"Fire support in wargaming" Topic

I'm interested in discussing ways that artillery and other support pieces (air, mortars, rockets, etc.) has been represented in war games of various eras. From on-board pieces with guess estimating ranges, to off-board pieces with rules for their impact on the table.

I'm interested in all aspects of the discussion that could ensure, such as opinions on which rules are better, or more realistic, or more playable, and so on. I'm curious to learn about methods more common than those I'm familiar with, and to find rules that would be interesting to pick up just to learn about the different ways fire support has been utilized.

Also, I'm interested in the topic all the way back to the ancient period, when it was catapults and ballistae, up to modern and future or science fiction orbital attacks.

I miss the old "general discussion" board, and still dislike the splitting. It took me longer to find the right board to post this to than it did to post the topic itself.

I also miss the days when most topics were cross-posted to 18th C discussion for no good reason.

Dirtside 2 had orbital artillery (ortillery) as an option. On planet arty didn't deviate whereas ortillery had a chance to do so. You could also generate variations where ortillery wasn't available for/on x turns because of planetary rotation and/or outfit different weapons from orbit like particle beams.

I like the indirect fire in War of the Ring/Kings of War/similar. If your dice scores you a hit, you roll a set amount of dice for potential damage. This gets rid of template placement argument phase of the game :)

As I understand it, the author of "Jagdpanzer" rules for WWII was in the Artillery and he paid very close attention to the Arty portion of the rulebook. When "Jagdpanzer 2nd Edition" came out, I believe he was very specific that those Arty rules remain unchanged.

While I think they are very good at simulating Arty on the battlefield, they make the game a bit Artillery centric. Of course most casualties were caused by Artillery, I get that, but does this make it a good GAME? Are we willing to face the facts of reality, or do we want to have fun? I always limit the amount of Batteries and Missions when I play these rules, and I find it makes the game a little more enjoyable. Turn limits help too. Otherwise players would just sit back and shell enemy positions into oblivion, and then walk into the objectives. Sort of like reality…

BD

What is it?

First you have to define what it is.

THW's Star Army and Battalion Commander use off-board artillery, as does Future War Commander.

Then you have Ogre, which uses artillery on the board.

I haven't played Battletech in awhile, but I seem to recall rules for both on- and off-board artillery.

I think the scale of a modern or SF game means the arty should be somewhere off the map (unless, of course, something's gone wrong). For anything pre-World War I, those units should be on the board.

The video of Battleground tv program (someone shared a link to it on Youtube today) Battle of Edgehill shows a neat but fiddly mechanism for cannon fire.

They have a protractor of sorts and lay it on the intended target unit. They then roll 1d6 to determine windage (odds to left and evens to right, it appears) and a second d6 to determine bounce.

Cool looking, kind of like a slide rule but also kind of cringe-worthy with the simplification in many rule sets today. I can imagine there were a lot of fights on alignment of that device when it was being used.

Every game recreating battles from say the 1870s on should have rules for off board, unless the units depict mega-scale formations.

Personally I dislike having to guess ranges: it makes no sense, because the guys actually doing the aiming and shooting know their business, so why does the C-in-C suddenly have to step in? Plus not everyone is good at guessing. It makes as much sense as not allowing people to use QRS' during the game.

In GWs games anything that's indirect or HE, rolls for deviation, which usually is absurdly big, even if they just hit that same unit in the same place last turn.
Another weird thing about their rules is that you can't aim indirect or artillery fire at enemy units in contact with own units. Who hasn't read examples of "Lay it down on MY coordinates! NOW!"

WW2 rules and beyond should include rules on different fire drills and organizations, especially for off table: who could call in what? If WW2 rules of company or higher level don't depict US Time-on-Target for example, forget about them. Don't know about BA, but Battlefront (Fire & Fury's WW2 rules) does depict it. As does GI Commander IIRC (although that's an unplayable set of rules with way too much detail, but because of that, for anyone wanting to write WW2 rules a great source).

I'd depict most close air support as off board 'artillery' too (and still find a way to get those aircraft models on the table of course).

I don't like the way most rules handle forward observers. These often weren't simply a man added to some staff somewhere, but specialized vehicles operating waaaaay up front in the thick of it.
Also, these guys were well trained, so their fire calls should hit harder than fire called in by a unit's own commander, no matter if it's that commander's own support sub-unit.

My own pet peeve is the heavy mortar from WW2-present. If these are towed or onboard, they shouldn't ever have to 'unlimber' or 'limber', but be able to shoot and move as freely as infantry heavy weapons like MMGs. When I was in the army shouting orders at 120mm mortar gunners, our platoon could land effective fire (say 6 shells in a 100x100m target zone up to 6km away) within 5 minutes of the fire request … when receiving that request while on the move in our APCs, AND be on the move again before the last shells hit the target zone (you'd better be: the radar-controlled counter battery salvo was already flying across the front line on its way to hit your position).
And while most rules would put such mortars off table, in real life we were quite close to the front line most of the time, and sometimes even temporarily behind enemy lines (when some incompetent high-ranker (pleonasm?) failed to inform us of the battalion fall-back).

And finally, most rules don't allow off table support by HMGs. I know, it was't used all that often. Nevertheless, it's in the manuals and was trained for: to use .50s for indirect fire support to over 5kms away. Provided the guns have been properly prepared and fired a few shots with an observer at the target to adjust, a few of them will present a huge factor in the defence of say a bridge.

Cheers