After reading a few battle reports, cover seems to play an important role in protecting your troopers. What do you all think of the possibility in having a mortar type unit or a weapon attachment that could deploy a smoke screen/chaff cloud that would temporarily block line of sight in a small area for both normal vision/electronic sensors. Otherwise I feel it will be difficult for infantry type squads to move from cover without being chewed up. This will hopefully promote movement rather than just shooting back and forth from cover. Thoughts?

This seems like a great idea as an upgrade for a support unit (or maybe a commander?), I like it a lot! That being said, there's no telling if something like that will ever be released. If it is, it should probably be a one time discard-on-use or at least exhaust-on-use effect, because never being able to shoot anything is more frustrating and boring than shooting back and forth from cover.

I think there is some sort of a poor visibility condition card that has a similar effect, so until a smoke screen unit/upgrade is released that's the closest thing we've got right now.

14 hours ago, Y-Wing said:

Otherwise I feel it will be difficult for infantry type squads to move from cover without being chewed up. This will hopefully promote movement rather than just shooting back and forth from cover. Thoughts?

There's also the Dodge action, the ability to move twice, cover/flanking interactions, and the game being objective (rather than kill point) driven, to encourage movement.

15 minutes ago, svelok said:

There's also the Dodge action, the ability to move twice, cover/flanking interactions, and the game being objective (rather than kill point) driven, to encourage movement.

Well yes, there is plenty of reason to move. Thankfully it looks like it will be hard to actually win by just hunkering down in cover all game. Still, if done right then a temporary line-of-sight blocker can add plenty of tactical depth to gameplay, which is usually a good thing.

Also, @Y-Wing it looks like this was your first post here, so welcome to the forums!

@ShadowKite , thanks! I agree that having a commander with the ability to deploy a smoke screen once or twice in a game would add to the tactical options a player has.

Smoke is an interesting concept. How would you do it? Large flat tokens on the ground? How would smoke interact with terrain that isn't flat? Raised cottonballs in the air?

2 minutes ago, Crabbok said:

Smoke is an interesting concept. How would you do it? Large flat tokens on the ground? How would smoke interact with terrain that isn't flat? Raised cottonballs in the air?

Just a token. “All trooper units in range x are treated as being in base contact with cover.” That way you have to have at least half your squad in the smoke.

Not bad.

And each token would be separate, so if you are far enough away from another "Smokey" covered unit, it'd still be light cover?

I feel like cover is the wrong term here though. Perhaps before they are attacked by a unit NOT within range 1 of this Smoke token, they gain a dodge.

There's a few different possibilities for defining the area of the smoke screen:

1) Large flat token. If line of sight passes above the token, confer the effect. (Something like the dust cloud obstacle in Armada.) It probably wouldn't work well for uneven terrain.

2) Place two tokens within range x. Both tokens must be range 1 from each other. If line of sight passes through the line between the tokens, confer the effect. (Similar to the Jamming Barrier objective in Armada.) This should work just fine for uneven terrain.

3) Single small token, confers its effect to units within range x (Jabby's method above.) I don't like the "treated as being in base contact with cover" phrase because that means you can shoot out of the smoke without any penalty. In my experience if you're standing in heavy fog or smoke you can't see much of anything and would be lucky to hit the broad side of a barn.

-probably some more I haven't thought of.

If I were designing a smokescreen, I'd start with number 2 from the above list. For the during of this round, if line of sight is traced across the line between the two objective tokens, the defender gains Cover 2. The following round, the defender gains Cover 1 and then the tokens are removed once the round ends. Lasting for the up to 2 rounds might be too powerful, but I like the idea of the screen gradually dissipating. Also I think conferring cover is the best approach because then grenades with the Blast keyword would be unaffected by the smoke and that seems appropriate.

You mean concealment. Concealment blocks line of sight; cover blocks direct fire. You can have concealment without cover, shooting blind through smoke.

Concealment might be weird since they are using "true line of sight" rather than a base-to-base measurement; the latter makes it easier to lay down a smoke template or token and if the base-to-base line crosses it you have concealment.

I wouldn't be surprised to see it in a more abstract sense. For example:

Upgrade "Smoke Grenades" - Discard this card. Models in this unit count that are not in Cover as being in Soft Cover until the start of their next activation".

Something like that. It'd be very much in FFGs style tbh.

The poster above is spot on about the Concealment/Cover distinction too, but the rules won't make a differentiation so Soft Cover seemed appropriate.

Dust warfare has a smokescreen so does flames of war. Both are cool from a tactics standpoint