What are your favorite wargaming rules for micro armor?

[Sudwind]

....my favorite is probably Command Decision. Each stand represents roughly a platoon of infantry, guns or tanks. The author and his crew play the game with 15mm and larger figures, but our group always found it looked better and had a lot less scale distortion when played with 285th scale figures. In the day, we ran Bulge and Market Garden campaigns using CD2 and CD3 and had a blast. I have yet to give CD4 a whirl. It seems to be more streamlined....so has good and bad points when compared to older versions of the rules.

These,days, my collection is much better, realistic terrain (love my Terrain Maker hexes) and a lot of mins....but our number of gamers is much smaller and our gaming time is more limited. Damn reality!

I also enjoy using Panzer Leader/Panzer Blitz/Arab Israeli Wars converted to minis on my hex terrain.

[bishnak]

Fistful of TOWs 3

[bishnak]

Fistful of TOWs 3

[BurtWolf]

Blitzkrieg Commander 2 and now version 3

Would like to know what people think is best game system for solo play?

Has anyone tried PBEM successfully?

[scopemaster]

Hi My favorite is still WRG armor infantry ww2 and modern also I really enjoy Tractics, does thia Age me

[madman]

Ha! Beat me to it. Tractics.

[Extra Crispy]

I play a wide variety of rules. For post WW2 I like Fistful of TOWs III. Fast and deadly but with enough depth to allow for adjustments in plans. For WW2 I use my "Flames of Awesomesauce" which is a Flames of War variant. Basically it uses their data and some mechanisms wed to my chaotic turn sequence.

I have not done PBEM but I have tried a concept I call "semi-solo." Basically it works like this: you set up a game. Lay out the general situation, take photos of the map. Get another gamer to play with you. You send him the info and he develops the plan for the other side. You execute the plan (playing against yourself).

At critical junctures you update your opponent and have him adjust/revise the plan. You have to be able to leave the game set up and allow time for your opponent to respond.

I did it once with distant players for BOTH sides. Definitely a new gaming experience.

[Cav Dog]

WRG works for me. Both modern and WWII.

[madman]

Well Tractics is what I started with and have played the most. I am just getting back into the hobby after a 25 year hiatus so am both overwhelmed and frustrated at the plethora of choices and difficulty of identifying what systems I would be interested in.

One of the games I was determined to get into when I started up again was Advanced Squad Leader (ASL). It was the scale I wanted to play WWII at, covered everything, I already have most every module for the areas that interest me and best of all was still very popular. So I set up a game with one of the local gurus (took a while to make contact) and a couple turns in realized why I never got into it seriously before. TOO MUCH EVERYTHING. Having to learn pretty much most of the game to start and the endless sequence of play... Blech! I seriously wanted an infantry heavy game so no issues there. Luckily I quickly found Awakening the Bear (AtB). Squad Leader light! Some great new insights on game design no page after page of charts and tables and I was hooked. Down side is limited areas covered. So now I am working on making terrain (always my downside tons of armour no buildings, hills or infantry). and stands of troops.

Tractics was never very good for moderns (too many unknowns and I didn't get the infantry rules, from any era) plus I was more into modern air combat than tanks truthfully. So fast forward and all my bleeding edge armour is old hat and cold war. Frankly I can't be bothered buying all the latest only to have it outdated next year etc. so I was looking at and started to unload my cold war stuff. Then I come across Hind and Seek. The Soviet involvement in Afghanistan. Caught my interest hard plus I can use most of my old Soviet stuff. Of course back to the build terrain, buildings and infantry... But I get to use my cool Hinds and Hips.

I have WRG but never liked a lot of it. Armour classes were too coarse and hated the command and control rules, or lack thereof. In truth (reread it months ago so this is how it made me feel not exact details) lots of it felt highly both detailed and unfinished in the same rules. I also have Challenger but did nothing with it. Haven't read it since way back when but IIRC it was just an update of WRG with most of the same faults. I had the old Enola Games modern rules (don't remember the name now, battlefield command or such) both books base game and expansion. I also have their same period modern naval rules and much like WRG were insanely detailed but then left out major effects or results of having or not having the resultant dice roll, weapon system switched on etc.. Not satisfying. My copy of the naval game has almost as many questions penciled into the edges of the game books as there are rules to question. I think the land game had a similar effect.

Just my $0.02 coming back 25 years later. I am open to suggestions but they are going to have to be pretty good to surpass what I have found and what I am looking for. I also don't care for tank games where a single figure represents say a platoon of armour. Play a board game if that is what you are trying to achieve, why use minis? Fight a platoon as a platoon don't call it a battalion. I have been seriously unimpressed with reports of games where the armour is lined up across the board side by side like some kind of traffic jam or Napoleonic battle. I am very happy playing a platoon or company. The forces maybe a combined unit with elements from various forces so as to allow infantry, armour, etc. to operate, but each is one whatever.

Frankly, although the imagination is impressive, this fetish for ORCs in space driving (bad) rejects from WWI tank parks draped in skulls and Romanesque regalia (probably only because using WWII era German iconography is against some law somewhere) is a big put off. It was just starting "back in the day" with fantasy figures and it was off putting then. I like fantasy gaming and WWI but this initially started by GW and now others is crap.

On a lighter note I am intrigued by the larger scales, using 15 mm where micro armour was used before and the same for 25/28s where we once used 15s. I still prefer micro armour but have to say these older tireder eyes do find the larger figures easier to see on a table...

[whoa Mohamed]

Able archer is good

[Sudwind]

I also don't care for tank games where a single figure represents say a platoon of armour. Play a board game if that is what you are trying to achieve, why use minis

Nah....I think I will do it my way.

A stand with minis on it representing a platoon looks far better than a counter and using Command Decision, it fights like a platoon. Visualizing the action using 3D terrain and troops is better from a learning standpoint, as well as more aesthetically pleasing.

Trying to game battles involving battalions in 1:1 scale is just very difficult to do....time consuming and unwieldy. I enjoy grand tactical scope, so gaming with company sized and smaller forces often bores the hell out of me.

Different strokes
http://modernwarsinminiature.blogspot.c ... odern.html

[STS]

Maybe not my all-time favorite but the one I currently play the most and one that's easy to teach to new players are the Flames of War rules. A few years ago I switched from Battlefront 15 mm to GHQ 6 mm (easier to store, cheaper, faster to paint, more "epic" and realistic feel - looks less like a parking lot).

Especially the new Team Yankee rules seem to work much better with 6 mm visually than 15 mm for which it's intended.

[pmskaar]

I like the Mein Panzer rules from ODGW. These are for World War II gaming and each vehicle model represents a single vehicle and each infantry stand represents a squad or a team in some cases.

In this game, you usually run a company sized element but if you have several players or don't mind the extra workload you can do a battalion plus per side. The game is impulse driven with each side conducting several alternating impulses each turn.
The game does not get into some of the smaller details such as turret facing and exactly where the round hits the tank but I think it gives decent results.

I also have enjoyed FFOT3 but have not actually run a game of this myself. I plan to do this for the modern period and maybe WWII as well. It seems to play pretty quickly and gives decent results as well.

I have also played the original Jagdpanzer rules in the past. It has been a long time since I have used these.

Pete

[John Secker]

Depends on the level I want to play at. I'm enjoying FFT3, but I also enjoy IABSM, especially solo, where the card-driven mechanism works well. At a much higher level I really enjoy Panzer Korps, for brigade or division level battles. 6mm was made for this.

[Mk 1]

I'm with Pete. I like Mein Panzer. A lot.

And like madman I greatly prefer 1 model = 1 tank unit scale, with 1 stand = 1 squad infantry. I don't begrudge others their preferences, but if I'm going to put a model and the table and then say that model does NOT represent in the game what I see in front of me on the table, then it just disconnects my imagination like flipping a switch off. I'm just as happy playing with cardboard cut-outs or tokens or whatever. If I were to go to 1=platoon unit scale, I would probably also drop to 3mm or 2mm model scales (WHAT!?! HERESY!!!) so I could put a platoon of models on a base and see them among the 1/600 or 1/1000 terrain features. And after 40+ years of collecting 1/285th stuff I'm just not very likely to do that.

I've played WRG, both original and updated. Started with WRG in original form. I began to get disenchanted with the over-simplified armor rules. "Oh I'm sorry, your tanks are rubbish, didn't you know that the Russians never damaged a German tank" gets old pretty quick.

I tried for years to make the Challenger series work for moderns ... I have maybe 5 or is it 6 booklets in the series. Never got a good game out of 'em. The problem was not so much in the details (too much -- yeah probably, but...) as it was in the rules mechanisms, which were to just add another die role, with another table (or 3), for every issue. IIRC by the 4th update it took something like 11 die roles to work through a single ATGM shot. So my games would have about 4 or 5 turns of maneuvering, and then after the first or second turn of shooting everyone was done and wanted to pick up and go home.

I tried the Enola games books, both for WW2 and moderns. Tried Tank Charts (back when it was sold as a product of GHQ). None of them satisfied me.

It was after this that I came back to WRG (the updated version). I tried, I really tried, to make those rules work. Sure, Gurkhas are different from other Indian troops, Maoris are different from other Anzacs, both can be distinguished from South Africans, who are different than Canadians, who differ from Highlanders, who differ from Yeomanry ... but ALL US Army Infantry are green, period. Right. But the problem of un-nuanced armor persisted, and the one stand = fire-team basing also began to get me down. A Russian tank company was 10 models. A battalion was 21 tanks. But a company of infantry was 39 stands. 39 different elements to move, to measure, to shoot with. So if I wanted to do some combined arms gaming, the tanks could have at for a while, then we got one turn of infantry combat, and everyone was done and wanted to go home.

I ran with Mobius' Panzer War rules for a few years. I love the detail. Really superb. But alas it was just not possible to run games of the scale I wanted (combined arms battles with a battalion or more per side).

I picked up Troy Ritter's SchwereKompanie, but never even got it onto a game board when it became clear it did not handle multiple players per side well.

If you like WRG and want something in that style that doesn't have quite such a British-centric view of WW2, then I suggest looking at JagdPanzer 2nd Edition. They play about as well as WRG. You don't have all the various modes and stances, which might take out a bit of the flavor from infantry, but the firing sequence is a more nuanced, improving the vehicle combat. My one observation/criticism after playing several games (I was part of the Beta testing for the 2nd Edition) is that the kill mechanism seems a bit too linear ... after a bit of extra penetration potential vs. armor I kind of expect an accelerating kill potential -- I'm OK when a hit from an 88 has only a 10% chance of a kill against a JS-2 and a 20% chance of kill against a KV-1, but I start to wonder when it gets only a 30% chance of kill against a T-34. Having the majority of 88 hits bouncing off of T-34s just doesn't feel right to me.

After all is said and done, Mein Panzer is my clear preference. It plays so well at the level of a re-enforced company per player, and adding players scales so gracefully. The turn mechanism keeps all players involved on every impulse -- there is no 45 minutes of boredom for one side while the other side measures and moves all their pieces. It has more detail and more nuance in the guns-vs-armor than WRG, giving some distinctions between various sub-models of tanks and types of ammunition, and allowing mobility kills or turret kills, not just all-or-nothing tanks. It mixes infantry, AT guns, artillery and engineering in with the tanks better than any other rules I have played, allowing for really interesting scenarios that are still highly playable. It is the first issue, and this last issue -- the ability to do multi-payer games with a battalion or more of truly combined arms forces per side, that drives my enthusiasm for these rules.

That's my take, at least. Your mileage may vary.

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)