Some weeks ago, we were invited to Brian Dewitt's for a day, and the first scenario set out by Brian looked fairly familiar. This was a microarmor affair, with a battalion represented by 5 or 6 tokens. We began the battle, and, sure enough, I had been here before.
Brian was treating us to a game of ARMOR 5, which we had played some ten years ago... I had described the ARMOR 5 rules in the REVIEW of December, 1989. I'm not sure when the first 'ARMOR' (ARMOR 1) appeared, but it must have been a year or two earlier. As the name implies, the rules of the gaming system had undergone several revisions before it emerged as ARMOR 5. In fact, after five versions, I had dropped the system, and never gone on to ARMOR 6. And here, in 1999, was Brian, reconstructing memories of the past!
Brian's game rekindled my interest in the concepts presented in the first five editions of ARMOR "X", and so I dusted off the old rules sets and drummed up the system described in this article, ARMOR 6, bringing it up to date with some of the gaming procedures that I had experimented with in the ten intervening years..
The first battle on my ping-pong table pitted an attacking British force commanded by Cliff "Hot Dice" Sayre, against a defending German force run by Jim "Scorched Earth" Butters. And I must say that ol' 'Hot Dice' truly lived up to his name. I think Scorch won only one of the many close assaults in which the sides participated... when an attacking unit closed with a defending unit, the result seemed to be ordained... 'Hot Dice' was a winner.
As the defender, Scorch had to spread his forces rather thinly across some 7 feet of frontage. He occupied three towns on the field, and if he lost two of the three, the battle was over.
Scorch was assigned a total of 5 battalions to defend his front. A battalion consisted of 3 stands, with the basic battalion defined as 3 infantry stands. Another type of stand could be substituted for one of the infantry stands to give the battalion additional capabilities. For example, Scorch's force of 5 battalions consisted of
- Brigade G
- 23rd Btn 2 infantry stands, 1 MG stand
26th Btn 2 infantry stands, 1 armor stand
Brigade H
- 6th Btn 3 infantry stands
24th Btn 2 infantry stands, 1 anti-tank stand
30th Btn 2 infantry stands, 1 MG stand
The content of the battalion affected its fire power. When a battalion fired, the target unit noted on its data sheet a number of "temporary" Loss Points (LP). These were "temporary" in that, after a couple of half-bounds, they would be translated into 'actual' casualties, i.e., boxes crossed out on the battalion data sheet. Each battalion had a total of 8 boxes, called Unit Vulnerability Factors (UVF)... in effect, it had 8 lives, recorded as:
- 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45
The "vulnerability" terminology was employed because, if a battalion had a couple of UVF's crossed out, it now looked to the next existing UVF number... this was the chance that the battalion lost a stand. If, for example, the '10' and '15' were crossed out on the above chart, the chance the battalion would lose a stand is 20 percent.
When the fire phase occurred, each of the three stands in the battalion would strike at the target unit. I drew up a "standard" loss chart, a shortened version of which is shown below: Chart 1.
| Firing Unit | Loss Points (LP) of the Target Unit | |
|---|---|---|
| Infantry | Tank | |
| Infantry stand | 3 | 5 |
| MG stand | 4 | 0 |
| Anti-tank stand | 1 | 6 |
| Tank stand | 4 | 3 |
If the firing battalion consisted of one anti-tank and 2 infantry stands, and it fired at a battalion containing one tank and 2 infantry stands, the results, as picked off the chart, would be:
- (a) Each infantry stand, firing at the opposing infantry, scores 3 LP, a total of 6 LP
(b) The anti-tank stand fires at the enemy tank, scoring 6 LP
(c) The total LP loss to the target battalion is 12
(d) Now we have an "accuracy" roll, seeing if the total of 12 LP should be modified
Table 2.
- 01 to 33 Add another 3 LP
34 to 66 No change
67 to 100 Subtract 3 LP from the total
Note that in phases (a), (b), and (c), the result is deterministic... no dice throwing involved. It's only in phase (d) that a random factor is inserted. In the above example, a low dice throw, and the total LP loss to the target would be 12+3, or 15 LP. A high dice throw, and the loss would go down to 9 LP.
I liked the deterministic method of noting casualties... we didn't have to have each battalion generating its own probability-of-hit (POH) percentage. Which means that we eliminated tossing a number of dice, and instead simply went to the chart and picked off the LP loss. In fact, late in the battle, the suggestion was made to drop the random factor completely... forget about the "plus or minus 3" factor, i.e., why bother at all with the dice throw.
ARMOR 5 had a similar chart to assess casualties... in fact, it had about 20 such charts to give a certain amount of randomness in the number of hits scored. For ARMOR 6, by employing a single "standard" chart, as that in Chart 1, I thought I could get rid of the necessity of drawing up 20 separate charts. And, here, the randomness factor would be inserted via the dice toss of Table 2.
But it turned out that even the Table 2 dice toss was unnecessary... remember that the LP were temporary, and in the phase in which they were translated into permanent losses (crossed out UVF's), there was a random factor already inserted. Why have several random factors in a row, when only one will do?
But now, back to the battle. In the encounter, Scorch placed the 30th German Infantry Battalion in the town of Gutz, on his western flank. Scorch's 4 other battalions were placed to defend the towns of Glitz and Glopp. And in Gutz, the 30th stood alone, for all practical purposes out of the battle, for General Sayre's British attack, coming in from the south, concentrated solely on Glitz and Glopp, ignoring Gutz entirely.
Sometime during the battle, Scorch tried to move the 30th to the east to help defend the towns that Sayre was besieging, but the 30th wouldn't budge. When they tried to cut through the woods to the east of Gutz, they didn't pass their 'rough terrain test', failing to toss 70 or under on percentage dice. Evidently, the 30th was having such a great time in Gutz, partying it up, out of the war zone, they had lost their desire to help maintain the Thousand Year Reich.
The half-bounds went back and forth, the units each accumulating temporary losses, LP, through the various fire and melee phases. And now the question was... what to do with the LP, how to translate them into actual losses, i.e., crossed-out UVF boxes? And the answer... we use a clock, of course.
At the beginning of each half-bound, a 10-sided die was tossed... when the accumulated total, termed the Elapsed Time, reached 12, that was the signal that the time had come to assess the actual damage to the units on the field.
All battalions had the same requirements... an accumulated total of 20 LP translated into one crossed-out UVF. At the end of 2 bounds, almost all of the German battalions had lost at least 1 UVF, with the 6th Battalion, initially assigned to defend Glitz, taking it on the chin, and losing 3 out of its 8 UVF. When I say "almost" all the German battalions, I, of course, exclude the Fighting 30th, happily encamped in Gutz, not caring at all about went on in Glitz and Glopp.
For some reason, I instituted no morale checks in the sequence, and hindsight says that this was a mistake.
The result of the absence of a morale check, after a unit was hit by enemy fire, was that the battlefield was fairly static... the firing unit went BOOM!, the LP were recorded on the target battalion, and the target simply stood there, accumulating losses. There should, however, have been some chance that the target battalion commander decided to pull back. General Sayre concentrated 4 of his 7 British battalions on the eastern town of Glopp. After trying to soften up the defending German unit, Sayre ordered the 33rd Battalion to charge into the town and drive the Germans out.
In charged the 33rd, and the engaged units fired on one another using the LP losses taken from Chart 1. Then the units looked at the following parameters:
- S Number of existing UVF boxes on own unit (survivors)
C Number of crossed-out UVF boxes on enemy battalion (enemy losses)
K The side with the fewer recorded temporary LP losses received this 'bonus'
Each side combined the above in the following calculation, to obtain the product, P, where the higher product won the melee.
- P = 10-sided die x (S + C + K)
When the British 33rd Battalion entered the town, both sides in the combat still had their original 8 UVF boxes intact, hence for both sides, S=8, while C=0. The only modifier was the 'K' factor of +1, which the British got... because they had bombarded the town sufficiently to give the defending German battalion quite a few losses.
Thus the sides tossed as follows:
- For the British P = Die x (S=8 +C=0 +K=1) P= Die x 9
For the Germans P = Die x (S=8 +C=0) P= Die x 8
In this first close effort, The German unit had a 43 percent chance of winning, and despite its slight disadvantage, Scorch's defending German battalion tossed higher than did the 33rd, and the 33rd was thrown back. This was, I think, the only melee won by the Germans.
The retreating 33rd fell back 10 inches, and, because it lost, recorded another 10 LP on its data sheet. The winning German battalion remained in Glopp, and recorded a small loss of 4 LP on its sheet.
Another movement phase, and Sayre's second British unit entered Glopp... a couple of dice tosses, and this one was successful. Glopp was in British hands, and the Germans had no units nearby of sufficient strength to counter-attack.
And Glitz was the last to fall. Again the charge into town was preceded by inundating the defenders during the fire phases so as to ensure the British unit in melee received the 'bonus' +1 factor in the melee calculations.
More hindsight. Note that the melee I described for Glopp was battalion-on-battalion. I had provided no chance for a nearby supporting unit to run over and assist, as I do in all my other rules systems.
Definitely a mistake. In retrospect, it made no sense to have a unit close assault an enemy unit and have the nearby allied battalions of both sides simply stand there without raising a hand to assist. In the scale of this game, at the battalion level, the battalion commanders would certainly have tried to support a sister battalion engaged in combat.
After ten or so years, ARMOR 6 didn't do so bad... but it didn't do so good. We'll have to fine tune it.
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© Copyright 1999 Wally Simon
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