Re: [GZG] Changing topics again (FoW) Was: Re: FT Light: 5 is the new 6?

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Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 11:48 AM, Allan Goodall
<agoodall@hyperbear.com>wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 5:55 AM, Indy <indy.kochte@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > So, I'd personally say *try* FoW at some point before writing it off
> > wholesale. You *might* be surprised. Or you may decide you were
right,
> > depending on the attitude you take to the game. <shrug> Again, YMMV,
but
> you
> > should at leave give a game system a fair shake before chucking it
away.
>
> This is off topic, but at least it's miniatures... but _how_
> ahistorical is FoW?

Welllllll, it allows for you to do US vs Soviet matchups if you really
want.
I personally don't. You can tailor your forces to be historical matches
with
relative ease. I tend to find the battles we play to give fairly good
results. We choose a time period, a theater, a battle or section of a
battle, and then choose a mission that best fits that battle and have at
it.
Many of the missions I think would be easily translatable to SG:AC when
that's been more fleshed out. :-)   I'm looking forward to putting a NAC
or
UNSC force on the table facing down a surly ESU or FSE company.

> My 9 year old wants to play a WW2 miniatures game.
> I've been looking for rules, focusing on tactical games because at his
> age it's easier for him to think of a tank shooting another tank
> rather than a tank platoon shooting another tank platoon. Yet the game
> we play the most is abstract and he doesn't have a problem with that,
> so I'm obviously worrying about something I don't need to worry about.
>

Probably. :-)  FoW does units fire at platoons type of combat resolve.
Thus
you could have a platoon of four tanks facing a couple of AT guns and a
few
tanks. You could designate X number of tanks from your platoon to engage
the
AT guns while the rest fire at the tanks. Which unit in a platoon gets
hit
is somewhat at the discretion of the defending player, given some rules
guidelines for this.

The one thing you, Allan, will probably like to ultimately have is
overwatch. I know that some groups have house-ruled overwatch into their
games. My group hasn't, and has been happy with how it all plays out
currently.

>
> I keep hearing FoW come up, which might be a next logical step. We'd
> be playing in 6mm, not 15mm.
>

Actually, I have recently started considering adding that scale to my
repetoire as well. :-)	Going through my random assortment of 6mm WWII
vehicles the other day, I'm not THAT far off for replicating some of the
armies I currently have in FoW, and can easily now field a Soviet
Tankovya
battalion if I'd like (I have seven Sov armored vehicles in FoW
currently -
three of them are "captured" T-34s for my 10.PzD)

>
> I'm interested in a game that's fast paced but not too terribly
> ahistorical. As a point of reference, we both enjoy playing Memoir
> '44. We have the entire set of supplements. (In fact, I started out
> being easy on him, but now if I'm easy on him I can't win! The last
> game we played I wasn't ruthless, but I wasn't easy on him either and
> he still won.)

A friend of mine was at Historicon this past weekend (actually a lot of
my
gaming group was; I was one of the few who didn't go). He mentioned
this:

"I also played a WWII skirmish game which was a lot of fun, with a
simple
set of rules, and another popular WWII 15mm game with a more complex set
of
rules than FoW. Funny thing is, the complexity did very little to change
the
outcome of the battle. Lots of order chits cluttering up the table and
cross
referencing charts to get the same results as if it had been done FoW
style,
except it took about 2x as long. While it was enjoyable, I'm with Les on
sticking w/FoW for 15mm WWII."

>
> It doesn't concern me if the game is too terribly popular. If there
> are miniatures gamers, other than GW (and those are few and far
> between) where we live we haven't found any. It will just be the two
> of us, and maybe a friend and his son from work.
>

While BF would *like* you to use their minis, they are *not* saying you
*have* to use their minis. They recognize that this imposes an unhealthy
restriction on the gaming population that a large subgroup would rail
against. They do ask, though, that if any photos of games are posted to
their forum, that the majority of the minis be BF minis (well, it *is*
their
forum, after all ;-) ). Otherwise, you can play with whatever minis
you'd
like. :-)

Mk