"Want to test something for me?" Topic

Had some thoughts for a fairly unusual firing mechanic.
(very quick, one-roll only, focused on pinning)

If you have about a platoons worth of individually based figures, give it a shot and see if it has legs or it sucks.

It's only 3 pages so shouldn't take up too much of your time or brainspace :)

Intended for ww2, but I don't think anything would break at all if you tested it with cold war stuff either.

Want a hand in what games NWG does in the future? This is your shot.
Tell me if you'd like to see it fleshed out more or if it's a dead end.

PDF link

I like it. It's very different from your other work to say the least. The control roll and the ability to activate again is really neat. I can see the commander/leader figures really taking a key roll in combat which is as it should be.

A couple of questions:

When you roll to move it is for the team as a whole, right? Not like No End where you roll for each soldier's movement.

How do you place the firepower template? I can see this being manipulated a lot to focus power on just a couple of figures (with a better chance of scatter) or laid out very a large group for suppression. I assume that is your intent here.

About how big do you see this game going? Platoon? Up to a full company? With teams being units I can see it scaling up to 12 or so units myself.. Say company at the top?

Anyway, looks cool Weasle.

Thanks. Think of it as a "tech demo" to see if this engine has legs to stand on :)

The aim is to play VERY fast. I think it could stretch into company size but "well reinforced platoon" might work best.

At the moment, the firepower template can be placed anywhere. That can get a bit choosy intentionally but I think that'll add some player decisions to the game.

Movement is by team, yes.

Unable to anything with this. Without a ground scale it's impossible to get any sense of what it is trying to achieve. It is not clear why sections cannot dispose there fire in different dire tons in a case sat they were surrounded. An area 6 by 6 looks small, ST effective range is probably only in reality 50 to 100 yards. 6 inch is only then about 25 to 50 yards, in extended order a platoon may be 10 yards apart. Not really a sensible concentration against a platoon in extended order. I suggest you read more on tactics, decide what you want to model and then start looking at rules. Please note this is intended as constructive criticism.

oh ushcha…

Oh, he's fine :-)

Let me clarify though:
The purpose of the draft is to ascertain if the core mechanic is functional in it's own right, not to provide much of a simulation.

Think of it as a tech-demo, not a game demo, to borrow a computer game term.

Ranges were selected to correspond relatively closely with existing games (and be reasonably 1-to-1 for 15mm figures) for ease of testing.

You'll note that quite a few key items are non-existent for much the same reason ;)

For specific questions:
6x6 is big enough to encompass a normal fire team in most cases.
How big of an area could a team with bolt action rifles realistically suppress? 10-15 yards of terrain sounds about reasonable.

I have my doubts as to whether a half-squad realistically would split their fire significantly , though with the mechanic it could be done, but they'd risk dropping under their required firing strength.

Weasel my reading is that all fires in 6by6 not just suppression so we are back to ground scale. Model parameters should come first ideal which is where this concept appears to be missing.

Scale is a lost cause in games, in my opinion, since the ground scale usually never matches our miniatures, terrain etc.
Good old Stargrunt f.x. had a scale of 1" = 10 meters, which meant the average 15mm tank was 40 meters long and a street between two houses would be 20 meters wide.
Certainly very silly.

As such, for a skirmish game, the only sensible solution is that the ground scale matches the miniatures.
With 15mm figures, an inch is about 3 meters.

This puts the firing area at about 15 meters and SMG range at about 45 meters.

That's compressed a little but not too bad.

In 6mm, an inch is about 4.5 meters. This makes our firing area about 27 meters (round up and call it 30 and it's about the distance you can hurl a grenade reliably) and SMG range just short of 70 meters which about the high end of effective use.

Rather than getting hung up on the 6x6 issue and scale (I agree, scale in wargaming is pointless beyond the broadest generalities), I like the idea of a game modeling "pressure" rather than outright casualties/lethal fire. My read of WWII combat is that units endeavored to pour enough metal into a given sector of the battlefield that it either destroyed the enemy there or compelled them to fall back. If the enemy was in the poor cover (caught in the open, enfiladed, etc), that was relatively little firepower; if in good cover, it required a lot.

The Napoleon seems more than a little frightened of his horse!