ASL's and CM's portrait of "handicapped" tanks.

[Mattias]

To all you ASL fans out there.

I have heard tell that ASL did a good job of portraying the weaknesses of the French tanks / armoured tactical doctrine. They looked very potent with regards to armour and gun but once the action started they were handicapped by a host of, realistic, limitations.

So, did ASL really managed to pull this off in a believable and effective way? And if so, are similar problems in the tanks of other nations also brought to light by use of the same rules?

Interested to hear about it and how it relates to BTS solutions for CMBB.

M.

[TankDawg]

Hi M,

In a nutshell, what the ASL system does for many early tanks was due to them being radioless.

They were great tanks, better than the German ones up against them, but with no radios, they had to use "Platoon" movement, which really stifles their flexability.

Early war Soviet tanks had the same command issues. CMBB will be factoring this in from what I hear.

Hope that helps.

[ASL Veteran]

Just to expand slightly on the previous post - Soviet and French tanks had to use platoon movement which meant that - rather than move each vehicle individually (and sequentially) all vehicles moved together in one group simultaneously. I believe that the Soviet tank had to be CE to pull it off too (although I don't recall for sure since it has been a while). French tanks also had numerous little things regarding one man turrets too. If a vehicle was separated from the 'group' he had to roll a die to gain the initiative to actually do anything - otherwise he just sat and did nothing (other than fire at targets in LOS).

Not knowing what CMBB will do to address this issue, there really is no way to compare. Having said that though, armor was never really done 'well' in ASL. It was more of an infantry combat game and tanks always felt awkward to me. The limitations of the board game environment hurt tanks in ASL and I'm sure that whatever they do in CMBB will be satisfactory. I would guess that they will have some sort of a platoon commander who has a command radius equal to LOS between the tanks in his platoon. Any vehicle which strays beyond that command radius should probably get a severe time penalty before performing any movement commands. I'm sure it will be similar to how infantry platoons work in CMBO now.

German platoons will probably be able to remain in contact with the platoon leader over most of the playing area since they would have radios to keep in contact with each other. This would give the German tanks a great deal of flexibility over their Soviet counterparts. German platoon commanders would also not need to be CE.

[dalem]

I'm hoping they have CE Sovs with signal flags. Normally I don't care about window dressing but I think that would be fun to see.

-dale