Re: [GZG] Small arms tech and troop quality

Hi Jon,

I come out of lurkerland to give some opinion (for once)...

> was that effective range probably does NOT alter between
> quality 
> levels as much as SGII depicts; the argument for this was
> that poorer 
> troops tend to open fire at longer ranges than they should
> do in an 
> attempt to prevent the enemy closing with them, even if
> they can't 
> really do anything effective at that sort of range. Better
> quality 
> troops have the fire discipline to wait until the enemy are
> close 
> enough that their fire can really be effective, so might
> actually 
> start firing at a CLOSER range than the poor ones.
> The outcome of the discussions was pretty much that for
> game purposes 
> we'd be better off using fixed range bands for all
> troops rather than 
> variable ones by quality level. The firers' quality
> would then be 
> taken into account in the weight of effective, directed
> firepower, 
> not at the range it was used.
> 
> However, this is not yet set in stone, and I'd welcome
> further 
> discussion and input here.....
> 

It is true that badly (or no) trained troops tend to fire sooner and
farther, and mostly at full auto, but that´s just usually a waste of
ammo. While a gun might have an effective range of a few hundred yards,
the real effectiveness is in hitting the target, not in the shooting
itself. Luck, of course, is a factor (as always), but a good shot at 200
yards is more effective than a hundred bad shots at 400... unless, of
course, one of those 100 actually hits.

Before I start ranting... my point is that IMHO and rulewise, you should
look at the effects of the shooting, not the number of actual shots that
would have been fired. The SGII rules does this very well, but it can
forget that "flight-of-the-intruder" lucky shot that was impossible, but
actually hits. 

In my (admitedly, very few) games, we tried to simulate this with
additional range bands for lower quality troops. They more or less would
equate their standard (shorter) bands with the elite-troops´ ones in
length, but they had an appalingly bad possibility of hitting
(additional d4 dice, taking the worst result). I must admit that it had
no real influence in the game, but at least the player with the better
troops was quite careful with the movement of his troops, even at long
range, "just in case".

It is just an idea, but if it helps... well, there it is.

(as for the simulation of the bad fire discipline of green troops, we
also used some borrowed rules from Heavy Gear tactical, adding another
"ammo roll"  after firing full auto repeteadly, which they did very
often... but had to discard them because the green troops with auto guns
ran out of ammo quite fast... which we thought was more realistic, but
turned into boring games).

My 2 cents.

David



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