Infantry - meeting halfway between BMR and TW rules

[Calimehter]

As conventional infantry are typically spread out about any given hex they occupy, heavy Battletech-scale weapons should not be as effective against them as they are against 'hard targets' like vehicle and Mech armor.  The older pre-TW rules do not account for this at all.  The Total Warfare rules do . . . but (in our very humble and possibly unpopular opinion) the newer TW rules overcorrect the BMR situation and do not account for the ability to sweep streams of laser light or autocannon shells across a formation.  The pendulum may have swung too far in the other direction from the BMR rules set.

As a middle ground approach, we are considering adopting the following when it comes to damaging infantry:

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1.  Weapons fire against infantry deals 1d6 damage per hit, with the damage dealt 'capped' at the standard damage of the hit.

2.  Machine guns, Flamers, Plasma cannons, and direct-hit artillery strikes do 2d6 damage (uncapped).  Battle armor flamers/MG/APG, A-Pods, and mines do 1d6 damage (uncapped) per hit, as do artillery strikes that hit 1-hex away from the infantry.

3.  When damage from such hits is to be multiplied (for infantry in the open, special anti-infantry munitions, vacuum operations, etc.) roll extra dice instead of just multiplying the result of the initial damage roll.

[Daryk]

With all of the extant anti-personnel and area of effect weapons in the list, I don't see this as much of a problem requiring house rules.

[Calimehter]

True, I might be answering a question no one asked.  8)  If you like infantry where they are at, you won't need our rules.

With that said, the current rules set seems to assume that you have full access to more 'recent' tech like plasma cannons and/or have machines well set up to utilize specialty ammunition.  That is not always the case, and without that there are a fair few designs [and individual weapons systems] that were published before the current rules required all of their weapons damage to be focused on just 1 or 2 troopers, and as such will struggle much more with infantry than their flavor text, fictional history, and descriptions would otherwise indicate. 

[Daryk]

Good points... I'd only point out that AOE weapons were expanded for the 3025 era with Artillery Cannons.  For a mere 10 tons, you can have an AOE weapon that does 5 points of damage to everything in a hex (the Thumper Artillery Cannon, to be precise).  With 20 shots per ton of ammo, and only 5 heat, it's hard to resist.