Aotrs Commander
2007-10-31, 10:25 AM
With a great deal of personal pride and smugnitude - despite my only peripheral involvement - I can finally announce the release of Maneouvre Group into the general public!
Manoeuvre Group is designed to fight all arms actions in the period from 1941 to at least 2010, using forces up to a Company Group (Battle Group in US terminology). That is, up to 8 tanks, 1 or 2 platoons of supporting infantry and their supporting close reconnaissance, engineering and artillery assets, in an evening. The innovative rule system means no book keeping.
At this scale the battles are fought at close quarters, in relatively dense terrain, be it urban or rural, from England to Iraq and all points in between.
Manoeuvre Group’s emphasis is just that, the command of manoeuvre units to
eliminate the enemy. The reading of the ground, timing and employment of all arms assets are the key to winning a battle. The player will spend more time moving units about to exploit weaknesses in the enemy’s plan than calculation of hit factors and dice rolling. The rules capture the ebb and flow of a battle often missing in other rules. With practise, experts (in tactics) can achieve 10 to 15 bounds in an evening even with a full Company Group.
I'm chuffed for several reasons - first, pride on behalf of our little group that we've finally got something in print, some bragging right since I can now say "I've contributed to proper wargames rules that our in print" with actual justification, partly because now it's in print people will take it seriously and mainly because it's a totally kick-ass game!
The rules have been about four years in the writing by my Dad and his compatriot, with a great deal of playtesting. Our group has been regularly displaying the game at wargames conventions in the UK (we're hoping to do Recon in December) and had achieved some measure of notority for our fold-flat cardboard buildings as well.
It's a unique and innovative set of rules, where the primary emphasis is placed on manouvering to the right position rather than weapon factors (like Warhammer 40K and a lot of historical rules). I found myself that you had to make a substantial mental shift for the tactics. The key I realised, was that you aim to catch the enemy in the side, rather than attacking head on.
The rules are simple but intuitive in that things like formation rules don't exist, but the nature of the game (i.e., that your vehicles only have a limited arc of visibility and take take to turn their turrets to react, having dead ground on hills where you can't shoot into and so on) means that you end up using real-world tactics to fight for the same reasons as they do in the real world. We've had more than a ex- and current few military chaps come and play, and they all commented on how realistic it was.
The basic premise of the rules was to use simple rules to achieve complex results (i.e. simple generic rules giving you complicated tactical problems that have nothing to do with game mechanics.)
It really is 'at least 2010' since we've used MG for sci-fi - with my own tabletop representation of the glorious Army Of The Red Spear - with needing to do nothing except add a few pieces of sci-fi technology (like shields). (Actually, my Dad could have just said 1941 onwards, but hard-core World War II players can get a bit twitchy sometimes when you mention sci-fi.)
I can't stress enough how different - and better - it is to play. You do, though, in order to make the best out of the game, need quite dense terrain. The typical wargamer three-houses-is-a-village, token hill and a few hedges won't do it. Fortunatly, as I understand the plan is to slowly release some of the cardboard fold-flat buildings in scenario packs, though as both the authors have full-time jobs, I don't know the timescale on these.
(You'll forgive me as that sounded a bit advertisey, didn't it? But I can't think of another way to get people as excited as I am about a set of mechanics without, y'know, talking about the mechanics.)
I am quite willing to elaborate further if anyone is interested! Though got now I can just bask the the reflected glory and say to myself "hey, I slightly contributed to a published set of rules! Huzzah!"
Manouver Group is now available here (http://www.wargamingonline.com/catalog/product_info.php?currency=GBP&products_id=353) at Wargaming Online in PDF format.
Manoeuvre Group is designed to fight all arms actions in the period from 1941 to at least 2010, using forces up to a Company Group (Battle Group in US terminology). That is, up to 8 tanks, 1 or 2 platoons of supporting infantry and their supporting close reconnaissance, engineering and artillery assets, in an evening. The innovative rule system means no book keeping.
At this scale the battles are fought at close quarters, in relatively dense terrain, be it urban or rural, from England to Iraq and all points in between.
Manoeuvre Group’s emphasis is just that, the command of manoeuvre units to
eliminate the enemy. The reading of the ground, timing and employment of all arms assets are the key to winning a battle. The player will spend more time moving units about to exploit weaknesses in the enemy’s plan than calculation of hit factors and dice rolling. The rules capture the ebb and flow of a battle often missing in other rules. With practise, experts (in tactics) can achieve 10 to 15 bounds in an evening even with a full Company Group.
I'm chuffed for several reasons - first, pride on behalf of our little group that we've finally got something in print, some bragging right since I can now say "I've contributed to proper wargames rules that our in print" with actual justification, partly because now it's in print people will take it seriously and mainly because it's a totally kick-ass game!
The rules have been about four years in the writing by my Dad and his compatriot, with a great deal of playtesting. Our group has been regularly displaying the game at wargames conventions in the UK (we're hoping to do Recon in December) and had achieved some measure of notority for our fold-flat cardboard buildings as well.
It's a unique and innovative set of rules, where the primary emphasis is placed on manouvering to the right position rather than weapon factors (like Warhammer 40K and a lot of historical rules). I found myself that you had to make a substantial mental shift for the tactics. The key I realised, was that you aim to catch the enemy in the side, rather than attacking head on.
The rules are simple but intuitive in that things like formation rules don't exist, but the nature of the game (i.e., that your vehicles only have a limited arc of visibility and take take to turn their turrets to react, having dead ground on hills where you can't shoot into and so on) means that you end up using real-world tactics to fight for the same reasons as they do in the real world. We've had more than a ex- and current few military chaps come and play, and they all commented on how realistic it was.
The basic premise of the rules was to use simple rules to achieve complex results (i.e. simple generic rules giving you complicated tactical problems that have nothing to do with game mechanics.)
It really is 'at least 2010' since we've used MG for sci-fi - with my own tabletop representation of the glorious Army Of The Red Spear - with needing to do nothing except add a few pieces of sci-fi technology (like shields). (Actually, my Dad could have just said 1941 onwards, but hard-core World War II players can get a bit twitchy sometimes when you mention sci-fi.)
I can't stress enough how different - and better - it is to play. You do, though, in order to make the best out of the game, need quite dense terrain. The typical wargamer three-houses-is-a-village, token hill and a few hedges won't do it. Fortunatly, as I understand the plan is to slowly release some of the cardboard fold-flat buildings in scenario packs, though as both the authors have full-time jobs, I don't know the timescale on these.
(You'll forgive me as that sounded a bit advertisey, didn't it? But I can't think of another way to get people as excited as I am about a set of mechanics without, y'know, talking about the mechanics.)
I am quite willing to elaborate further if anyone is interested! Though got now I can just bask the the reflected glory and say to myself "hey, I slightly contributed to a published set of rules! Huzzah!"
Manouver Group is now available here (http://www.wargamingonline.com/catalog/product_info.php?currency=GBP&products_id=353) at Wargaming Online in PDF format.