"Artillery Barrages" Topic

Not so much a rule set as something you can drop into the 'pre-game' of pretty much any ruleset.
It allows players to deploy an artillery barrage at the start of an attack

link

It works for pretty much any period, WW1 and onwards

I have an easier system, more luck oriented too as you as the bombarded do not get to choose how to take your casualties.

The defender lays out his forces in their trenches or pillboxes or even in the open. The scenario decides if the opening barrage is very heavy (use D6) or standard (use d10).

Now the attacker is going to roll one die for each squad or MG or artillery piece of the defenders. He just points to each one first then rolls.

If heavy barrage: 1-2: Stand eliminated if in open

1: Stand eliminated even if in
cover.

If standard barrage use same numbers but remember you are only rolling a d10 not a d6 so it will not be as effective.

You can play around with this easily enough – maybe the defenders have a particularly thick bunker so instead roll a d20 and only that 1 will knock it out. 5% chance.

Funny true story once – one of our guys brought his young daughter along and he was rolling dice to knock out enemy units in the opening bombardment.

He wasn't doing that well even with his D6 rolls. Well, it was the time now to roll to knock out this critical heavy pillbox on the ridgeline which commanded the open ground below. So he turned to his little girl and handed her the 20 sider.

She duly made her only roll of the night (she really had no clue what all this was about other than daddy wanted her to throw it on the table). Sure enough – ' 1 '.

The defending player's look on his face was hilarious, we all were laughing so much.

some clubs say that if you use a small child to roll your dice, you have to provide a small child to roll the other side's dice as well otherwise you'll have an unfair advantage :-)

Certainly the us artillery according to the US manual says artillery is to suppress and fix in place. At best 10% casualties unless unprecedented amounts are used. Better perhaps to suppress, say unable to operate for one bound, and on a say 1 to 4 on a D 10 they can ignore the result.

Bit oversimplified, but light barrange effects only troops in open or up to soft cover.

Heavy applies to all troops. Now this is not WW1 where barrages lasted for weeks but does work for less eg WW2 and modern untill you get vey modern. In the Ukrain was, Russian artillery is at very high rates or was untill HIMARS. ukrain be in better and drones more akin to direct fire. Not worked how do do that using even our rules as drone and anti drone warfare the is little data, even less on pier groups which the Ukraine vs Russia is not. High tech few vrs mass incompetence very difficult to model.