A swing at infantry house rules and an invitation for suggestions on same

[beachhead1985]

In RAW, medics are covered on pages 152-153 of TO:AUE, in case you want to compare. :)

Thank you!

[beachhead1985]

Beachhead, all of those rules I mentioned have been play-tested heavily as part of my internal rule-set. Though there are BattleTech-specific aspects insofar as the game engine is concerned, they should work since they simply leverage or repurpose existing rules. The key is minimizing the extra rules for players to reference or memorize.

The morale-adjacent "movement under fire" or "pinning" rules are a straight-addition...but they could just as easily work for every other unit-type, maybe with a less-stringent target.

Most of that is just stuff I added like more BT rules; as options. You don't need the rules of Melee weapons, if you never use them, for instance, or the rule for extreme environments, ect.

I'm a fan of morale as a factor in wargames.

[beachhead1985]

A couple of things I've seen skimming. (Sorry, it's late, I don't have the bandwidth to grok more at the moment.)

Squad Composition. If you have access to it, BattleTroops has some good info about what each trooper in a given platoon type might carry. Note it is written for FASA versions of Mechwarrior, specifically 1e, where lasers are better weapons than slugthrowers in all areas. (Until I understood this, current BT rifle damage frustrated me to no end. Now I know what to blame. )

I have access to BattleTroops, their organization was interesting and I like that it mixed weapon types more, but that was all I got out of it.

I don't mind lasers being better, or else why have them?

Mechanized Infantry. If the squad is to be the basis of infantry units. remove mechanized infantry from the game. The troop type exists to simulate infantry squads with APCs/IFVs mounting the 1 ton transport bays that CityTech's new platoons couldn't use after they got cargo tonnage equivalents in Battletech Companion (and possibly Battletech Manual). They are no longer needed as a separate unit type when foot infantry can mount APCs.

I admit that the Moto/Mech rules throw me for a loop too. I added the "Desant" infantry as a means to lay out how it should work, without the mess. But Moto/Mech are baked into the game now through a couple of dropships and other areas, so I have to address them somehow and I have a few ideas. They're going to be less grounded in reality than my other ideas though.

Infantry Rating. Automatically giving all infantry the same Gunnery and Anti-Mech skill ratings breaks a narrative tenet of the setting. Only some troops are crazy enough to get skilled at this tactic. But otherwise, other tasks are perfectly valid to cluster under a Gunnery/Infantry skill.

So you'd suggest having a default null (cannot attempt) skill that units with Anti-Mech training could improve alongside their general skill? I'm not against that, honestly; I never considered it. Rather that a unit either could make anti-mech attacks or not and that their skill at doing so would closely conform to their other capabilities.

Reduced hit chances with casualties. If the infantry are losing damage due to fewer shooters, it's really unnecessary to make shooting harder, too. 

It is unnecessary, but it makes sense if you consider the aspect of effective fire control in target engagement. It's compensated for by them being harder to hit.

100m hexes. No infantry is going to cover 100m in a 10 second BT turn. If you go to 100m hexes, all infantry will become move or fire and encumbered infantry (I didn't get what defines this) should have to declare movement then test to make it to the next hex.

100m hexes. These make things extremely fast unless you also propose increasing the duration of a turn.

Encumberment is tied to encumbering equipment; some weapons, armour or gear is listed as encumbering in the RAW and I like the idea. Turns them into move-or-shoot and they can't do Anti-Mech attacks. Gives you a good incentive against heavily equipped soldiers.

I propose eliminating the duration of the turn.

100m hexes are also breaking on basic unit movement, which is calculated based on the 6-10 second turn and the 30m hex. And makes turns longer breaks weapon reloads.

So I just take time out of the turn and make it an abstraction. A turn is just a turn.

What you get back in range brackets that make sense is worth it to me. If it doesn't work for you, just ignore that part.

Detachments. Too fiddly in the 10 second turn paradigm of BT, even before a shift to 100m hexes. Squads stay together.

Valuable where you only have a few infantry with special capabilities. Demo troops or spotters mainly, but special weapons too. I thought it up to take advantage of certain tactical options. You can leave encumbering weapons behind with their operators to provide fire support, while you do anti-mech attacks in another example.

[beachhead1985]

My 2 cents - I would make the basic infantry unit a person.  Equip every soldier and split them however you see fit, soldiers may move from unit to unit in the same hex on their activation.  Infantry initiative will be a big balance factor, so lets try Infantry receive a number of Initiative activations equal to soldiers/50 rounded up, each initiative activation the player may activate up to 50 soldiers activating them unit by unit.  If soldiers move between units both units must be activated during the same activation with restrictions on movement and actions (e.g. the soldiers changing unit still must adhere to their MP and actions), any unit that fails to do this loses their activation.  If you have used all your infantry activations, any un-activated infantry units lose their activation.

Every soldier has a carry rate of 3 combat equipment- maybe they could carry more with encumbrance rules.
Example Gear - obviously subject to play testing and just made up off the top of my head.
Auto Rifle - allows an attack at range 1,2,3  doing cluster damage at 0.5xauto rifles fired (e.g. cluster 5 firing 10 rifles) - always round down for infantry weapons, for cluster 1 attacks roll on the cluster 2 table and minus 1 from result
Laser rifle - allows an attack at range 2,4,6 doing cluster damage at 0.3xlaser rifles (e.g. cluster 3 firing 10 laser rifles)
SRM Launcher - 2 slots - fires SRMs - no ammo - crew 2 (loader/firer) (2 soldiers must spend their action to fire this weapon)
SRM - 1 ammo for SRM launcher
LMG - 2 slots, attack at range 1,2,3 doing cluster 1xweapons fired, cannot fire if the unit moved this turn. - weapons in the same range bracket can add fire together, e.g. LMG and Auto Rifle
FO Kit - (range finders etc. to act effectively as forward observer)
Entrenching Gear - allows up to 10 soldiers to "improve" their cover
Comms  - allows tactical coordination - e.g. spotting units in double blind
Medic Kit - substantially improves the chance to recover lost soldiers at the end of battle.
Jump Pack - grants the soldier 3 jump MP but increases bulk for bays/compartments by 20%
Assault Infantry Armour - when receiving anti infantry (burst) or AOE damage soldiers with body armour count as 1.5 casualties (round down)

Example 10 man SRM squad

Soldier 1 - Auto Rifle, SRM Launcher
Soldier 2 - Auto Rifle, SRM Launcher
Soldier 3-8 - Auto Rifle, 2 SRMs
Soldier 9 - Auto Rifle, FO kit, Entrenching Gear
Soldier 10 - Auto Rifle, Medic Kit, Comms

When a unit receives casualties roll 2d6, if you roll over the number of friendly infantry in the Hex the unit disperses and exits the battle
When a unit is only 1 soldier it may only move and hustle until it joins another unit, it may take no other actions
Up to 50 infantry may share a hex
Burst/AOE Casualties are removed from the hex rather than the unit, TN is against the easiest unit to hit
The infantry owner chooses which soldiers are lost.
Each soldier may move and take 1 action each turn (Hustle, Dig in, Fire weapon, Swarm attack, embark on vehicle, call in fire,  etc.)
Vehicles are purchased separately, for example a motorized platoon might consist of 30 soldiers and 30 wheeled transport seats which the infantry can embark/disembark from. 
Embarking on vehicles is an action - embarked infantry have numerous rules adjustments such as movement speed, receiving damage, firing, entering buildings and digging in.  This will vary based on what they embark on.

There'd be loads more details to cover but that's a bit of it.

That's impressive and inventive, but more granular than I want to get.

[paladin2019]

I don't mind lasers being better, or else why have them?

The point is, sometime after FASA closed, one of the new IP users changed them. They are not in all ways better now.

So you'd suggest having a default null (cannot attempt) skill that units with Anti-Mech training could improve alongside their general skill? I'm not against that, honestly; I never considered it. Rather that a unit either could make anti-mech attacks or not and that their skill at doing so would closely conform to their other capabilities.

An on/off qualifier works fine without requiring another skill. It just has to be clear that only AM infantry can use their infantry skill to do it.

It is unnecessary, but it makes sense if you consider the aspect of effective fire control in target engagement. It's compensated for by them being harder to hit.

So I just take time out of the turn and make it an abstraction. A turn is just a turn.

This is the problem with games like WH. It makes it extremely difficult to extrapolate things the rules don't cover. Diegetic stats we already have break down. When a mech or combat vehicle's real speed is listed in the TRO, a turn's duration can be easily extrapolated. If infantry move too fast then immersion breaks. If you want undefined time, range is undefined, too.

Valuable where you only have a few infantry with special capabilities. Demo troops or spotters mainly, but special weapons too. I thought it up to take advantage of certain tactical options. You can leave encumbering weapons behind with their operators to provide fire support, while you do anti-mech attacks in another example.

Except that that's not done. Squads don't split up like that. Fire teams don't operate more than 100m apart from the other one in their squad and they don't split off their primary weapon from it's security. What you want is separate "squads" with smaller numbers of personnel. But your system means to eliminate a hard standard on the duration of a turn so the time it takes to reorganize a squad to do <censored> might work.

[Failure16]

The Anti-'Mech skill has always been binomial check-box, going back to 1987's The Rules of Warfare (where it was claimed that "a ratio of Anti-"Mech platoon to twenty normal platoons is normal" [FASA 1626, p. 47]). I shall presume that has changed, then? If so, well, I am firmly with paladin in that it should not be a universal skill.

I have always viewed an AM attack as the platoon splitting up, with the support weapons providing a base of fire while the specially equipped riflemen go for the close assault. In game terms, they are operating within a hex-plus, but not all 28 troopers are firing grapnels and going for a ride in a literal sense.

Motorized troops make sense for me--albeit as squads and not platoons--but the present mech-inf rules break it for me, since we have rules for AFVs of all sizes*. There only needed to be rules for Mounted vice Dismounted (i.e. normal) fire and movement and the issue would have never occurred. We had the APCs since the start. 


*Let's be fair, here: BattleTech (okay, BattleDroids) was originally heavily influenced by Dougram, and they showed infantry aboard jeeps and motorcycles at times. And I have worked with scouts on dirt bikes, which saw their origination in the US military in the 1980s, so I get it, just not as entire platoons at once, but even then, it's not a dealbreaker. And sure, nowadays, "motorized" means mounted on trucks but fighting as light infantry; my own rules use "Mounted" as the descriptor for troopers on dirt bikes, ultralights, animals, etc., with an inability to use support (especially anti-armor) weapons while mounted.

[DevianID]

Yeah I'm with Failure.  The jeep squad from battledroids is the largest vehicle type id like to see for infantry before going to vehicle APC and dismounted troops.  The battledroids jeep is a fine stand in for the unorthodox troop squads like atv teams or even a toyota hilux.  The 40 ton mech infantry squads we have now are just silly levels of abstraction for a platoon.

[AlphaMirage]

I actually rather disagree I'd rather Mechanized Infantry or a similar abstraction replace the vehicle APCs and preferably all <=15 combat vehicles (that are not helicopters) including yes the Savannah Master (heresy I know). These would all be built as support vehicles instead. I do this because all of these lightweight vehicles are either 1: APC-adjacent, 2: Scouts (a role that can be fulfilled by motorized or mechanized troops) or 3: total cheese by being hyper-fast.

A Mechanized Squad and their light vehicles by contrast is about as tough or sometimes tougher, slower, and more balanced with other vehicles for its tech level. Infantry Heavy Weapons are capable of a decent punch at close range and if you use the field gun/my MLRS rules adequate for area denial while not being an OP gun trailer made of slabs of armor and gauss rifles/missiles with obscene ammo.

[Daryk]

I'm on the other side of that issue.  Mechanized Infantry is less consistent with the rest of the system, especially now that Small Support Vehicles exist.

[beachhead1985]

A lot of good points here regarding the moto/mech troops. Still not sure what I am going to do there.

One interesting point @Alphamirage is that I also consider the Savannah Master a kind of ultimate take on motorized/mechanized infantry.

Another thought I had was modelling them somewhat like Battle Armour in giving them armour and mobility, but a significant squish factor. One idea I had for the armour was a BAR-factor/armour value where the armour value is the average of the four main armour locations or even the base armour number divided by four for simplicity sake.

While they are a little weird, I think it is useful to abstract sub 5-ton vehicles, but still give them their other stats to reward players who want to use the rules to make their own.

At 5-tons though, I'd be handling those on ship with an infantry bay and house rule multiple small vehicles (<20tons) in vehicle bays and play them as separate vehicles on the board and just "Call" them a mechanized/motorized infantry unit.

***

I'll leave off on that point for the moment and address re-jigging the basic weapon stats...

So I have this spreadsheet...and I made it years before Shrapnel came out, but prior to that, it had all the infantry weapons I could find with all the stats side by side for contrast purposes. And...there appear to have been a number of abstractions. Such that it's hard to extrapolate what a given weapon's stats might be if converted and harder to find some consistency across the board.

I cannot, for instance say how a given weapon should perform under TW/TM-rules based exclusively on it's stats, even across multiple-versions of the roleplaying games.

Coupled to this are a few weapons that seem to have been statted-out to make the old even more-abstract infantry platoons make sense in context of the new system. IE/ why use anything but an autorifle? (With the attendant collorary speculation of just *what* an "autorifle" might be?)

Given as I plan to rationalize the support weapons in-line with their mech/BA-scale equivalents (An SRM launcher will do 2 damage per hit), this leaves me wondering where to start in terms of a benchmark for statting out these other weapons, given as I begin with the premise that many of these weapons have been wrongly-modeled.

[Daryk]

I took a swing a transport bays here: https://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php/topic,73980.0.html

And you really should take a look at the Shrapnel weapons.  They change the whole paradigm, especially the Sniper Rifles and Laser Rifles.

[idea weenie]

I was trying to figure out a way to actualize the law of sole ninja primacy as a rule...

In the law of sole ninja primacy when there is an army of ninjas: they die like flies, despite decades of training from birth, they are just mooks. But a small team of ninjas is a major threat and the sole survivor of a ninja clan or a lone assassin is practically invincible.

I wanted to try and figure out a rule for where the more troops you had in the hex, they harder they were to hit, but also harder to just *over-run*. As far as I got was the idea where at the point you had more than 50 dudesmen in one hex, you practically couldn't miss. All that survived of that was the split rate.

Um, is that supposed to be 'easier'?

For me the easy method would be AI weapons doing more AI damage if there are more people in a hex.  Lets you handle riots and combat with the same rule. (+1 AI damage per 10 people or fraction thereof, to make the math easy?  So 30 people = no benefit, 31-40 = +1 AI damage vs that hex, etc.)

Assuming a 3-meter wide lane, a 4-lane road, that is 12 meters wide, and 30 meters long for that part of the riot.  Assuming each rioter gets 1 square meter that is 360 people in the hex.  With a 30-person 'safe limit' that means every AI weapon will do +33 AI damage (360-30, divided by 10 to make .

That might be a bit much, maybe +1 AI damage up to doubling or tripling the original damage?  (So a weapon that does 2 pts AI damage would do 4-6 AI damage against that riot, but a 20-pt AI weapon will do 40-53 pts AI damage.  This bonus gets adjusted based on new total people persent.)

But if I was using the canon 30m hexes and not my 100m ones, I would have kept to the canon limit of 30.

As for the medics, in my mind, it's just one person with a special job. They don't even *have* to forgo a weapon. You just need to may more per platoon for it and source the skills if you are playing a really detailed merc game.

If the safe limit is 30 people per 30-meter hex, then a 100 meter hex will have a safe limit of ~333 people (100mwide/30mwide * 100mlong/30mlong * 30 people).

Medics might be set up to do zero damage during a fight, but they provide more rolls to recover troops after the fight.  Make the fancy rules for design and after combat, during combat you need to make it as easy as possible.

I took a swing a transport bays here: https://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php/topic,73980.0.html

And you really should take a look at the Shrapnel weapons.  They change the whole paradigm, especially the Sniper Rifles and Laser Rifles.

That is the 'fun' part.  Wish those Shrapnel weapons were noted as being for AI damage only, and not able to affect any other weapon ranges/damage/etc.  So if you have a Sniper rifle with a range of 20 hexes, it does not affect the range of the man-carried SRMs.

I'd like to make it where there is only one special weapon per squad, but you can put many squads together (i.e. two 'squads' of 4 people each are a listed as a pair of fire teams).  So one force might have a special weapon needing 3 people and make squads of 4 people each, but as soon as a squad has taken 2 casualties then the special weapon is out of action.  Another force might have that same special weapon needing 3 people and put them in a squad of 7 people.  That larger squad needs to take 5 casualties to take the special weapon out of action.  The force with the smaller squads can put 7 of those special weapon squads in a 21-person platoon giving them an impressive amount of firepower, while the force with the larger squads only gets 3 of those special weapons, but is more resistant to losing firepower.

For anti-Mech squads you'd also need to set up how many reloads are available for the anti-Mech weapons.  I.e. a 3-person squad with 1 man-portable SRM launcher would only have 2 people available to carry the reloads, giving a 21-person squad the ability to simulate an SRM-7 with 2 shots.  A 7-person squad with 1 man-portable SRM launcher and 6 people able to carry reloads could simulate an SRM-3 with 6 reloads.  You wouldn't track all the SRMs, just mark down how many SRM shots the platoon has.  For Satchel Charges you might say that all the offensive troopers have a satchel charge (except for medics, anti-infantry personnel, the platoon leaders, etc), so maybe the last five people don't have Satchel Charges.  So when doing an anti-Mech swarm attack you take the current platoon's strength, subtract 5, and that is how many troopers you roll on the Swarm attack table.

Similarly you could have a leadership squad that provides bonuses to other squads attached to it, or at least reduces their penalties (i.e. the platoon leader with various specialists is better able to organize the platoon, instead of each squad randomly selecting a nearby target).

[Daryk]

I converted the Shrapnel weapons to TW scale with the exact same procedure TPTB used for all the TM weapons.

[DevianID]

So what about the system that 'legions imperialis' uses.  In a nutshell, you track a platoon by moving a bunch of squads together at the same time.  Each squad, like in battle droids, doesnt track HP or anything, any clean hit on them drops 1 squad/base (but you get that bonus to be hit still for being a squad).  I would mount these squads on something like a penny, 2 to a hex, so a platoon organically is 'spread out', but when you go to fight or shoot or whatever you shoot the whole platoon together.

So clan infantry would be 5 bases of 5 troopers, taking up 5 hexes max or 3 hexes min.  You check range and LOS normally to a base of troopers.  If the troopers are in terrain, you give them a 4+ save.  This is instead of doubling the damage to troops out of terrain.  So if you have that example clan squad, with 2 troops in cover and 3 out, when you fire on the platoon and hit with 3 weapons, the 3 out of cover get mowed down.  The next time you shoot you have to shoot at troops in cover, taking the terrain penalty to hit as well, and hits would only remove a trooper in terrain on a roll of 4+, on a roll of 1,2,3 you hit the terrain, kinda like partial cover.

Mguns and other weapons that roll multiple d6, still roll multiple d6, but this is to check if they hit a troop in cover.  So an mgun rolls 2d6, and if either is a 4+ you hit that squad.  A flamer, supreme at rooting out infantry in cover, rolls 4d6, and gets a hit/removes a single base if any of the 4d6 is a 4+.  So flamers and mguns are still better then medium lasers and such for dealing with infantry, and still use the listed xd6 to keep rules continuity, but we get the simplicity of battle droids squad tracking.

Edit: As an aside, anti-mech, the skill used to attack vehicles in close assault, should probably be re-named "close assault" or CQB.  You would use CQB when making attacks at targets in the same hex as you, not just versus mechs and vehicles.  So that anti-tank field gun platoon with anti-mech skill 8, would hit on 8s if enemy infantry attacked them at point blank range, as they are unable to defend themselves compared to normal troops.  Likewise in a building, attacking floor to floor, would be CQB, or the anti-mech skill, as you blow holes in the building with charges rainbow 6 style, rappel down ropes, climb up remote access areas in the floor, ect.  We really should incorporate the 'piloting' skill of infantry more, as too often its a dump stat used to lower the troops BV by a silly amount.  In all the RPGs and such, infantry always need a hand-to-hand skill, as its usually the two sides comparing margin of success.  So if there was a separate CQB use outside of the very limiting anti-mech attacks, then the 'ninja' with a high CQB score would rightfully murder enemy troops in a building.  Also, its pretty easy to make the 'satchel' charges that enable leg attacks an explicit equipment (it is now, but its buryed in the construction rules) so that you can have a DCMS troop with rifle and sword still have a CQB/anti-mech skill, without them carrying satchel charges.

[Daryk]

1d6 hit/miss mechanics sound an awful like that other game... ::)

[DevianID]

Yeah, but I really wanted the xd6 that burst fire weapons use to have a value, without resorting to more damage tracking.  So since mguns roll 2d6 as an extra step already, its a way to use that part.  It also works well with how infantry weapons at .6+ damage have burst now, so we dont need yet another mechwarrior rewrite haha.  Im loathe to put in 'ignores cover' like they tried to do with flamers in tac ops.  The xd6 system emulates that just fine.

Edit: Since infantry are the only thing in the game that doesnt have a hit location, this d6 roll would probably be billed as a 'hit location table' for infantry.  Thus using the 'damage strikes cover' from existing partial cover would explain mechanically what is happening in battletech terms.

[Daryk]

But it also drops the damage down significantly...

[DevianID]

Well the baseline is 1 hit kills a squad.  So with a 4+ save, an average of 2 hits kill a squad.

That puts 1 "hit" at around 3-4 damage in TW stats, which when doubled for troops in the open is enough to wipe a squad.  A 7 avg TW damage machine gun versus infantry in cover would have a 75% chance to remove a squad with the 2d6 versus 4+ cover.  That is like rolling a 5 or less on a 2d6 mgun damage roll.  The math maps out pretty closely to current squad survivability values, as in both systems troops in cover take about half the damage of troops out of cover.

[beachhead1985]

I took a swing a transport bays here: https://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php/topic,73980.0.html

And you really should take a look at the Shrapnel weapons.  They change the whole paradigm, especially the Sniper Rifles and Laser Rifles.

That's a really interesting take on the vehicle bays and I like the idea of lighter bays for less function. I think the Excalibur was like that. But I want to avoid anything where I need to edit every canon dropship for their bays. Even when I think what you're arguing for makes sense (and I do).

I'd rather head-canon my way around the nonsense where I have to and it's so easy to model moto/mech troops as being moved in foot infantry bays and their vehicles in vehicle or cargo bays. Then it's just like the moto/mech bays are a very specialized thing and that's why they don't show up as much in the canon designs until recently.

Oh, I've seen Shrapnel. Valiant effort on the shotguns, in particular. I don't have the last few issues though and I have access to none of them right now. So I haven't updated the spreadsheet. Looking at it, it seems like I was working from someone else's original work as well, as they'd added stats for Star Wars blasters, which was novel. But everything seems consistent to the RAW.

[beachhead1985]

Um, is that supposed to be 'easier'?

Sure is. And I think I just figured out how.

Remember the infantry record sheet and how damage reduces based on casualties? And I hardly need to say more, do I?

Simple, basic infantry rules column for the number of troops in a hex. Fewer the troops, the higher the TH penalty. 1-50.

For me the easy method would be AI weapons doing more AI damage if there are more people in a hex.  Lets you handle riots and combat with the same rule. (+1 AI damage per 10 people or fraction thereof, to make the math easy?  So 30 people = no benefit, 31-40 = +1 AI damage vs that hex, etc.)

Assuming a 3-meter wide lane, a 4-lane road, that is 12 meters wide, and 30 meters long for that part of the riot.  Assuming each rioter gets 1 square meter that is 360 people in the hex.  With a 30-person 'safe limit' that means every AI weapon will do +33 AI damage (360-30, divided by 10 to make .

That might be a bit much, maybe +1 AI damage up to doubling or tripling the original damage?  (So a weapon that does 2 pts AI damage would do 4-6 AI damage against that riot, but a 20-pt AI weapon will do 40-53 pts AI damage.  This bonus gets adjusted based on new total people persent.)

If the safe limit is 30 people per 30-meter hex, then a 100 meter hex will have a safe limit of ~333 people (100mwide/30mwide * 100mlong/30mlong * 30 people).

Now that is a very interesting idea. Particularly if we stick to a basic sliding scale for additional D6s of damage/per people in the hex. But we're also sliding towards a mass murder simulator now with riots and I don't know if we need extra rules for that. I'll think about this more though.

Medics might be set up to do zero damage during a fight, but they provide more rolls to recover troops after the fight.  Make the fancy rules for design and after combat, during combat you need to make it as easy as possible.

I think I already said there is a lot I don't see happening during  game turns. I'm cool with medics working between games. We're not "That other game"---love that we all know who we're talking about. Yeah; no "Saved wounds" here.

That is the 'fun' part.  Wish those Shrapnel weapons were noted as being for AI damage only, and not able to affect any other weapon ranges/damage/etc.  So if you have a Sniper rifle with a range of 20 hexes, it does not affect the range of the man-carried SRMs.

If I get what you're talking about here, you mean that particular shade of weirdness where under RAW the support weapons dictate the range of the personal weapons? Sorry, I can't go there with you. That was immersion-breaking for me. I'm just happy they erratted that it worked with hand to hand weapons.

I'd like to make it where there is only one special weapon per squad, but you can put many squads together (i.e. two 'squads' of 4 people each are a listed as a pair of fire teams).  So one force might have a special weapon needing 3 people and make squads of 4 people each, but as soon as a squad has taken 2 casualties then the special weapon is out of action.  Another force might have that same special weapon needing 3 people and put them in a squad of 7 people.  That larger squad needs to take 5 casualties to take the special weapon out of action.  The force with the smaller squads can put 7 of those special weapon squads in a 21-person platoon giving them an impressive amount of firepower, while the force with the larger squads only gets 3 of those special weapons, but is more resistant to losing firepower.

For anti-Mech squads you'd also need to set up how many reloads are available for the anti-Mech weapons.  I.e. a 3-person squad with 1 man-portable SRM launcher would only have 2 people available to carry the reloads, giving a 21-person squad the ability to simulate an SRM-7 with 2 shots.  A 7-person squad with 1 man-portable SRM launcher and 6 people able to carry reloads could simulate an SRM-3 with 6 reloads.  You wouldn't track all the SRMs, just mark down how many SRM shots the platoon has.  For Satchel Charges you might say that all the offensive troopers have a satchel charge (except for medics, anti-infantry personnel, the platoon leaders, etc), so maybe the last five people don't have Satchel Charges.  So when doing an anti-Mech swarm attack you take the current platoon's strength, subtract 5, and that is how many troopers you roll on the Swarm attack table.

I'm not particularly worried about limiting it that way, because even with two-man teams for many support weapons, half your people still have small arms, as a minimum. It's only weird for me if you have some contrivance where there is an immobile support laser platoon where everyone is gunner for a laser and it just doesn't move. That's just an edge case it's easier to just say "You can't do that, it's too silly". Even fortress troops need ammo bearers.

Ah, okay. That makes a degree of sense of SRMs and similar, but how would I handle things like support lasers? Semi-Portable Autocannon? Grenade Launchers?

Satchel charges I got you covered on. They are "Disposables". Marked off as used, same as LAWs. And your odds are likely better spamming a target with LAWs than doing an AM attach anyways.

Similarly you could have a leadership squad that provides bonuses to other squads attached to it, or at least reduces their penalties (i.e. the platoon leader with various specialists is better able to organize the platoon, instead of each squad randomly selecting a nearby target).

Already assumed and built into the dispersal rules. I figure each platoon has a commander. The farther you are from them, or the more telephone-tag you have to play; the more difficulty you have coordinating and passing information. Even personal radios only have limited value if your visual reference is different enough.

[beachhead1985]

I converted the Shrapnel weapons to TW scale with the exact same procedure TPTB used for all the TM weapons.

Could you share that? Is it found somewhere? I'd love to see that.

I've already wondered if it was a mathematical process or more of a philosophical one.

[beachhead1985]

Edit: As an aside, anti-mech, the skill used to attack vehicles in close assault, should probably be re-named "close assault" or CQB.  You would use CQB when making attacks at targets in the same hex as you, not just versus mechs and vehicles.  So that anti-tank field gun platoon with anti-mech skill 8, would hit on 8s if enemy infantry attacked them at point blank range, as they are unable to defend themselves compared to normal troops.  Likewise in a building, attacking floor to floor, would be CQB, or the anti-mech skill, as you blow holes in the building with charges rainbow 6 style, rappel down ropes, climb up remote access areas in the floor, ect.  We really should incorporate the 'piloting' skill of infantry more, as too often its a dump stat used to lower the troops BV by a silly amount.  In all the RPGs and such, infantry always need a hand-to-hand skill, as its usually the two sides comparing margin of success.  So if there was a separate CQB use outside of the very limiting anti-mech attacks, then the 'ninja' with a high CQB score would rightfully murder enemy troops in a building.  Also, its pretty easy to make the 'satchel' charges that enable leg attacks an explicit equipment (it is now, but its buryed in the construction rules) so that you can have a DCMS troop with rifle and sword still have a CQB/anti-mech skill, without them carrying satchel charges.

This is a good point. Skill, or not; the anti-mech *capability* requires at least the explosives or what have you to get the job done...

Until they do a Gray Death Legion story where someone disables a mech with a big rock shoved in the knee joint...

[beachhead1985]

A few more ruminations on the "Auto-Rifle".

It does show up in a book once; carried by dropship crewmen in "By Blood Betrayed" IIRC.

And the Rock Rover has them as mounted weapons.

My own two cents tells me to go with the suggestive title of Dave Drake's eponymous "The Automatic Rifleman" for a clue: While automatic rifles are a vague concept, militarily speaking they aren't unknown; particularly in the American Military. So I think we're looking at something roughly analogous to a fully-automatic battle rifle. A rifle with some traits of a machinegun. Although going with the "Browning Automatic Rifle" was tempting.

So we can pull out a few assumptions there; while a "Battle Rifle" isn't necessarily an automatic weapon, an Autorifle probably is. Also likely meant to be full-calibre (not an intermediate round) and also controllable. You can find this in some versions of the G3 and FN FAL. And then there is the original CETME if you really want accurate full-auto from a full-bore rifle out to a few hundred meters.

The designer of the Rock Rover might have been looking for an effective LMG and found the superior AutoRifle and read it as something more akin to a SAW; a squad automatic rifle. But I think we can discount most of that if we want something more easily envisioned as a personal weapon for everyone.

My own head-canon has BT mech and vehicle armour as small, ablative scales that are individually weak, but can turn or blunt almost any kind of high-velocity penetrator like a DU rod or a HEAT/EFP effect in number and layers. The downside is that small-calibre weapons can smash single scales or plates, rather than bouncing off with no hard done. This gives you protection from today's one-shot kills, but allows us to imagine a setting where massed small arms fire can do small amounts of damage. But what it also does is gives us a preference to larger bullets, which explains some of the heavier guns and smaller magazines we see in MW. The TK is a cool gun, but it's the odd one out with the Imperator; an artifact of leftover 70s gun-tech that never went anywhere in real life.

The complicated part is that the gun itself exists as-stats to justify the old abstract rifle platoon. So the question then becomes; does *that* make sense as-written?

[Daryk]

Could you share that? Is it found somewhere? I'd love to see that.

I've already wondered if it was a mathematical process or more of a philosophical one.

It's all available in my sig block (I finally gave up and fixed all the links after the demise of "pretty links"), but here are the most relevant links to your request:
Shrapnel Issue #1 Sniper Rifles in TW
Shrapnel Issue #3 Pistols in TW
Shrapnel Issue #5 Sub-Machine Guns in TW
Shrapnel Issue #7 Combat Shotguns in TW
Shrapnel Issue #9 Laser Pistols in TW
Shrapnel Issue #9 Laser Rifles in TW

Where to get the various issues of Shrapnel:
Shrapnel Links on DriveThruRPG

A discussion on Small Arms Ammunition:
Small Arms Ammunition (getting from 2/3 to 4/4 damage)

And finally, a spreadsheet to help you with converting AToW weapons to TW scale:
Conversion Table for AToW Scale Weapons to TW Damage

[idea weenie]

Sure is. And I think I just figured out how.

Remember the infantry record sheet and how damage reduces based on casualties? And I hardly need to say more, do I?

Simple, basic infantry rules column for the number of troops in a hex. Fewer the troops, the higher the TH penalty. 1-50.

Sorry, I meant that your original quote here had the comment "I wanted to try and figure out a rule for where the more troops you had in the hex, they harder they were to hit,"

I figured you meant that the more troops there were in the hex the easier it would be to hit, and wanted to confirm.

Now that is a very interesting idea. Particularly if we stick to a basic sliding scale for additional D6s of damage/per people in the hex. But we're also sliding towards a mass murder simulator now with riots and I don't know if we need extra rules for that. I'll think about this more though.

To me it isn't really extra rules, just more damage if you have more people present in a hex.  You can design an 80-person platoon with eight 10-person squads, but you can also expect to take lots of casualties when those platoons are hit.  The limit of 30 is from existing rules, and the +1 per 10 is because I wanted easy math.

I think I already said there is a lot I don't see happening during  game turns. I'm cool with medics working between games. We're not "That other game"---love that we all know who we're talking about. Yeah; no "Saved wounds" here.

Ah, gotcha.  I wanted to make sure the option was open for multiple medics in a platoon, not just the one.

If I get what you're talking about here, you mean that particular shade of weirdness where under RAW the support weapons dictate the range of the personal weapons? Sorry, I can't go there with you. That was immersion-breaking for me. I'm just happy they erratted that it worked with hand to hand weapons.

I wanted it where weapons had their own range, so you can't grab a few long-range weapons and use those to boost the existing short-range high-damage weapons.

But it sounds like you already separated them, so that is good.

I'm not particularly worried about limiting it that way, because even with two-man teams for many support weapons, half your people still have small arms, as a minimum. It's only weird for me if you have some contrivance where there is an immobile support laser platoon where everyone is gunner for a laser and it just doesn't move. That's just an edge case it's easier to just say "You can't do that, it's too silly". Even fortress troops need ammo bearers.

Ah, okay. That makes a degree of sense of SRMs and similar, but how would I handle things like support lasers? Semi-Portable Autocannon? Grenade Launchers?

Satchel charges I got you covered on. They are "Disposables". Marked off as used, same as LAWs. And your odds are likely better spamming a target with LAWs than doing an AM attach anyways.

For support Weapon troops, they would likely be carrying a sidearm rather than an assault rifle.  So they have the special weapon they can fire at targets, but if they get flanked or run out of Support Weapon ammo then they would only be using Pistols/SMG vs the opposing troopers using Sniper Rifles and assault rifles.

For weapons too heavy for a single person to carry, you'd divide up the weapon into as few parts that people can carry, and use the extra mass available for extra ammunition.

I.e. imagine a Support laser that masses 26 kg.  The troopers can only carry 10 kg beyond their current loadout so the Support laser is split between 3 troopers.  3 Troopers can carry 30 kg total, so there is 4 kg remaining.  Those 4 remaining kg are used to carry the ammunition for the Support Laser.  If each shot of the Support Laser requires a 1 kg battery, then the Support Laser would look something like:
Support Laser + 4 shots:
3 troopers per squad to carry
Each extra trooper per squad allocated to carry ammo for the Support Laser provides +10 shots

So you could have a 3-person squad with a Support Laser that only has 4 shots, but adding a 4th trooper changes that to 14 shots.
So a 24-person squad with eight 3-person squads would be rolling on the '8' column of the Cluster table and have 4 volleys.
A 24-person squad with six 4-person squads would be rolling on the '6' column of the Cluster table and have 14 volleys.

Semi-portable Autocannon if it is too heavy for the troopers to move would almost be a light building with the autocannon installed in it.

Grenade Launchers would be the troopers each mounting a grenade launcher under their rifles and carrying a few extra grenades.  Each grenade does not do a lot to a Mech, but enough of them 'might' do some damage.  Or the grenades might get the Mechwarrior's attention.

[beachhead1985]

It's all available in my sig block (I finally gave up and fixed all the links after the demise of "pretty links"), but here are the most relevant links to your request:
Shrapnel Issue #1 Sniper Rifles in TW
Shrapnel Issue #3 Pistols in TW
Shrapnel Issue #5 Sub-Machine Guns in TW
Shrapnel Issue #7 Combat Shotguns in TW
Shrapnel Issue #9 Laser Pistols in TW
Shrapnel Issue #9 Laser Rifles in TW

Where to get the various issues of Shrapnel:
Shrapnel Links on DriveThruRPG

A discussion on Small Arms Ammunition:
Small Arms Ammunition (getting from 2/3 to 4/4 damage)

And finally, a spreadsheet to help you with converting AToW weapons to TW scale:
Conversion Table for AToW Scale Weapons to TW Damage

Wow, that's really impressive and helpful with the shrapnel weapons too.

I'm not quite sure whats going on in that table, I'll have to study it more to figure it out.

[beachhead1985]

Sorry, I meant that your original quote here had the comment "I wanted to try and figure out a rule for where the more troops you had in the hex, they harder they were to hit,"

I figured you meant that the more troops there were in the hex the easier it would be to hit, and wanted to confirm.

No; I definitely meant the opposite; fewer troops: harder to hit.

To me it isn't really extra rules, just more damage if you have more people present in a hex.  You can design an 80-person platoon with eight 10-person squads, but you can also expect to take lots of casualties when those platoons are hit.  The limit of 30 is from existing rules, and the +1 per 10 is because I wanted easy math.

I get where you're coming from, but I'm happier with the harder/easier to hit thing.

I wanted it where weapons had their own range, so you can't grab a few long-range weapons and use those to boost the existing short-range high-damage weapons.

But it sounds like you already separated them, so that is good.

Right there with you. I HATE that rule. I figure range and special capabilities should be enough to divide weapons. I want to do up a Kurita security platoon based on the mooks you encounter in Crescent Hawk's inception as an example. Random bullies, basically with whatever weapons they feel like hauling around to terrorize the locals with, so a real hodge-podge broken down into a few discrete attacks.

For support Weapon troops, they would likely be carrying a sidearm rather than an assault rifle.  So they have the special weapon they can fire at targets, but if they get flanked or run out of Support Weapon ammo then they would only be using Pistols/SMG vs the opposing troopers using Sniper Rifles and assault rifles.

Depends on so many factors. The Imperial Army of Japan used to have guys go literally unarmed as part of MG crews. I think it was like the gunner, who fired the gun and had nothing else: two assistant gunners with nothing, two more guys with rifles and an officer/NCO with a pistol and a sword.

Then there's the clag I used to run with who, if you had a GPMG, made SURE you---the GUNNER---were also carrying your assault rifle and possibly also an underbarrel grenade launcher.

A saner medium would be most modern armies, who give everyone in a weapons team an assault rifle or carbine.

For weapons too heavy for a single person to carry, you'd divide up the weapon into as few parts that people can carry, and use the extra mass available for extra ammunition.

I.e. imagine a Support laser that masses 26 kg.  The troopers can only carry 10 kg beyond their current loadout so the Support laser is split between 3 troopers.  3 Troopers can carry 30 kg total, so there is 4 kg remaining.  Those 4 remaining kg are used to carry the ammunition for the Support Laser.  If each shot of the Support Laser requires a 1 kg battery, then the Support Laser would look something like:
Support Laser + 4 shots:
3 troopers per squad to carry
Each extra trooper per squad allocated to carry ammo for the Support Laser provides +10 shots

So you could have a 3-person squad with a Support Laser that only has 4 shots, but adding a 4th trooper changes that to 14 shots.
So a 24-person squad with eight 3-person squads would be rolling on the '8' column of the Cluster table and have 4 volleys.
A 24-person squad with six 4-person squads would be rolling on the '6' column of the Cluster table and have 14 volleys.

Semi-portable Autocannon if it is too heavy for the troopers to move would almost be a light building with the autocannon installed in it.

I'm impressed you have a mechanic figured out for that, but I'd rather not be tracking basic loads for the guys along with everything else.

Grenade Launchers would be the troopers each mounting a grenade launcher under their rifles and carrying a few extra grenades.  Each grenade does not do a lot to a Mech, but enough of them 'might' do some damage.  Or the grenades might get the Mechwarrior's attention.

I dunno; UBGLs seem to add considerably to the firepower of the rifle in the TW stats.

[Daryk]

I've asked about underbarrel grenade launchers before... the answer was they straight add to damage, and don't decrease the range.  It sounds crazy, but that's what it is.

[Charistoph]

If I might present a few thoughts...

Motorized Infantry are more or less fine as they are.  They are in the fuzzy area where trying to justify making Support Vehicles work just really doesn't.  So it works for the abstraction of the game.  They could be a little faster, depending on type (and the MechInf types should be represented here), but I like what they represent as is.

It is the Mechanized Infantry that are a problem.  For all intents and purposes, as a name, MechInf should disappear as a unit type.  Mechanized Battle Armor is already a rule, so this is just confusing.  All what is currently MechInf should just be either Heavy Motorized Infantry or Armored Motorized Infantry, and be done with it from there.

I think the Squad question should answer the idea of the difficulty to be hit question.  I like the idea that a squad of ConvInf in a hex all alone should be harder to hit than a squad of Battle Armor.  The problem comes with Stacking and how that works when 2 or more Squads of the same Platoon are in the same Hex.  One needs to plan on 3-5 Squads (Clan format) to be in a Platoon's organization in the Hex, and have degredations based on that.  However, different groups have different sized Squads, so that needs to be taken in to account as well.  And since it's starting to get late, it's giving me a headache.  Hopefully that helps get some juices flowing.

[DevianID]

I agree with charistoph.  Mech infantry with 30 tons of 'vehicles' that are not 3 10 ton APCs, but instead some un named not purchasable vehicle need to go away.

As for a squad, well I still push for the +2 to hit a squad of infantry with no further option to get harder to hit/dig in, like in battledroids.  I think only 2 squads per 30 meter hex as a stack limit means we dont need a rule for crowds.  Im not sure we need rules for 10 squads of 10 soldiers in a single 30 meter hex... as thats not a real thing, right?  100 soldiers dont ever fight like that spartan shield wall rank and file any more, not sure we need to complicate rules to add this that amount to 'dont do this'.  Making a rule that allows you to put 100 people in a platoon in 1 hex just to nuke them a second later feels like rules bloat.

If you want to play a platoon, we have rules for protomechs that say 'activate all subunits as a single activation'.  Same should apply to a platoon.  A platoon of 4 rifle squads, an attached mortar squad, and a machine gun team, would just all activate at the same time, moving each squad as a little sub unit so as to not ruin initiative. 

Im a gameplay first person, and the big thing I prioritize is getting infantry into a playable place.  Currently a dozen infantry units of any size slow the game down, cost nothing, are just unfun to remove, and if the infantry are dealing damage its probably in a very unbalanced way, like an ambush or city fight where an expensive mech just gets demolished over a turn or 3 without having any input, in a very unfun exchange.