On 3/16/06, Grant A. Ladue <ladue@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Grant Ladue wrote:
>
> >I imagine that
> >I don't have the best grasp of modern combat, but is smoke really the only
> >way that recon units break contact?
>
> There are two ways to break contact (for any unit, not just recon):
>
> 1) Kill or chase off all enemies in sight, or
>
> 2) Move out of sight of all enemies, preferrably by moving behind some
> LoS-blocking terrain feature. If there is no such terrain feature close
> enough to let you get behind it quickly, deploy a smoke screen to buy the
> extra seconds you need to get out of sight.
>
> For light recon units option 1) is rarely practical, so they usually have
> to resort to option 2) instead :-/
>
I wonder if it was the inability to pop smoke for our units that dragged
out the firefights. We ended up in firefight where neither side was all that
likely to damage the other. Two of my tanks were damaged, so at 1/2 move
they were hideously slow. Took 5 or more rounds to get behind cover. I
dunno. It seems odd in retrospect. Has there been much playtesting
*without* smoke capable units?
I thought there was a 'go to ground' method for breaking up a
firefight, ducking into one of those too-small-for-the-table
undulations in the terrain. Of course this would immediately end your
movement, but it is an option to take. IIRC the humans did it a couple
of times (or maybe I'm misremembering; John?)
> >
> >Yeah, I think get that. How fast are those grav tanks moving in their
> >"big move" though? The gap they were crossing was about 6 or 7 inches wide.
> >Some piece of me feels like they should have been able to blow across it
> >without being forced into an extended combat.
>
> A Combat Move of 12 mu equals a speed of 135 mph (216 km/h). If the gap is
> only 6-7 mu wide a grav tank moving that fast can easily avoid *extended*
> combat by simply using its first Combat Move in the FireFight to move out
> of the gap, but it can't escape *all* enemy fire - enemy units on Overwatch
> will get one shot at it before it can move away.
>
Hmm, I think the grav tanks only move 3.5 inches at at time undamaged in
the firefight. Perhaps they were unusually slow in combat. I didn't seem
wrong for movement *towards* the enemy, but seemed slow for breaking to
cover. Perhaps when running for cover and not shooting at the enemy, the
units should move faster?
I don't remember what the engine/movement rating we gave the grav tanks
in the Friday night game. I think we wanted to keep the speeds down a
*little*, so we made them slow grav tanks. This was to help offset a
little the heavy punch the K'V tanks had vs the H'Ms
Mk