Thanks for the quick replys! All solid advice. It's nice to see an active forum for this game as alot of the info I have been coming across was very dated and I worried it was completely dead.
I tried a few trial combats with some random NPCs and some rough PCs. A few ideas I have are as follows:
- I created an
encounter generator with excel. Only group encounters work at the moment. This uses all the stock tables from v2.2, and lets you generate a groups vehicles, support weapons, and numbers very quickly. Note you need macros enabled.
- Generate terrain. I'm currently using grid ruled chart paper, and making some simple contour lines, trees, and land cover. Similar to wargaming/last battle, anything that blocks line of sight (such as >20m of forest, elevation change, buildings, etc) disallows direct fire actions. Combat can then be played out on the chart paper similar to warhammer using a ruler for range determination.
- Spreading sub-units out. Basically what you said Olefin. With a group encounter including 4 sub-units of 6 for instance, each sub-unit is spread across the encounter area. Say for instance you are in open terrain and roll an encounter range of 8 (300x8=2400m). Your 4 groups of 6 would be spread across this 2400m area, so if the PCs make contact with a sub-unit, the others may be at further range or blocked from LoS. PCs can then divide and conquer or hit and run without taking fire from 24 units simultaneously. The NPC unit in contact may also try to communicate with their other sub-units who can then provide support or maneuver onto the PC group (allowing for some interesting hit/run tactics or ambushing). Another option is to leave some of the sub-units "off-map" and allow them to come in a later point in the battle, from a direction of GM choice.
- Something I'm seeing a lot of is novice NPCs being knocked out of battle very quickly. Novice NPCs have an initiative of 1, and according to P.194(v2.2)
"A character whose initiative level is reduced to 0 or lower may not act at all". Also P.211
"As soon as an NPC takes any hits in the first row, he or she is slightly wounded and suffers a -1 initiative penalty". This precludes them for further combat action. Am I interpreting this correctly? It seems reasonable that un-committed/rookie soldiers would panic/exaggerate in the face of any wound whatsoever. This also allows for post-battle roleplay treatment of enemy wounded/POWs, forcing the PCs into some interesting ethical scenarios (kill wounded enemy?
eat the wounded!? try to recruit him and have an NPC army? interrogate? Etc.)
I did buy the last battle PDF and read it over. While it does seem much simpler (especially for vehicle combat), I think it sacrifices too much in terms of detail. It could work with modification, but at that point you might as well just homebrew your own marker/miniature battle with grid paper. Time to hit the dollar store and pick up some plastic army men!
Anyways i'm just spitballing here. Please keep the ideas coming as, again, it's pretty intimidating facing my first RPG which I must also GM!