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May 01, 2008

Metal Storm WWII Review

Like many hobby related forums, TMP has its share of "controversies" that seems to flair up on a regular basis. Normally you can count on someone (either a innocent noob or a troll, it doesn't matter) to come out with "GW, evil empire or not? discuss" before 100+ posts flames away by the usual suspects.

In the last few years a popular surrogate which is taking a kicking is Flames of War. There's always detractors about how the rules are the spawns of the devil, and promoters will laude it as the rules set the saved historical gaming. It is in one of these long exchanged I first heard about Metal Storm WW2 (MSWW2) rules.

The author is squarely on the FoW detractor camp. He touted it as a more historical set of rules which promotes real live tactics better than the 40k-ized world of FoW. The rules are based on Metal Storm Modern which is a distant offspring of Peter Pigs' AK-47 which garnered a lot of positive word of mouth. Given that I now have matching armies of FoW which can be readily used for MSWW2, and that the rules are available in PDF format for ~ $16 US, I sprang for a copy.

The rules are definitely in the old school of "by wargamers, for wargamers". It's got very rudimentary graphics and no game concept illustrations at all (pictures are eye candy variety). It's not going to compete against FoW in getting the new converts, but will be (maybe?) acceptable for old farts like me who are used to "a good set of rules wrapped in not so good physical packaging".

FORCE ORGANIZATION
The scale of the game is the same as FoW: Each player command around a company strength force, with maneuver element being a platoon, and combat is conducted between individual stands (each being a squard or section for infantry, or an individual vehicle). interactions of the stands reminded me of DBx school of rules (with more explanation later). There are no army lists to tell you what's in a force so newbies will be lost. The formula for calculating point cost for a unit is given but a lot of "interpretation" needs to happen on the part of the gamers so definitely not for someone who's new to the period.

Treatment of hardware is very "broadbrush" and impressionistic, for example all armor defense are characterized into a few categories with some examples given (i.e. a Tiger has a D10 for armor, a Sherman a D8) . If you have some exotic vehicle you need to make your own mind up on where it fits into the continuum. If you are the type of treadheads who cares about the armor difference between a long barreled PzIII and a early short barreled version, you will be disappointed. The author cares more about troops quality than hardware.

DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
The author stated that the rules emphasis is on troop quality more so than hardware, so your quality decides how well you shoot, how much penalty you take due to hardship, and how long you will stick around the battlefield when bad things starts to happen. Hardware might give you a modifier of somekind but is definitely not the deciding factor. I am not going to go into the "historicity" of this decision, but from a pure gameplay point of view it simplified on a lot of nuts and bolts consideration of playing a ww2 game like FoW (where number of machine guns on a tank and their rate of fire is important), and one can get into a game much quicker, and think about the game probably more appropriate of the intended scale (after all if you are a company commander, you think about "sending in your heavy armor reserve", you don't worry about whether your tank can maximize number of machine gun tubes firing this turn).

TURN SEQUENCE
Turn sequence is what I call The Sword and the Flame sequence, where you use a deck of regular cards, and when you flip one color, side A get to move one unit of its choosing, and if another color, side B gets to move a unit of his choosing. Cards are not tied to a particular unit so planning is a little less restrictive.

Once a unit is activated he gets to do either one or two actions depending on what it is. Very straightforward and clean. Movement is also very Sword and Flame like: roll a number of dice and move that amount of distance in inches, modified by quality and terrain.

One change is that a unit can be in overwatch mode for the turn (decided before the cards are shuffled). In this case a overwatch unit may fire BETWEEN card draws (instead of the more obvious "you get to fire anytime during an opponent's move") I am still trying to puzzle this out to see if I like this, since theoretically speaking if you can't see a enemy unit in the end of a card draw, you can't fire at it, and on the next card draw he can activate and then hit you on close combat before you can shoot back even if you are on overwatch. In out test game we used overwatch fire sparingly but didn't seem to make a big difference.

COMBAT
Combat reminded me of a combination of Piquet and DBA. Any attack (regardless of fire, melee, vs inf or armor) always rolls two dice, defender always rolls one die. if attacker beat the defender on both, it's dead. If only beat it on one, then it's gone to ground (pinned, or for armor vehicle it's "threatened"). Very straight forward and clean.

Modifiers and quality comes into play through the quality of the dice you throw. So if you have an 88 firing? you'll get some big dice (D12 & D12), and if you have something crappy maybe you only get D4 & D6. The same principle applies to the defense (see my example earlier on tank types). Any modifiers (there are only a handful so easily remembered after a few turns) are applied as dies up or die down (a la Piquet). This may cause some strangeness for those who's not used to handling different die types (i.e. D8 with a -1 modifier becomes a D6) . This is definitely a broadbrush threatment akin to DBA combat results, but it "feels" right for the level of game the author intended. Of course every die regardless of type has a "1" on it, and a bad roll could mean that your King Tiger gets taken out by a anti tank rifle. But if the explanation of (it's a critical hit that happened to went into the vision slit) causes you problem, this might not be the rules for you.

Gone to Ground is more likely than killed outright, and this means the stand is pinned (can not move or fire, can still melee with a negative modifier). one can either spend action during an activation to remove GTG status, or it'll get reduced by one level at end of turn. It's possible then to inflict multiple GTG result to keep troops down which is a pretty historical tactic.

MORALE
The game doesn't use a tradition morale test, but instead uses a Mission Resolve (purportedly from AK-47, though not having played it I am not sure). The theory being that on a modern battlefield adverse events causes cumulative stress (i.e. losing stands, seeing friendly unit dying, etc.), once stress builds up to a certain level the unit will just quit the field. In game terms this means that unit are called upon to make Mission Resolve tests on certain events. If they misses nothing happens, but on the third miss they are just GONE (we call it the three strikes rule). This means there are some record keeping, but it's not onerous. I think it works, but will need to reflect upon it a bit more to see if this is superior to the more traditional "roll to pass or you are pinned/shaken/routed followed by rallying" mechanism.

OMISSIONS
There's a very explicit omission stated by the author: based on his research there are very few instance of infantry close assaulting tanks without AT weapon (in the rules that means weapon with explicit AT capability like ATR or bazooka, there are no stats for molotov cocktail or improv weapons), so in the design close assault vs vehicle (and conversely vehicle overrunning infantry) is simply forbidden. In our game we have no situation where things might be weird, but I can see in a city fight for instance the tank can just rumble forth into infantry infested narrow streets (assuming that inf have no ATG hiding about) without any worries. I don't have enough historical data to see if this is realistic or not, but since every other set of rules in gaming history have rules to support infantry passing a morale check and then jump on tank to assault it with bare fists I thought I'd mention this (and if this really is a problem, the rules structure are flexible enough that to bolt on a rule of your own devise would not be hard).

CONCLUSION
We both enjoyed the game, and will play again. It is definitely a "high level" of game then the rifle counting of FoW. Some pluses and minus

+ fast moving, can do a largish game much quicker than FoW or other alternatives.
+ Historical tactics works.
+ works well with FoW forces out there.
+ Exact basing not important.
? Lack of close combat vs tank might create weird situations (did not surface in our playtest).
? Overwatch fire did not work as expected, not sure if it works or not.
- If you want detailed differences between troop types and tank specs, this ain't gonna float your boat.
- If you want nationality differences you ain't gonna get it here (one country's "Veteran" behaves very much like another countries' "veteran".

Posted by msoong at May 1, 2008 04:16 PM

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