More Stargrunt-SL (was Re: SG2tweaks)

 > Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 13:08:27 -0500
 > From: Doug Evans <devans@nebraska.edu>
 >
 > Are you planning on putting this on your site (or is it there and I'm
too
 > fumbly to find it?), or should I make this my formal request for a
copy?

I will put it on my web site.

The rules are done. What's slowing me down now are the counter sheets. I

did counters in Visio, and they aren't too bad, though I need to tweak 
them a little. Some of the information is a little too close to the
edges.

There are a _ton_ of counters. In order to make the game play more 
smoothly as a board game, and due to the fact I adapted the rules to 
_Squad Leader's_ scale, I decided to put small arms weapon ranges on the

infantry counters. That meant having counters for every combination of 
armour level _and_ Quality Level. That's 25 combinations of counters. 
Each combination has enough counters for a full company, including 
medics, snipers, "teams" (you decide if they are weapon teams or 
whatnot), ECM and individual figures. Oh, and in case you want to use 
fire teams or detachments, each squad comes in a squad sized counter 
(three figure outlines on the counter) and two half squads (two figure 
outlines on the counter). That's a lot of counters, but of course you 
don't have to cut them all out at once. Lord knows _I_ didn't.

Anyway, there are different outlines for the different armour levels, 
too. For instance, the outline for D4 infantry looks far less armoured 
than the D8 figure. Power Armour have their own outline. Although I 
haven't done many of them, I also have counters for vehicles and heavy 
weapons. There are several different heavy weapon counters, so a mortar 
counter looks different from a DFFG counter. I haven't finished the 
vehicle counters, but there are tanks and APCs, with different "hulls" 
denoting the type of mobility. One thing I haven't bothered with were 
things like civilian vehicles. If there's a demand for them, I could do 
that later.

The counters are double sided, and will be black-and-white and available

as PDFs. At least, that's my intention. Right now they are in Visio. I 
have an old version of Visio (version 5) that doesn't do a great job of 
creating JPEGs. I'll have to see if I can get it to run through 
distiller properly to produce PDFs.

I will include instructions on making the counter. It's pretty simple, 
though I recommend you have a can of spray adhesive available. For 
humans, I simply printed out counters on two different colours of light 
card stock paper. This gives you two different forces. I also created a 
set of Phalon counters to go with the Phalon playtest rules. The reverse

side of the counter is its activated side. You don't use the Quality or 
Confidence Level counters. This information is marked on a squad status 
sheet, which I will also include. After a unit is activated, you flip it

over (and, if more than one squad is in a hex, you move it to the bottom

of the hex stack). The squad status sheets can be used in regular SG2 
games as well.

All I have to do is compile the rules into a coherent whole (they are in

pretty good shape as is) and fix the counters. Oh, and complete the 
vehicle and heavy weapon counters. I would also like to include a couple

of scenarios, but that can wait.

One question: I don't use any colour on the counters themselves. They 
are intended to be printed on coloured paper. I wanted them to work with

the widest range of printers possible, so the counters have black text 
and black figure outlines. I could have easily generated colour 
counters, but I thought this was safer. Now, I prefer the more modern 
counters with colour, but these are more easily used and have a retro, 
Squad Leader look. So, here's the question: should I "pretty up" the 
counters and use colour, or should I stick to black-and-white counters? 
I originally ran mine off on a laser printer, which is why I stuck with 
black and white.

Allan

-- 

Allan Goodall	    http://www.hyperbear.com
agoodall@att.net    agoodall@hyperbear.com