"OGRE Miniatures with Laser LOS rules all around?" Topic

Sometimes the "pretty much everything modern gets indirect fire" aspect of OGRE gets to me. I totally understand it abstracts drones, targeting satellites, and forward observers. It just makes it seem more like I am playing with counters than tanks. Has anyone else tinkered with it along these lines? I was just going to use Laser LOS for all units except Howitzers, Missile Tanks, and Ogres.

That said…I was also thinking of taking some of the Air and AA units from the Ogre supplement book and working them in. If you have to see it to hit it…air power is a bit more survivable. I've been wanting to scratch build a Continental Siege Aircraft:

link

The introduction of LOS would make for a different game, which is not necessarily bad, but it would be a big change to classic Ogre.

The Ogre Miniatures book has rules for it…for antiquated units and the laser towers. It's a fun set of rules…thinking of just using it for more than just their main setting.

If you assume a certain level of information systems and communications and networking technology, you pretty much automatically get a situation in which anything one unit sees, all of the units on that side "see." At that level of technology, the computation of direct fire is almost a trivial problem. I think the rules for antiquated systems and energy beam weapons, which you note, make sense really only for those types of things, in the Ogre context. That said, you could utilize a bit of hand-waving about ECM disrupting the technology to your desired degree to get the effect you want.

Doug

Blame it on the ECM. It's the old race of bigger guns vs. heavier armour all over again, but on the electron scale.

Or maybe that's what command posts are for--to coordinate indirect fire. So once your CP is destroyed, only those units with innate indirect fire (HWZ, MSL, OGRE) can shoot beyond LLOS.

Good idea on the CPs.

Doug

Another idea is that once your command post is taken down then don't allow combined fire by units.

I am currentlly playing a homebrewed version of Ogre with LOS all around and reaction fire.

It's fun, but it comes across as more of a futuristic version of Panzerblitz.

What else have you tweaked? I would dig hearing about what you have altered and how it worked.