RE: War of the Worlds in DS2

> I'm not quite sure how one reconciles forcefields into DS2 
> without forcing a pretty much complete rebalancing of the 
> system, regardless of how strong or weak they are.  

I was originally not in favor of a point value for shielding, but John
talked me into it for completeness sake.  As it stands I'm looking for
more
of the right feel than anything else, and I can guarantee that the point
values will change, probably drastically, by the time it's fully tested.

What DS2 does not represent well is any kind of ablative or degrading
system.  Even an OGRE (in DS@) follows the ping/ping/ping/boom paradigm
of
waiting for a lucky hit rather than gradually degrading its
effectiveness.

So, I gave the Martians some level of shielding that would allow them to
degrade gracefully and be a match for the human forces.

In the first game the Martian player had 2 fliers and six tripods (each
with
an infantry element) each of which as an individual unit.  The Humans
had 17
Shermans, 5 Chaffees and an assortment of infanty and artillery.

The humans were badly outmatched, but with some tweaking of the
shielding
(lowering it to the values you see now) and adding a few more tanks and
some
ad-hoc anti-armor capability for the infantry I think we'll have a good
balance.

As for the faithfullness to the books, either in theme or philosophy, I
haven't read the book or watched the movie for years.  This is intended
really to be a fun, beer and pretzels style game, though a working and
(hopefully) interesting WW2 mod will be a nice side effect.

Tom