Re: DSII Question- Obstacles

At 18:27 2/16/98, Brian Burger wrote:

>This looks good - and provides people with a pressing reason to get
>engineering troops out onto the field. The demolition-by-engineers rule
>could apply to wire as well, maybe - making commanders choose who gets
>machine-gunned whilst mucking around in the wire, your regular infantry
or
>your engineering inf.

JagdPanzer (WWII microarmor) has a formula for clearing obstacles: each
obstacle has a rating, and various units have clearance factors. The
more
units/greater number of factors applied, the sooner the breach.

Frankly, this seems like a bit much. I'd tend towards the standard
engineering demolition rolls for wire (eng spends its combat action in
contact with something, at the end of the turn, that something explodes)
and assuming it's not 'nasty' wire (monofilament, electrified, local
cable
TV monopoly) regular infantry could clear it by spending 2 combat
actions... provided they're not under fire.

>Dragon's teeth and wire could be, in points-based defense battles,
bought
>- say 75pts for 6" of wire, 100pts/6" of dragons teeth? (purely off the
>cuff costs - but I'd say that 600 meters of wire is worth as much as a
>standard APC, no?)

I dunno.... an APC can take the fight to the enemy, the wire is totally
passive. Maybe it's worth it to you, but I can't see spending that much
on
it.

>Otherwise, scenarios would specify the amount of wire/teeth available,
and
>maybe where it is set up (eg Defenders get 18" of wire; at least 6"
must
>be within 400m (4") of FireBase X...)

Another JagdPanzer rule: if the player who controls a particular
location
has engineers assigned to that location can *before the game* may
"create
of reinforce his entrenchments". I'm assuming this would work like the
DSII
engineering function Create Hasty Defences (p.45). but possibly allow
for
better cover, or somesuch. Probably a good case for a scenario specific
rule.

>Actually, instead of dragon's teeth, just call them 'anti-tank
obstacles'
>- covers teeth, ditches, roadblocks of various sorts, etc...

But you'd need to distinguish how they work... with Grav, GEV, wheeled
and
tracked mobility types some defences are going to affect only some
vehicle
types.

>How about in-game deployment of wire/teeth? (mostly wire, or only
wire...)
>Say 6" of wire takes 2 turns to deploy by regular infantry, or 1 turn
w/
>engineers; takes up 8 cargo spaces; cannot be deployed by units under
>fire; cannot be deployed by engineering vehicles, only inf;
etc...Coupled
>with the existing rules for fast entrenchments, you can produce a
fairly
>secure firebase in two or three game turns - maybe too fast?

That does seem a bit much. 'Hasty Defenses' seems adequate for
engineering
during combat, anything else would take time and efforts that could
hardly
be performed under fire. I can't see putting up wire under direct
attack..
what's the point?... but I'm sure this has happened *somewhere* in
history.
Anyone got an example? Any SeaBees vets?

>Enough wire could make things very, very nasty - imagine trying to
close
>to close-assault troops entrenched behind two or three lines of wire,
out
>to about 4-6" from the trench-front...can we all say 'WW1', kiddies?

Ah, but this is the future! Drop RAM artillery on 'em, send DFFG grav
tanks
over the wire with PA wading through the wire (or bouncing over) up
behind
them. Of course for underarmed militia vs. restless natives type
scenarios,
it would fit in quite well.

>Wire/teeth rules would need to have wire-vs-tank rules and
>wire-vs-arty/DFO rules - what happens to a razor-wire line when a group
of
>Size 5 GEV panzers cruise through or a battery of medium artillery
drops a
>converged sheaf load on it? (Teeth would be unaffected, I'd think - for
>fairly obvious reasons...) Don't forget what tanks were originally made
>for - wire-busting (at least in part)...WW1 again...

The trick is, can we come up with something that works well without
bogging
the system down too much?

>How do other, historical micro-armour games handle wire/teeth? Could
those
>rules just be plagarized and dropped straight into DS2? (for house
rules
>only, of course, copyright being what it is)

Notes from JagdPanzer are above.... I'm too lazy to root through
PanzerBlitz at the moment. Maybe tomorrow. Just out of curiousity, how
does
the Evil Empire's latest incarnation of the epic rules handle this?

Renegade Legion Centurion has 'digging charges' carried by many APCs,
engineering vehicles and fired by arty mission which create instant hard
cover...craters big enough to allow grav vehicles and troops to go
hull-down. Nothing I could find in the rule book about wire or
fortifications.

>I'm just throwing these ideas off...feel free to hack them
>up/critique/hate them/love them...esp. the last :)...

Personally, I don't think human engineers will have any place on the
futuristic battlefield becasue AI engineering systems will be able to
outperform them in every way.... errr.....sorry. Still channeling the
fighter combat thread. :)

------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
Jim 'Jiji' Foster / jfoster@kansas.net / Jiji @ AnimeMUCK / TIP #28

"That's the way we all begin," said Tom Platt. "The boys they make
believe
all the time till they've cheated 'emselves into bein' men, an' so till
they die--pretendin' and pretendin'."
    Rudyard Kipling, _Captains Courageous_