I'm about to have my group get into their first larger battle it's going to involve an assault on a formidible (but undermanned) chaos reaver held space port. The station itelf is situated inside a planetary right above a world experiancing nuclear winter from when the reavers conquored it. The next phase is going to involve assaulting a Harbour city.

My Captain has 5000 men under her comand more or less imperial gaurd with 100 of them counting as veterans. Shes paired up with a beaten up and undersupplied gaurd regiment of about 7000 gaurdsmen 50 tanks 650 storm troopers and a cruiser. She has a cruiser as well but the space station is heavily armed.

How should I play this battle? I really don't like the into the storm rules and I don't want to switch to a warhammer game (i dont think that could capture the scope of the whole fight). How have you run these sort of things before?

Reverse Frozen Reaches. Players are given a map that lists primary, secondary and tertiary objectives. They decide how they want to allocate their forces in order to attempt to take said objectives. You fight back with the defenders you have placed at each location, sending out your forces to repulse the invaders Keep it all very handwavey, in my opinion. Use the ItS rules to work out Strength, then roll off a d10+ Strength. Winner takes the objective.

Thanks! I'll give that a shot.

Errant said:

Where are this rules in Into the Storm? Aren't you talking about BFK rules?

I did, yes! For some reason I always blur those two together.

The BFK rules for ground combat work quite well from experience, they are however hard to remember all the various bonuses and modifiers on the fly especially with a large combined arms force.

I'd maybe make some unit cards ( few inches across) with a picture of what the unit is on one side and it's stats on the back. This way you can draw out a largish terrain map and push the cards around - feeling like a proper Montgomery/Patton/Zhukov/Rommel.

Ten groups of 100 soldiers do more damage than the same 1000 soldiers in a larger group. BFK rules don't work without houseruling.

Errant said:

And what modern nation just marches a wall of infantry at their targets? It's all about macro-scale tactics and micro-scale organisation. Split your units up, divvy out weapons properly, flank and outmanouver. These are all things i happily accept increasing the damage.

The rules should be more flexible, they should allow for players to be rewarded for using different tactics at different times. Using the current rules concentration of force is stupid, but it shouldn't always be. Force dispersal is the current modern tactic but thats mainly because current military operations are against a less technolcologically advanced threat who are using geurilla tactics.

I don't think the US would use the same tactics to fight the Taliban as it would to face off against China god forbid that ever came to pass.

In any case the rules need to be more flexible to let players fight how they think is best not force them into using one specific way to fight.

I've heard Frozen Reaches is better than BFK for the battle system but I don't have enough direct experience to say. You do have the option of making the battle more abstract and in the background while the PCs accomplish some other objective, such as battling the commanders of the reavers.