"Thoughts on 'over stacking' a space on the battlefield" Topic

I tried playtesting my own WWII rules and came across something to think about – the impact of overcrowding a space on the effectiveness of those troops

Here are some of my thoughts…

link

If anybody has any other thoughts to help…

Let an artillery battery find their range and you will soon solve the overcrowding problem. Surely it is about risks like that rather than any other reasons that it should be allowed – 'never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake'.

Agree that artillery should have a field day. "Target Rich Environment"

It's hard to tell how to respond unless we know what the squares represent. If based on the picture I'd guess they are about 75 x 100 feet. But then you may have some other ground scale where 1" = 50 feet or whatever.

Troops in WW2 generally did not bunch up that way. If your rules don't "punish" that formation then you need to figure out why not. That looks a lot more like a Napoleonic square than anything.

I think really there are three tactical effects (depending on ground scale):

1. they will get in each others way, reducing effective outgoing fire
2. the amount of usable cover per man will be reduced (as there are only so many folds in the ground), making them more vulnerable to fire
3. they will be more vulnerable the area effect of small arms fire (as most rounds land in an area, not aimed at specific targets), increasing the danger, a lot.

area weapons like mortars, artillery and airstrikes go without saying, but it also massively increases their vulnerability to small arms fire.

IRL the vulnerability effects are not linear (typically a tripling of target density results in a doubling of losses), but for game purposes it it is far easier to go down the Squad Leader route and have all fire affect everythign in the area – assuming it is something reasonable like a 50m or 100m square. A rifle section can expect to suppress a target 100 yards across and a platoon can suppress 300 yards of front (and a couple of hundred yards of depth).

So if your typical section fires 1D6 of fire at a square, if there are four enemy sections in there, they ALL take the hits (or roll 1D6 against each, or whatever).

If your squares are 1km across, you may wish to rethink.

You could also limit the number of elements able to benefit from cover, so e.g. a wooded hex might only give cover to two elements, and limit the amount of outging fire (a maximum of three elements, in any direction).

I have tried the incremental additional dice thing, and while it is a neat mechanism and arguably more 'realistic', it can get very confusing if a lot of shooting is going on.

The arty thing never stops FOW players from side by side tank lines. Its so goofy looking, and when a non FOW player points this out, the nerd rage and say "every game has this".
No. No they don't.
I've played giant micro armor battles and i've never sen that in games we played.
As to the main question from the op…spread out. I guess i just would'nt play in a game that rewards this with miniatures. If i wanted to play like this, i'd get out a avalon hill game.

Well, I have played and watched many, many WW II games and I have seen the side-by-side tank thing in at least 10 different systems. It has NOTHING to do with the rules and everything to do with the players. Many WW II gamers put too darn many tanks on the table and want to bring as many to bear as possible. The result is that tanks sometimes get jammed in to far little space.

And actually talk to almost any experienced FoW player and I think you'd find they do indeed adjust how they set up troops and tanks if there is artillery or air support to consider.

Just because you haven't seen it doesn't make your assertions true in any way.

Thanks folks for the responses. One of the aspects I wanted to represent was the allocation of support weapons on a realistic ratio. This then went to the problem of how you base those support elements and then allocate them to look reasonable on the table. This then lead onto the issue of how to space them on a. Grid system. I agree that there is a certain Napoleonic appearance, however the example was an extreme showcase. For those ASL players, the 3 squads stacked with several machine guns and a strong leader, providing a strong firing point, was a common approach, and juicy target for artillery. There was then a reliance on strong leadership to maintain the integrity of the stack…but that's another story!

> For those ASL players, the 3 squads stacked with several machine guns and a strong leader, providing a strong firing point, was a common approach, and juicy target for artillery.

Not just artillery. Attacks in ASL are (nearly) always against the entire contents of the location. Stacking is usually a very good way to lose an ASL game.

Good to see that German infantry are allowed to form square.

LOL! 40 years of playing wargames and NOT seeing anyone pack tanks side by side except while playing FOW.
Yeah.I have no idea what i'm talking about.

I find it HILARIOUS that FOW players will never come out and say, "yes, i side by side my everything because it ups my firepower in this stupid looking game i defend."

John, I dont understand you're point. How does FoW incentivize players to play their tanks hub to hub where other games don't?

Closely packed troops should probably get a small morale boost but obviously be more vulnerable to incoming fire.

In FiveCore, I solved it by letting excess damage results carry over to other, nearby units.

Which works out great in FiveCore, btw!

cheese, I don't play FOW.I bought the game, seen that it was very "game-y" and put it on sale.
My point was, no matter who says what, everytime someone shows the game, there thay are!Tanks side by side.I assume because its a benefit to fire all the tanks at the same target or to reduce the number of flank shots.
I really could care less if people play the game. But i HATE the simple fact that no one will just say, "yeah. its to game the game.I can't be bothered to play otherwise."
IT looks goofy and tanks don't operate like that.And before anyone says, "well its a grand scale problem".I call total BS.
Iplayed in tennis court micro armor games with a couple thousand pieces.Not one person in those games deployed tanks like that.

Squad Leader very neatly models the tension between cohesion and control vs vulnerability to fire.

Forces with good leaders clump up around them, forces without, don't. Frankly, Lt Stahler stacked with three 838 assault engineer squads was going to wipe the floor with anyone unless you massed overwhelming firepower against them, or they threw low unwisely running across a road.

But those dreaded sniper activations with a SAN of 7 kept his head down.

From Memory – I don't think there is a penalty in Spearhead to base to base, Artillery targets individual bases. BUT as the bases represent a platoon on a football field (choose code, Association, Rugby, hand-egg Colonial) those hub to hub tanks aren't.

As to the OP – First; depending on Arc of Fire Rules some of those bases will block others.

In PBI I think there is a bonus to shooting at squares which have more than a certain amount of bases in.

In IABSM you get +2 for each section in 2 inches of the target, and the results are spread around. We've stopped adding that for small teams (eg AT) unless there is an obvious case. Poor old PIAT man had to wander round with his ammo guy all alone.

Although the results get spread around lessening the long term impact per team (maybe, when balanced againstthe +2s), the chance of pin/suppress goes up. Also Hit and Run tactics become viable against bunched units- 1d firing you'd normally be lucky to get a result. If a platoon is bunched, 1 action moving up, 1 firing at +4, 1 bugging out becomes a possibility.

Again ground scale is the key.

We finaly admitted in our rules (MG) that we should have added the 40m rule, we added it in Bulletin No 2 recently. That is that tanks closer than 40m appart (really anyting fron 40 to 60m in the real world) as its an almost guaranteed first hit proability if you hit the tank next to it last time. This limits alternate positions to being at least 50m appart (LIKE THE REAL WORLD).

For infantry we have not put an area of small arms fire in. The reasons for this are that in a sensible game a platoon has to cover a minimum 250m front or the enemy can get round it, forceing some spacing of elements. MG's working more like the real thing, so may not always be co-located with the grunts. They are effective at 400m so can if choseN work flanking fire from a distantance, again encourageing spRead of forces. Our rules allow for artillery to do its real job which is suppress and fix in place, not be the supper weapon it never was in the real world as feature by some games. This means minimal artiller supresses vast numbers of troops. Humvees with tow are supposed to me a minimum of 250m apart so they are not suppressed on the same artilley sheaf.

Finally infantry work really only in relatively close terrain. If you have that then its not sensible most of the time to walk in a clump as you get shot from angles you can't shoot back from. The answer is not more rule its a better integrated system of representative terrain and function of all arms. Google maps is you friend. Load up a real map of the area of the ground you are representing and then see how yoy have allowed for this in your rules. If your infantry all bunched end up in the middle of one field, then you have to have rules that allow the other guy to use the ditches round the field to slauter him.

Start from your original concept and review what went wrong.

Took me two seconds to google images of hub to hub tanks in IABSM: link

and Rapid Fire: link

Most games incentivize playing tanks close together to get fire on a target. Why hate on one of them?

"Yeah.I have no idea what i'm talking about."

Well at least we can agree on that! 8)=

"I don't play FOW.I bought the game, seen that it was very "game-y" and put it on sale."

Ahem. My experience was exactly the same, although I did play a number of great games of it with my buddies before I gave up on it. You assume that because I disagree with your assertion that EVERY FoW game ever has this as a feature and no other game does that I am a FoW player. I am not. I just dislike black-and-white hyperbole which unfairly slams one set of rules.

Again, just because in your (impressive) 40 years of gaming you haven't seen any other game have tanks hub-to-hub does not make it so! I've seen it in Battleground WW II, Battlefront WW II, Battlegroup, I Ain't Been Shot, Mum, Fireball Forward, Arc of Fire, and many, many more. These games are run in various scales from 15mm on up to 28mm and it all boil down to the PLAYERS, NOT the rules. We actively discourage it in our group, although one dose of artillery or an air attack will rapidly cure it, regardless of which rules are being used.

some battlegroup kursk hub-age here: link

That looks

Indeed, it kind of does, but now you've seen 3 other highly regarded rulesets used that also feature games with hub to hub tanks. Just wanted to make sure you didn't have to go another 40 years without seeing that most games encourage it just as much as FoW, thats all.

As we game on 1" to 100 yards we feel it reasonable to be hub to hub. If you are going to do skirmish then I suggest you get an automatic additional shot at any target in close proximity.

What hagenthedwarf said, extra shots make people spread out very quickly in tactical games (although sometimes they don't, and then either look baffled or moan when an entire company gets pinned down my one MG).

Anyway for hub-hub beat this:

Two Canadian infantry and divisions and one armoured division lined up to attack the Hochwald in 1945, we could barely fit them in their historical deployment areas (1 base = 1 battalion, 4cm = 1km). There is an independant tank brigade, an AGRA, Kangeroos and other stuff from Corps in there to add to traffic jams.

Got any MPs to sort out the traffic jam? No MPs and movement rates are halved!

Having artillery that has a significant effect (either by killing, suppressing, or otherwise blinding units in a barrage) is always a good way to encourage units to spread out.

Don't know the groundscale in FoW, but the carpark in IABSM is so so wrong. It is primarily an infantry game with few tanks. We normally play 10mm, with a 30mm square base equal to 4 or 5 men.

In IABSM you get a AT shooting bonus if you hit the target last turn. I suggest this could be extended if shooting at a tank with in 6" of a tank you just killed.

Having delt with real life excercises of battalion, division and corps level support trains, being overcrowded is common especially in an unstationary situation such as an advance or withdrawal.

The only area with some space in near the front lines. Lol.

All good points, my two cents:

One major point to consider is that when playing with Battlefront miniatures (15mm) or larger, the ground scale you play with simply dictates that you will have parking lots. Otherwise your game table will be 20' x 30' not 4x6. This is not practical for most gamers hence the bunched up nature of 15mm games. When I first wrote Schwere Kompanie rules, it was designed for 6mm. We rarely had parking lot problems (unit identification was more of an issue!).

When moving to 15mm, I considered changing the ground scale but soon realized that the table size would become enormous to game the company-sized games it was written for. A choice was made to preserve the scale and accept the issues that the physical size of the minis was going to cause. Rather than penalize the gamer for this reality, I instead chose to relax the rules to allow distance to increase in relation to C&C and unit placement. This allows platoons to enjoy the benefits of leadership and C&C without sitting in each others lap.

Troy

lol john doesnt understand ground scale lol!

Yep troops naturally bunch, probably for morale support. A good set of rules will punish poor behaviour.

But I can remember coming off a weekend traing exercise with the TA and going to watch "A bridge too far". There is a bit with American paratroops moving through the woods and our sergeant was jumping up and down. "Thats how I want you to move. Do you get it now?".