Sighs & Portents: Soviets need Tank buster plane variant
- Thread starter JayRaider
- Start date
Rabidchild
Mongoose
So long I had forgotten the headache that comes with trying to read his typing! :wink:DM said:
IIRC there is an air power book being prepared.Mr Evil said:
The problem with air power is, that in most games (WaW included) aircraft are too efficient. The pilots spot targets without problems, easily tell the difference between friend or foe and are incredibly accurate. It is necessary for the aircraft to be an useful option when building the army for a game, but completely detached from the reality.
An example of "real" airpower performance: 25th June 1942. Soviet airforce, 780 ground strike combat flights in one day. Result - destruction of 30 tanks, 16 guns and 60 trucks. According to official documents of course (read: divide by 5 at least). The standard estimates were: 4-5 Il-2 aircraft were necessary to destroy a light tank, 12-15 to destroy a medium tank or an assault gun. Much more aircraft were required if they were not specialized like the Il-2 was (say, horizontal bombers or fighters).Soft targets (infantry, trucks) were easier, as they didn't require direct hits.
The piss-poor performance of Soviet airforce was the standard for all WWII airforces (and not only WWII - the stats for A-10s in the first Gulf war are not that much different). Spotting the target and hitting it while sitting in a fast-moving aircraft is rather difficult. Especially if the enemy has some ideas of his own and cheats (e.g. shoots back, maneuvers or tries to hide). If it wasn't, the Wehrmacht wouldn't have any tanks left after the first big Allied airstrike
I'm not too keen on the use of aircraft in a skirmish level game. The scale is just too fine to be really condusive to using them properly - you end up with very high speed planes flying over what is ultimately a very small battlefield making a mess of things.
Also you end with army lists featuring dedicated AA guns and other exotic units, and so on... and at this sort of scale you're supposed to be representing what's ultimately a small front line field engagement - large fixed weapons don't have much place in that sort of game.
Whilst the models are nice, things like artillery, planes and AA belong off the table IMO - a bit like carriers in naval games.
Also you end with army lists featuring dedicated AA guns and other exotic units, and so on... and at this sort of scale you're supposed to be representing what's ultimately a small front line field engagement - large fixed weapons don't have much place in that sort of game.
Whilst the models are nice, things like artillery, planes and AA belong off the table IMO - a bit like carriers in naval games.
Alexb83 said:
That is the good thing of WaW, the rules for planes are included, but nobody is forcing you to use them.
The above is also the reason why only 1 plane per faction was included in the WaW rule book army lists.
IMO WaW at its core is an infantry game with the some armoured support. Air Power is really something for a dedicated supplement, for all the prop heads like Matt who love to use them.
In our games we are only occasionally using them, but I really like having option to include planes.
DM said:
Not the worst reason in the world to include something. . .
Alexb83 said:
Here is the thing.
BF Evo plays like a skirmish game, and that is how most people will start (for obvious army-building reasons).
However, it was designed as a battle game, with armies of 6,000 points plus, and at least a full company (plus support) on each side. If you get a chance, give it a try - it scales up very, very well, and games do not take hours to play, even at 10,000 points.
With 1/72nd scale models, armies of this size are still very affordable (probably still cheaper than many 1500 point 28mm armies), and in next month's S&P, we show you how to paint them extremely quickly.
So, give your games some legs and give the big battles a go - there is a reason we state how many platoons you can have for x points. They are there as 'building blocks' for larger forces!
How true
Even at "company" level the involvement of tac air is tenuous at best, even in contemporary actions. Until the advent of kids and the "time sink" that they impose I was averaging one battlegroup level WW2 or modern game every month or so, and even at that level tac air's presence was extremely limited and concentrated mainly on ops aainst the enemy's rear (and in many cases those games involved actual "practicioners of the art" from HM armed forces - the battalion level street fighting game using "Dirtside II" against a couple of guys from the School of Infantry was awesome and, in their opionion extremely realistc, despite being a set of SF rules shoehorned into a near-future scenario. In this respect, as in many others, wargamers can be left with an entirely false view of how and why things work the way they do on a battlefield. Which is in itself OK as long as one remembers the "its only a game" aspect. It does, of course, lead in some quarters to the "aren't the military stoopid" kind of debates when wargamers fail to appreciate the difference in their perceptions of kit performance and udsage compared with RL, and wonder why the military can't work the wonders that gamers in some cases expect they should
