FoGN v2 Firing out of Buildings

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richafricanus
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Re: FoGN v2 Firing out of Buildings

Post by richafricanus »

Ha! Ha! Just a little irony in there Shadow...? :wink:

What it does fix is simplifying the rules. The reason I picked it up was that only yesterday I had a fairly exerienced FOG N player ask me, "Remind me what the purpose of heavy artillery attachments is again?" And in all my playing of FOG N, I think I've seen someone use them once. So just as we've removed things like mortars and rockets, this could be another rarity to be safely removed without any pain. And while I've never used them myself, I've always thought how annoying it would be to have this 40mm base sticking out from my nice even 30mm bases :lol:
shadowdragon
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Re: FoGN v2 Firing out of Buildings

Post by shadowdragon »

richafricanus wrote:Ha! Ha! Just a little irony in there Shadow...? :wink:

What it does fix is simplifying the rules. The reason I picked it up was that only yesterday I had a fairly exerienced FOG N player ask me, "Remind me what the purpose of heavy artillery attachments is again?" And in all my playing of FOG N, I think I've seen someone use them once. So just as we've removed things like mortars and rockets, this could be another rarity to be safely removed without any pain. And while I've never used them myself, I've always thought how annoying it would be to have this 40mm base sticking out from my nice even 30mm bases :lol:
I too had forgotten about the difference for heavy / howitzer attachments. The 40mm vs 30mm deep bases was why I preferred howitzer...which I believed were 'medium' artillery, although I could never find an explicit reference that said one way or another. I did ask once on the forum but never got a response. Oh well.

As for simplifying the rules....remember "as simple as possible but no simpler". :wink:

Here "no simpler" means without surrendering an adequate representation. So, thinking over some key points about fighting in buildings / towns (it helps that I'm reading Thunder on the Danube at the moment) and what that means for the rules:

1) More infantry doesn't seem to matter as much as leadership and the management of reserve. So, 4 dice per infantry unit whether large or small seems okay. Large units should have the benefit of more reserves but they get the ignore 1 hit benefit.
2) The broken up nature of buildings / towns means an inability to coordinate large bodies of troops - so, the FoGN v1 method of a defender getting to fight / fire at each opponents seems to produce that effect.
3) Unreformed defending infantry don't seem to suffer in comparison to their reformed counterparts. Perhaps that's because combat in this environment often seems to be small group engagements (maybe a company or less) and we can't preclude such small groups of unreformed infantry making a sortie from the defended town to disrupt attackers. In any event, the zone of control argument convinces me that the range should be up to medium. Historically, whether or not there was effective fire up to that range control of the villages did seem to exert a type of 'zone of control' that influenced operations. The conclusion for me is that both reformed and unreformed defenders should be able to fire out to medium range.
4) Historically bringing up artillery to support the infantry does seem to make a substantial difference - even where it's not the corps artillery reserve. Since the proposed revised rules will only allow artillery units in one division which is meant to represent the corps reserve artillery park, that means in many cases the artillery in question will be attached artillery. I could see that extra dice are allowed for artillery attachments and for large artillery units. Here historically more artillery does seem to make a difference. If we go with 4 dice per unit that means that the only representation of the influence of artillery will be if the corps reserve artillery is committed to capturing or defending a particular town.
5) For artillery firing into buildings, canister isn't that effective, so it's reasonable that artillery has fewer dice than normal at medium / close range. Perhaps it doesn't seem reasonable that large artillery units are no more effective than small ones or that medium is as effective at heavy artillery at medium / close range. Options could be to have the proposed 4 dice for all artillery units, an extra dice for large units; or use the long range number of dice (3 to 5 dice).
6) Howitzers did seem to make a difference so getting rid of howitzers will lose that difference but perhaps this is something that could be taken into account in a scenario specific rule. Probably not important for competition games.
7) The influence of cavalry....haven't really thought about it, but I would think that cavalry units or attached cavalry would be able to suppress sortieing infantry defenders or attacking skirmishers.

I think those sum up the major deviations from the basic 4 dice.

So, yes, a 4 dice for each unit is simple but the question is does it lose some of the flavour? And does that loss matter?
richafricanus
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Re: FoGN v2 Firing out of Buildings

Post by richafricanus »

Fair point on the role of artillery vs buildings. I suppose though in simplifying everything to 4 dice we are in effect making long range medium guns 1 dice more effective than v1 and small infantry units at medium range 1 dice more effective than v1 so are maybe doing enough to average it out (while admittedly not rewarding artillery attachments)?
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