"How do you treat buildings and urban areas and why." Topic

This topic typically covers 20 century but may have some interest in earlier periods. Typically before the late 19th century most urban area were taken by siege. Once the outer defenses were taken then typical house to house fighting was not an issue. As time and weapons move on while sieges still take place, the roll of urban warfare becomes more of an issue. One only has to look at Stalingrad as an example of at least in part house to house warfare.

So how do you model that.

However you do it, its likely to be quite an approximation as the area scaling is such that one building may represent 25 or more buildings, and possibly more than that depending on ground scale. Even at 1 to1 on ground scale models won't fit through the doors. So what do you see as the key features?

This is my list, how does yours vary. Obviously ground scale to figure scale comes an issue but there is still some commonality across scales I assume.

What we do

Where possible the urban area should be at a ground scale representative size.

As many of the roads as practical should be modeled so that for instance on a long straight road weapons can fire down the road their normal distance.

The representation, be it just buildings or more detailed garden wall hedges, should where appropriate, severely restrict the visibility from any roads modeled. We may keep the roads to the minimum practical width at potentially some artistic ideal to maintain this, practicality over art.

The number and type of weapons need some restriction as although there are many more buildings, large numbers may not have a useful firing position.

We do account for the stories of a house and restrict the firing arcs such that higher stories of a building may not have a good protected view of an adjacent road at close range.

Heavy weapons can only move down the street or be placed in the street. Many European houses and older UK houses have basements and the floors are not stressed to take cannon or vehicles of any size without additional work.

What we don't do

Model the effects of rubble in the streets after a big barrage. Hence roads remain passable at all times.

We make cover no different whether houses are damaged or intact.

Internal structure other than floors are not modeled. Room to room fighting is not considered.

Account for the Blanketing effect of buildings intercepting shells and hence leaving some protection on the far side of an obstacle. This effect is more significant for gums than Mortars/Howitzers.

I play ASL, in particular Red Barricades and Berlin: Red Vengeance. So pretty much the exact opposite of your list. Have not played anything more evocative of the descriptions of the fighting in those places.

If you're not interested in a science fiction setting, skip this post.

I usually have buildings in StarGrunt games. Each one represents a single building. I impose a movement or action cost for entering and leaving, movement cost for movement inside, and give a cover benefit to units inside.

I don't separate the interiors into rooms. I just abstract it. Thus if opposing units have entered the building, they can engage in fire combat or close assault. If I had a really large building, I might divide it into sections.

I usually use boxes for buildings, from food containers to shoe boxes.

Depends on scale, but for 'army' games, a building usually represent a town area. Over the years, I found I placed a base under the building so I can move the building out of the way when two forces battle over the area. Multiple areas means bigger towns/cities.

On a skirmish level, I'd figure one building is one building, especially if it has removable floors as many models do. Then an area is defined by the room.

Depends on the troop ratio. Anything higher than 1:5 and even that is iffy, then the buildings are representations of complexes or blocks. Only in 1:1 skirmish is a building simply a building.

Oberlindes Sol LIC,
You cover most of wht I do, the only bit I add is the angle of fire outwards.

I am an EX Stargrunt II man. Out own rules are for bigger games but SG II taught us a lot. Out of interest we came up with the penalty for moving into/out of/in buildings not as 1/2 a D20*10 METERS. This is on average a bit less tan our normal 60m move but represents the possibility of finding a big corridor or lots of timy rooms thatr are hard to get through. Well that is the excuse. What it does do is add dissorder, which is not untypical of urban fighting. You nominate wher you want to go and role the die, you may get there you may not. the more anmitios the more your troops straggle out. What move penalty do you apply.

Dynaman8789,
ASL proably did Uban the most throughly. I did like the freeeze that could effect parties in hose to house combat. Agisn I wanted bigger games that played a bit faster but it was/is proably at the top. Strangely while it would be ideal in some ways as a haex based minis game, it never caught on. I gueuss its because a lot of mini players are more into the minits than into the real world tactics and planning that ASL demands.

House to house applies in any period. Ground scale is army level, including shooting range and movement. But combat is one base equals one combat resolution, i.e. plays as skirmish. We don't element base, we only use single basing. So doors and other narrow spots agree with the visuals of the figure scale: we do 25mm to large 25s and our buildings go accordingly. I set up a town to be visually pleasing in the scale, and each building is treated as one building, all the while the ground scale, including shooting range and movement, remains the same as army scale (one inch equals ten yards). You just get used to the abstraction when considering the play as skirmish, but it's really an army. And when you don't want each figure to represent a bunch of men, for instance in an RPG scenario, you just ignore that you are moving and shooting in army level scale.

Another sci-fi player here. This mostly pertains to our games of Mech Attack in 10 and 28mm.

Regardless of scale we tend to try to arrange our cities a bit unrealistically in order to cut down on extended firelanes. Alot of "T" intersections in our cities. In general -except for very small skirmishes we also abstract infantry in buildings. A cost for entering and leving but infantry inside are assumed to be able to shoot from any opening and to be able to be shot at through any opening. Sqads can freely enter a building occupied by another force (we are considering modifying this) and shooting and assault within is simply treated as occurring in or over terrain.

For very small skirmishes, we'll use the buildigns that can be opened and treat infantry as being in specific locations within the buildings.

UshCha: I just double the movement cost in a building, but I like your approach of a dice roll to determine internal movement cost.

I once adapted the ASL sewer movement rules, which use that concept, for StarGrunt. It worked pretty well. I used US pennies for the manhole covers.

Ordinarybass, we allow one figure (1 to 1 scale) to fire out of any apature depicted on the model, with the approriate cover bonus. This "sort of" indicates the troops have found the real houses that have acceptable fire arcs. Any number opf troops can fire out an apature but they get no cover bonus. Basicaly they are in the open or too close to the apature to get cover bonus.

There is no cover bonus if you fire down onto the road from an upper story close to the base of the house, basicaly you are leaning out of the "window".

We have not forced entry by door of the model You can go in any wall. However it is never good to go in the door if you can avoid it as its usually the first place you bobby trap so it is not that daft.

I should say we have not covered Mouseholing by fire. It would be difficult in our model identify an advantage in our model.

Perhaps its our failure but we have not used access ladders to start on say the next floor up. We could do it without any additional rules and it would allow acces to the next floor up. I guess it would not give much advantage generally in our rules.

I use a home-brewed set of rules for The Sword & the Flame, which is large skirmish-level, to handle enclosed buildings in a more abstract way so that play is less fiddly and prone to arguments about who is where, who can see what, who can fire or not, and doesn't make the set design of a particular building the sole determinant. Because not all buildings are made equal, or even logical, and rules lawyering is terrible in these situations.

If the scale is consistent between figures and buildings, I say that the footprint of each level of the building is the limit to the number of infantry figures that can fit inside (the "garrison"). Figures inside a building can choose to remain in total cover from small arms fire but may not fire themselves. They may still be vulnerable to heavy weapons, artillery, etc. but I allow a saving throw for casualties. Figures inside a building who wish to fire at eligible targets are restricted to no more than 1/3 of the garrison allowed to fire out from any one side of the building and are themselves considered Class IV targets if fired at, as per the normal rules. This prevents a lot of fussing about how many figures can cram together at a window or doorway or "make loopholes," etc. Or a garrison being punished by a building not having many actual openings. I assume buildings should be tough nuts to crack, but not invincible. I assume that the garrison is dispersed to cover all avenues of approach, some figures simply have no field of fire, some are busy reloading, making barricades, exploring for weak points, looting, what have you, and everyone can't rush to the same windows and fire volleys in any given direction.

If the building is assaulted by an attacking unit, I resolve the combats with a variant of the TS&TF close combat rules, with certain modifiers. This would take too much space to type out here, but it is a bit faster than the standard rules and need not be fought to the finish, the attacker is given the opportunity to withdraw after each round (and become Pinned).

piper909, Facinating take. Its shows how we approach diffrently. At our scale we allow 1 figure per window so some houses are less useful a deliberate choice ;-).

The diffrence in artillery is also intersting but it my be about type. We cheat a bit, but allow troops on the ground and first floor of a 3 floor building to be imune from mortar fire. This was the case in WWII in parts of stalingrad but the houses were a bit taller, designers licence.

We allow withdrawal similar toi you but not if the unit is on a higher floor adn the l;ower is occupied by the enemy. Mind you most of our houses are quire small so its easy to occupy most of the ground floor.

It's my understanding that urban areas and woodlands tend to suck in troops who are then no longer able to respond to command and control as the formation commander would like. The pace of operations slows in those areas too. I play games at army level in the ancient and Pike and shot periods, these are periods where generals couldn't afford to loose control of their troops so fighting in urban areas was rare.

My solution is to treat urban areas as a type of difficult terrain. They have restricted sight lines and movement restrictions and specific rules that mean troops will be difficult to get moving once they have entered the urban area.

As an aside house to house fighting did occur in the English Civil War I know of examples at Beverley and Horncastle which included house clearance combats as well as street fighting at Worcester, Brentford and other places.