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gradenko_2000 posted:that's two USA scenarios in Second Front won. It's like a switch went off in my head and now I can see the Matrix What's your secret? I gave up on this game when even the very first scenario seemed insurmountable.
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Feb 16, 2024 21:02
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Mister Bates posted:Some observations on the first Army General campaign for WARNO: rare historically accurate depiction
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Feb 16, 2024 21:11
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Was gonna say, NATO having no meaningful AA seems realistic
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Feb 16, 2024 23:25
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whats a civil war computer game that's actually fun to play?
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Feb 17, 2024 01:07
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Ultimate General
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Feb 17, 2024 02:03
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skooma512 posted:What's your secret? I gave up on this game when even the very first scenario seemed insurmountable. as an attacker, you will always run into a situation where the enemy is holed up in a building, or in terrain that provides cover, and you need to eject them from it, whether because it's specifically the objective hex, or it's in the way what you do NOT want to do is to blast away from a distance and try to Break the enemy before ever moving towards the target. Ain't nobody got time for that. the only units that should be spending the entire Fire & Movement Phase firing at the enemy are squads with mortars, MMGs and HMGs (and you should position them with LOS towards such target hexes). every other squad, including ones with LMGs, should be constantly moving towards target hexes, only taking shots after they've already moved, if possible. the goal is to get into melee ASAP, and the way to get to melee is to move adjacent to the target during the Fire & Move Phase, then advance one hex into the target's hex, during the Advance Phase either you send in the green/regular troops first to absorb the defensive fire, so that your regulars/elites are no longer facing any defensive fire when it's their turn late in the phase... or you do it vice-versa because the regulars/elites will resist breaking better than the greens/regulars can. I don't know which one of these works better, but at least try to have a rubric. Move the squads one a time, and one hex at a time. an infantry squad has 4 MF, and most terrain is 1 MF to move through. If you are exactly 4 hexes away from the target, or less, then it's simple: Walk the four hexes to become adjacent to the target, then Advance during the Advance phase if you move with the Walk option, that's 4 MF if you move with the Run option, that's 6 MF, but you have a penalty when doing Close Combat and when shooting at a target, and you cannot Run two turns in a row. Notably, Running makes no difference on your likelihood of getting hit by defensive fire, but you still have to count your hexes carefully to check if it's worth it to Run immediately, or if you should Walk this turn and Run the next turn. moving as a stack with a leader grants 6 MF, and 8 MF if you're also running, which can be useful for getting around quickly, but there's another big important use for leaders later what you do NOT want to do is to place yourself in a situation where it's the Advance movement which will put you adjacent to the target, but you're left one hex short of being able to engage in melee. If that's the case, better to move more conservatively this turn, and then guarantee the melee engagement on the next as you approach targets and take defensive fire, some squads will Break and Rout. The game will automatically move them towards a non-open hex, like a forest or a building. You want to move a leader into the same hex as them, so they'll Rally and get back into the fight during the recovery phase anyway, sometimes you get lucky and a support weapon breaks the defender, or rifle fire from your approaching squads breaks the defender and you take the hex with no contest. But the rest of the time, you get into melee, hope you have a numbers advantage, and completely eliminate the enemy squads in Close Combat and win the hex I'll try to do a demonstration of playing through a scenario soon
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Feb 17, 2024 14:05
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Makes me wonder how much melee actually went on in real life?
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Feb 17, 2024 14:15
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Orange Devil posted:Makes me wonder how much melee actually went on in real life? Not a lot of literal melee but the "assault" represents point blank shooting and hand grenades. Keep in mind each hex is approximately 40 meters, so "assault" just means moving closer than that range E: also iirc ASL doesn't directly track casualties but just a units general cohesion, so assaults may not literally kill lots of people even if they do force them to go be somewhere else, preferably too disorganized to shoot back at you StashAugustine has issued a correction as of 14:29 on Feb 17, 2024 |
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Feb 17, 2024 14:26
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Also I downloaded steel division 2 which I bought and never played and man its kinda overwhelming
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Feb 17, 2024 18:16
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The lack of Army General for Italy and Normandy... what a waste.
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Feb 17, 2024 18:18
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lol one of the most popular mods for WARNO is a 'realism' focused combat overhaul that just makes all the NATO vehicles massively more powerful, the Pact vehicles worse, and also gives the Pact decks much greater numbers to 'simulate the realistic tactic of human waves'
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Feb 17, 2024 18:38
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StashAugustine posted:Also I downloaded steel division 2 which I bought and never played and man its kinda overwhelming use recon units ahead and to the sides concealed, they have camo, better spotting riflemen are cheap use them to defend just stick them in tree lines or buildings, MGs at chokepoints control points just give points they're not always the best places to fight from dont try maneuvering your entire fighting force around to find & fight enemies & don't attack move everything towards cap points you find the enemy with scouts and position your army to sweep over them, use tanks as fire support and for breakthroughs vs small arms, don't send tanks unsupported they'll die if sappers get close to them always have command units near combat for the stat bonus and to call artillery look at roads, elevation changes and choke points controlling movement, take roads w/ mech, mot. & armored to establish encirclements, always use smoke on the offensive, advancing into fire is pointless without smoke
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Feb 17, 2024 20:56
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Feb 17, 2024 21:07
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Shambhala seems like tempting fate
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Feb 17, 2024 21:10
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FirstnameLastname posted:use recon units ahead and to the sides concealed, they have camo, better spotting Thanks yeah- I did play some Wargame so I get the basics at least. I gave it another shot with minimum points and maximum AI on a small map and had a lot more fun, since you're just focusing on part of a front instead of multiple at once. On map artillery seemed kinda mediocre but maybe I was just using bad ones or I don't get how to spot for them. There's still just a whole bunch of units to get a grasp on lol Also I know we were just ripping on the interwar Polish government but it is fun to play the good guys with stolen Tigers in the first phase
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Feb 17, 2024 21:15
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Finally found some time to play the new Starsector update Good old Parthian strats still work early on
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Feb 17, 2024 21:48
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tankbuster which specific lotr mod/version do you play, theres a few different ones out there
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Feb 17, 2024 23:03
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Feb 18, 2024 00:02
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somehow every single thing about the screenshot: the longass fanfic ideology, Lenin's ghost as a Buddhist saint, the fact they shoved so many choices for the NAME of the country that it can't fit onto the UI makes it the perfect encapsulation of HOI4
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Feb 18, 2024 00:11
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Megamissen posted:tankbuster which specific lotr mod/version do you play, theres a few different ones out there I am playing with the AGO Sub-sub mod for the Divide and Conquer Submod (which is standalone now). One big thing it changes is making professional troops not be free upkeep unless they are in a fort, so you have to disperse your fancy army to the far corners of your realm and save money that way.
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Feb 18, 2024 00:17
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Megamissen posted:tankbuster which specific lotr mod/version do you play, theres a few different ones out there It's very probably Third Age Total War. I started a campaign as the other elves. Your cities grow slow as hell, and it takes ages before you can even roll around with full stacks, but your boys are good enough to handle it. Actually there's a lot of partial-stack combat in general.
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Feb 18, 2024 00:18
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Kazzah posted:It's very probably Third Age Total War. I started a campaign as the other elves. Your cities grow slow as hell, and it takes ages before you can even roll around with full stacks, but your boys are good enough to handle it. Actually there's a lot of partial-stack combat in general. TATW is kinda old now. Divide and Conquer is basically a standalone expansion, and AGO is the first big attempt at using the Medieval 2 engine overhaul project to add some flair. The fact that humans get to sail down both the anduin and celduin rivers gives them a lot of fun force projection. You absolutely can ferry your cobbled together fullstack across, stomp on the goblins and still be back in time to give the orcs in mirkwood a bloody nose.
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Feb 18, 2024 00:21
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 This is a [zoomed-in] view of the first American scenario in Second Front. You can see three victory hexes on the left-hand side, of which we have 4 turns to take them, since they deplete at 10 VPs per turn, but the first real target hex is this house across the street, which I've marked with an X. Only one squad is able to reach adjacency with the target hex within this turn: the lead one, and they need to run to get there - 3 MF along the road, 2 MF to enter the forest hex, and 1 MF to enter the hex with the well on it, for a total of 6, and then they'll spend the Advance phase approaching into melee. Since we only have one squad capable of getting into melee, it's not worth trying to do it this turn - they'd have to survive all the defensive fire, and then they'd be alone in the melee phase even if they did. Instead, we'll move everyone to set us up to take it in turn 2.  This is what our layout looks like after committing all movement in Turn 1's Move & Fire Phase. We now have five squads in position to move on the target hex by turn 2. Note here that I did not make any of them Run to their current positions - walking was enough, because I could hexes and know that I can keep the Run option in reserve for the next turn while still moving how I want. Also note that I did not move to the furthest possible extent of my movement - going all the way to the edge of the treeline would expose me to fire this turn, and there's no real need to do that now. Finally, I do recognize that it does seem a bit spoilery to know that that house is going to need to be taken because I've played this scenario many times before, but that's going to happen to you eventually whenever you hit a scenario that you cannot beat in a single go, and you'll learn to recognize or suspect that a house or a terrain feature is going to have enemies in it because that's where you'd place them, if you were the defender.  During the Advance phase, I move the more rear-positioned squads one hex further. That actually does remind me that when you're counting hexes and MF to approach a target, that the Advance phase also counts to give you one more hex to get closer with. I didn't move the two lead squads since they're already as close as I want them to be.  The Germans take their turn, and they move aggressively, going into the treeline and coming up adjacent to our squads immediately.  First, we engage in gunfire - the two already-adjacent squads fire on the Germans, and we get a good result from the green arrow where the German squad breaks. They're not going to be a problem anymore.  Movement: - in the green arrow, we moved two more squads to be adjacent to the German squad with a LMG. Note that you can stack a maximum of three squads in a hex, so I left behind the one carrying a bazooka, because there's no need to throw those folks into a melee unless you really need to, since they carry a special weapon for shooting at tanks with. - in the yellow arrow, I selected one of the squads. Again, not the one with a bazooka, and ordered them to Walk to be adjacent to the house. As the first squad moved to the edge of the treeline, it got shot at by an LMG from across the street (teal arrow), but they missed and the LMG malfunctioned. I reissued the order because the game pauses and lets you re-decide after defensive fire, and they got next to the house, at which point they took defensive fire from the squad inside the house itself. They broke. - selected another squad from the same hex at the base of the yellow arrow, and ordered the same movement. They took defensive fire again, but to no effect. I ordered that squad to shoot into the house, but to no effect either. Now we have one squad next to the target house, but one squad to one squad is marginal. We still have the bazooka-carrying squad to make it 2-to-1 at least, but do we risk it? Let's check.   if you mouseover a hex in the game, it'll show you unit information in the upper left. The red reticles on these German squads are grayed-out/empty, which means they can't fire anymore this turn. The LMG itself has the gear icon, meaning it's broken (and the 17% means it's got a 17% chance to be repaired... that's virtually a roll of "1" on a 1d6). Since all of the defenders (that we know of) won't fire anymore, I think it's safe to order the Bazooka them to advance, just to maximize our chances of winning the melee phase for the target house.  We do that, but we leave the leader behind - we have a Broken unit, remember? Once that squad routs and runs off to a non-open hex (probably one of the forest hexes) to take cover, we need to move the leader to them so they can rally.  We move the rest of the back-line units forward. Of note here is that we moved the MMG to have LOS to the Germans in the northern objective house.  During the [automated] Escape (ASL: Rout) phase, the German squad that was Broken gets eliminated immediately for Failure to Rout: it had nowhere to go that wouldn't be adjacent to our squads. Meanwhile, our own one broken squad retreat right into the arms of the leader. That's fine, and we won't move them anymore.  It's now the Advance phase, and I've got the two squads adjacent to the target hex selected. The info box tells us that: - both sides have a 16% chance to succeed at an Ambush. An Ambush happens whenever you're entering into melee in a non-open hex, and if your side succeeds in Ambushing, then the "to-kill" roll of Close Combat happens sequentially rather than simultaneously. That is, the Ambusher rolls first in melee, and if they succeed, then the Ambushee gets killed without ever getting to roll. If there is no Ambush, then the melee is rolled simultaneously, which can cause both sides to wipe each other out. - we have an 83% chance of succeeding at the melee "to-kill" roll, which is good for us.  We Advance everyone but the MMG and the leader nursing the routed squad. Of note is that the other melee we've set-up on the treeline, with three of our squads to the Germans's one, has a 98% chance of success, and the Germans have 0%.  It doesn't go all as planned: - in the house, both sides wipe each other out - in the treeline, we kill the German squad for no losses ... - ... but during the German Move & Fire Phase, the LMG squad in the house shoots and breaks two out of three squads there.  During our [Defensive] Fire phase, everyone that's in LOS of the house takes shots at it. - we get a Pin result, which doesn't really matter in this case - Pins cause the unit to be unable to move and reduces their firepower. It's useful in cases where the enemy is adjacent, and Pinning them prevents them from advancing into melee with you, but since it gets removed at the end of the German turn, that squad will be back to full strength by the time the turn gets back to us. - we get to Break the leader inside the hex - it's nice, since broken leaders cannot rally units, but until that squad gets broken itself, the benefit is only marginal.  The state of play at the start of American turn 3. We got some successful rallies at the end of our turn 2 and again at the end of the German's turn 2, so we now only have one Broken squad. I'll break this up into another post, but our next goal is to lunge for those objective hexes.
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Feb 18, 2024 04:16
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StashAugustine posted:. On map artillery seemed kinda mediocre but maybe I was just using bad ones or I don't get how to spot for them. make sure you have recon w/ radio + a commander unit at the artillery, start with 1-2 guns at the beginning and don't add any until they're all firing constantly don't overlap more than 2 guns on a target except to get packed armor or buildings, landing direct hits and getting kills with artillery is less important than area denial & suppression it makes it way harder for them to defend since you can pinch their line in two at a bottleneck & concentrate force on the weak half before they can respond, force them to counterattack etc FirstnameLastname has issued a correction as of 04:42 on Feb 18, 2024 |
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Feb 18, 2024 04:39
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My biggest problem with the recent eugen games is the awful, awful AI. I know they're meant to be played multi but sometimes i dont wanna do that damnit
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Feb 18, 2024 04:52
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gradenko_2000 posted:
We want to get to that northern-most house, but we know that there's an LMG squad inside of it, so we use our MMG team to take shots. We get some bad luck, as the MMG both Cowers (reduced firepower, ends all possibility of follow-on shots) and Misses. Checking around the movement ranges of our squads, we know that we have quite a few that can move into the house, but that MG team is still at full power. The trick here is to move around the back-line units and bait the MG into firing against us, to deplete their shots before the more critical squads get to make their move. If the back-line squads get stopped/broken/killed, well, they were never going to make it to the house anyway, so no harm no foul  These two squads do the thing: one of them takes casualties and gets broken out in the open, while the other "only" gets broken in the treeline. [if you're going to be doing this, you want the units to moving through hexes that provide cover, though in this case the first squad that moved had (as far as I could tell) no choice]  in exchange for that first play, we get to execute this next series of moves: - in teal, one squad plus a leader makes an 8 MF Running movement to be adjacent to the house. - in pink, one squad makes a Running movement to be adjacent to the house. - in yellow, one squad makes a Walk movement to be adjacent to the house. Two of these three squads will have a penalty in melee (and shooting) for having used Run, and cannot Run again in turn 4, but since we're piling on three squads to their one, I think we'll be fine - finally, in green, one squad plus a leader makes an 8 MF Running movement to seize the actual objective hex behind the German squad. They take defensive fire from someone and it breaks the squad, but I think we'll still get ownership of the house if the melee works.  up next, - in green, one squad makes a walk movement to move next to the middle house, which it will take during the Advance phase - in yellow, two squads plus a leader make an 8 MF Running movement to move next to the southern house, also in preparation for taking it during the Advance phase This is a risk, since now both of our leaders are out in front, which means our three broken squads have no one to rally them, but it's a risk I feel is necessary to take the objectives immediately.  and the rest of the back-line troops move forwards  per the plan, the three squads pile in to the northern house, with a 91% chance of success in melee we also seize the middle and southern houses, and score their VP the squad+leader that we can into the northern house end up fleeing north - they couldn't rout back towards us because of the German squad they were already adjacent to. Unfortunate, but we will try to recover. and then everyone else advances one hex, including the MMG team, since their current target is about to be cleared-out  we get a good result: the German LMG squad gets killed in the melee, and we score the 20 VP from securing the house. During the German Move & Fire Phase, thee squads walk up and shoot at our routed men, causing casualties. We have no one in position to shoot at them during our Defensive Fire phase, so we move on.  The state of play at the start of American turn 4. The Germans used their Advance phase to move a leader into the other empty building hex of the northern house, but since it's just a leader with no squad, we still "own" the hex. Our next goal will be to engineer a situation where we can prevent the Germans from attacking the northern house.
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Feb 18, 2024 05:27
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this is complicated
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Feb 18, 2024 05:35
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I don't know why I keep buying eugen games. I have the fantasies of being the strategic mastermind and being all " tanks exist to be destroyed , I will advance with overlapping fields of fire and exert pressure at all points in the line simultaneously to exploit any breakthroughs" which translates to rapid paralysis and melting down as my precious units get shredded and I end up setting everything to AI aside from the air or maybe an artillery unit
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Feb 18, 2024 05:46
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Strategy & wargames:Buck Wildman posted:this is complicated
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Feb 18, 2024 05:49
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good luck with beating the nazis, or being them it's hard to tell
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Feb 18, 2024 06:00
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The Chad Jihad posted:I don't know why I keep buying eugen games. I have the fantasies of being the strategic mastermind and being all " tanks exist to be destroyed , I will advance with overlapping fields of fire and exert pressure at all points in the line simultaneously to exploit any breakthroughs" which translates to rapid paralysis and melting down as my precious units get shredded and I end up setting everything to AI aside from the air or maybe an artillery unit start from positioning & targeting your biggest guns and work your way down, plan for how to approach the first thing in your path and set yourself up to advance from that to the next thing use infantry to hold ground and fill in where there's cover out at the forward edge, advance out in straight lines because the thing controlling your firepower & rate of advance is gonna be how fast replacements can get to the front wherever the ground goes up or narrows will be harder to move through, wherever it goes down/widens are where you want to attack from if you think about it like that the rest is learning unit specifics and the maps and the more specific opportunities & big plays will show up from there
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Feb 18, 2024 06:35
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American Turn 4 If we click through our squads, we can identify six of them that can potentially advance to within melee range of the stack just outside the northern house, so we can melee them on this turn. I want to be aggressive here: yes, it's a full stack of three squads and a leader, but if we can take them before they ever get inside the house, we buy ourselves more time to pile on even more squads and make them fight for every hex.  it costs us six squads to complete the maneuver: in the forest hex, two squads go in and are broken by defensive fire, and in the clear hex along the road, one squad gets broken by defensive fire from across the river. but, we're in a position to take the Germans in a melee, three squads to three, though they have a leader.  I take our two leaders and put them in a position to potentially receive and rally all of the recently routed squads.  next, I take one squad and move them into the right-hand hex of the northern house. During the advance phase, that squad will move in to melee the German leader in the left-hand hex of the house. The leader is by themselves, so a single squad should be enough. then, I take two more squads and move them between the northern and middle houses. During the advance phase, those two squads will move into the right-hand hex of the northern house, acting as our reinforcements should the melee go awry.  zooming out, we can see that there's these two indicators on the south end of the board. That means that off-map German units will enter the board on the 4th German turn. As such, we have to leave some kind of reserve to secure the southern flank  to that end, I send the one squad occupying the southern house into the treeline, as a spotter for the Jerries as they emerge from the flank, while three more squads reinforce the house itself, and one of our recently rallied squads moves forward  finally, the MMG squad moves forward by four hexes to get better LOS on the entire sector as this fight develops. ... we end the phase, and the Germans already did all their shooting, so there's nothing that goes in their Defensive Fire phase ... ... the Escape (Rout) phase runs, and three of the newly routed squads run to the hexes with leaders on them. Here's hoping for good rally rolls.  During the Advance phase, we hatch our plans: three squads move into melee combat with the German platoon. We have a 41% chance of killing them, they have a 58% chance of killing us. Since this is an open hex, no ambush is possible, and both sides will potentially kill each other simultaneously. one squad moves into the northern building's left-hand hex, and has a 91% chance of killing the German leader there. and we reinforce the northern building some more we end the phase, and lots of stuff happens in the inter-turn:  - green circle: during the melee phase, we kill the German leader - teal circle: also during the melee phase, the fight outside the house is inconclusive. One of our three squads takes a casualty reduction, but the two groups are still locked in combat - yellow arrow: during the German Move & Fire Phase, a tank (!!!) drives up the road and shoots at the house. No effect, but we'll need something to deal with it - red arrow: the German HMG squad across the river breaks our own HMG squad  in the southern sector, two German squads and a leader come out of the treeline - our defensive fire breaks the leader and pins one squad... ... but one more platoon emerges, and they break our outer-perimeter squad in return. no one on our side has any LOS or ability to fire, so I just end the phase and let the Germans continue  the state of play at the start of American turn 5. The melee at the end of the German turn was inconclusive yet again, so our squads are still tied up in combat. We had two squads rally, so we have something to work with. Our immediate concerns will be coming up with a plan to deal with the Panzer, and organizing a defense of the southern flank.
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Feb 18, 2024 11:08
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Buck Wildman posted:this is complicated I mean, yeah it is. My take is that because learning the rules of ASL and implementing them takes so much effort, getting to the point where you can experiment with and practice tactics ends up needing to sink hours and hours into the game. And while lots of strategy/wargames can be like this, the decision space in ASL is so much wider, and the actions and results can seem so opaque, that you might not even discern how you should be proceeding, or whether this or that particular move was the better one, since it's also buried under dice roll probabilities. It's my second crack at playing this game after a seven year hiatus, and I only managed to figure out this basic pattern of tactical problem solving by playing Retro, an alternative ruleset: Retro's rules let you move around the map a lot without bogging the game down in stutter-step defensive fire, and after I'd done two scenarios I was like "wait, how come I can move around so much?", and then when I sat down and tried to math-out your chances of pulling the kinds of movement that Retro lets you do, in ASL, and I realized that, yeah, you could move around just as freely, it was the conceptual breakthrough I needed. Which brings me to a final remark: it's almost like a certain familiarity to IRL tactical concepts ends up hurting your ability to play ASL. Fire-and-maneuver, right? You take a squad, fire on the enemy squad that's in cover until they're suppressed, then a second squad can run towards the enemy squad and either engage from a flank, or get into close combat and finish the job that way. But if you try to do that in ASL... you're going to run out of time, all the time. Even in Second Front, if you try to issue a move order into a hex that the game knows is going to draw defensive fire, the game will throw up a warning on the mouse indicator... which suggests you might not want to do it... but the scenarios don't give you enough time to approach cautiously! It correctly identifies that close combat is the most reliable way to score complete kills on enemy troops, but there's a certain disconnect in the notion of "laying down a base of fire", because the game ends up demanding that you forge ahead with the assault even if the HMG team rolls high and accomplishes nothing. Perhaps this is less of a concern in larger scenarios where you have enough troops and/or crew-served weapons do stack-breaking fire-groups while still having another 2-3 platoons to move forward with, but I haven't quite seen it yet (and such games would take even longer to play as a boardgame).
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Feb 18, 2024 12:16
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I like that the game is apparently encouraging you to do actual literal human wave attacks (ie throwing bodies at machine guns in lieu of suppression so you can have other units close to assault)
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Feb 18, 2024 13:52
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Gradenko I think you've made me realize why I lost so much Combat Commander when playing against my ex. I used what Close Combat games taught me, and kept deploying to cover the whole map, set up kill zones and make nice fire groups to plink away at range and get frustrated with how little effect it had. She would just charge me through an open field and get into melee and wreck my poo poo, to my immense frustration. Starting to suspect Combat Commander isn't so different from ASL.
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Feb 18, 2024 14:31
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let's have a bit more of a think about this: does ASL model the ability of crew-served weapons to be more efficient in terms of applying firepower versus riflemen? take a 1st-line German squad of 7 morale, and sit them inside a stone building against them are three 1st-line US Army squads, with 6 FP each, for a combined FP of 18 when shooting together as a stack on the IFT, 18 FP rounds down to 16, and rolling a 7 (the most common result of a 2d6) gets you a final result of 10, after the stone building's +3 DRM you've got a 58.33% chance of rolling an NMC result or better, and given an NMC, the 7 morale German squad has a 41.67% chance of breaking so, those three USA squads have a 24.60% chance of breaking the German squad, shooting together with their 18 FP the USA MMG (the game doesn't really tell you the specific weapon) has an FP 4, while there are two HMGs with 6 and 8 FP, respectively since a half-squad can operate an MG with no penalty, you could theoretically take a full 6-6-6 squad, break it down into a 3-4-6 half-squad, and have it man an MG. As long as you're using at least an MMG, you're coming out ahead on the stacking limit: 3 inherent FP from the half-squad + 4 FP from an MMG = 7 it would only take you three half-squads with one MMG each to exceed the 18 FP of three full squads or rather, since the half-squads only have 4 range, you might be using just the MGs to shoot against distant targets, but that still means a 7 FP MMG is already 1 FP more than the 6 FP of a full 1st-line squad (granted, this is mostly a thought experiment - while you CAN break down full squads into half-squads under the full ASL rules, you cannot trade for more MGs or whatever, the OOB on a scenario is set in stone) alternatively, an M2 mortar, as a 60mm calibre weapon, shoots as an equivalent of 8 FP, or about the same as an HMG, except mortars also gain a -1 and -2 DRM on successive shots against the same hex. Where an 8 FP infantry fire attack only has a 27.78% chance to get an NMC or better when firing against a defender in a stone building, the M2 mortar can get that down to a 58.33% chance after two shots, and the mortar also has a ROF of 3, so it's got a 50/50 chance of firing against after already having fired once an 81mm mortar would be even better, firing at the equivalent of 16 FP, though I don't know how many of these an infantry unit would realistically have (ASL of course supports much larger weapons, but anything bigger than a mortar requires specialized crew and cannot be manned/used by regular infantry squads) in that context, it does seem like it should be possible to play the game with the intent of only/mostly advancing against already-suppressed targets, using heavy weaponry (or lots of riflemen) to do so, but as I'd said, it would require A. a large scenario with lots of squads, and B. using ordnance and guns, and in the boardgame context that entails even more rules knowledge and rules overhead
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Feb 18, 2024 15:27
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gradenko_2000 posted:Which brings me to a final remark: it's almost like a certain familiarity to IRL tactical concepts ends up hurting your ability to play ASL. Fire-and-maneuver, right? You take a squad, fire on the enemy squad that's in cover until they're suppressed, then a second squad can run towards the enemy squad and either engage from a flank, or get into close combat and finish the job that way. I've heard that about ASL, but I don't know enough about the old school PnP tactical war-games to have a point of comparison. I've consistently read good reviews of Avalanche Press' Panzer Grenadier series, and have pre-ordered all of the A-H titles of Infantry Attacks (the Great War variant) if anyone has tried those. Otherwise, JTS Squad Battles would be the other tactical system I'm familiar with, and there's a lot in it you couldn't do on pen and paper, so maybe that's a poor point of comparison.
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Feb 18, 2024 16:46
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Well let's have another think: *why* exactly do the objectives need to be taken in 4 turns rather than the Germans just shot off of them over however many turns it takes? As I've argued before, from a game-design standpoint this is the right kind of artificiality to introduce into the design (as opposed to loving with weapon/troop effectivity numbers), but if you're taking it to such extreme lengths that it basically becomes impossible to ever follow the doctrine of the army you are playing it feels like something has gone wrong? Or at least it underscores that, if you would follow proper doctrine, either: a) it becomes a tedious slog to run anything at all in the engine they designed and/or; b) every single scenario they could come up with becomes a joke because of how easy it becomes Which might tell you something about how effective said doctrine is, and/or how fun their design is.
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Feb 18, 2024 16:50
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iirc gamers do not like shooting troops off of objectives. The designers of SPWW2 mention that in particular because apparently people are constantly asking them to reduce the effectiveness and availability of artillery, far below the historical OOBs they built the game, campaigns and scenarios around. I think they also mentioned that players prefer the USMC, which was more tailored to assaulting positions over the US Army, which was much more able to displace the enemy with firepower, when playing campaigns in the Pacific. But then I could swear I read a book comparing the Army and USMC in either Okinawa or the Philippines where the Army did much better and suffered fewer losses.
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Feb 18, 2024 17:10
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I would argue that qualifying "getting less Americans killed" as "better" is a highly subjective judgement.
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Feb 18, 2024 17:22
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