[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by tsofian

I disagree with a lot of this. First to say that MARS teams receive a relative minimum of combat training seems to be contraindicated by the canon description, their equipment load outs and their Acronym. They are a combat asset. They should be recruited from the best available resources and given as much additional training as possible. Otherwise all the fancy tools they get up to and including the MARS 1 are just a waste of valuable resources. I don't think I need to specifically state this because it is stated in canon

"The personnel of the Project are well trained, but they are not all combat verterans..." (This indicates that a portion of them were)

3rd edition Introduction

"The warriors of the Morrow Project. MARS stands for Mobile Assault, Rescue and Strike forces. The members of these teams are equipped with heavy weapons and the knowledge of how to use them"

"Many of the members of Mars Teams are veterans"

3rd edition page 11

I'm not certain how much more clearly this canon statement can be. It doesn't specifically say that the "veterans" were SF or other Sof troops but since the Project sought out the most capable individuals they could find it stands to reason that they would have looked for the best "warriors" they could find.

You state that canon says SF vs MP will lead to MP being handed their ass. Canon is only so good. It gave us things like the MARS 1 and the even more loathed Science Rover. It also has blue undead. The original designers saddled the project with almost a dozen calibers of ammunition and gave Recon teams vehicles that aren't amphibious, the design team was not infallible. Yes I quote canon above and like everyone else will pick and choose what parts of it I use and what parts I don't.

That being said is it, the players need to be extremely careful about getting into any combat. Getting shot in the original rules was likely to kill a character. Depending upon how a PD runs the game (and again YMMV) civilization can't really be rebuilt by the gun alone. I haven't looked at Ruins of Chicago in a long time, but even if the MP should, through some huge fluke, beat the SF guys can they succeed in their mission?

To add to what others have already noted:

MARS describes the mission profile of an entire branch, it does not imply that every MARS team is capable of every single possible MARS mission.

The statements given in canon are broadly interpretable. "Assault" and "Strike" are roles regularly assigned to line infantry, "Rescue" is, as has been noted, a SWAT role. The fact that there are top-tier military units performing these roles as well does not mean that the Project is at that level. "Well trained" does not indicate for which parts of their mission this applies, nor does it give us any comparison to know how "well" they really ARE trained. I don't have the book with me this weekend, but if I recall correctly the base combat skill numbers for MARS are only about twice as good as the abysmal scores acceptable for Science teams - that doesn't seem that "well".

You focus on what the Project teams SHOULD be, but that is an unrealistic standard. Every US infantryman SHOULD be as proficient as a Delta commando, but realistically we can only get so many men of that caliber and can only spend so much time and money on their training... just like the Project. The Project has very strict recruiting standards (psych profile, willingness/ability to abandon all family and friends, the willingness to abandon the US to destruction and rebuild something presumably at least a little different in its place, etc) and even if they hit up every SOF operator they would probably only get a small number of takers, so I suspect that line MARS teams will probably not have anything more elite than line infantry.

You also note (correctly) that even in MARS units not everyone is a veteran - whatever the standard may be, the Project must be able to train civilians up from scratch to that standard or else send teams into the field with weak sisters. I don't think the latter generally works and the former requires that the Project have a military training organization that (a) hits a particular standard (SOF for you, perhaps AIT or so for me) and (b) can sustain it without tipping anyone off for the entire recruiting phase of the Project. The latter alone is daunting even for the AIT level, I am not sure how the Project could do it for SF.

FWIW, I always assumed a tiered system (as with everything in my Project-Region-District-Group scheme) where MARS units down at the Group level would be tasked with dealing with small scale disturbances - bandits, mostly. Larger or more difficult opponents would involve retreat or holding actions while waiting for the progressively better recruited/trained teams assigned at the higher levels to show up. So if Phoenix represents the top capability of SOF in the Project, then perhaps the Regional commands have a few teams with SEALS and Green Berets and the District teams have some Rangers, EOD techs, and Force Recon Marines. But you cannot maintain that skill level across the entirety of MARS.

And I (and I think others) have been assuming that the players in this scenario represented a low-level MARS team, not "the very best of the Project". The very best of the Project is Phoenix, and they (or some reasonable facsimile of them) should be able to outdo an SF team if they really wanted to - I suspect they too would prefer to work with them rather than against them.

One last thing to consider is that most of this discussion has focused on the classic war-game scenario - Red forces entering the board from the left while Blue forces are entering from the right, find the enemy and engage. The reality here is that the SF team is established, and if they are at all competent in their jobs it means that they know the lay of the land and have recruited and trained allied forces. The Project team would probably never see more than a couple of the Green Berets at a time, they would be facing larger numbers of "indigenous" troops with the soldiers in command/advisory roles. This just makes things worse for the team, despite their edge in equipment.