Quick and easy Battleforce questions - Units and distributing damage

[Cybertec]

Hello all.

Played some of the new Battleforce when the SO book came out, but now after a long period of not playing any mini games (And some accidents), I've forgotten how to play. Thus the questions.

1. A Unit in BF is four or more elements, right? As in one unit could be an IS Lance, or a Clan Star, or even a Company, A Battalion, Cluster/Trinary or any formation?

2. How does one assign and distribute a turn of damage against a large unit? Do attacks against a unit get divided equally against all elements in the unit? Or are all attacks directed to a single element in a unit, at a time?

3. Is there a limit to the amount of units allowed in a game session, as I assume a battle would have to be occurring between a somewhat equal number of balanced units?

4. in discussions of the two upcoming IO books, the terms BattleForce (BF) and Strategic BattleForce (SBF) have been used. Is an updated version of BF coming out, like the QS/Alpha Strike books came out, or are the BF & SBF just different terms for the same SO BF rules?

Any constructive clarifications are heartily welcome, and needless to say, any referrals to wait for the IO books for all the answers are not helpful.  :-)

Hoping to get back to my BT BF campaigns, and custom scenario battles! 
Signed, A recovering BT Grognard

[Atlas3060]

1. I believe the scale of unit is one lance/star/etc.
2. Elements within your Unit can pick which Mech/vee/whatever they are going to hit.

At least that's how I remember playing it.

[Xotl]

Strategic BattleForce will be regular BattleForce, placed in IntOps and scaled up one level of play.  So it will essentially play like BF in many (but not all) ways, but with bigger hexes and larger turns, and one miniature representing a company, binary, or trinary instead of one mini = a lance or star as it is in BF.  Hopefully it receives a public beta like the current ACS rules have, so people can grill it thoroughly.

For regular BF, the lack of a combat example is very regretful in a ruleset of that size, but Elements firing from within the Unit choose their targets, which are any enemy Elements within range.  So the mini is just an abstraction, as you can split fire all over it seems.  The combat phase section on p. 225 explains it all.

As with any ruleset, the limit is what you have time for and can stomach.  But you'll need to use the new PV values as seen on the MUL to have something approaching a balanced game.

[Welshman]

BattleForce and Alpah Strike as virtually identical save for two key differences.

1- AS is written for playing with terrain. It uses Inches for movement. To get BF movement just divide by 2

2- AS has 1 Unit is 1 Element. BF has 1 Unit is 1 Lance/ Star/ Level II

What Atlas and Xotl have said is very accurate.