====== Ogre Digest, October 7th (Last: September 29th) ======== ===== GEV 9.036 - ridiculously unbalanced ============================== From: David Morse Subject: GEV 9.036 - ridiculously unbalanced The "Ogre Raid" variant presented in GEV 9.036 is ridiculously unbalanced. I know, I know, "GEV is possibly the most fully playtested game ever". However this is a backwater scenario and not often played. The attackers get 6 GEVs and an Ogre Mk IV. The defenders get 30 infantry, 8 armor units plus 1.5 per turn, and has to defend like 23 D1 town hexes. Talk about a tough assignment... Any 6 VP or higher defending armor just gets rattlered to death. Light tanks get outmaneuvered and persecuted by GEVs. LGEVs just don't have the attack factors to do anything. The reinforcements trickle in so slowly they're just VP for the missile racks. So .... the defense is utterly screwed. To rebalance the scenario, I'd guess something like a defense force of 30 infantry, 15 armor + 2 reinforcements per turn. ===== [The Mark IV is great at beating up on the helpless isn't it? That scenario is 9.037 in my copyright 2000, 5th edition, 1st printing rulebook. Continuing with the GURPS OGRE infantry if I might, I find the selection of "long arms" to be a bit lacking. The grunts need a weapon that will penetrate DR 125 (found on certain battlesuits) and do at least a little damage and do considerable damage against the DR 100 on the hypersmart missile. To me that says 6d6x3(3), which requires APFSDSDU, 6mm, medium barrel, electromag, normal power. (6mm x 40 = 240mm or just a bit under ten inches which is a nice size to strap to somebody's forearm as will be seen below.) Recoil is going to be nasty so a RoF of four rounds per second will suffice which is a light automatic weapon. The ranges are Half Damage: 2,800 yards, Max Range: 9,100 yards, Indirect Max: 22,750 yards. (Good luck hitting the broad side of an Ogre at that range.) Note that this weapon is useless against any vehicle and so is only used against infantry (who stay under cover mostly) and missiles (who pop up when you least expect them). The base weight of the gun is 21.6 pounds which gives it a surface area of about one half square foot which requires 1.25 pounds of BPC to give it DR 100 (To protect against nuclear near misses. Don't you hate losing all your weapons when a SATNUC goes off 20 yards away?) which costs $125 for the armor, 1 pound and $155 for sealed and basic emission cloaking and the final weight of the unloaded weapon is 24 pounds. The Acc rating is 16 and the snapshot is 17, with a Rcl of -1 and a Min Str of 20. (Most grunts are trained to aim!) Each round of ammo weighs 1/140th of a pound, takes up 1/20,000th of a cubic foot and costs 69 cents. The weapon requires a power source of 86 kW to fire on full automatic, 21 kW selective fire. The cost for the weapon is $13,000 plus $125 for the armor plus $155 for the surface features for a total cost of $13,300. Clips have 100 rounds of ammo, are armored to DR 100 with the above surface features, weigh one pound and cost $80 each. Note that this weapon does NOT have a power supply or a handle. Instead it clips to a hardpoint. (A pair of these hardpoints adds 2.5 pounds and $5 to the total cost of the battlesuit.) Normally, a grunt will clip his gun to his primary arm and a missile to his off arm if he expects to see immediate action. Ready times for a battlesuit take four seconds to pull out, attach and sync-up a missile or gun to a hardpoint, but only three seconds to change ammo clips for a gun. (This is one of the disadvantages of having the controls for the weapon inside the suit.) So the final infantry load comes to 1 gun, 10 spare clips and 10 missiles, for a total weight of 135 pounds. (And the battlesuit is down 2.5 pounds for the hardpoints. So there are 10 pounds or so remaining for other weapons.) The Infantry package changes Grenade Launcher to Guided Missile and remember that the effective skill with hardpoint mounted weapons cannot exceed Battlesuit skill. Well I think I'll combine this with the infantry missile and my GURPS Ogre infantry tactics notes and see if Pyramid will accept my article this time. (It's a RPG article honest!) -HJC] ============================== List Moderator: Henry J. Cobb ogre@sjgames.com Archives for this mailing list may be found at http://www.io.com/~hcobb/ General online support for the OGRE game is at http://www.sjgames.com/ogre Ogre, G.E.V., Shockwave and other products mentioned here are trademarks or registered trademarks of Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by SJ Games. This material is used here in accordance with the SJ Games online policy at http://www.sjgames.com/general/online_policy.html