A while back I set myself an insane goal, the goal of playing every sci-fi skirmish game ever… utter madness it was. And this was after I’d laughed off Discourse Miniatures claim on YouTube that she was going to play a game of every Wargame ever… I guess my goals were a little more sensible, however upon reflection still an impossible task.
Especially when at the outset I had some rather goofy ideas about adapting other rulesets to play sci-fi skirmish games… how about using a 2-15mm WW2 Mass Combat game for 28mm sci-fi Skirmishes?
Enter Mechanised Warfare by Andrew Thomas… still sold by Irregular Miniatures for the princely sum of £4.99. These rules have been adapted by Panzer8 into multiple other settings including sci-fi (but never skirmish). His adaptations can be found here.
It dawned on me some time ago that many wargames follow the same formula. And so, when it came to certain rule sets a little jiggery pokery and what is intended to operate as a Tiger Platoon, could in fact also work for a single heavily armed and armoured trooper from the future.
So that’s basically what I did:
Everyone gets a standard 6” move, because they’re all humans. The Marines, are Elite meaning they get +1 to their hit rolls. They have rifles (20” range) or heavy rifles (30” range) which all have an ‘attack factor’ of 2. The Marines also have a defence of 2.
Players roll off to determine which is A and which is B, this stays the same for the whole game. The turn goes through the following phases:
A Moves
B Shoots
B Moves
A Shoots
Rally
A hit is scored in Panzer8’s version on a 4+ to which modifiers are applied, and on a 5+ in the original rules.
Attack and defence factors work simply, if a hit is scored then players make an opposed roll, the attacker adding their attack factor, the defender adding their defence factor. If the defender wins or the roll is a tie then the hit does nothing. If the attacker wins by 1 the target is pinned, by 2 and they are suppressed, by 3 and they are dead.
If a suppressed figure is within 12” of their leader they can attempt to rally to pinned by rolling a 5+ and pinned figure can attempt to rally back to normal by doing the same.
I’d probably switch that so instead of having two levels of morale trouble, if beaten by 1 the defender is pinned, and if beaten by 2 they are wounded. One requires the leader, the other a medic.
Melee combat was lacking full development too. As you can probably imagine in Mechanised Warfare they’re not really attempting to simulate melee, but instead very close range firefights. To add this in to a skirmish version I’d probably just add a Melee of Combat factor, then when joined make an opposed roll, and the higher scorer kills their opponent.
It was a very fun game in the end, quick and rather brutal. Especially when I realised a side could fire and then move into melee. Which was mostly how the Marines wiped out the Cannon Fodder, as I hadn’t figured out the Melee Factor idea, so I was just using their normal attack factors.
Weirdly, this mass combat game may have made for one of the fastest, and fun sci-fi skirmish games I’ve played, and the core certainly has scope for development.
Deathzap 
Nothing like some sideways thinking 😀
I rate the rules greatly. I never picked up the Thomas rules from IM as I think they work by strip rather than by base.
John
Nice idea and nicely executed.
One lad at our club produced a brilliant set of Napoleonic Naval rules from Xenos Rampant 🙂
Wow, now that’s really thinking outside the box!
That’s what we thought, but it works really well 🙂
Mechanised Warfare works by base, but a lot of Irregular’s rules do work by strip, I still base my strips though on tiny 2cm x 1cm bases.
I do like the MW rules and used them years ago. Very interesting rules. I based some of my older WW2 rules off MW and they worked great. I do also like the Pz8 implementations – 2 pages each and quite good as well. I have not thought of skirmish but they are very adaptable (as you have shown!).