RE: SG II Snipers and the spirit of the game

>> Or an elite unit will take up firing positions and
>> put two rounds through the sniper's head.
>
>Not too likely given that snipers tend to fire from out of range of
normal
>weapons (and way beyond the range at which you stand a chance of seeing
them).
>
>Any unit stupid enough to simply assume firing positions against a
sniper
>deserves to be removed from the gene pool.
>
>---
>Steve Gill

Well, er, not to get too picky <g>, but when Michael Rose assumed
command
of UN forces in Sarajevo a few years back, he requested and received SAS
counter-sniper teams who's job was to sneak about hunting the snipers
that
were plaguing the city.  Military snipers tend to shoot from out of
"normal
every- day rifle" range, but if your elite unit is set up to snipe
snipers,
they'll either get themselves some kind of positional advantage, or have
the right equipment, or both.  I think that's what he meant - the elite
unit by virtue of their being elite, and not dummies, wouldn't "take up
firing positions" in a place that they wouldn't have any chance of doing
what they are setting out to do...

This has been an interesting thread, by the way.  

Tom and I spent quite a while discussing Marksmen vs. Snipers about 6
months ago, and I've used Marksmen extensively in SG games.  Works
really
well when you use them simply as another support weapon in the rifle
unit
(though I give them the double range bands).  They have the choice of
either firing WITH the squad's fire, in which case they just add their
firepower die to the squad's fire (as with any other support weapon),
but
in this case they don't get any range advantages, OR they fire
separately
with the squad's quality, their weapon's firepower, and double
rangebands.
They don't get the "pick your target" bonuses of Snipers, or the
movement
and hiding bonuses.  Keeps it simple, and works fast without making them
too powerful.

Tom covered numbers well in his response to the question about how many
to
allow.	I'll add that from my experience using this system, having a
couple
in a platoon size formation is plenty, unless you are setting up a
special
scenario OR are using one side as a specialist formation.  For example,
I
played a great game vs. Tom and several of his friends where I was a
slightly reinforced NAC platoon, fighting against a mech company
defending
a "planetary defence grid operations HQ bunker".  The longer I held out,
the more ships I got off planet in my retreat from his implacable
advance,
and that would be relevant later in the FT scenario that was to follow.
That kind of scenario is one in which having more marksmen rather than
less
is fine.  If you're just playing the ordinary "meeting engagement" type
of
scenario with roughly equal forces, then keep the numbers of Marksmen
down,
or you'll end up in a long-range sniper duel and the game gets bogged
down
and boring...

In my NAC units (I play NAC Light Infantry, not NAC Marines, and the TOE
I
use is up on Ted Arlauskas' TOE webpage (great resource, by the way:
http://www.naxera.com/ted/gzg.html)), I often use a marksmen team of two
troops as a separate element at the Platoon level.  They act as a
separate
"squad" and can be reactivated, etc by the platoon commander, but are a
unit of two troops only - a "marksman" and a "spotter" who carries a
regualar AR and a laser target designator (which almost never comes into
game play, but that's the figure I use... :).  They use the Marksmen
rules,
and not the sniper rules, and it works well.  But as Tom said, having
Marksmen as part of squads works well also.  Another friend has his FSE
Legionaires with a marksman in each squad (like 2REP now), and that is
cool
too.  Makes the squads rather powerful, but that's ok 'cause we
compensate
in other ways for balance when setting up scenarios.

Anyway, there's my $0.02 to this thread...

Adrian Johnson
ajohnson@idirect.com