Re: [SG2] Urban combat

>
>
>Brian Burger wrote:
>
>> Had an interesting SG2 game tonight, with a lot of buildings,
including
>> for the first time a two-storey building. (I finally got around to
making
>> it...)
>>
>> How do other people handle some of the oddities of multi-storey
>> structures? I'm speaking specifically of assaulting a squad that's
not on
>> the ground floor, and of shooting over smaller buildings.
>>
>> For close assualting of second storey squads, we had a stop-gap rule
that
>> to get to the 2nd floor, you must get combat movement sufficient to
get
>> you into the building _plus 4 inches_ to get you to the next floor.
The
>> defenders got a +1 die shift for the entire assault. (see my webpage
for
>> Bunker & Building rules for the +1 die shift idea)
>>
>> For the second situation, we said that you can shoot over lower
obstacles,
>> but that they had a 'dead zone' behind their farthest wall equal to
the
>> distance from the firer to the nearest wall. Thus, if my squad is on
the
>> 2nd floor and is 4" away from the nearest wall of a 1story bldg, they
>> cannot target units closer than 4" to the rear wall of that building.
>>
>> How have other people dealt with these sorts of situations? All ideas
&
>> comments welcomed...
>>
>> Brian (burger00@camosun.bc.ca)
>> -- http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Nebula/9774/games.html
--DS2/SG2/misc--
>
>How about using a long string?  Place one end at the firer, and place
the
>other end on the target.  Pull the string tight.  If the string catches
on
>something, the target can't be seen by the firer.
>
>Donald Hosford

Or one of those darned laser pointers that seem to be everywhere these
days.  We were playing (ahem...  um....  Necromunda, by GW) in an
enormous
industrial city terrain set, and the host had one of those inexpensive
laser pointers.  It worked excellently for drawing line-of-sight - you
position the pointer nest to the head of the miniature shooting, and if
you
can "lase" the target, you've got line of sight, and can tell exactly
how
much of the target can be seen.  It is quite easy to see if there's any
obscurement of the laser, also.

Personally, however, I don't like the things (there's nothing more
annoying
than getting to a tense, exciting point in a movie only to have some
idiot
in the back of the theatre start playing with a laser pointer and
targeting
the hero, or whatever...), but this is actually a meaningful use for
these
things (well, sort of...)

As to the close assaulting in multi-story buildings - because the ground
scale in SG is different from the miniature scale (remember 1" = 10m),
we
figure that a single multi story building is actually *buildings*, with
much more detail than is represented on the model (ruined staircases,
piles
of rubble, etc).  For ruined buildings, the terrain is rough (so you
lose
movement) and we play that if you close assault up a building, you use
your
normal movement, which is reduced anyway.  I've never played in
"undamaged"
buildings - they always seem to have been whacked with artillery preps
or
airstrikes or something (well, acually we don't model undamaged
buildings...)

For shooting over stuff - if you have line of sight, you have line of
sight.	If you don't, you don't.  Just agree ahead of time on the means
of
measuring line of sight (good players and common sense is, I think, the
best measure actually, but the string/laser methods are a good backup).

We try to build terrain on bases (say, thin hardboard  or sheet
plastic),
and the rule of thumb we use is that if you are on the base, you are in
the
terrain.  So if you are on a ruined building section, you count as being
"in ruins" and get a hard cover bonus - even if models have clear line
of
sight to you (this reduces arguments over whether or not a model has
cover
or not).  The only time we don't use this is when direct line of sight
is
blocked to a model not on a base - if you can't see him, you can't shoot
at
him.

My $0.02