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Oh, and before I forget, this is why Katyushas suck hard: They're unable to shoot smoke (a flaw shared with every other soviet arty option, admittedly), don't have the special rules to kill things, and they're unarmoured vehicles: Not only can they not dig in and benefit from concealment but they're stuck on a permanent 5+ save with no firepower check! A tank platoon of 4 firing MGs at a dug in heavy gun (this is bad odds for you) will probably kill a gun per turn. That same platoon, firing at the Katyushas, will average six and a half dead trucks per turn. They're free VP.
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Apr 28, 2016 04:30
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Does either FoW or BA have Anti-Tank dogs?
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Apr 28, 2016 05:36
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Arquinsiel posted:Peter Pig also do English Civil War which is somewhat interchangeable. It's about the same time and there was quite a lot of travel of mercenary units at the time. Not a clue on your Old Glory problem. Perhaps email and ask? I find that Old Glory never returns emails or seems to answer their phone. At least they ship packages when you order online, but thats why I am asking for experiences with them rather than just asking direct.
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Apr 28, 2016 05:42
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nesbit37 posted:I find that Old Glory never returns emails or seems to answer their phone. At least they ship packages when you order online, but thats why I am asking for experiences with them rather than just asking direct.
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Apr 28, 2016 05:57
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Otisburg posted:Does either FoW or BA have Anti-Tank dogs?  
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Apr 28, 2016 06:08
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No fooling this is a tremendous selling point for me on the game. Regardless of how they modeled their efficacy, I now want to run a list that spams the maximum legal number of these guys.
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Apr 28, 2016 06:12
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Otisburg posted:No fooling this is a tremendous selling point for me on the game. Regardless of how they modeled their efficacy, I now want to run a list that spams the maximum legal number of these guys. They're actually pretty good, Soviets get extra selection for infantry AT teams so they can take 3 squads of them, they hit on a 4+, whiff on 2-3 and hit one of your own vehicles in range on a 1. Damage wise they hit like a medium AT gun which can mess up most tanks. And once you burn the dogs you can use the handlers like little independent kill-team to harass enemy squads or hunt spotters.
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Apr 28, 2016 06:19
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Galaga Galaxian posted:Ok maybe I missed it in the last few pagesn but what is Sharp Practice? I've seen the nam mentioned a bunch of timesn but not much about it other than minis are based individually. You have obviously missed it as my last 15 posts or so have been entirely about it including an over view , tutorial videos and blog posts about it. 
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Apr 28, 2016 06:44
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nesbit37 posted:The little talk of 30 years war in here has got me looking at it again. I have asked this question before about 10mm, but for 15mm, who should I be looking at for figures? I know there are some for Old Glory 15s, but is that the same company that does Old Glory 25s? My thought is not, since one is in Michigan and the other is in Pennsylvania. It matters since I do have a membership of the Old Glory Army that gets me 40% off their stuff till this fall. I don't know why but it seems difficult to pick a range for this period other than just buying English Civil War stuff unless it really is that interchangeable. It's fairly interchangeable. Khurasan have some nice ranges. http://khurasanminiatures.tripod.com/ecw-tyw.html I've got their Scots/Irish for ECW and they are beautiful minis.
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Apr 28, 2016 06:56
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muggins posted:I have four boxes of Perry Bros acw on the way. Gonna figure out how to base them individually for Sharpe Practice but also use trays for Black Powder. Swagger Dagger posted:All the lardies blog posts have them on little trays with cutouts for bases, they look like the litko rank trays: http://www.litko.net/products/Rank-Trays%2C-Multiple-Formations%2C-20mm-Circle-Bases.html They use Warbases trays. I'm rebasing my unpainted ACW currently so I can use them for SP2 and Black Powder. 25mm rounds then 4x2 sabot bases from Warbases. Frontages in BP don't have to be exact, it's no massive deal if your and your opponents frontages are a couple of cm/an inch or so out.
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Apr 28, 2016 06:59
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Why am I surprised, BA has everything (except for a decent range of plastics).
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Apr 28, 2016 09:10
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Otisburg posted:No fooling this is a tremendous selling point for me on the game. Regardless of how they modeled their efficacy, I now want to run a list that spams the maximum legal number of these guys. Weren't these AT dogs terrible in practice (aside from the obvious moral ramifications)? I thought they all pretty much kept running back to the handlers and the program was dropped as a failure.
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Apr 28, 2016 10:53
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berzerkmonkey posted:Weren't these AT dogs terrible in practice (aside from the obvious moral ramifications)? I thought they all pretty much kept running back to the handlers and the program was dropped as a failure. It was a really mixed bag that seems to have been on the balance a failure (though at the Battle of Kursk they credit 16 dogs with disabling 12 German vehicles, so if you give that credence the dogs... had their day). Really though, there is something that feels quintessentially, pragmatically Soviet about the program that just captures my imagination. Owlbear Camus fucked around with this message at 11:38 on Apr 28, 2016 |
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Apr 28, 2016 11:01
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I believe (at least part of) the problem was that the dogs were trained with Soviet tanks.
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Apr 28, 2016 11:28
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moths posted:I believe (at least part of) the problem was that the dogs were trained with Soviet tanks. One problem apparently being that dogs, as we all know, have an acute sense of smell, and the Russian tanks that they trained on ran on diesel, while the German tanks of the time were gasoline-powered.
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Apr 28, 2016 11:37
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Otisburg posted:One problem apparently being that dogs, as we all know, have an acute sense of smell, and the Russian tanks that they trained on ran on diesel, while the German tanks of the time were gasoline-powered. Diesels and gasoline engines also sound significantly different, which was probably a pretty big factor as well.
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Apr 28, 2016 12:19
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spectralent posted:the soviets don't have many artillery special rules worth mentioning Really? I thought they did, but I haven't played in a while. That's yet another point against Battlefront and their stupidity regarding the Soviets. Also, WI has an article on Sharp Practice 2 this month, but I haven't read it yet. I suspect it'll convince me to buy it, even though I have no one to play with. At least I already have figures!
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Apr 28, 2016 12:55
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A gaming mate just bought a AWI British force for SP. Get in.
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Apr 28, 2016 13:02
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JcDent posted:Why am I surprised, BA has everything (except for a decent range of plastics).
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Apr 28, 2016 13:07
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chrisoya posted:Are the BA plastics bad? I meant it in the "they should definitely have more plastics" way
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Apr 28, 2016 13:16
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The German Wehrmacht plastics I have are great. The older Soviets not so much.
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Apr 28, 2016 13:18
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chrisoya posted:Are the BA plastics bad? Warlord Games (who publish BA) plastics are "bad" in the way that most 28mm plastic miniatures are bad: they are bulky, heroic scaled miniatures with unrealistic proportions. Some more so than others: for example, the Late War German plastics that were released early on are remarkably worse than their Blitzkrieg German plastics. Whether this bothers you or not probably depends on how much you mind "Games Workshop" style miniatures in general. But the bulkiness of the minis is one of the reason why I think that 1:48 scale tanks look nicer, since actual 1:56 scale, which is supposedly closer to 28mm scale, looks too small compared to the impossibly hulky minis. Personally, my German forces are mostly Warlord Games plastics and metals, and some of them are better than others. They are not amazing models, but they are affordable and pretty ok. I also have Perry Miniature plastic Germans that I converted to be Gebirgsjäger, and they are noticably slimmer. Whichever floats your boat, but I would not call (most) Warlord Games minis objectively bad. Though, I know our Soviet players are a little bit more pessimistic, but they also claim that there are almost no very well done Soviet miniatures in 28mm. E: and the blanket answer to the discussion on vulnerable artillery pieces in WW2 games IMHO is this: why the hell would you put large artillery pieces, which would launch projectiles from several kilometers, on the tabletop? Just like airstrikes, artillery should be off table if you are playing skirmish fights over a couple of hundred yards of terrain. For example, the absolutely shortest ranged Katyusha missiles had a range of 2 800 m, while the longer ranged ones could fire between 4 and 10 kilometers. Small caliber fire should not be an issue here. lilljonas fucked around with this message at 13:29 on Apr 28, 2016 |
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Apr 28, 2016 13:19
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Colonial Air Force posted:Really? I thought they did, but I haven't played in a while. That's yet another point against Battlefront and their stupidity regarding the Soviets. The soviets have 2, kinda three rules for their artillery: One is for direct fire pieces only (Volley fire), which is a reroll when firing immobile at short range. It's not terrible; it makes SU-152s fairly good at digesting infantry and removing anyone hiding in a building and SU-122s just horrific at munching platoons, and it synergises with H&C on the units that have both. Proper artillery gets "Roll up the guns" (Medium and heavy teams move as light teams) and Steel Wall (76mm and 122mm guns in mixed batteries are allowed to direct fire with the 76 and indirect fire with the 122 on the same turn). This is nominally because the historical use is to move the 76mms up to fire directly while bombarding with the 122mm, but you can't actually do this because you'd have to move everything out of cohesion anyway, so eh. It's also a shittier version of the british special rules, which just give you separate batteries you can merge together. Roll up the guns also applies to very little: out of 19 guns, only 4 are heavy or medium (although admittedly the 76mm and 57mm are medium, which are pretty common antitank guns) and you can't move and shoot with artillery. Hilariously, one special rule they don't get is the Mobile Rocket Launchers rule that Germany gets, meaning the Katyushas default to being vulnerable to counterbattery fire like man-portable rocket launchers are (though they get it, phrased as a stolen german innovation, in Desperate Measures and Berlin, so late-war it's gone away). They also universally don't get smoke, which isn't a special rule but is another major point of difference. They get no special rules that make their guns any killier, and they're not exceptionally cheaper for it. The British 5.5" gun has the same profile, even in direct fire, conviniently, as the 152mm ML-20 gun, which makes it possible to directly compare them: The 152mm is 220 points for four, vs the 5.5" at 240. However, the 5.5" comes with an observer and a carrier, whereas you pay 15 points just for the observer (it can't get transport) for the soviet gun, and of course, you get the british artillery special rules, including the reroll to range in on the first try and reroll successful saves on a repeat bombardment, as well as other juicy stuff like combining bombardments from separate platoons. Essentially, soviet artillery is amazingly anemic, especially the historically well-known Katyusha, which won't even damage vehicles and will do jack-all to infantry. It'd be tempting to say the other allies are just really good, but at least Germany gets to smoke people. EDIT: Checking, the similarly identical 15cm gun the Germans get in the same book has the exact same profile, two observers, and fires smoke, for 235 points for four, and it doesn't have the light-gun tax. lilljonas posted:E: and the blanket answer to the discussion on vulnerable artillery pieces in WW2 games IMHO is this: why the hell would you put large artillery pieces, which would launch projectiles from several kilometers, on the tabletop? Just like airstrikes, artillery should be off table if you are playing skirmish fights over a couple of hundred yards of terrain. For example, the absolutely shortest ranged Katyusha missiles had a range of 2 800 m, while the longer ranged ones could fire between 4 and 10 kilometers. Small caliber fire should not be an issue here. FoW does, though, so you've kind of got to live with it. spectralent fucked around with this message at 14:23 on Apr 28, 2016 |
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Apr 28, 2016 14:18
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spectralent posted:
If we played FoW, this would be one of the first things that we'd mod away from the ruleset.
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Apr 28, 2016 14:29
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I wouldn't blame you. It's also one of the reasons naval support is such a good deal. You can get AT 6 (!) FP 1+ 8-gun batteries with your choice of an AOP (!!) or observer, that can't be destroyed because it's not on the table, for 250 points. It's only ten points more than the four guns of the 5.5" battery, which has worse stats!
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Apr 28, 2016 14:41
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lilljonas posted:E: and the blanket answer to the discussion on vulnerable artillery pieces in WW2 games IMHO is this: why the hell would you put large artillery pieces, which would launch projectiles from several kilometers, on the tabletop?  Yeah, having artillery on the board just smacks of "40K" syndrome. Not having it on the table is actually one of the things I really like about CoC - even a basic infantryman's rifle can hit anything on the table, and artillery is modeled by forward observer teams rather than the guns themselves.
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Apr 28, 2016 14:42
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Ilor posted:
I can totally see the appeal of building and painting big artillery pieces. I've done it myself, I built a 1:48 scale 8.8cm gun that I'm still waiting to put on the table, because it looks very cool. But it will be as an objective to fight over, rather than an actual fighting unit, since shooting point blank should not be the normal way to use artillery in the 1940's. 
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Apr 28, 2016 14:46
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I have a  theory that Warlord bought Wargames Factory entirely to suppress cheap, true-scale 28mm WW2 figures.
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Apr 28, 2016 14:47
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Ilor posted:
Well FoW is 15mm, so it's a bit smaller scale, but having said that, yeah. It's range scale makes very little sense at the best of times, with rifles firing half the range of tank main guns... Supposedly this is because it's "sliding scale", but it's probably got more to do with the 40k thing. That said it's what everyone plays so 
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Apr 28, 2016 14:49
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Even Blitzkrieg Commander which is a battalion level game has most artillery off the table and in that game scale a 6x4 is a couple of miles across
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Apr 28, 2016 14:55
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moths posted:I have a I'm really curious if they'll actually update the plastics before eventually releasing them again, as there were a bunch of old sprues (16th Century samurai) that were promising but didn't 100% hit the mark.
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Apr 28, 2016 14:55
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lilljonas posted:I can totally see the appeal of building and painting big artillery pieces. I've done it myself, I built a 1:48 scale 8.8cm gun that I'm still waiting to put on the table, because it looks very cool. But it will be as an objective to fight over, rather than an actual fighting unit, since shooting point blank should not be the normal way to use artillery in the 1940's. More common than you think. I've seen award orders for AT gun crews knocking out tanks from as little as 50 meters.
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Apr 28, 2016 14:56
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lilljonas posted:If we played FoW, this would be one of the first things that we'd mod away from the ruleset. Having models for 5.5 inch guns are sort of cool though. Even though they've probably never been fired over open sights in all of NW Europe.
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Apr 28, 2016 14:58
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moths posted:I have a I read this as 'Wargames Foundry' and was pretty confused for a minute there.
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Apr 28, 2016 15:05
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lilljonas posted:I'm really curious if they'll actually update the plastics before eventually releasing them again, as there were a bunch of old sprues (16th Century samurai) that were promising but didn't 100% hit the mark. I dig their soviets since they're the only people who released 28mm plastic female soviets, AFAIK.
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Apr 28, 2016 15:21
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Ensign Expendable posted:More common than you think. I've seen award orders for AT gun crews knocking out tanks from as little as 50 meters. Yeah, AT guns, no problem. I'm thinking more about the field artillery, like how you can put 105mm howitzers (with ranges around 10 000m) on the table in BA. That makes little sense.
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Apr 28, 2016 15:21
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lilljonas posted:Yeah, AT guns, no problem. I'm thinking more about the field artillery, like how you can put 105mm howitzers (with ranges around 10 000m) on the table in BA. That makes little sense. Counterpoint: Artillery looks cool. Also, it's fun to make little explosion noises when you fire it, but that doesn't strictly require models on the table.
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Apr 28, 2016 15:25
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Thinking about it if I was redoing FoW artillery I'd probably have it so your artillery is off-table by default, can optionally be deployed close for direct fire or in "we're overrun" missions, and have a rule like "If an enemy unit makes it to your board edge it can go off-table and make a skill check to take out off-board assets like guns" or something.
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Apr 28, 2016 15:29
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Kaza42 posted:Counterpoint: Artillery looks cool. Also, it's fun to make little explosion noises when you fire it, but that doesn't strictly require models on the table. Solution: build and paint cool artillery pieces. Place them off the table, like in your kitchen or on a shelf or something. Then you can role play your observers calling in the artillery strikes, AND you can make the little explosion noises, AND have a realistic depiction of artillery in the game. I'd totally build a 1:700 scale battleship and put it in a tub of water if my list allowed me to field naval bombardment. 
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Apr 28, 2016 15:34
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The WGF Soviets are great for a number of reasons. Besides women soldiers, you also get enough extra detailed parts that you can make a PSC 28mm box look awesome.lilljonas posted:I'd totally build a 1:700 scale battleship and put it in a tub of water if my list allowed me to field naval bombardment. I would accept this because the 1:700 model is farther away from the table. I've never forgiven Battlefront for making 1:144 airplanes closer to the observer than 1:100 ground forces. That's not how perspective works! If anything, they should be using 1/76 so it looks right when viewed from above.
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Apr 28, 2016 16:07
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