Sample ground combat rules

[BroAdso]

Hello, all.

I like the current VBAM 2e ground combat rules - they do their job well, and the focus of the game is space battles, not planetary ones.

However, I felt like monkeying around a little bit and came up with this system for making planetary combat a little more complex without quite bringing it to the level of space combat.

A summary:

1.Units are organized into armies. Each army chooses one enemy army to attack. The units in an army can then each individually choose a unit in the army their army has attacked to engage.

2. Ground units are now subdivided into Air, Special, and Infantry. Their Construction Points available are adjusted slightly, with Air units getting one less than a normal VBAM ground unit of the same size, and Infantry units getting one more than a normal VBAM ground unit of the same size.

3. When engaging, all the Air units in an army choose and engage a unit in the enemy army first, followed by Special units, followed by Infantry.

4. When one unit engages another unit of the same type (Air unit engaging Air unit, Infantry engaging Infantry, etc) combat follows normal VBAM rules. Asymmetric engagements - Air attacking Infantry or Special for example - allows the engaging unit to deal half its ATK in damage automatically.

5. There are some new Special Qualities available to make these kinds of asymmetric engagements more productive or more dangerous.

The rules are attached. They do a good job, I think, of avoiding trying to port all of space combat over (there are no equivalents of Scouts, Disruptors, Formations, Readiness, etc etc) but still letting players think about things like air superiority, heavy armor, and so on. I'll try to type up an example combat under these rules today and get it up Saturday.

SampleCombatRules.pdf

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[aelius]

I like these rules.
They give you decisions that actually mean something to make during construction and and also assembling forces for an operation. But its only enough to to make things interesting, not enough to seem like a while new level of game tacked on.