Wargames misrepreseting weapons

I have played a lot of war games as I am sure most you guys. But it has always bugged me on the use of range be it from the maximum weapons ranges to the range affects to penetration.

The two biggest issues that I don't understand is shoulder fired man portable antitank rockets. Be it from ww2, like the Piat, bazooka or panzershreiks or modern version, like that AT4, or RPG-17. The ranges are never to scale of the battlefield, mostly 6'x4' tables. Since most games are played at 1/100 scale that makes the battlefield 600'x400' (182.88m x 121.9m). This is WAY, WAY inside the vast majority of weapons maximum effect ranges.
Just about every game I have played has them set to Max of 10" some times 20". This is way to unrealistic. That's 83' in scale, wtf? (The worst game for this was Battletech, I know it's sci-fi, but, with the weapons having stupid short ranges for what they represent.)

I guess this range restriction is to force unit movement. But that can easily be religated to hit modifiers and los.

The second issue is tank guns and penetration values. Again it comes to the small size of the battlefield. Penetration shouldn't have a decreasing value. It would be the same value across the board. For example a tiger 88mm penetration is 151mm effective pen at 500m (depending on ammo type and using the american penetration critiria) That's all the way across the board + 4 more. And it's pretty much that way with all the big guns.
What I am getting at is the penetration values for pretty much all weapons would be best if set.
The only game that I thought had the most true to form penetration for range and scale was the old twilight 2000 rgp. My friends and I trashed the rpg aspect and just played the vehicle combat. It was freaking fantastic. It was a little complicated at times though.

This is pretty much just me letting out what is in my brain from being on the road driving all day. I needed to get it out and see what others think.

Hi Tau,

Well, for playability reasons, the distances between miniatures are heavily downscaled ; think of this as playing with 1:100 miniatures on a 1:600 (if not more!) board. If we were to respect actual combat ranges in 1:100, even early WW2 light tanks could engage each other at distances up to 5 meters, while NORTHAG's AT missiles could engage targets at distances ranging from 15 meters for small missiles like the AT-7 Saxhorn/Metis, up to 60 meters for the AT-6 Spiral/Kokon and TOW missiles. Meanwhile, most artillery units could fire accross a football pitch.
So, it had to be downscaled quite a bit so that we can play on regular tables. Otherwise, hell, if the scales were realistic, some early AT missiles could not be used on our combat tables since they have a minimal range of 300 to 500 meters!
I know that some people do play wargames with realistic ranges, but they play it in 1:300 and 1:600 scales and still need extremely large battle mats to recreate a decent skirmish.

I imagine there may exist a game where the ground scale matches model scale, but I don't know of any. Battlegroup, as I understand it, is "flexible scale" in that there's no defined ground or time scale.

I I vaguely remember playing Micro Armor back in the late 80's. From what I remember it was true to scale. But then again my friends and I always went epic with huge fields that we played on the living room floor, easily 15'x15' so range was not so unrealistic.

The one thing I always try to do is think of a reason for rules, like range, armor penetration, and all types of modifiers. Us my imagination to come up with a story to justify this stuff.

But I am curious of why game designers come up with this.... universal aspect of a weapons range being so limited. I mean you can easily just have all mordern ranged weapons shoot across the board with no problems. Be it a bazookas and sub machine guns to sniper rifle and tank guns. Have it just be the limits of terrain and modifiers to hit.

At CincyCon back in March, they had a group demoing their 15mm game. They had it laid out on the floor in the lobby, about 15'-20' square. At that scale, gun ranges were still half their real world values.




EDIT: MOD - I removed your Spoiler tags. Bit pointless to use them.

We are going to attempt a large game of BG at so e point. Hoping for around 3 to 4 thousand points and using 18'x8' (6 tables). Going to drop the limited range and double the penetration ranges for penetration values.

Also I just read this blog that was sent to me.

https://warwickkinrade.blogspot.com/2016/02/getting-closer-to-simulation.html?m=1

Now I understand the thinking behind the rules and it all make sense.

It's a game.

Played with toys soldiers on a limited table space.

That's generally why weapons in some wargames have abstracted limits.

Warwick's explanation is spot on, have seen Waterloo done with 2mm blocks from Irregular and that was on a 36x6 table and was impressive but the exception to the rule.

In fact it is probably fair to say that in this context it is not the weapons that are 'misrepresented' but the ground scale. At 1/72, at the ranges the table that the size of the average human habitation and the length of human arms allows, modern weapons' fire is devastating. Consequently modern conflicts generally have been fought out at ranges much greater than that table allows. If we adopt a realistic ground scale for fire effects, we are limited to fighting either with tiny blobs (plenty of people do, nothing wrong with that at all if that is what you like) or to scenarios involving either very dense terrain or suicidal frontal assaults. If however we want to have our cake and eat it -  ie play with nice toys and at the same time want to enjoy a game of manoeuvre, we have to cheat with the ground scale to make that possible.

Or crawl around on our hands and knees on a football pitch..........  

Said the man who has been known to fight HGW-style battles on the carpet and lawn using a vintage Britains howitzer to fire actual steel bullets at toy soldiers.  

Incidentally, even after a 100 years, the spring on that thing can propel the projectiles with enough force to make visible dents in seasoned and varnished wood at 10 feet. A toy clearly not designed with elf and safety concerns in mind....  

Bestest
K

Just because a weapon may be sighted out to 1000 yards or more doesn't mean you can even see let alone hit something that far away. The steppes of Russia may be any exception but elsewhere there is usually some terrain intervening - even in the open desert there is heat haze which shortens visibility considerably. Most tank combat in WWII was done at ranges under 500 yards and infantry combat around 100 (the battle sights on rifles were set to 100 yards - everything further away is a section or platoon volley target with the range and rate of fire called by the commander e.g "at 300 yards five rounds rapid")

I think that BG rules really allow for more realistic ranges. Have the weapons shooting a cross the table is fine. It's really all about the spot roll. If you can spot it, you can shoot it.

All of the games my brother and I played have bee unlimited ranges on a 8x6 table. And the only differences we have had are faster games, 750 pt game taking 1 1/2 hrs compared to normally 3 hours if having to wait. Platoon games on a 4x4 taking 30 mins.

The spot rule and the 25% or less can't be targeted. Really controls and balances out the range. Plus this allows us to use models we normally wouldn't, like sp ATGs, towed ATGs, field guns and the like.

But we also have a rule that once you get modifiers that make your hits greater than 6 with small arms can only be suppression fire.

With the type of dense to semi-dense terrain our group likes to play scenarios on we almost never run into the issue of something being out of range.

I think the only weapons that really suffer in the context of this discussion is the hand held anti tank weapons such as Panzershreks and Fausts and American Bazookas. (I guess a Piat would count too, if you can get it to actually launch). I feel they are limited to their extremely short range for gaming purposes only because otherwise they would become absurdly unrealistic in their effectiveness. If you were to give them even a 40 inch range on a 8 by 4 table every battle would turn into a Victoria Cross citation like that of Major Robert Cain with burning wrecks everywhere from death dealing small teams.