Modern Grunt/High tech grunt

>>If you want to do modern conflicts, you have a bunch of stuff to add
or
>>change. Artillery accuracy is a biggie. For World War II, it's mostly 
>>handling
>
>Well, see, I don't know if that would neccesarily be a *good* thing....
>
>Sure, more accurate artillery would be more "realistic" (although it's
easy 
>enough to PSB accuracy away in an SF game), but devastatingly accurate 
>artillery strikes in SGII scale can just...suck..  Makes for a very
quick, 
>and generally quite boring, game when Death From Above wipes out one
side 
>on turn two.
>
>I generally avoid the use of artillery in my games, for much that
reason.  
>It's just not as much fun as a pitched firefight.  If it's going to be 
>used, I'd *prefer* for it to be relatively inaccurate, and as risky for
the 
>attacker as it is for the defender.  Increases the tension level, makes
the 
>game better.  For me, at least.

I too avoid much artillery in SGII, fopr pretty similar reasons... when
it 
hits it just seems to be too devastating for game-play.

BUT for the games I intend to play, that is relatively small skirmish 
conflicts between a desperate British infantry force trying to hold
Normandy 
against a Russian force, all the artillery conflict wil have been done.
The 
Russian doctrine in the 1980s was to pound the hell out of any target
with 
divisional level artillery before you got anywhere near them with the
main 
forces, which were intended to be entire divisions of tanks and motor 
rifles. So the actual engagements that I am intending to fight would not
be 
where important resources sush as artillery, air-cover or even the best 
troops woudl be ditrected, so I can justify all but ignoring artillery.

Really it's things like the command structures, rules for the support 
weapons (e.g. Milan), armour sugggestions, C3 (such as the british army
had 
no section radio at the time...) and so on. Technologically, I intended
to 
do nothing more complicated than make an AK47 FP3 and SLR FP1 but give
it an 
extra range-band.

We have had quite a lot of discussion about this on the SG FT
Yahoogroup. 
Including at last someone giving me a TOE for the Red army of the era.

>All that said, Ultra-Grunt would be the bee's knees.

OOOh high tech armies (Henlien's Mobile Infantry for one, Perhaps even 
soldiers from Iaan M Banks' Culture yeah I think we need soem rules for 
"FYT" suits!) slogging it out, that'd be cool. But maybe more in the
relm of 
FmaSK.

Richard

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