Small Unit Veterans, a potential thematic codex supplement

[gunnyogrady]

Hey folks!

 

Based on some of the suggestions from the Rumors thread a few posts down, I got to thinking how Guard might work if the squads worked more like contemporary fire teams, specifically in regards to voxes, artillery, and medics/corpsmen.

 

I'm drafting up some rules that I might clear with my gaming group to do a narrative campaign with my Regiment versus their 'Nids and Orks and such.

 

So I'm asking you folks, where does your imagination run to when you think of Guard behaving in a more modern sense?

 

I'm thinking of the title like, "Codex Supplement: Small Unit Veterans"

[Carraigf]

Hey Gunny, it's an interesting idea. As a starter I'd go for the ability to split squads into fire teams of five one under the Sgt another for the Cpl but retain the overall squad strength for the sake of morale checks.

 

Next how about squad buffs that could work as mini orders where the squad can sacrifice an action in order to combine fire or call in suppprt..,

Combined fire: if the squad hasn't moved the squad lead can designate a target within los, the squad lead doesn't fire but the rest of the squad gets +1 to hit

Fire suppprt: If the squad has vox squad lead and vox trooper can sacrifice move and fire to call a strafe fromm flyers in reserve or off table, or a fire mission for any arty on the table wit reduced scatter, maybe with a ld check to see if they can get hq to free up a barrel.

 

Last one I'd go for is specialist abilities, allow Sgts to buff morale checks for nearby broken squads to get them back in the fight, or corps men to grant a single re roll on squad saves.

[WarriorFish]

To be effective they'd need some special rules, stuff like being able to support fire each other, co-ordinate together and such. Maybe stuff like intelligent retreat and regroup? With smaller units they're going to need to have some bonuses from working together or they're going to get blasted off the table.

[Ulrik_Ironfist]

I actually thought about this, but I actually looked at it in terms of combining squads. So if you could put 6 infantry squads in a platoon, you'd have 3 squads of 20 men and there would be 10 men to a fireteam (because everything is bigger in the Guard... commence innuendo). In the US army, a fire team is only 4 guys, a TL, Grenadier, Automatic Rifleman, and a Rifleman. The SL, RTO, and Medic aren't usually in either team, usually sticking in with whichever team is closer. The standard patrol formation we used in my CST class (I was USAF weather, and our Combat skills were taught by army infantry instructors, so we learned to do this the army way) was as follows:

 

                        TLA

         ATL/G

                                    AR

Rifleman

 

                     SL

 

                     Medic

 

                     RTO

 

                       TLB

 

AR                                      ATL/G 

 

                     Rifleman

 

 

We used a wedge up front, strong side right (Machine gun to the right), while the trailing team was a diamond, strong side left. Obviously we would change formations if we needed to, but this was how we typically set up to start. I'd suggest having a way to break up and reform the unit so you can really run the small unit tactics...