So, I know that, in many people's eyes, the rules for RT Mass Combat are sort of...well...yeah that, but I'm trying to figure out some optional assortments of units, as they COULD prove useful for running Warpstorm Trilogy, at least Frozen Reaches. Some help on interpreting what they meant, and what i would thus do, would be great.

Mass Combat Units for RT

Aquilla Squadron

Aquilla Squadron is a bomber squadron that launches from the Passage of Judgment. They are a highly-skilled unit of elite airmen who specialize in tactical carpet-bombing of land-based opposition.

Unit Strength: 10 (10% of 100) or something with Size (Massive [30]) p.126
Morale: 90 (Veteran)
Power: 13 (Air Force Base Power 8: Heavy Modifier +2: Tech-Level Modifier +3) Attack: 4d10+13, Armor: 26
Movement: 2400

So, here I have a unit of attack bombers. My main problem with them stems from their Unit Strength. A squadron of bombers is 10, so that would be US: 1. This is obviously wrong. Each ship has 10-15 crew, so 100-150 squadron crew, for US: 10-15. That's still piddly, even if they take half damage from most ground units. BFK said something about using their Size, but not sure how it figures in. I don't know how units of tanks, artillery, or these would calculate their Unit Strength.

Mass Combat Units for RT

Adepta Sororitas

The forces of the Sisters of Battle.

Unit Strength: 50 (5x 10)
Morale: 100 (Elite)
Power: 9 (Infantry Base Power 4: Heavy Modifier +2: Tech-Level Modifier +3) Attack: 4d10+9, Armor: 18
Movement: 20

Special Rules
Armor of Faith - The warriors of the Adepta Sororitas are often protected by more than the best armor the Imperium can provide; they are also often shielded by the limitless might of their faith in the Emperor of Mankind. When the unit is attacked, it is treated as if it had a Field rating equal to half of their current Morale, rounded up.

This one is a bit cheesy to start with, because I like the Sisters of Battle, and their Faith-based powers, but I'm not sure how to make them. I can treat them like Space Marines, as they are, in a lot of ways, even if the Astartes are "the best the Imperium has", while the Sororitas are purely mortal. That would use 5x their squad size, rather than 10%, but I'm not sure I can pull that. They wear power armor, like Astartes, but I don't know how the Astartes are having PL 20, other than they are the poster army for 40K, and don't know how much to give the Sisters, to be like them, when they sort of aren't. Even though they give "rules" for Astartes in the Mass Combat blurp, they still don't give all their stats, so it can be hard to know what their numbers, and by extension their lady counterparts, should have. The field rule I like, though I suspect others won't, but I'll probably keep it.

Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated. If you actually like the rules for Mass Combat enough to at least have mapped out some units for your own game, it could be nice to see them, too.

I used the Horde Rules - basically turning Squads into Hordes...

If said Horde is broken up - then the individuals are handled by the GM accordingly

Otherwise Horde vs. Horde is just 2D10 plus/minus Modifiers - me myself was looking for a Quick Way to give my players control at certain scenes over individual Hordes on a battlefield basis, granted I did rework the Horde Rules slightly

Each Player gets to control an individual Horde (in the virtual game table I created Horde Tokens like the one seen below - granted I blurred it on purposed to respect the artist / business I bought it from)

My system by no means is perfect, rather it was meant to be quick and satisfying and allow for Token based action in Fantasy Grounds...

http://www.wurkhaus.com/docs/Hordes.pdf

I'm always open to better options - for me this is simple enough to work...

Stay GAMING

Morbid

I've used both the rules provided for Frozen Reaches, and those in Battlefleet Koronus. The players loved the former and hated the latter. I'd recommend using Frozen Reaches as is and just arbitrarily assigning a strength to any units your players bring along.

That said, I've made up my own house rules for mass combat, but they aren't written very well. Look, you don't want to bog your players down in special rules just to run a war with. If you do that your players won't want to get involved in any more wars, and where's the fun in that? My players, like myself, are old miniatures players, but they aren't sitting down to play miniatures, and they don't want that complexity in an RPG. You want battles to come down to a couple die rolls, usually a Scholarly Knowledge-Tactics Imperialis or Command check. I use Tactics just to give the Arch-Militant a leg-up on the RT and Missionary in this role. If your players engage in warfare frequently you'll see more people buying this skill with Elite Advances. Things that modify that check are terrain, weather, technology differences, and battlefield strength, so don't make up a bunch of rules just to figure out what those unit strengths are...they shouldn't be the sole determinant of the outcome, because there's times you'll want some technologically backward units ambushing a tank column in the jungle to win. I use those 4 categories, and each can't modify the Tactics check by more than +/-60, nor can the total be modified by more than +/-60.

All those modifiers are only going to give you the winner of the battle. You'll need another method to determine actual casualties. I just have each unit make a survival (not Survival skill) die roll and suffer strength loss depending on the outcome of that roll. The roll is modified by the outcome of the battle. In this manner a winner might still take heavy casualties, or the loser might escape with only light casualties. You want to simulate everything possible with the fewest number of die rolls.

Hordes will work in some situations, but not a whole war zone. When your players start deploying battalions, regiments, and brigades, you'll need something different. Always try to abstract and bring it down to a few die rolls that match your players' skills on their character sheets. In this instance Tactics Imperialis is your friend.

I totally agree and see your point Knight - what I opted to do was more along the lines of...

OK guys your squad is approaching the objective point <player assumes take over of horde>

Now lets have our skirmish - which is in fact part of a much bigger battle, war, campaign - aka a "scene" if you will that's pivotal or important enough to do battle over. If/when doing larger scale conflicts - like Knight said I'd opt to negotiate the whole by a few Tests and decisions made by the PCs...

Again this concept for my game is used when a session is devoid of combat for the actualy characters to engage with - some players and GMs actually like combat in our RPGs but agree it shouldn't take massive amounts of time - that aspect I hate ~ go figure (the worst game for that is Champions - I remeMber 4 hour battleroyals LMFAO)

Anyways good stuff dudes - TTYL

Stay GAMING

Morbid

I've used small scenes within large battles before, but to be honest I don't like the concept inasmuch as it doesn't seem to fit the scifi genre. It does make for good storytelling, though, and the players seem to have fun, so I'll use it again even though I disagree with it.

Historical ancient miniatures is one of my favorite wargames. I've evolved past games, though, that permit the over-manipulation of units. How much Command & Control (C2) did Alexander actually exert at Gaugamela? The plans for the battle were laid ahead of time and each commander, of which Alex was only one, exerted C2 over only a few units in their immediate vicinity. Since that small action around Alex decided the battle that seems to favor the dramatic scene approach...in ancient warfare.

As knowledge and technology progresses, though, C2 becomes more effective. Generals move from the front line to the rear, so they can more effectively control the flow of the battle. Hilltop positions become important, if only so the commander can have a better view. Artillery increases the width and depth of an army's influence. Radios grant even more control by affecting rapid reactions on the field. Immediate aerial recon grants the commander more information. Computer systems increase decision output capacity and reaction times even more. Imagine the effects of remote listening posts whose data is collated by a wristwatch-computer and gives advice.

At some point commanders spend all of their time collating data and directing the actions of others. I feel that scifi tends to epitomize that point of saturation of the commander's time. Between directing the infantry, armor, artillery, air mobile, tactical air, and orbital strikes, along with which weapons of mass destruction to employ or probably not to employ, I don't think the scifi commander has much time left to swing a sword, powered or not.

The Rule of Cool is the final determinant, so I'll fall back on my dramatic moments, but I like to give my players a sense that their game universe is not just another world war played out in outer space although the game system is certainly set up to give the players the impression that without them the Dynasty will fail. It's just another fine line we GMs tread between arbitrators of rules and narrators of scenes.

Well, let me weigh in here... The ground warfare section in BFK had a lot of good ideas but, IMO, was incomplete and thus broken. How do the Xenos races fit in? what about logistics? What are the real practical effects on the dynasty's bottom line when you take a city? How about a Hive?

I realize that once you get into the huge armies fighting battles across a theatre things will get somewhat more generalized but they didn't make a lot of sense here. I'm usually a big defender of ffg but this was a fail guys!

That being said, one of the things the system did relatively well was the concept of a flashpoint. These are mini scenarios that PC's take part in that provide a bonus to the overall command roll that determines victory or defeat!

What I would like to see is the BFK rules fleshed out rather than scrapped. I don't think they're unsalvageable just not complete!

As an example; it makes perfect sense to me that if a RT creates a regiment for his own personal crusade, that regiment should be translatable to OW so as to allow an entire sub-campaign start to play at "ground level".

I would be willing to collaborate on this if anyone's interested.

I don't think the BFK rules are unsalvageable, they are just unmanageable. They are too unwieldy, too crunchy. My players want to play something like the War for Damaris, but the only reason it should take multiple sessions is because of the wonderful intrigue it provides. If ran as a wargame it should be playable in a single session. Any wargame that measures units in terms of companies fighting for a very limited surface area just shouldn't take days to play, and BFK would take days just to play out the maneuvers.

I'd love to translate Only War regiments to RT. I can't find my OW right now. I have a new new desktop and my files are in disarray. I had a lot to transfer. That's what I get for not making a separate folder for every game. I only have a sketchy memory of OW regiments.

BFK had the right idea, but like much with FFG it was poor in execution. The campaigns didn't run smoothly. The modifiers were all wrong. My players quickly found out that simply arming their masses with spears was more cost-effective than lasguns, and the penalty wasn't great enough to matter on the battlefield. That's right, spears versus tanks, spears win. Do the math. They had all the right ideas, I'll give them that much.

Errant, While I agree with your basic premise, you'd have to show me that math!

If a company of spear armed feral infantry (Power level 2, attack 4D10+2, Armour lvl 4, Str 10) engaged a company of Medium tanks (Leman russ, Power lvl 9-10, Attack 4d10+9 (or 10), Armour lvl 18 (or 20), Str 10), The result would be a slaughter! Avg damage values (26 for feral infantry vs 32-34 for tanks) means the tanks will annihilate the spearmen every round! Not to mention, If I had a unit of spearmen engage tanks I would rule them automatically wiped out unless they had some special means of destroying said tanks.

In any case, We all agree the BFK system is broken. Has anyone tried to fix it?

The BFK system was basically good for codifying the process for creating regiments.

The basic rules of engagement do not state how many forces can be in a given area. IMO, For purposes of the game, a company would "occupy" a single 1km square.

The attack damage does not make sense to me. 4d10? Where'd they pull that out of? Given the armor and strength values of a given unit 2d10 seems like a much more reasonable number.

Any other thoughts out there? (preferably positive)

Shameless self-plug here. We generally use these, which can be easily adapted to Rogue Trader, as "logistics" is little more than "profit factor with a larger variance in digits" in the end! (Due to the mess Infamy is, we had to pull things apart a bit to actually get into army management). We initially tried the BFK rules as well, btw, but they didn't sit well with how we view different units, let alone tech levels (!) to interact.

https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/174831-accounts-of-black-crusades-using-tome-of-decay-rules/

It's not 'perfect' as such, and probably won't be improved since the campaign is already over, but, it was functional enough for our purposes. I'm happy to incorporate suggestions/criticism though.

Rad, your modifiers for the Acquisition of those Leman Rus tanks is -10 (medium) -10 (modern) -10 (armor) for base of -30.

Those spear armed guys are 0 (light) +30 (feral) +0 (infantry) for a base of +30.

If you raise a company (+0) of Leman Rus (presumably 10 per company), your PF Acquisition check is at -30.

Your opponent can meanwhile raise "armies" (-30) of spearmen (presumably 10,000 men per "army") at PF Acquisition checks at +0.

Now take the system's Unit Strength factor into account. While that company of armor (unit strength approx. 10) will certainly kill a number of charging spearmen (unit strength approx. 1000 per "army") they will simply overwhelm that company. The tank company is dealing out (on the average) 32 pts of damage, and its Armor is 20. Each spear company is dealing out 24 pts of damage, and its Armor is 4. 5 companies of spearmen will do enough damage to take out the tanks. The tanks will wipe out 3 companies of spearmen in the process. These are all averages, of course. Even if you make the spearmen fight as a single "army" unit versus the tank "company" unit, the spearmen will wear down the tanks in 5 rounds.

Now you say you'd only let the spearmen damage the tanks if they had a means to do so. Okay, you've just house-ruled the system by GM fiat. The players raised those spearmen in the expectation that you'd arbitrate the battle according to the rules. Now there are upset players. Obviously the system is broken, and just as obviously it needs fixed.

And you hit the problem spot on. It's the 4d10 random factor that's the problem. That's more variance than weaponry. In fact, it's more variance than weaponry and technology combined, meaning the random factor has more to say about the outcome of the battle than anything and everything except sheer numbers, hence the hordes of spearmen.

The problem doesn't stop there, though. None of the numbers make sense except unit strength (number of people/10 = damage unit can take) and that's the single factor that's broken. If that's the case, then all the other factors need changed, and if that's the case I want to change unit strength as well. The whole thing can simply be done better.

P.S. I started a thread under House Rules, so we can discuss fixing the system there.

Here's some junk I did for it:

PIX : http://gameroid.blogspot.com/search/label/40K%20RPG

FILE : https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B646HAX7vVpGS2RmQXZaUEhlbG8https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B646HAX7vVpGS2RmQXZaUEhlbG8

the way I found to make the BFK combat work was to wing the first half, then fudge the second half.

but I did find that the little unit cards made the players feel good and

gave them something to maneuver around the table top

YMMV

the second link doesn't work

I like the cards, though

yikes, was an ancient version, almost archaeotech

here try this: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B646HAX7vVpGQl9EUEZMMTBPVDQ/view?usp=sharing

Instructions on how to use it are on the 2nd page "display"

in the 4th column, 9 steps for making a new unit.

or you could copy/paste/edit the ones in the files for your own.

to the left of each card is a unit type #, which controls the vlookup to the stats.

you have to insert your own pix and fluff.