Pardon the late entry to the thread, but thought I might chime in (provided everyone has not already packed up and gone home).
To the question of 1-to-1 unit scales, I play 1-to-1 for vehicles, with squad-stands for infantry. There are rules that do 1-to-1 vehicles and fireteam-stands for infantry … I played several over the years and decided to shy away from them due to the difficulties in managing combined-arms engagements. With 10 models to a Russian tank company, but 36 stands to a Russian infantry company, guess what happened to the game turn time when infantry appeared on the table?
My preferred ruleset now is ODGW's Mein Panzer. For vehicle combat they are relatively fast-play, with just about enough detail to keep me interested. I like the turn sequence a lot -- it addresses a lot of the failings of I-go-U-go, helps fix some of the "panzer dash" issues, but interestingly enough also easily addresses the "what happens when a vehicle wanders off from the platoon" question.
In the turn sequence, each player generally activates ONE unit per phase in the turn. Usually a "unit" is a platoon. All players in the game do this simultaneously, in game terms. In practice we do it one at a time, but any combat results are considered simultaneous IN THE PHASE (not in the turn).
Each player activates one unit per phase, unless he has more total units than the other players, in which case he gets to activate two units on his first phase or two. (This provides interesting advantages to players with more units.)
Every unit gets one, and only one, activation per turn. The player decides which unit will be activated in each phase, until they have all be activated.
Each element in an activated unit generally gets 1 move, and 1 action. That action can be any of a variety of things … spotting, shooting, communicating, conducting engineering tasks, whatever kinds of actions that unit might be capable of. If suppressed, the action can be an attempt to remove the suppression. This makes a unit that has successfully un-suppressed capable of only one further thing in the turn -- movement. This has the interesting effect that units that are losing the battle to suppress wind up pulling back -- if they use their actions to un-suppress instead of shooting, the enemy will get closer and more dangerous turn by turn. All they can do is sit still and eventually die, or move back until they can make it through a turn without getting suppressed.
The action can also be a move -- which means units that are not doing anything else in the turn can double-move. And conversely means that units that are double-moving can't do anything else in the turn.
But elements that are outside of command-control radius from their unit get ONLY an action, no separate move. So you can leave an element behind to provide a base of fire while you advance, and they will be able to continue firing, but they become incapable of moving and shooting in one phase as the unit commander moves away, and when you finally do want to move them up to rejoin, they are incapable of combat while moving, or double-speed movements, and they have to stop to communicate, or spot, or whatever.
The panzer dash is addressed in a couple of ways. One of the actions most units can undertake is an overwatch. When you activate, you set them on overwatch in a particular direction. In any phase until their next activation, they can perform one phase worth of fire on any target(s) that moves into sight in that direction.
Guessing which unit your opponent is going to activate first, second, third, etc. puts interesting dynamics into the game. It's hard to dash out of sight when you don't know if your opponent is going to activate the unit that can see you during the same phase (and so get simultaneous results with your movement), or if he will activate some other unit, allowing you to get behind cover before the unit that could have fired on you gets activated.
As to Russian poor coordination (due to lack of radios, lack of training, etc.), there is provision for less advanced armies to activate by company rather than by platoon. That means, for example that a Russian battalion of 21 tanks might get perhaps 3 activation (2 companies and a 1 tank HQ), while a German company of 14 or 17 tanks might get 4 activations (3 platoons and CHQ zug). You will find that even though a) The Germans have fewer tanks, and b) the Germans are only activating 4 or 5 tanks in most phases, versus the Russians activating 10 tanks most phases, that the Germans can outmaneuver the Russians by having more flexibility in how they activate.
Another side advantage of the unit activation sequence is that it is simply more fun to play the game when you are constantly involved. Each phase all the players are active. You don't have to try to stay awake while you sit doing nothing as the other guy figures out exactly the perfect move for each of his 36 infantry stands.
In my experience it's the best ruleset I've seen for WW2 combined arms action where each player has perhaps a company plus one or two supporting units, and games might have a battalion plus support per side. Not enough of a ruleset if you want ultimate detail for platoon-per-player, and perhaps a bit too much of a ruleset if you want 3 battalions per side (although I haven't tried a game at that size yet, so who knows, maybe it works better than I anticipate).
Your mileage may vary.
-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)
looks at some new terrain products, which use space age technology!
