CCW/Compendium Rules Question - Incoming damage? - Page 2

juris · 09-27-2021, 10:11 PM

I agree with this - I also agree with Sword that the current rules do seem to let you hit a destroyed component again - but the 'current rules' for CW 2.5e is joke - the game is 20+ years old

I remember the AADA banned people from dueling with an empty space in their car for this reason.

I'd just house rule that a destroyed component or empty cargo location is not a valid hit location.

Otherwise a car with 6 MGs facing front gets a little absurd when it's basically impossible to destroy each gun with weapons fire

Quote:

Originally Posted by kjamma4

Continuing the quotes from page 41, "When a weapon penetrates from the
side, roll randomly to see which of the three locations is hit. Re-roll for any nonexistent location."

I guess I don't follow the RAW but if I only have two locations, I roll randomly for the two I have.

I'm a rebel that way. :)

swordtart · 09-28-2021, 12:28 AM

If you consider the case where you have a car with 2MGs forward, you roll randomly to see if it is hit. If one is destroyed you still roll to see if you hit the destroyed one on later hits - current rules.

So you could fit a destroyed MG from the start and create a bypass to protect your other MG. You still need the weight and space of course and the damage still hit something.

If you remove the damaged MG and put nothing back to replace it, suddenly the gap is not a valid location and enemy fire automatically homes in on your remaining MG.

This is a bit odd, but it falls out from the rule that damage that bypasses front armour automatically hits your front weapons regardless of how little of the available space they take up before passing through. Consider a single MiR in the side arc of a Minibus. It's probably in the order of 200 sq ft of side armour and the MiR must be less than 1 sq ft in cross sesction.

Consider the case where you have BC mounted front. If you had the space you could fit 3 mini-rockets. This would provide a mechanism where your BC will now only be hit 1/4 of the time despite it being significantly larger than all the MiRs combined let alone any single one.

I would favour the chance of hitting the front weapons (or the internal components when the time comes) being a factor of the space the weapon takes up but you would also need to include a mechanism to cover the space it "could" have taken up (the 1/3 total spaces per arc).

This would mean drawing up some table for each arc where you have weapons and working out the probability based on space including the un-used spaces from the 1/3 per arc rule.

So for example in for Lux with 6 spaces available for any arc and 1 MG and 2 MiRs you would roll D6. On a 1-4 you wouldn't hit any weapon and damage would go straight through to the next compartment. On a 5 you would hit the MG. On a 6 you would hit the space part allocated to MiR. As there are only two there you would have a 1/3 chance of hitting either one and 1/3 chance of hitting the empty slot and the damage passing through.

As a system, it has some flaws but it is fairly easy to understand and administer on the fly and is consistent regardless regardless of whether you have weapons fitted or not or whether they have been destroyed.

You might worry that 1/3 spaces for 6 arcs adds up to double your space allocation. "Just keep swimming" as Dory would say :)

EDIT:
Incidentally this also fixes the cheesy use of a Component Armoured Mini Rocket as ersatz armour. The protected rocket takes up 1 and 1/3rd spaces. On a luxury it has a 4 in 18 chance* of protecting you and the rest of the time it is bypassed.

* The 1 space for CA for a weapon counts against the 1/3 spaces per arc rule and so it is includes 1/6 for the space the CA takes up and 1/3 * 1/6 = 1/18 for the rocket itself. You could either use a D20 and re-roll 19-20 or stick with a d6 with a 1 being a definite hit and a 2 needed a second roll of 1-2 to confirm.

svawter · 09-28-2021, 01:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by swordtart

....er Car Wars :)
The game is one of SJGs earliest. It evolved over a decade under different editors, some who were involved in the original game and who perhaps had a holistic understanding, others who brought a particular bias or mandate, others who I suspect looked at it purely as a product. Supplements were developed by different authors in parallel who introduced the same or similar components with different rules. ADQ was the usual route to rules questions, but unfortunately there was an editorial swing door and previous "decisions" could be overturned in an instant and reverted a few issues later. With no coherent version control between supplements it became too big a mess. New supplements bring new revenue, revising existing ones not so much so (especially if that requires a new print run).

As a prime example, the ruling for how much/many DP steel belting adds to tires went through a flip-flop for how many issues of ADQ after the rules showed 1/4 bonus and the example showed 1/3... each time they wrote the rules it stated 1/4 (SSB == 15dp) vs AD Q&A and examples of SSB 16dp...

Racer · 09-28-2021, 06:51 AM

Oh yes Battle Cars ! We played that almost every long Friday afternoon (lessons finished before lunch) at my boarding school . Much simpler rules & set up , with added BattleBikes & Battle Chairs (motorized wheelchairs for injured Drivers , from a White Dwarf article) supplements - plus customized Car Sheets via cutting up photocopies & recopying them again .

Moveable buildings & scenery for playing field also a bonus . It was simplistic , but extremely playable . We actually had to replace the eight sided dice twice , as we used them so much the corners started to get rounded !

Generally when it came to Rules queries in Car Wars , if something can't be found in the CWC 2.5 or other rulebooks like Aero Duel , then our groups went with 'The Rule of Logic' resolution .

How many DP of rubber on an Oversized Plasticore Tire ? ; Can Fuel Tanks be placed in EWPs ? ; Can you have 3 FP Solid & 1 Normal Solid Tire of same size on a Car without losing HC ? ; Stats for Hi-Res Binoculars (mentioned in article text but not listed in Military Ped Equipment) ? ; etc were all satisfactorily resolved under 'Rules of Logic' and games continued .

Different groups may draw different conclusions , but if group your playing with are happy with a brain stormed rule , then it's okay .
Okay some of guys we play with are extremely smart - working at BAe , MoD , IBM , at Universities or run their own web design firms , so the pool of knowledge is huge , so you may not have our resourcefulness on hand .

HeatDeath · 09-28-2021, 07:52 AM

Ok...

So the cited rule paragraph has no generally accepted mapping to a particular gameplay procedure. This was not remedied at any point prior to or including 5e. [6e changes the damage allocation rule sufficiently that the problem no longer exists, but cannot be really said to have provided a back-portable ruling.]

Everyone who encountered this paragraph and went on to actually play the game developed their own interpretation. They would have had to, since this isn't exactly a weird edge case - it's literally the second most common possible situation after "damage goes internal on a pristine car".

An authoritative ruling /may/ have been issued, but at no point did it ever get promulgated back into the published rules documents, and at this late date no one remembers or particularly cares what it was, particularly since it's entirely possible that it may have changed more than once.

All of this implies strongly that at no point did the editorial staff /ever/ actually attempt to play the rules-as-written, in /any/ edition, or this would have come up almost immediately.

Am I missing something?

swordtart · 09-28-2021, 09:31 AM

Hmmm.

Possibly different groups may have had a different interpretation but in every group I played we always used the rule that the destroyed weapon remained a legitimate location and so you could bypass the surviving weapon. If there is agreement within a group then the rule is wholly consistent for that group. This is usually self-enforcing as new players are introduced to the game by existing players who explain things to them rather than requiring them to read it for themselves (and thus the group-think).

SJG was also one of those groups, I don't know how they played it, but they wouldn't have noticed an issue if they all agreed how it should be interpreted (and the rules can't have undermined that impression or they WOULD have changed it). Every new player learnt to play it that way (probably taught by the game designers themselves) -no, no problem here. If I had to place a bet it would be that SJG spent more time playing games in the 80's than they do in the 20's.

There are really only two interpretations and neither breaks the game or confers an advantage, you either keep a weapon but suffer internal hits more quickly or you loose all offensive firepower and retain some internal DPs. In either case nine times out of ten you are out of the game anyway.

It's only when you try to go under the bonnet to pick at other issues that you start to see the problems. In casual play, no-one cares. Once you see the issues you realise that to fix it would be more effort than to completely toss it out and rewrite it which is what SJG did with 6th (and to a lesser extent 5th).

However I have now done a detailed trawl of my archives and in Auto Duel Quarterly issue 6-2 the specific question you asked was submitted.

Q: When a car has two MGs mounted on the front, for instance, and one is destroyed by enemy gunfire, if the front is hit again, would the damage automatically go to the other MG or would it have a chance of hitting in the same place that the destroyed one was, destroying more internal components?

A: There would be a 50/50 chance of the shot missing the undamaged MG and going on to damage the next interior component. Of course, this is not true for collision damage.

This has never been subsequently contradicted in any official ruling to my knowledge nor was any other interpretation suggested previously.

So, it wasn't enough of an issue for anyone to worry about asking until then. It was unequivocally answered at the time it was raised in the official organ of the game. No-one asked the question again until now. People may have been quite happy playing it differently in the interim, but the answer is there if you want it (personally if I didn't like an answer in ADQ&Q I'd ignore it and play it the way I wanted).

I can think of a certain other dark and grim miniature game company that has fundamentally changed the game rules every few years or so. At least in CW you can use the same playing pieces :)

juris · 09-28-2021, 12:25 PM

Yep - that is clearly the 'official' 20 year old rule that you can totally house rule ;)

It was fine when it was just two linked weapons. It gets absurd when you have a vehicle with an empty cargo space and weapon damage goes right through your car!

Quote:

Originally Posted by swordtart

However I have now done a detailed trawl of my archives and in Auto Duel Quarterly issue 6-2 the specific question you asked was submitted.

Q: When a car has two MGs mounted on the front, for instance, and one is destroyed by enemy gunfire, if the front is hit again, would the damage automatically go to the other MG or would it have a chance of hitting in the same place that the destroyed one was, destroying more internal components?

A: There would be a 50/50 chance of the shot missing the undamaged MG and going on to damage the next interior component. Of course, this is not true for collision damage.

kjamma4 · 09-28-2021, 03:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by swordtart

So you could fit a destroyed MG from the start and create a bypass to protect your other MG. You still need the weight and space of course and the damage still hit something.

I would without reservation let someone WASTE weight and space to do that if they thought the trade off was worth it.

kjamma4 · 09-28-2021, 03:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by juris

It was fine when it was just two linked weapons. It gets absurd when you have a vehicle with an empty cargo space and weapon damage goes right through your car!

If you have a luxury with six unused spaces, why would it be absurd to think that incoming fire from the left side that penetrated couldn't hit "dead air" and continue to the right side armor?

I'll grant you it gets absurd if you only have 1/3 space as cargo and you have a one in three chance of the extra damage "hitting" that.

Chris is not the only one who thought of "the chance of hitting one component is a ratio of its space to the total spaces that could be hit" but at some point it just becomes easier to split the chances evenly between crew compartment, power plant, and cargo regardless of the spaces of each.

swordtart · 09-28-2021, 03:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kjamma4

I would without reservation let someone WASTE weight and space to do that if they thought the trade off was worth it.

How about if they fitted a destroyed MiR? Under rules as written is has just the same 50:50 chance. But if it was a MiR, it only costs $50 anyway, you might as well fit a real one.

Hmm, what about a fired rocket, is the fired tube still a weapon for damage allocation purposes? Technically it is no different to any other weapon, it just has a single shot magazine so the same rule should apply.

What if I never replace it? It can't suddenly change state just because we have started a new combat.

09-28-2021, 12:28 AM	#12
swordtart Join Date: Jun 2008	Re: CCW/Compendium Rules Question - Incoming damage? If you consider the case where you have a car with 2MGs forward, you roll randomly to see if it is hit. If one is destroyed you still roll to see if you hit the destroyed one on later hits - current rules. So you could fit a destroyed MG from the start and create a bypass to protect your other MG. You still need the weight and space of course and the damage still hit something. If you remove the damaged MG and put nothing back to replace it, suddenly the gap is not a valid location and enemy fire automatically homes in on your remaining MG. This is a bit odd, but it falls out from the rule that damage that bypasses front armour automatically hits your front weapons regardless of how little of the available space they take up before passing through. Consider a single MiR in the side arc of a Minibus. It's probably in the order of 200 sq ft of side armour and the MiR must be less than 1 sq ft in cross sesction. Consider the case where you have BC mounted front. If you had the space you could fit 3 mini-rockets. This would provide a mechanism where your BC will now only be hit 1/4 of the time despite it being significantly larger than all the MiRs combined let alone any single one. I would favour the chance of hitting the front weapons (or the internal components when the time comes) being a factor of the space the weapon takes up but you would also need to include a mechanism to cover the space it "could" have taken up (the 1/3 total spaces per arc). This would mean drawing up some table for each arc where you have weapons and working out the probability based on space including the un-used spaces from the 1/3 per arc rule. So for example in for Lux with 6 spaces available for any arc and 1 MG and 2 MiRs you would roll D6. On a 1-4 you wouldn't hit any weapon and damage would go straight through to the next compartment. On a 5 you would hit the MG. On a 6 you would hit the space part allocated to MiR. As there are only two there you would have a 1/3 chance of hitting either one and 1/3 chance of hitting the empty slot and the damage passing through. As a system, it has some flaws but it is fairly easy to understand and administer on the fly and is consistent regardless regardless of whether you have weapons fitted or not or whether they have been destroyed. You might worry that 1/3 spaces for 6 arcs adds up to double your space allocation. "Just keep swimming" as Dory would say :) EDIT: Incidentally this also fixes the cheesy use of a Component Armoured Mini Rocket as ersatz armour. The protected rocket takes up 1 and 1/3rd spaces. On a luxury it has a 4 in 18 chance* of protecting you and the rest of the time it is bypassed. * The 1 space for CA for a weapon counts against the 1/3 spaces per arc rule and so it is includes 1/6 for the space the CA takes up and 1/3 * 1/6 = 1/18 for the rocket itself. You could either use a D20 and re-roll 19-20 or stick with a d6 with a 1 being a definite hit and a 2 needed a second roll of 1-2 to confirm. Last edited by swordtart; 09-28-2021 at 03:49 PM. Reason: Because my brain works slower than I would like.

09-28-2021, 06:51 AM	#14
Racer Join Date: Jan 2006 Location: London, UK	Re: CCW/Compendium Rules Question - Incoming damage? Oh yes Battle Cars ! We played that almost every long Friday afternoon (lessons finished before lunch) at my boarding school . Much simpler rules & set up , with added BattleBikes & Battle Chairs (motorized wheelchairs for injured Drivers , from a White Dwarf article) supplements - plus customized Car Sheets via cutting up photocopies & recopying them again . Moveable buildings & scenery for playing field also a bonus . It was simplistic , but extremely playable . We actually had to replace the eight sided dice twice , as we used them so much the corners started to get rounded ! Generally when it came to Rules queries in Car Wars , if something can't be found in the CWC 2.5 or other rulebooks like Aero Duel , then our groups went with 'The Rule of Logic' resolution . How many DP of rubber on an Oversized Plasticore Tire ? ; Can Fuel Tanks be placed in EWPs ? ; Can you have 3 FP Solid & 1 Normal Solid Tire of same size on a Car without losing HC ? ; Stats for Hi-Res Binoculars (mentioned in article text but not listed in Military Ped Equipment) ? ; etc were all satisfactorily resolved under 'Rules of Logic' and games continued . Different groups may draw different conclusions , but if group your playing with are happy with a brain stormed rule , then it's okay . Okay some of guys we play with are extremely smart - working at BAe , MoD , IBM , at Universities or run their own web design firms , so the pool of knowledge is huge , so you may not have our resourcefulness on hand . __________________ Five Gauss Guns on a Camper !!! The Resident Brit .

09-28-2021, 07:52 AM	#15
HeatDeath Join Date: May 2012	Re: CCW/Compendium Rules Question - Incoming damage? Ok... So the cited rule paragraph has no generally accepted mapping to a particular gameplay procedure. This was not remedied at any point prior to or including 5e. [6e changes the damage allocation rule sufficiently that the problem no longer exists, but cannot be really said to have provided a back-portable ruling.] Everyone who encountered this paragraph and went on to actually play the game developed their own interpretation. They would have had to, since this isn't exactly a weird edge case - it's literally the second most common possible situation after "damage goes internal on a pristine car". An authoritative ruling /may/ have been issued, but at no point did it ever get promulgated back into the published rules documents, and at this late date no one remembers or particularly cares what it was, particularly since it's entirely possible that it may have changed more than once. All of this implies strongly that at no point did the editorial staff /ever/ actually attempt to play the rules-as-written, in /any/ edition, or this would have come up almost immediately. Am I missing something? Last edited by HeatDeath; 09-28-2021 at 09:12 AM.

09-28-2021, 09:31 AM	#16
swordtart Join Date: Jun 2008	Re: CCW/Compendium Rules Question - Incoming damage? Hmmm. Possibly different groups may have had a different interpretation but in every group I played we always used the rule that the destroyed weapon remained a legitimate location and so you could bypass the surviving weapon. If there is agreement within a group then the rule is wholly consistent for that group. This is usually self-enforcing as new players are introduced to the game by existing players who explain things to them rather than requiring them to read it for themselves (and thus the group-think). SJG was also one of those groups, I don't know how they played it, but they wouldn't have noticed an issue if they all agreed how it should be interpreted (and the rules can't have undermined that impression or they WOULD have changed it). Every new player learnt to play it that way (probably taught by the game designers themselves) -no, no problem here. If I had to place a bet it would be that SJG spent more time playing games in the 80's than they do in the 20's. There are really only two interpretations and neither breaks the game or confers an advantage, you either keep a weapon but suffer internal hits more quickly or you loose all offensive firepower and retain some internal DPs. In either case nine times out of ten you are out of the game anyway. It's only when you try to go under the bonnet to pick at other issues that you start to see the problems. In casual play, no-one cares. Once you see the issues you realise that to fix it would be more effort than to completely toss it out and rewrite it which is what SJG did with 6th (and to a lesser extent 5th). However I have now done a detailed trawl of my archives and in Auto Duel Quarterly issue 6-2 the specific question you asked was submitted. Q: When a car has two MGs mounted on the front, for instance, and one is destroyed by enemy gunfire, if the front is hit again, would the damage automatically go to the other MG or would it have a chance of hitting in the same place that the destroyed one was, destroying more internal components? A: There would be a 50/50 chance of the shot missing the undamaged MG and going on to damage the next interior component. Of course, this is not true for collision damage. This has never been subsequently contradicted in any official ruling to my knowledge nor was any other interpretation suggested previously. So, it wasn't enough of an issue for anyone to worry about asking until then. It was unequivocally answered at the time it was raised in the official organ of the game. No-one asked the question again until now. People may have been quite happy playing it differently in the interim, but the answer is there if you want it (personally if I didn't like an answer in ADQ&Q I'd ignore it and play it the way I wanted). I can think of a certain other dark and grim miniature game company that has fundamentally changed the game rules every few years or so. At least in CW you can use the same playing pieces :) Last edited by swordtart; 09-28-2021 at 03:58 PM.