White Star Rising: Game Tactics

[Whiterook]

Ne of my all-time favorite games, ever since the first edition, the new Second Edition offers many cool upgrades and improvements! This thread is a catalog, per post, of tactics and tips for game play.

[Whiterook]

Reconnaissance Units

This game handles recon units the best of any system I’ve played, and it’s not really because it’s complex or anything… it’s quite elegant in that …

…recon vehicular units (marked with an “R” on the counter) are the third layer (after Headquarters and Sub-headquarters) that can call in artillery and indirect mortar fire on enemy positions.

That makes them very powerful units, yet using them is tricky, as they are light armored vehicles… ti get them in range, it also puts them in lines of fire.

A cool mechanic that’s not to be overlooked is the fact that …

any concealed enemy unit (in cover, basically) becomes ‘seen” if a recon unit is four or less hexes away with LOS!

I’ve always had a bit of a problem using recon units in board and miniatures games, primarily because they are inherently vulnerable to incoming fire.

[Whiterook]

Move and Fire

You know, I can’t rightly recall of this was an option of the original (I’ll check at some point), but at the least this is a great upgrade if so… the concept is that, if your unit has a Movement Factor greater than 1, you can either Move and Fire, or Fire and Move; the caveats of that action being that you can only move half your MF (rounded down), and your firepower (FP) is decreased by 1 and your To Hit is increased by 1, which makes sense because you’re firing on the move and your effectiveness is slightly reduced.

To drill down into this a little more, understand Combat is done through rolling a number of dice equal to your FP, to which you need a result equal or greater than the To Hit.

This is of course represented in many Wargames, mimicking real-world battlefield mechanics. There are time when you need to edge forward and let loose some shells! But what I’ve never seen represented in this type of combat maneuver is how this system represents the following

Opportunity Fire (OF). Again, as in many Wargames, your opponent gets a chance to fire on you when you move a unit within their range and Line of Sight (LOS). For this combined action in this game, units conducting OF on Stacked Units moving and firing together may only target one unit in the stack per hex moved.

Thats big! On a stack of enemy units that have a final halved MF of two or more, you can only slow down one of two units (…stacking limit is two units max per hex)…that can be problematic for the OF unit.