"ASL: Was it always this awful?" Topic

Reread the rules in ASL Starter Kit #1.

Good lord, was this game always this awful?

*Poof* goes another memory of my youth,

Yes.

Squad Leader as a game was great, Advanced Squad Leader was almost impossible to play. It required a huge dedication of time to learn the rules. It seems that many of those who did and played it thought the system was realistic..

But define awful…

Remember playing Brown Box D&D… incomprehensible.
Remember the first version of TSS? Arghh…
How about Wellington's Victory?
Air War 77?
Magic Realm?
Empire?
WRG 7th?

All these were difficult. We however overcame them… and moved beyond them.

They haven't changed. We have.

For the better I hope.

With age comes wisdom… for some.

Joe Collins

I guess it depends on your definition. I used to play it a lot back in the day, but I don't have any interest in playing it now. I don't want or need that much granularity in my rules.

Never played ASL on principle…Having bought and enjoyed SL and all the follow-ons, I was not going to re-buy them when AH said they were redoing the game system as ASL. I still am enjoying the original SL series after all these years when not playing with actual miniatures.

I will never play it nor spend a cent for it.

When the late John Hill, (designer of Squad Leader) informed me that he was treated badly by AH after Crescendo of Doom was published and that MMP treated him even worse, I wrote them both off.

I am happy to play SL, CoI and CoD thank you very much.

Gave up after Squad Leader became ASL. That was a long time ago. Yes, it always was this awful.

Played SL and Close Assault – never went to ASl

Squad Leader = 70-80s great at the time; good now
ASL 90s bad
GMT Combat Commander 2000's great always

Played ASL once when someone GM'ed us through it, but the rule book/encyclopedia set was a non-starter.

Do have fun memories of the ASL tournament at AvalonCon. Table after table of pairs of guys hunched silently over their boards, the only sound being the twinkle of dice falling into drinking glasses (the preferred way of rolling). It was like walking through a cathedral.

I thought ASL was fine back in the day and played it quite a bit. I still have several modules somewhere. Maybe I'll look for them, but I doubt it. ;)

I owned all of ASL, never played it. Just was busy. But I loved the original SL.

Squad Leader was amazing.
Advanced Squad Leader is not amazing.
Combat Commander from GMT is king.

I think most gamers go thru a phase when more detailed/complex = better. ASL epitomises that.

For me – the level of complexity in ASL was not the problem. For me the issue is the fundamental structure of the game is still like it was in the original SL. They overhauled the armour factors to be more accurate but left infantry firepower factors arbitrary.

Also – the broken/good order dichotomy is too unsubtle. More should have been done with 'pinned' which is a rare result when it should be the most common effect of being fired on.

I fixed it in my own ASL style system. It was simple enough to do and works well producing what seems to me like a quite accurate simulation.

ASL is a dinosaur now. It cannot evolve so it will die out with this generation of players.

I suppose there might be a bias with miniature players and the style of game they like which is indeed less granular in general.

Many people actually enjoy ASL better. I have found memories of ASL and it is not as complicated as it sounds. If you stick to infantry combat, it is quite fun, Armor and anti-tank gun, direct artillery bring a new level of complexity and gaming, not all that complex, but the mechanisms are different. If you wish to use indirect artillery, then again, it becomes more complex (that's where I reached my level of adaptability and either ignore scenarios with artillery or shamelessly count on my opponent to (re)explain the rules to me.

Then, you have special theaters and their geographic rules, and yes, it becomes more information to take in, and yes, I do find it tedious.

But overall, it has given us plenty of fun and tense hours or gaming. For those people who have invested in ASL and can't bear to re-learn the system or find it too complex, I recommend the RETRO rules that simplifies a lot of the mechanism and let you re-use a lot of your existing collection.

ASL takes 5-8 hours to play, even more, depending on the scenarios and time becomes more and more scarce unfortunately.

I do play combat commander more, but in terms of experience, I find it more bland than ASL.

It's funny how things strike me now that didn't when I played SL.

For example, leaders. They're really just wandering DRM's – there is no chain of command so any leader can attach to any unit.

All is not lost though. I got $140 USD for it on E-bay so that's a win.

You pretty much have to dedicate your life to ASL. I was not willing to do that.

RIP John Hill.

RIP Chad Jensen.

I'll echo what many have already said, original Squad Leader is wonderful, one of the best wargames ever while ASL is wretched excess. However, I like how ASL handles variable rate of fire (whatever the rule is called) for weapons, ie roll a low enough number on the colored die and you may fire again. My solution was to use ASL counters and import that rule and a few others I liked from the various follow on games (love how snipers work in CoI) and made a kind of Frankenstein game that is mostly basic SL rules. The result is super easy to play with infrequent referring to the rules book yet includes any piece of equipment you want from ASL.

Regarding the idea of "pinning", I was satisfied that a situation where my squad could not leave the cover they were in without being gunned down simulated being pinned down. No special rule was needed. And no need to have heroes created via die rolls. When my sergeant runs out into the street with a panzerfaust under withering fire and destroys an onrushing T-34, that is a genuine hero creation mechanic.

When any aspect of ASL is criticised the grognards always explain it with 'design for effect'.

I call that fudging the issue. You can imagine almost anything makes sense if you try hard enough.

Personally I want a granular game like ASL to not need so much 'fudging'.

I actually liked ASLs Heat of Battle rules. It gets a bit 'Hollywood' but allows stuff to happen which did happen and was beyond the control of the players/commanders. I kept this in a slightly streamlined form in my own rules.

Anyway. People like or don't like ASL for their own reasons. At least nowadays we have much more choice than in the 1980s. Much of ASLs fanbase date back to that time when it was the only game of its scale.

ASL is not a game, it's a lifestyle choice. If you don't like it, you just don't get it.

- Ix

PS: I have never liked ASL.

It's a product of its day. I wouldn't call it bad, but it has several assumptions that don't quite mesh with how things were done historically.

If you like this kind of dense detail rich boardgame, ASL has a lot to offer, but a lot of people will simply look elsewhere for a wargame fix and find a product more suitable to their expectations.

Got a few boxes kicking around, only ever did a few intro scenarios aeons ago. Wasn't quite impressed then.

One man's awful is another man's best game ever.

As hard as it may be for some of you to understand, there are many people who prefer playing games like ASL with all their "boring" details and complicated rules/mechanics. And they're not just engineer types but professional baseball stars like Curt Schilling.

However, I'm not one of them. I play Lock N Load Tactical's Heroes games when it comes to squad-level hex-and-counter gaming.

There's about 20 guys in my area that still play ASL every week and love it. I tried to join up, got the starter kit but it turns out I'm too dumb to play..

I loved SL and still own it. ASL I wanted to love but nobody I could think of was going to learn the rules besides myself. I saw a lot of potential with it and put a lot of money in it but at the end it just was never going to be played and was traded away. I will miss the scenario cards though. I would use those for minis games, especially Schwere Kompanie.

You can download the old scenario cards, just google them. I use them for Crossfire.

I played some SL and modeled some of the rules in my system. Didn't even try asl. But some of my friends did and the game tournaments fried them.

I'll save you some google time…SL Scenario cards here.
link

I played SL with a few friends (never bought the game). ASL drove all of them crazy and they returned to SL.

This is *extremely* interesting.

I agree with most people here: SL is great fun, ASL is, um, not for me.

But when I talk to boardgamers and wargamers locally I generally find that if they care at all they love ASL, and have little interest in SL. Something about minis gamers makes them prefer SL while a different subset of gamers prefers ASL?

I am not willing to say, though, and ASL is horrible. The people who like it are otherwise reasonable people who really like ASL. It's a different *aesthetic*, not actually better or worse. A different flavor. The firehouse of minutia that repels us makes these other guys quiver with excitement. So, good for them, but I think I'm going to play one more game of ASL (I promised someone I'd try it again) and that will be it. Lots of SL, if I can arrange it. But if I made a list of things I dislike about ASL, well, we'd be here all day.

And, honesty, not to invite any flames, but SL could be about 10% simpler and be the better for it. I want to play the darn battle, not count portage points.

SL was fine, the COI expansion was fine. COD and GI expansions just about killed it, although the extra counters were nice.

As a game it suffered from two fundamental flaws, the lack of unit integrity and the treatment of light support weapons (LMGs) which should have been built into the squads, not modelled as separate counters. To avoid huge stacks of LMG counters, it meant every rifle company went into battle seriously under armed.

I agree about the bungled treatment of light support weapons. They claimed [later] that LMGs were integrated into squad FP – but if so the Germans should have much higher FP than they get.

IMO they really should have revisited all the squad FP-Range-Morale factors based on actual research when they launched ASL. Alas – they did not. Armour factors got completely redone but squad were all just ported straight across from GI's values with only minor adjustments.

Alas, ASL was the final nail in the coffin for me. I was severely disappointed when GI Anvil of Victory came out and the first thing they said was to throw away all your old counters. I was looking for Italians and there were none. ASL came out, bought it and thought it was a mess. Played a game with a friend who was well versed in the "new, improved rules" and was severely disappointed. Sold everything I had.

Liked ASL but graduated to miniatures, can't beat 3D

Someone did a great parody of I think SL or maybe ASL, where the most valuable piece was the wheelbarrow. Such that when a unit was killed it dropped all it's weapons and your unit where to rush to site with the wheelbarrow to pick up all the weapons that were dropped.

The Squad Leader Academy. Maybe you should get some college credits in history if you complete the course:
wargameacademy.org/SQLA

The problem I had was the lack of real leadership (leader counters are a roving DRM) but that abstraction was what the designer wanted. Also no real TO&E you could organize with.

But it suffers from what most games suffer from, a scaling problem attempting to integrate multiple small unit actions into a fixed game turn.

Each hex in Squad Leader represents 40 meters or real terrain with counters representing individual leaders, support weapons, and vehicles of 4 man crews and 12 man squads. Each game turn is divided into two-player turns with 8 phases, equivalent to two minutes of actual time.

What I see as the core problem is that historically many small unit engagements were over in 2 minutes. In two minutes a vehicle moving 20kph can move 75m in 15 seconds (one phase) so 600m in 2 minutes and be fired at 1-2 times by a tank or anti-tank gun every 15 seconds. Opportunity Fire movement and ROF timing is historically all out of whack.

For me, there is too much abstraction for a small scale 1:1 vehicle game and suffers from the same problems any IGYG game does. However, there is a lot of good stuff in there and details to use in other games. I admire players that can play the advanced version because I can't.

Wolfhag

Had another blast playing this awful game today. Korean war fight between NK and SK forces. Sk forces falling back to a bridge with NK forces advancing. Each side had choices to make constantly through the game and there is never a "best" choice between firing or moving.

It's not awful per se it's just too complex and takes too long to play. If I'm going to put that much effort into a game I'd rather play miniatures. Cheers!

It was/is a brilliant game…but…it needed a massive investment of time and study (ideally from 2 people) to work properly, I for one never had that.
My biggest gripe with SL and ASL was lack of a facing for infantry sections
Plus it spawned Upfront which really WAS a terrific game

Having been around back in the day when both Squad Leader and ASL were new kids on the block I was very intrigued and bought into both. Nowadays they are both lacking compared to newer systems. Primarily the insane turn sequence. Pre fire phase, pre move fire phase, first breakfast defensive fire phase, final protective check toilet paper level phase.

The other aspect which has been handled better is alternates to the attack factor vs defense factor ratio Combat Results Table.

Other than these very integral aspects of the game it is not bad. ASL's attitude that you had to know everything to play the most basic scenario has been recognized by the new starter kits. I have also seen alternative squad leader game, Valor and Victory or something similar which purports to be slimmed down SL/ASL but it retains the problem issues where it could have broken away and replaced these with so much more sensible and modern methods. Maybe the turn sequence and CRT are too ingrained in the game or more likely too ingrained in the devotees.

I don't play ASL but am using the scenario cards in my own gaming. Great stuff!

> It's not awful per se it's just too complex and takes too long to play.

Despite my posts here I agree it is too complex (by a large margin too). But it in no way takes too long to play. It depends on the scenario of course but the smaller ones (one map) I usually finish in 2 to 3 hours and the larger ones in 4 to 6. There are HUGE scenarios and campaigns that take many days but that is another matter.

Similar to Major Mike, back in the day I was just getting started with historical miniatures but was still an avid SL player. I had all the gamettes and Was anxiously waiting for GI Anvil of Victory to be released. Finally, it came out and I purchased it. If I remember correctly, it cost around $30 USD, which at that time was a lot of money. Then I discovered that the counters were not as cool as the counters from the first game. And THEN I read that I needEd to purchase a hardback set of rules (ASL) to play the game i had just bought and those cost somewhere around $50.00 USD. I was so disgusted, that i flew into historical miniatures and never looked back. Thanks, ASL!

normal Guy – you are thinking of Beyond Valor (though it sounds like a mishmash). Anvil of Victory was the last of the Squad Leader game series and it did have brand new counters to replace the old ones but it did not require the ASL rules – instead it had the final iteration of the abomination that the original Squad Leader rules became. Beyond Valor was the first ASL specific title but it required the Squad Leader (only SL) maps to play it IIRC…

I thought SL was the best tactical board game ever when it first came out. By the time GIA was released I thought it had become too complex to be playable. ASL came out and promised to streamline the rules and make the SL system better and more playable so I shelled out my $45 USD or whatever it cost for the ASL rule book, took one look at it, considered the cost of all the follow on modules and put it away forever.

I still have it though, it might be worth something someday.