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Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Representing Suppression

I'm still tinkering with my Suppression mechanic.  I've decided to modify the Suppression rules slightly:
Mortar firing. Wikipedia.



Any Unit which suffers a Wound must make a Suppression Test at the end of the Phase.  A Suppression Test is a form of Leadership Test.  Make the Leadership Test with the following modifiers:
•    The Leader may always test with a +1 bonus.  (Suppression is not as serious as a Break Test.)
•    If the Unit was Wounded by a Suppressive weapon, it suffers a -1 penalty for each level of Suppressive the Weapon has.  If the Unit was wounded by weapons with different Suppressive values, use the highest Suppressive value to determine this penalty
•    If the Unit was Wounded by Suppressive weapons from multiple Units in the same phase, it suffers a -1 penalty for each additional Unit whose Suppressive Weapon wounded them.

The last line used to read:


·         If the Unit was Wounded by multiple, different Suppressive weapons, it suffers a -1 penalty for each additional weapon that wounded them.

I decided this was undesirable.  Some Units will contain multiple Suppressive weapons, such as a tank armed with more than one machine gun or a mortar squad with multiple mortars.  It seems to me that the Suppressive effect of such weapons should lie in the rating of weapon's special characteristics, rather than the number employed.  None the less, I want to increase the Suppressive effect of firing on a unit from more than one direction or with multiple units.

The downside of this approach lies in the fact that a single large unit, with multiple Suppressive weapons will be less effective than several small Units with the same number and type of weapons.   There's some justification in this effect: increasing the volume of fire from a single direction(or Unit) is probably less Suppressive than an additional attack from another direction (Unit) on the target.

In an earlier stage of the game, I used a completely scalable system.  Suppression occurred if a unit took a number of Wounds equal to half its numbers.  Wounds from Suppressive weapons counted double (or triple, etc).  This was very similar to FoW's five-hit rule.  I abandoned this system, to tie Suppression more closely to Leadership, and to simplify the record-keeping involved.  (No need to count all those Wounds.)

In all matters of game design, however, there is a trade off, and I wonder now if the old system was better.

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