Breaking Their Line: Vehicle Movement Discussion

A Tank In Action- John Hasell, 1917

Eriochrome back after a long disappearance. We have gotten the infantry rules for movement set for testing but we know that the tread-heads out there are going to want theirs tanks rumbling around the field of battle.

The feel of the infantry in M42 is very flexible movement that allows the unit to flow around the leaders position to deal with enemy threats.  The speed across the battlefield if you are not interested in risking your neck is not fast but rearrangement of your battle line is easy.  When you think about tanks and apcs moving around the battlefield, you expect them to be faster than infantry when they can get up to top speed but it is hard to get up to speed when you have to maneuver around all the debris and terrain in the tight M42 battlefield.  Remember that the battlefield is only like 100 yards across so even at only 20 miles per hour you will be across it in like 10 seconds.  Vehicle speed does not really matter.  Maneuverability is the key when trying to move in dense environments with enemies right on top of you.

I was thinking the first thing is to divide vehicles into 3 classes for determining their movement: Light, Medium, and Heavy.  All the vehicles can move 12 inches in a single move (24 inches At the Double) measured from the tank front for each linear part of the move but what sets the vehicles apart is how well they can turn.  Originally I thought to limit the number of turns and the max angle of any turn to 45 degrees but Sandwyrm was concerned about people measuring 45 degrees.  So I thought that turn really represents slowing down and exposing different parts of your tank to fire from other directions.  So maybe each turn should cost you an evasion point.

So the basic idea is that light tanks can turn twice without any penalty but after that they take a 1 point evasion for each additional turn.  Medium Tank makes this only 1 free turn, while the heavy tank gets no free turns so every turn cost a point of evasion (but their heavy armor will protect them from those hits).  You can take the turns at any point in the movement but each one before, during, or after count.  Turns are made around the vehicle center or the center of the base for models with bases.

Maybe we do not want to go around obstacles.  Lets go through them.  If a tank going through a terrain feature it has to make a test (characteristic depending on type or a do not roll 1).  Failure causes it to stop at the edge and pick up 1-2 suppression markers making the crew likely to bail if they come under fire.  You might run if you are underfire in a sitting duck tank.  They might be able to free themselves the next turn by clearing the markers.  This I think might work better than bogging since it integrates with the suppression system not requiring additional things to keep track off.

Now what about skimmers.  I think that skimmers would probably be one class higher than normal.  So a heavy tank style skimmer would move like a medium tank or a medium skimmer like a light tank.  Since these are just unit descriptors when the unit entry is written just make the adjustment there directly.  For terrain I think skimmers ignore any non dangerous terrain that they can actually place their model on.  They can essentially always go high enough to avoid small obstructions.  This cuts down on the turns they will need to make so I think they will probably be able to get anywhere they want with like 2 turns.

What does everyone think about these ideas?