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Author Topic: Speak to me of Early War rules...  (Read 3000 times)

Offline SteveBurt

  • Mastermind
  • Posts: 1283
Re: Speak to me of Early War rules...
« Reply #15 on: July 25, 2018, 11:02:56 AM »
One thing Battlefront:WW2 does really well is artillery. In fact I've never seen a better system in a WW2 rule set. Really reflects national doctrine for artillery.
(e.g. whether you can use  a concentration, or in the case of the US, Time on Target bombardments, speculative fire at terrain features, smoke, mixed barrages, you name it). It also handles airstrikes pretty well.
Rapid Fire is a skirmish set pretending to be a high level one; version 2 is a bit better but doesn't really solve the underlying problems.

Offline Arlequín

  • Galactic Brain
  • Posts: 6218
  • Culpame de la Bossa Nova...
Re: Speak to me of Early War rules...
« Reply #16 on: July 25, 2018, 11:32:25 AM »
My thanks to Arrigo and Steve Burt for their insightful comments on Battlefront WWII. It's not a rule set I'd considered previously and I've been looking for something larger than platoon-company level recently.

 :)

Offline Arrigo

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  • errare humanum est, perseverare diabolicum est
    • Forward HQ my new blog where you can laugh at my crappy photos!
Re: Speak to me of Early War rules...
« Reply #17 on: July 25, 2018, 12:51:41 PM »
One thing Battlefront:WW2 does really well is artillery. In fact I've never seen a better system in a WW2 rule set. Really reflects national doctrine for artillery.
(e.g. whether you can use  a concentration, or in the case of the US, Time on Target bombardments, speculative fire at terrain features, smoke, mixed barrages, you name it). It also handles airstrikes pretty well.
Rapid Fire is a skirmish set pretending to be a high level one; version 2 is a bit better but doesn't really solve the underlying problems.

Perfectly agree, while I was armor by trade, artillery has become my pet peeve in rules. too often it seems completely random or depicted like a single tube is firing. Very few rules have any idea of sheaf patterns, or the fact that indirect fire is not that random but governed by ballistic laws (as long you have good maps and good FOO is not random at all. One of the issues I have is the dumping of spotting rounds and fire for effect all together. The best actual representation of the process was in some older editions of The Gamers Tactical Combat Series. You actually fired the spotting rounds until they were on target and the switched to FFE, but it was quite tedious. Firing spotting rounds is not a thing I like to do all the time. It was streamlined later on, but it works for a game were a counter is a platoon and a turn 15-20 minutes.  I usually like games where the spotting rounds process is abstracted (not omitted, but abstracted... another of my pet-peeves... as I said to the students, abstraction is when something is still in the game but you run it i n the background usually in the 'engine' itself, omission is when you just dump it out... usually the latter looks easier... but this is another story).

Rapid Fire... nice game but still a skirmish one pretending to be bigger, but its supplements are quite useful anyway. I found it easy to adapt scenarios to other rules. The OoB info are also good.

"Put Grant straight in"

for pretty tanks and troops: http://forwardhq.blogspot.com