In a galaxy far, far away, in the four thousand and lebenty-lebenth Year of the Imperium, Fred Haub and I landed our Empire government forces on the planet Hoth. It was summer on the planet Hoth… the temperature was all the way up to minus 55 degrees centigrade… and our mission was to destroy the power generators. Defending Hoth and the Hothites? Hothians? Hothists?, was Bob Hurst. This scenario was generated by Bob to display his newly acquired Star Wars figures. A month or so before, Bob left Texas and came east to visit for a couple of weeks. He discovered that the local TOYS R US outlets were having a huge closeout sale on 20mm Star Wars miniatures. And so Bob and I went to the local TOYS R US stores, grabbing all the boxes we could from the shelves, bothering the store managers… “Do you have any more figures in stock?”… and definitely bothering the customers standing in line at the TOYS R US checkout counter. At one store, we had over 70 boxes, each containing some 10 Star Wars figures plus giant walkers plus speeder bikes, etc., and each on sale for 99 cents. That’s less than a dime per 20mm figure. Definitely worth it, since the plastic 20mm figures were all painted. When we stood in the checkout line, we discovered the checkout clerk’s cash register didn’t have its “multiplier” functioning properly… normally, she would have registered 70 boxes at 99 cents, pressed the “multiply” button, and that would have been that. But here, she had to swipe each of the 70 boxes separately with her bar code beam, and register each purchase separately. And that’s why the people in the checkout line were looking at us with murder in their eyes. Back to Hoth. Bob’s Hothian force was awaiting our Empire forces… we landed some 5 feet from the power generators we were supposed to destroy, and it was evident we’d have to fight our way through lots of hostile Hoth-persons. Bob had amassed over 1200 20mm figures, and around half of them were on the field. He had mounted them on stands of clear thin plastic… this was supposed to be a battle on the ice planet, and Bob had laid out a white sheet on the table top… the result was impressive, for while you couldn’t see the clear plastic stands, you could see lots of little people running around. There was a long list of types of units… ranging from elite guards to not-so-elite guards, to wishy-washy conscripts, to regular troops, to giant walkers, to something called AT-AT (some type of huge four-legged mechanical monster), to airboats, to speeder bikes, and so on. All these units had attack factors and defense factors, and percentage dice were used to score casualties. Each turn, we diced for the initiative. If you had won the initiative the previous turn, you deducted 10 from your initiative roll. Winning the initiative as the Active Side (AS) was big time, since the sequence started out with the AS moving or firing all of his troops. As the battle developed, the opposing battle lines of troops became stagnant… the battle became one of sheer attrition. And so the opportunity to win the initiative and to deliver the first bump each turn was critical. After the AS delivered its big punch, the sequence centered on three card phases. Prior to each turn, the sides were given 15 cards… ‘move’ cards, and ‘fire’ cards, and a couple of other types. The sides alternated in first playing their move cards. Movement was by stands… there were really no units in he game… and the cards permitted you to move either 3 or 5 or 6 infantry stands each a distance of 10 inches, or greater if the moving unit was a speeder bike. Following the play of move cards, there was a fire card phase. Again, the cards designated a number of stands to fire, and you could concentrate fire on a single enemy stand to blow it up. Weapon ranges, for the most part, were around 10 inches, and the weapon with the longest range was one of Bob’s Hothian ion-guns, which had a range of 24 inches. The third card phase gave you several opportunities. It allowed you to place a defensive force field around your own or one of the enemy stands. A stand within a force field, while it couldn't be hit, neither could it move or fire. Once the force field was placed, there were other cards enabling you to free the stand and get it back in play again. Another type of card stated you could bring on several reserve stands from your off-board reserves. You could waft your reserves to reinforce any group of 2-stands or more on the field. The “2-stand rule” was a clever one… if you had a single isolated stand way up field, you couldn’t reinforce it from the reserve units, until you had moved another one of your on-field units side-by-side with the stand you wanted to reinforce. During the firing phases, each side tried to isolate stands by knocking out their neighbors, so that reinforcements couldn’t immediately be brought up. Early in the game, I moved up two giant 4-legged AT-AT monsters side by side… their weapons had a pretty good range (20 inches) and they could fire overhead. When they were some 4 feet from my baseline, Bob placed a force field around one of the mechanical monsters. Fred and I tried to play our “remove force field” cards, but every time we did this, Bob would play another force field card… he seemed to have lots of them. With one of the monsters out of the battle, temporarily isolating the single active one, we couldn’t waft other reserve AT-AT units to the front line. Instead, we had to ‘walk’ the units out from our baselines, 10 inches per turn. In retrospect, we should not have waited to remove the force field, but, as soon as one of our AT-ATs was disabled, brought out the other reserve AT-AT, even though it was quite a long (10 inch per turn) walk from the front line. Bob’s Hothites stopped us some 20 inches short of our goal, the planet generators. We couldn’t breakthrough his lines. I tried to do an end-run on the right flank, but he drew his flank back and nothing came of my effort. And, in the interim, we were losing lots of little people, conscripts and elites alike. As an example of the firing procedures, assume my regulars troopers fired on his regular troopers. Regulars had a Defensive Factor (DF) of 90. They also had 3 men per stand, and so, when they fired, tossed 3 10-sided dice. I think they hit on a toss of 1, 2, or 3. I should note there really weren’t any close combat procedures… all combat, regardless of whether or not the troopers were standing nose to nose, was conducted by firing. Back to my example. Each hit by my troopers was good for 30 percent against the enemy regular’s DF of 90. Assume that, when my stand fired, I scored 2 out of the possible 3 hits. That was good for 60 Hit Points (HP)… enough to cause trouble, but not enough to destroy the target stand. First, we subtracted my 60 HP from the target’s DF of 90 to get a residue, or Impact Value (IV) of 30. Since the IV was less than the DF of 90, there was a chance (50 percent) to make the target step back 10 inches. Note that we didn’t use the HP caused by the number of hits directly, but subtracted it from the defending DF. And then, we looked at the residue Impact Value, IV, i.e., what was left over after subtracting the total Hit Points, HP, from the DF. The residue IV was the important parameter. There were three ranges here: a. First, if the residue IV was very large, and doubled the DF, meaning that when we subtracted the IV, there was enough to swamp the DF, the target stand was destroyed. By firing many stands at a single target, therefore, you could hope to get enough hits to make the residue total more than twice the DF, in which case, you had scored a kill. b. Second, if the residue IV was more than, but not quite enough to double the DF, you could still destroy the target: 01 to 50 You sent the target stand to the reserves 51 to 100 You destroyed it c. The third possibility occurred as in my example above. The residue IV was only 30 percent, not even equal to the DF, and in this case, two outcomes were possible, neither of them sufficient to destroy the stand. You tossed percentage dice: 01 to 30 You sent the target stand back 10 inches 31 to 100 No effect As I remember, the largest DF was 120, and so to fully destroy this type of target, as in item (a) above, you’d have to amass a total of more than 12 simultaneous hits on it. 12 hits, each at 30 percent, totaled 360 percent, and one additional hit went up to 390. The residue IV, when we subtract the DF of 120, is now 270, more than twice the DF. BOOM!… the target was gone. But tossing 1’s and 2’s and 3’s for hits on 10-sided dice, didn’t give too much opportunity to gather large quantities of hits. Fortunately, targets with DFs of 120 were rather rare… most of the stands had DFs of 90. And, referring to item (b) in the listing above, you didn’t have to double the DF… all you had to do was get a residue IV of more than the DF, and in that case, the chance of killing the stand was 50 percent. Ten turns into the battle, and it was evident the Empire wasn’t going to win this one. And so Fred and I retreated to our spaceship and reported back to the Emperor. Back to PW Review August 2000 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com