"Defining Cover" Topic

Often we use Soft and Hard to describe cover, but I think we allow too much to be Hard.

Hedge, fence, wooden hut – soft.

Hard – stone wall.. Brick house? Is a Brick house really hard cover – I know a lot of people define it as such but is the average brick wall really that good against modern (20th cent) bullets? I think I've seen stuff showing the bullet goes through. It may not be the greatest penetrator at the other side, but it doesn't need to be- it just has to hurt enough to make the man inactive, or scare enough to make him hide.

What do you define as what in your games?

Hard and soft are only terms to provide colour and variation in the game, to allow for variation in die modifiers, and hence to provide some small parameter the player can optimize on the gaming table.
In that sense, it is no different from any other modifier or parameter in the game.

Any relationship with "real world" cover is meaningless.

With brick buildings or any other kind, you would also need to account for penetrating furnishings, cabinetry and the like. How far do you want to go in determining this?

Would it be easier to assign a penetration value to firing weapon and/or projectile? How complex do you wish to make fire resolution?

If only using a few cover values, brick buildings are not 'hard cover'.

A stone building with walls 2' thick and a cellar (like the one I'm sitting in right now) is 'hard cover' – and given the the cellar also has loopholes at ground level (the victorian air vents) and a bomb shelter with a steel roof, it probably counts as a 'bunker'.

My parents house OTOH is made of brick and a 7.62 would go right through it several times over – so it only really provides some concealment. Light cover.

I tend to lump cover into 'light' (concealment only, possibly lying down in undulations), 'heavy' (something provides actual protection – thick stone walls, foxholes, thick earth banks etc), 'fortified' (proper trenches with at least 18" of overhead cover) and 'bunkers' (well, you know what bunkers are).

This primarily affects their vulnerability to artillery fire and DF HE, as anything beyond 'heavy' makes units essentially immune to small arms fire.

I think it also depends on period and weapon. Is a brick house hard vs a smoothbore musket? I suspect so, but not vs a cannon of the same era. I certainly agree that brick doesn't protect much from modern small arms.
Phil

As noted above, a house provides cover AND concealment. So, do you rate it as a soft cover bonus and a concealment bonus, combine them to make hard cover, etc.?

For QILS, how terrain affects line of fire and how to adjudicate terrain and movement are part of the rules. The degree of effect is left up to the description of the terrain in the scenario.

We do it this way because the effects of different types of cover on different weapons (as described in the OP) are highly situational.

We have the following definitions.

Soft cover including troops grounded in the open and typicaly brick type buildings.

Hard cover, substantial stone buildings, possibly some prepared positions in brick buildings and fox holes. Using cover from substantial earth banks or crest of small hill.

Fighting positions with minimum 8" earth overhead cover.

bunkers, these are substantial, possibly with a armour rating but due to open app a turns can be suppressed. The final standard is basically an armoured vehicle that is stationary. For instance some Germany bunker used tank turrets.

All of them can effectively be given an arc that they can be fired on and fire and arcs where they are virtually invulnerable. Typical examples can be found on the Atlantic Wall.

obviously some tailoring is possible for a specific position.

A specific example – Bocage? I'm thinking hard due to the earth bank

Is the earth bank thick enough to stop a bullet?

If not, it isn't hard cover. Bocage banks are pretty thick though, and usually stuffed with tangled roots, so probably yes, hard cover.

Similar banks in the UK have a stone/rubble infill so definitely hard. In Normandy it needed a specialist Shermans with bocarge cutters welded on or explosives to breach them.

Hard or soft cover?

MG42 vs cinderblock
YouTube link

.50cal and .223 vs cinderblock
YouTube link

Wolfhag

I have always considered cover as having two aspects. Concealment and protection. Concealment should provide a level of protection as the fire doesn't know exactly where the target is and should also prevent spotting. Protection varies according to the weapon system being used against the target. The heavier the weapon the less protection.

I would ideally like rules to reflect the need to have some idea of where the target is before laying down effective fire. Recon by fire and general suppression fire should be options.

What about Medium cover and Variable cover?
Mediu.m cover: If light cover is a thick wood fence and hard cover is a wall of steel reinforced concrete then Medium cover ought to be that brick wall?
and what about sunken roads or hull down or berms?

and at least one other way to define cover
In the 1 to 1 20th century skirmish game I do (SUTC) ,there is the following situation: It is a squads mission to take out a bunker. The bunker is of reinforced concrete with firing slits. The squad has rifles, smg and grenades. There are chances to get shots or grenades through the slits, varying by range, firer movement, position and other factors. The bullets and grenade fragments can only wound or kill if they get through the slits.
So, the bunker is of a certain kind of cover that varies because of the fire it receives, between, in this case, rifle fire at 20p meters to a grenade stuffed through the slit at one meter.
Hard vs soft becomes meaningless.

I look at cover as decreasing the amount of target exposure (hidden behind a stone wall with only head and shoulders showing).

Concealment hides the target but may or may not provide cover. You could be concealed/hidden in bushes and then spotted when firing but the bushes will not provide cover (will not decrease the area exposed to fire).

Cover can also provide concealment by blocking the LOS. This would be a unit in a trench taking full cover/hunkered down. It cannot be hit but cannot shoot back. Normally cover would only expose head and shoulders when firing.

If you can shoot you can be hit.

Cover decreases the amount of the target that can be hit. You can decrease accuracy, firepower or give a cover save.

As far as classifying cover I look at it like armor. A wood building can be pretty easily penetrated by small arms fire unless it has a prepared position with sandbags behind the walls.

From some of the firepower demonstrations I've seen cover should be given an "armor value" and penetrated to cause damage on the other side. Wooden buildings do not provide much protection from small arms fire which is why they sandbagged their positions behind the walls.

Wolfhag

"Cover" protects by providing concealment so it is harder for an enemy in sight to get a clear shot on anybody or to direct mortar fire accurately on the exact position.

It can also protect by physically stopping incoming unpleasantries.

I suppose the real question is how effective each is and how distinct they are from each other (and under what forms of fire?)

Unit skill may play into it as well, possibly?
Gut feeling says that a squad experienced in field-craft and camouflage would be better protected in "soft" cover than the guys fresh out of boot in "hard" cover.

Maybe?

Weasel,
At one show we met an instructor for the TA (UK Voulenteer force) who said his biggest problem was getting then to see/find cover under 6".

With respect to cover types, the granularity of your statistics limits the possible, plausible range of covers you could have. The other issue is perhaps why bother. I suspect, basic tactics are unchanged. Losses may be higher if the cover is less than perfect,but the tactics do not. One compensation mat be for the team in the poor cover to fire faster. This means they can only stay for a shorter time as ammo runs out earlier. Again regarding basic tactics it's no different. Again it's down to key parameters you want to simulate.

Interestingly we could have more cover types than we have. Basically we have one more type,than the 4/5 we have, at the poor cover end. We have seen no need as we strive to keep it as simple as possible provided we get acceptable solutions.

With respect to cover types, the granularity of your statistics limits the possible, plausible range of covers you could have.

This is part of why I like to specify terrain effects by the scenario rather than in the rules. Rather than going through all the combinations of every possible type of terrain, situation, and equipment, the two parameters QILS uses (movement and ranged combat penalties) only need to be sufficient within the narrow scope of who is present, specifically where they are and what they are doing.

Occasionally, there are scenarios where terrain effects are split by unit type, say infantry and cavalry for movement or rifles and artillery for ranged combat. Sometimes you can compress this down without separating effects. The most frequent case is, as Weasel suggests, skill based, but in terms of "home team" and "away team" differences.

Rarely, there is a need for a scenario specific rule about cover. I often get frustrated with "updates" and "improvements" to rules that accumulate one-off or one-in-a-thousand scenario conditions into the core set of dynamics.

Etotheipi, I agree that somtimes a specific rule for a scenario is the optimum solution. It saves huge amounts of design work to ensure it is true for all possible conditions plus it's much easier to remember a scenario specific simple rule than a complex universal rule. This applies to a range of issues not just cover.

There was a discussion at the ACW game this evening at a point I wandered over. Unit in the open in fire fight with unit in the wood. The player with the 'open' unit wanted to know if he got the same cover bonus, as there was the same amount of cover.

I opined that the point was the unit in the open couldn't properly see the unit in cover, that was the problem, not the trees (which the unit inside could aim to avoid)

Thought experiment on cover and concealment
With middle to late 20th 21st century war, no one, excepting those with special equipment, knows where anyone is. Most everyone stays out of sight which differs from our usual practice of putting the figures on the playing area eveb though they are fully concealed.
Variable cover and concealment. A machine gun burst against a concealed target is less likely to cause hits tan a shell burst, especially if the target is low to the ground or in an apple orchard or behind a hill or in a hole. There is a cover difference between high angle fire and flat tragectory, between flame and ballistics.
If we are considering 1 to 1 skirmish then skill has less to do with it as an elite under fire in tbe woods is no better off than the miitia. G
An elite platoon may be better off as it will have made better use of the cover, but not as individuals all things being equal6

If we are considering 1 to 1 skirmish then skill has less to do with it as an elite under fire in tbe woods is no better off than the miitia. G
An elite platoon may be better off as it will have made better use of the cover, but not as individuals all things being equal6

I disagree, because all things are not equal. Modern skirmish combat has repeatedly demonstrated the ability of a small, well-trained and supported force to take out a much larger number of barely trained pickup forces.

Now if you have a well-trained militia that drills together and knows the terrain backwards and forwards, the advantage slants in the other direction.

etotheipi
The context of my remarks was not about the ability of an elite squad
It was about the individual paratrooper in the forest under shell fire being speared by flying wood splinters, even though he was in better cover than that of the average soldier. Same applies to the bunkered up troops in say Korea, where even though the Chinese dug deeper and better, a direct bit from US heavy artillery would sometimes collapse the cover. Even Japanese troops on Tarawa to Okinawa in excellent cover died from flame, grenade or sometimes concussion. In these cases and similar it doesnt matter if the squad could outfight enemies, as the question is, well, what happens to a King Tiger tank, crewed by SS, hit hy a 14 inch armor piercing shell. SS strawberry jam with no saving throws.
We are not talking about the ability of the squad but about the effetiveness of its cover