While we are between games in our campaign I thought it would be interesting to share some of the house rules we have been playing with for this year. I feel like these rules capture the feel of some mechanics and units more so than the official book rules. Of course, all of our games are non-competitive and we are very much playing for the enjoyment of the game and not to win so maybe these rules unbalance some units and make them not suitable for competitive play but who knows! I doubt I'd play competitively at all in the future anyway!
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| Sergeant Malarky orders his men up the street supported by the templateless fire of a Sherman's main gun. |
To speed up the game we have removed all templates from our game. Instead, HE weapons do DX hits as defined in the rulebook for shooting at units in houses. I always though the templates were lame and sometimes its not exactly clear how many models you can get under them, it also gets rid of the weird scenario where a unit out of cover can take less hits than a unit in a fortified position. So far everything seems balanced enough and I don't see us going to templates for any reason!
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| The fortified German line comes under the HE-1" fire of a US bazooka team. |
While reading Arnhem: The battle for the bridges 1944 by Antony Beevor I was inspired by descriptions of both British Airborne and the Germans infantry firing these weapons at each other while fighting in the battles of Operation Market Garden. To represent this we have a house rule that if any of these shaped charge weapons fire at a vehicle its business as usual, however, if they choose to fire at artillery/infantry then treat the weapon as a HE-1". Makes those bazooka teams useful when there's no more armor to hunt and same with those left over panzerfausts in the final turns of the game.
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| The while the light machine gun team are safe from exception damage, Unteroffizier Fischer is fair game! |
Rule 3: Exceptional damage can't kill specific weapons only the squad leader.
I always thought this rule was really lame and didn't really make sense that a single guy dying can wipe out a whole machine gun team but not an artillery team. I don't feel like there is a satisfying explanation for why the other crew members couldn't man the weapon. This change makes weapon crews more resilient and also makes it harder to remove LMGs from squads thereby buffing them a bit (I think they are crazy over-costed anyway). It also makes snipers a bit weaker so we have changed them as explained below.
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| The German Sniper team prepare to inflict D3 pins on the troops moving up the street. |
Rule 4: A hit from a snipers 'scoped' shot does D3 pins.
Since we nerfed the exceptional damage rule we have given snipers D3 pins on a hit instead of the usual 1. This helps keep snipers relevant and I feel like it really captures the whole "keep your heads down there's a sniper out there somewhere", like the scene where Vin Diesel dies in Saving Private Ryan. So far it has played out really nicely and sticking 3 pins on a squad from the sniper team can be brutal and also cinematic.
As we are still very new to the game there have been a lot of rules which we have never played with yet but I'm sure they will come up and we will change them too (e.g: Transports auto-die if they are closer to an enemy than a friendly unit?!). We will be using air strikes in our next battle and I've read online the rules for those are abysmal so maybe we can see how we will change them after they play out.
Signing off,
Chewie
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