All fire is suppressive fire.

+Erik McGrath

With the old man nursing a pretty nasty broken leg we're getting back down to basics. Small games meant to test specific rules and copious arguing about edge cases and how to implement them.

A Sherman  using a stand of trees
to hide from enemy StGs.
There's one in both those visible ruins. 

We keep coming back to a couple things and after reworking them a dozen times I'm confident enough in the solution to talk about it in public.

Foremost among these repeat offenders are LOS, vehicles and what makes a model a legitimate target.

Observation and Engaging the Enemy

Before you can shoot the enemy you have to be able to see them. From the player's eye view of the models on the tabletop you can see everything and generally don't think about what the troops below would be able to see. Even in a second story like Herr Leutnant to the right its hard to pick things out and that doesn't even get into the fact that the tabletop is a relatively featureless, abstract representation of the battlefield.

Real terrain, even land we think of as flat, is rarely open and level unless its manmade. There are dips, rises, scattered shrubs and uneven grass. An infantryman lying prone is only about a foot tall in profile so it doesn't take much to get good lateral cover.

German lieutenant overseeing the battle

 from a second story ruin.

If you strain you can see the Sherman

above in the trees at the top right.

Rather than coming up with an ASL's worth of edge cases and specific rules the current iteration is to treat all fire as suppressive fire with three exceptions: ambush, close as
sault and sniper attacks.

An ambush for our purposes is a specific situation that has only occurred due to scenario set-up conditions. It must be executed by a unit deploying by pop-up deployment against a target that is not in a combat posture. This could be a unit walking down a road or on guard duty but not one that is simply moving in the open. Being out of cover is not required, guards are often behind sandbags or barriers but if they have not yet joined the battle they can be ambushed.

Snipers are basically conducting an ambush whenever they attack. The enemy is often aware of nearby enemy in this case but due to the sniper's preparations this criterion is waived. To conduct a sniper attack the shooter must be emplaced and in good-order. To choose a specific target they need to pass an observation test otherwise the reacting player may nominate any valid target for the attack. Fumbling an observation test doesn't negate the attack but it does downgrade the action back to a suppressive fire attack.

Eye-level view to show how hard

it is to actually see the enemy.

 Close assaults are the base case for a direct fire result since a close  firefight has a tendency to be both target rich and decisive. Once  entered the rest of the game stops until they are resolved.  Sometimes this means the two forces withdraw a short distance but  most of the time one side prevails and either kills or captures the  other completely. The rules don't actually force the second  outcome, its just that we don't order the boys to fix bayonets unless  we have greater numbers and superior position.

Armor

Armored vehicles present a challenge in any ruleset. The process of shooting at them is pretty easy since they are basically just structures that can move and shooting rolls can handle that with little work. The difficulty for me comes after the shot. What happens when you hit the target?

In BotG a 'hit' in most cases means a successful suppression attack. For infantry that's easy, you check morale and give out disruption counters to mark how effective the attack was. Mostly this means the enemy is going to be slowed down and their counter-fire will be weaker. On a high level this works just fine for AFVs as well but the devil is in the details.

For the poor, bloody infantry everything flying toward them on the battlefield is deadly. Cover is king, without it there is nothing but luck to keep your boys alive. Softskin vehicles are easy for this reason as well but since they are so much easier to hit than men they are actually much more vulnerable to enemy fire than infantry are.

Armored vehicles though are different. Most of the random projectiles on the battlefield can't harm them at all. Small arms and light mortars are no more than inconvenient to the vehicle but can still keep the crew buttoned up. Its the big guns that trip me up though.

The enemy has 3 StGIIIs.

This Sherman isn't rushing things.

In my wargaming experience what typically happens is that you separate out the act of hitting from damaging when dealing with AFVs. Most things hit about the same whether its a crewed gun, a tank or a bazooka team. After the hit you then need to compare the weapon to the target to see what happens. This can be simple or complex depending on how many factors are considered. Most at least consider the caliber of the weapon, location of the hit and the armor on that location.

My preference is to have One Rule to Rule Them All so as much as possible I want all shooting, regardless of attacker or target to use the same process. So that means I want to make a normal suppressive attack, then a suppressive results roll. If needed we then move on to a wound roll.

Naturally we've done just that and it is pretty satisfying for suppression results. Vehicles have crews so they can gain disruptions just like any other target. Its what happens with a direct hit and the frequency of those hits that is unsatisfying. Just using the suppression table ends up with very few actual hits and thus armor can just drive across the board. Since killing dug-in AT guns by overrunning them was not our preferred outcome there was a great deal of hemming and hawing about how to fix it.

In retrospect the answer is pretty obvious but it took weeks to get to it: treat anti-tank attacks like snipers. So if the attacking unit is emplaced and in good order it gets to make an observation test and then a direct attack if it succeeds. When choosing a target you use the parts of the tank rather than individual people as the choices. A successful observation roll means the attacker hits the desired part (ie whichever option is thinnest) and if failed the reacting player chooses the highest value option.

Cover plays heavily in this choice by limiting the options that can be hit and granting a bonus to the armor roll to avoid a kill. And using the sniper rule not only keeps the number of rules needed down, it answers the questions of when making this special attack is allowed. For AT guns the emplaced requirement is trivial since they can't attack at all unless they are deployed, for infantry AT weapons and vehicles it is a trade-off since they have to stop and emplace themselves which means not maneuvering for at least a turn and then staying put to keep counting as emplaced.

Then they have to be in good order which is easy in the early game but quickly gets harder and harder because the enemy is heavily incentivised to deny you clear shots at his vehicles. It also favors the defender in a scenario since they often don't need move their units so they can start in good positions and exploit them while the attacker's tanks have to move and accept the less effective shooting that comes with this.

Lastly, doing it this was also solved how to handle the rate of fire of a stationary versus a moving unit. Once a stopped shooter can act as a sniper a stationary attack is already much better than a moving one so there is no need to vary the number of attacks.

And that has to be my favorite thing in rules design: solving problems without addressing them directly.