Wednesday, November 2, 2011

What else can one hide?

Lets assume we are going to put on the table some category of units - tanks (stands representing 10 each) and infantry (in stands representing 80-120).  What can we use that to hide?
  • The stands may have variable strength depending on casualties - say two or three steps available.
  • They may also the straight-up strength-zero dummies.
  • It is easy to hide which is the command stand, if it matters.
  • An indicator can show which stand has the FOO with it.
  • Small support weapons (MGs, light AT guns, etc) can be a marker under an infantry stand until it should be deployed.  
Concealment is critical to understanding WWII, and a set of grand-tactical rules has to acknowledge that.

Secrecy in combat

Lets presume we can get away from the idea that we have to identify a particular firing stand and target stand, but can deal in groups firing and targeted.  That means that dummy stand might stay unidentified for a bit longer, since one need not exclude particular stand from those identified to the enemy as firing.

Megablitz has a nice idea where you total up your combat dice and hand them to your opponent, who roles them and secretly applies the results.  I'd like to extend this a bit to differentiate weapons fire.  So, I might determine that my 88 at 1500m gets a "red" dice.  Having rolled the dice, the target player organizes the results - so a red dice rolling a 4 might score a major results on a T/34 stand  but no result on a JS2 stand.  Results would be secret, and might or might not involve a visible result for the attacker; likewise, the exact firing stands might or might not be revealed.

Mixed formation

After lunch with Ross, one point from the discussion I want to capture are the cases where differing pieces of equipment were deliberately deployed in mixed formations - the classic being the 1-firefly per 4-sherman-75 troops used by Commonwealth forces in NWE.  Platoon level rules kind of ignore this, basically letting the player deploy one troop of fireflys per 4 troops of sherman-75s.

Visually, that's fine but I want a way that blends capabilities to represent to effectiveness of the merged formation.