroyed the building was, PLUS 1 die for all the building fragments bouncing around.

If the building is NOT destroyed, any units inside take an attack equal to whatever the firepower of the attack was, MINUS one die as the building protects them somewhat.

Units inside the building still get all the cover bonuses for their own defense dice.

I liked the system used in 'Cambrai to Sinai'. Weapons firing HE had a value which was multiplied by a D6, each point of damage destroyed a square metre of building, though brick and concrete structures were more resilient. Soldiers inside had a cover modifier for pc chance of casualties and survivors could re-man the rubble (often better cover than the original structure)

Trouble was, each building had an HE defence value, dependent on its construction and building materials that was, cumulatively, reduced by the HE strike value. If buildings lost over half their points they ran the risk of partially or totally collapsing, causing casualties to the inhabitants. Partially collapsing buildings could be inhabited, but had a pc die roll chance of falling down. Vehicles like the ISU-152 were absolutely lethal, but a 75mm armed tank needed lucky rolls, otherwise it was a battle of attrition, especially with auto-cannons. There were even rules for damage caused by solid shot.

It sounded complex, but was seemed to give a good simulation, albeit, the simulation of blast was not mathematically modelled.

Forgot, there was also a chance for the building to catch fire, forcing defenders to take repeated morale checks. Flamethrowers were particularly effective in rooting out troops this way.

Talking of dust and debris, I was reading an account of a group of Soviet soldiers, during some urban fighting who all went on to balconies to get a good view of a ISU-152 attack a strongpoint. The ISU fired, the strongpoint was obliterated, but the 152's blast shattered all the intact windows, in the vicinity, which fell on the men, causing numerous casualties!

Tim, I believe that clip was reacted for the cameras, after the building, but still might represent the historically close cooperation between their infantry and armour.

To interject a bit of reality. In Stalingrad the Russians were to all intents and purposes virtually impevious to artillery. If you have more than a few rows of buildings you are going to struggle to hit the inner rows as the first are in the way. It was noted that the Russans on the 3rd floor of a building were almost invulnerable to morter fire (only realy fire available due to above) as it went off on the roof. To really do dammage to a building you need large calibre weapons like bombs or the various specialist weapons like the british Churchill with whath apperas to be a landbased depth charge.

In reality the 20mm weapon will lose against any reasonable sized cinder building. True it will penetrate but the overall area of damage is unlikely to do much structural damage to cause it to fall. An example sighted recently is that moderm IFV's with autocannon stuggle to mousehole buildings. They smash suitable areas of concrete but do not do not break the re-enforceing tie bars. Again an unreasonable ammount of fire or fire at point blank reange may effect hits on tie bars but this is not a typical or practical solution for a typical generalised simulation. specialist.

In WWII it was noted that the germans deliberately ignited buildings to make them uninhabitable. The SAS went to great lengths to make bombs that could both blow open a 45 gallon drum and ignite the fuel inside. While buildings did occationally light accedentaly or due to fire it does not seem that common. On that basis you need to understand if such random event modelling improves the overall satisfaction of the game or again takes it out of the set of interesting games despite remaining within the set of actaul possible events.

In most cases the building on a wargames table represents an area significantly larger than a single building so destruction of a wargames building is unlikely. Even in an MG game we recognise the buildings are too big and hence the game is faster in an urban area than it should be but we find that acceptable. Play 1/300 models at 1/72 ground scalea and you get close. However by then the same actual building becomes perhaps 16 buildinga and gardens most of which may be unoccupied. Potentially more realistic but again out of the set of interesting games. However it does then illustrate how many buildings you would actually have to eliminate and the ammunition you would need to expend to eliminate even 1 wargames building. To make even an MG game representative we recon you need 10 to 20 buildings just to get some hidden from direct fire from the outside as would be the case in any real significant urban area. This then represents some 160 to 320 actual buildings, by no means a large conerbation.

Ditto,
You are correct in that the fundamental of crossfire is that the board is only 300m across hence why there are so many buildings. That is because everything is in rifle range. The problem is as far as I can see ther designer then lost the plot. Mortars and artillery have in genral an expected "danger area" some 200m short. That means its impossible to land artillery within the board without serious risk to you own troops but that seems to have got lost somewhere. On that basis your games do not need to worry about destroying builings in game, destroyed builings have to be so before your game starts.

In ASL KIA results from HE fire can result in rubbled building hexes. As KIA results are unlikely except with quite large guns it doesn't happen a lot in most games. Any troops in the building are destroyed if it is rubbled.

Ditto,
You are correct that it says somewher that a full length line of sight is a bad idea. It effectively splitts the board in two and makes it due to reality and the game mechanics to cross such a gap. Not sure how it coverd smoke grenades which might help here.

Interestingly MG uses only 1 small arms range and in a well designed close area this is not am issue as you never get to see that far anyway. Crossfire mechanisms for infantry and buildings was very elegant. I personally never took to it as I wanted to fight combined arms as as you say it covers only 200 to 300 yds. Within its scope I think it stands out as one of the "milestones" in the development of credible games and shows that buckets of dice are not required for an excelent simulation.

One of the items we are looking for facts on is the effects of the high power demolition guns on concrete bunkers. While we have rules we have not gone to town in this area and as our interest widens to our sort of campain this has potential to become an interesting issue. for our purposes they are considered a concrete hull down tank generally, but it would be fun to understand the real effects of hundreds of pouns of explosive going off quite close. Also the effects of the Greman remote control demolition tanks which the reports in Tigers in Combat Vol 1, indicate were reasonably sucessful.