So I think we all have concluded that having starships and big artillery pieces would not be within the spirit of the size, scale, and purpose of Legion.

With that being said, we would be remiss and quite honestly miss out on some spicy, tasty combat, if we didnt have an accurate representation of these in an infantry combat game.

While we have coordinated Bombardment, maximum firepower, DT-90, and the new mortar team for clones, we are still missing that cool and critical element that mortar and artillery pieces bring to the table...indirect fire not requiring LoS.

The fun part about this is that each faction can have a clever and unique way to bring Arty and CAS alive on the table that does not require symmetrical releases or one for one representation. for example, rebels just never had or utilize tanks or artillery because they needed to remain mobile, hostile, agile. But we have absolutely seen them call for air strikes because that is a fast and effective means to get sweet sweet firepower on and off the field quick.

Unit: Rebel Forward Observer

Trooper unit SF category

Gear, Training, Comm slots

Health 1, courage 2, two minis on small base

70pts

Scout 2, low profile, Fire Support, Indirect Fire Coodinator (This unit may fire upon an enemy unit that is within range and has LoS blocked. If LoS is blocked, halve your dice pool rounded up.)

Melee: 1B, A180 blaster: 1B1W, Artillery Strike: 3 W suppressive, CAS: 1R 1B 1W impact 2

This will bring needed impact to Rebels. Just an idea go ahead an please tweak

Unit: DT-90

Keep everything the same. Make a gear card or training card specifically for DT-90 that adds Indirect Fire Coordinator.

Unit: Clone Mortar

Same thing as DT-90. Make a specific gear card for phase II clones that adds indirect fire Coodinator.

For the CIS this can be debatable. Do we make it a part of the AAT??? Make an FO unit like Rebels? Add it to the HailFire tank???

Please discuss and debate this as as a pure artillery and cas thread that understands not to add giant pieces to Legion, cause it ain't gonna happen.

How would you represent Arty and CAS? How would you build a unit? What would you like to see? How would you word it?

I would use a single model on a small base, treated as an operative, with their command cards like Veers has.

Or have it baked in as a action. So for ex: Action: call for fire: when you activate, you may place a ranged in token at range 1-4 in line of site. The following turn, every unit (friendly or enemy) suffers an attack from the following (dice pool).

10 minutes ago, Docgimmethenews said:

How would you represent Arty and CAS? How would you build a unit? What would you like to see? How would you word it?

Command cards, same as Veers and Leia which are representing artillery or close air support. Forward observers MAYBE as an Operative. I don't really care to see it, artillery isn't a big part of Star Wars to me. There aren't artillery strikes depicted during the Battle of Hoth, or any of the other battles we see. The artillery that is deposited, the Self-Propelled Heavy Artillery or SPHA, I can't recall ever seeing it firing indirectly in the cartoon, only on targets in direct line of sight.

Artillery shouldn't be at the front lines, it should be in a safe area laying down fire missions that are radioed in. In scale the play area is around the size of the playing area for either kind of football (European or American), so if artillery is that close to the enemy, something has gone wrong or the artillery guns should be the objectives.

There's a post talking about a FO unit roughly every other month on here. You might want to search for some of those to see what people have previously brainstormed.

4 minutes ago, arnoldrew said:

There's a post talking about a FO unit roughly every other month on here. You might want to search for some of those to see what people have previously brainstormed.

The point of doing this, too, is to keep the subject alive. Not to be buried, cause I really want to see this happen

1 minute ago, Docgimmethenews said:

The point of doing this, too, is to keep the subject alive. Not to be buried, cause I really want to see this happen

This assumes FFG bothers to read the forums.

3 hours ago, Caimheul1313 said:

This assumes FFG bothers to read the forums.

"Bothers" I think puts the wrong intent on it, but otherwise an incorrect assumption yes.

This issue has been done to death, and sadly Alex Davy seems opposed to the idea. When asked, his response was mostly to dismiss the idea, and the one legitimate problem they had was with how to deal with overhead cover. Honestly, this one seems simple; give 'em cover based on their overhead protection. Oh well, maybe they'll wise up eventually.

As for it not fitting SW tech, that's just kinda stupid. Star Wars warfare is directly related to WWII combat in everything from weapon designs up through how combat occurs. Artillery was a very big player in WWII, and talking about how everything is aimed by the eyeball "just like WWII" is silly (that's a paraphrase from the Q&A, not this thread). Indirect fire makes sense, and is both mentioned and seen in the EU (since most of the movies really didn't have an opportunity for it) The '03 Clone Wars cartoon showed the SPHA firing indirectly during the Battle of Muunilinst, for example. We do see indirect fire in canon as well, in The Clone Wars. The Battle of Christophsis (from the opening TCW movie) showed artillery being used to good effect, clearly being used as howitzers to fire over cover/obstacles. The 501st also made use of Mortars as indirect fire assets during the Umbara campaign. Precedent is there.

14 minutes ago, Alpha17 said:

This issue has been done to death, and sadly Alex Davy seems opposed to the idea. When asked, his response was mostly to dismiss the idea, and the one legitimate problem they had was with how to deal with overhead cover. Honestly, this one seems simple; give 'em cover based on their overhead protection. Oh well, maybe they'll wise up eventually.

As for it not fitting SW tech, that's just kinda stupid. Star Wars warfare is directly related to WWII combat in everything from weapon designs up through how combat occurs. Artillery was a very big player in WWII, and talking about how everything is aimed by the eyeball "just like WWII" is silly (that's a paraphrase from the Q&A, not this thread). Indirect fire makes sense, and is both mentioned and seen in the EU (since most of the movies really didn't have an opportunity for it) The '03 Clone Wars cartoon showed the SPHA firing indirectly during the Battle of Muunilinst, for example. We do see indirect fire in canon as well, in The Clone Wars. The Battle of Christophsis (from the opening TCW movie) showed artillery being used to good effect, clearly being used as howitzers to fire over cover/obstacles. The 501st also made use of Mortars as indirect fire assets during the Umbara campaign. Precedent is there.

Very well stated, and I didn't know the devs were dismissing it. That is seriously disappointing, but not disheartening enough to stop talking about indirect fire every once in a while.

As I've said before having indirect fire would add some spicy and tasty combat to Legion!

53 minutes ago, Alpha17 said:

This issue has been done to death, and sadly Alex Davy seems opposed to the idea. When asked, his response was mostly to dismiss the idea, and the one legitimate problem they had was with how to deal with overhead cover. Honestly, this one seems simple; give 'em cover based on their overhead protection.

I think it's even easier than that. I don't have line of sight and am using indirect fire? They get heavy cover. Maybe reduce that to light if I'm getting help from some sort of FO.

Maybe if that ends up being too small of a penalty, make indirect fire require an FO, and the target still gets heavy cover.

10 hours ago, Alpha17 said:

This issue has been done to death, and sadly Alex Davy seems opposed to the idea. When asked, his response was mostly to dismiss the idea, and the one legitimate problem they had was with how to deal with overhead cover. Honestly, this one seems simple; give 'em cover based on their overhead protection. Oh well, maybe they'll wise up eventually.

As for it not fitting SW tech, that's just kinda stupid. Star Wars warfare is directly related to WWII combat in everything from weapon designs up through how combat occurs. Artillery was a very big player in WWII, and talking about how everything is aimed by the eyeball "just like WWII" is silly (that's a paraphrase from the Q&A, not this thread). Indirect fire makes sense, and is both mentioned and seen in the EU (since most of the movies really didn't have an opportunity for it) The '03 Clone Wars cartoon showed the SPHA firing indirectly during the Battle of Muunilinst, for example. We do see indirect fire in canon as well, in The Clone Wars. The Battle of Christophsis (from the opening TCW movie) showed artillery being used to good effect, clearly being used as howitzers to fire over cover/obstacles. The 501st also made use of Mortars as indirect fire assets during the Umbara campaign. Precedent is there.

By "indirect fire" do you mean like archers ( generally firing in an arc at something at something within eyeshot) or modern artillery (firing in an arc at a point on a map)? From what I can remember from Battle of Christophsis, the artillery is only used in a manner similar to Napoleonic cannons, not like a WW2 artillery barrage from miles away. Either way, the artillery (by which I don't mean mortars) should be firing from well off the game board (again, unless they are being overrun). I had forgotten about the Battle of Christophsis, it's been awhile since I last watched the Clone Wars movie.

I do agree neither is well represented in Legion, and if they didn't want indirect fire, then they shouldn't have included mortars... It seems that FFG wants to avoid making rules regarding terrain as much as possible since they aren't in the business of producing terrain. For instance, we don't have any sort of rules for occupying buildings, but the precedent is there as well, and taking defensive positions in a building just makes sense.

But this is also the game where all ranges are measured horizontally, allowing you to throw grenades up to the top of a Height 3 building. "Simplicity" seems to be their watchword, even at the expense of some more "realistic" elements.

Man, whole lot of my favorite meme in this thread...

So, "indirect fire" was not "dismissed" in the AMA. They said they didn't want to overcomplicate units like the Shore Trooper mortar, since they were already adding new rules like Fire Support and Critical to them, and they're already pretty good so they didn't want to stack too many new abilities on-top of them, both for the nature of the unit and also so I took the implication that they wanted fewer moving parts to test. Everybody and their mother in this thread has an idea how they would handle "top cover" of a roof or something, which means FFG likely had those ideas too - which would mean they would have to test them and figure out which works best in the game (and then still sometimes be wrong). Also on the AMA, they said they knew it would be an issue, and had decided KISS instead of working too hard on something they didn't care about yet. Seriously, I've thought of like a half dozen different ways to do it typing this and I have no idea which of them is better.

In general, I think line of sight with units normally is a mechanic to counter the fact that playing the game you as a player have perfect battlefield information which is NOT how warfare usually goes and is executed. You know exactly where everybody is, but if you can't finagle line of sight, you can't shoot them. This is a fundamental mechanic. Now, some special rules break fundamental mechanics, but it's important to do so in proscribed ways - just a free-for-all on sightless shooting would be bad. It's also not representative either - if you want to indirect fire in real life, you either have to guess or have somebody tell you where the target you can't see is - and in Legion there is no guess because you the player can see them. So, you need to figure out a spotter, which is a whole thing. It's not already a fundamental rule so it needs a new keyword. Where does that keyword go? On a unit card? On a personnel upgrade? Should it be gear? Maybe it needs to be comms which are paired, only one observer talks to one piece of arty. All this takes developing and testing - which FFG may be doing but they have a long cycle, and a lot of content to work on. It is not their design philosophy just to design realistic war mechanics, they are designing cool Star Wars war mechanics. And often it seems they start with an idea of a sculpt or unit type and then figure out how to make rules which make that unit thematically appropriate and cool. They obviously know about the concept, but it may not fit the units they feel they have a higher priority in designing, and the rules they develop may never hit their own personal design goals of being fun and/or fair. This, you must accept, for there is nothing you can do to change it - they design the game, not you. For everything else, there's homebrew. I think the game is still fun and cool with or without it, you're not gonna die if you don't get it.

And, as a third point, no matter how big your indirect fire boner, you probably DON'T want the currently designed mortar units to do it, they'd probably want to be different. Stuff like the DF-90 and the Clone Mortar seem designed to interact mostly with Fire Support as a way to offer additional firepower at R4 and add some fun stuff like Critical and Suppressive. Or also standby stuff to blow somebody up when you see them. You probably do not want your true indirect fire attacks to have keywords like this - if they bypass most hard cover on a horizontal plane and only get cover if there's a hard roof (or probably area terrain like trees), you want them to have probably weak dice pools and not a lot of those special keywords which could ignore the cover or dodge or anything because quite a lot of board design I've seen will not offer much cover at all to these weapons, so if you can get some, it really should count. And as we've seen with Snipers before, that can be really sucky and warping to have attacks which can break these certain rules and let you get attacked before you can setup (or, imaging if nobody brought terrain with a roof, never get cover). This unit would need different considerations than the ones we have now, and nobody seems to care about those considerations, they just want to have sweet indirect fire sex. That's how you get game AIDS.

This has been my TED Talk, thanks.

Well said, hear hear.

I do want FFG to take this seriously, so they cam take thier time on it. Still want indirect fire somehow though!

If I were to speculate, based on recent things Armada is doing, what you'd likely get is that some unit can place a "targeting token" as an action, either the unit itself or a spotter (and this action should be on like a gear or comms, so it can be patched back in to other units) can place the token at such-and-such range. For balance you may or may not need to have line of sight to the token. Then, when attacking, you would measure line of sight from the token to a unit, allowing you to shoot "over" cover, around corners, etc. Possibly if the LOS to the token is obstructed you still get cover, again, depends on what is balanced. And of course, the cost and other restrictions of this probably depend a lot on what sort of weapon it's tied to. And it may be it's not quite right the first time and some rules need to get edited later.

Sounds good! That sounds pretty innovative.

20 hours ago, Caimheul1313 said:

By "indirect fire" do you mean like archers ( generally firing in an arc at something at something within eyeshot) or modern artillery (firing in an arc at a point on a map)? From what I can remember from Battle of Christophsis, the artillery is only used in a manner similar to Napoleonic cannons, not like a WW2 artillery barrage from miles away. Either way, the artillery (by which I don't mean mortars) should be firing from well off the game board (again, unless they are being overrun). I had forgotten about the Battle of Christophsis, it's been awhile since I last watched the Clone Wars movie.

Either or both would work. In the battle in question, they were in danger of being overrun and thus were within sight of the enemy. However, they were still firing indirect, over obstacles, not like the typical Napoleonic field gun, a direct fire asset.

Battle in question:

And since I'm sharing videos, here's the AMA video, starting with my indirect fire question.

Luke's answer was quite nice and in-depth, but Alex's was dismissive, claiming indirect fire wasn't really seen in SW, and it didn't fit the "WWII analog" that was SW combat, which is laughable. Now, he may have misspoke, but that's what he said.

1 hour ago, Alpha17 said:

Either or both would work. In the battle in question, they were in danger of being overrun and thus were within sight of the enemy. However, they were still firing indirect, over obstacles, not like the typical Napoleonic field gun, a direct fire asset.

To be fair, most of the "obstacles" that field guns faces couldn't stand up to cannon fire. But they did also employ howitzers, mortars, and rockets, and even field guns have/had to arc their longer ranged shots a bit to reach their maximum effective range. During the American Civil War the military started experimenting with ways to make indirect fire more effective, by using balloon spotters with signal flags.

Quote

Luke's answer was quite nice and in-depth, but Alex's was dismissive, claiming indirect fire wasn't really seen in SW, and it didn't fit the "WWII analog" that was SW combat, which is laughable. Now, he may have misspoke, but that's what he said.

Yeah, Indirect artillery not fitting WW2 sounds like a mistake, either in understanding or speech. I'd agree it doesn't fit with the samurai aesthetic of Star Wars, but it totally fits the "WW2 based action film" aesthetic.

Fitting into Star Wars is fine, while the focus tends to be infantry lines, bombers, close air support and artillery have all been seen. It is a big galaxy with space wizards, you can justify just about anything.

As far as game rules go, I am hard pressed to think of a tabletop game that has easy access to indirect fire that doesn't grind down to a game of battleship. Line of sight usually forces more dynamic play. It would be especially devastating to short range units like Fleet Troopers and B2s that rely heavily on staying out of sight. If anyone has an example of a game that does it well, I would love to hear about it, but my personal experience makes me leery.