Are there any mini wargames that handle armored combat in a way that doesn't suck horribly?

"What was that?"

"An explosive round the size of your arm just hit about a foot to the right of your dick."

"......"

" Don't worry, it didn't penetrate and cause you to slowly bleed out due to metal shards in you cock as you were horribly burned to death......this time...."

"......BAIL OUT!"

Can't imagine why

Play A Fistful of TOWs 3 then probably. Covers WW2 through modern with very realistic and well written rules. Models/stands represent platoons, so maybe it's not the scale you'd prefer given you talk a lot about individual vehicles.

If you fancy you know a lot about tanks already, I Ain't Been Shot Mum (and its derivatives from Too Fat Lardies) gives you a lot of leeway in the rules to decide what is or is not reasonable for a given situation. It's also smaller scale where one vehicle = one vehicle.

Yup, though some motherfuckers were pretty blase about it too. One Stuart Driver in The Tank War mentions the time a 50mm shell punched through the front plate about a half foot from his face then just flopped onto the floor next to him, having expended all it's energy getting through the armour. So he turns and basically goes "Hey boss we just got penetrated" and the rest of the crew says bullshit because there's no way they'd not notice that. So the driver just wraps his hand in a rag, picks up the still hot shell and shows it to his commander and other crewmembers over his shoulder. The response is pretty jovial and then they just kind of got back to it. Interestingly enough, in that book it seemed like most of the 'false positive' bails happened during more sporadic engagements, while in the really vicious firefights crewmen seemed far less eager to bail, perhaps figuring that it's safer to be in a maybe penetrated tank than outside in the shitstorm without any protection.

even if we do have bailing out and morale in miniature wargames, how does the common system of morale checks meaning the crew can't do anything work? If they're going to bail out, they're gonna bail out and run for the hills, not sit inside the tank trying to decide if they should run or not

Yeah, it's a bit odd, I tend to think of it more as crews being stunned, disoriented suffering mechanical issues or simply being suppressed by the incoming fire when a tank is 'bailed' in Flames of War, which helps with my internal logic.

I can see that, but I think it could have been handled better by just expanding the damage system to include that. Allow for spalling, injured crew, whatever- so that at the very least you can drive the tank back out of fire while the guys inside recollect themselves.

I dunno, I'll probably end up trying to homebrew something. I don't really have many people to test it with right now, but looking through what's around just leaves me dissatisfied.

To be fair, they were Stuart crew. The fact that they got hit and no one was hurt had to have been so unlikely to them that they skipped the fear reaction entirely and went straight to derision.

"Oh come the fuck on, Kraut, you're just insulting us now!"

Or was it North Africa agains't Vichy's?

In FoW at least I don't think it needs anymore complexity. Maybe in a smaller scale thing (I'd like to see a robust

North Africa, against the DAK. Think it was on the Sidi Rezegh airfield during Operation Crusader. At that point in the war the Stuart wasn't actually too bad armour wise, for a tank of its size and weight at least. 5th RTR was a pretty veteran unit though, having fought in the Battle of France and then in North Africa as one of the founding units of the 7th Armoured Division, where they would continue to fight all the way to Tunis, before going to Italy, being taken back to Britain and then being on the frontlines almost constantly, all the way from the Bocage to the Rhine.

> In FoW at least I don't think it needs anymore complexity. Maybe in a smaller scale thing (I'd like to see a robust
and I forgot finish my sentence like a mong. What I meant to say is that I'd like to see a robust tank warfare game at the platoon or even individual level so that such detailed mechanics wouldn't make for too much bookkeeping. But FoW is a Company level game and putting too much micromanagement or too many intricate systems just slows down the pace of games.

I dunno, I've never actually seen any Flames of War armor battles that got beyond company level- most games I read about or watch or whatever only really have a single platoon of armor

Maybe I'm just watching small-scale games, though?

So they just had a blessed machine spirit, gotcha.

I Ain't Been Shot, Mum? Haven't played but I've heard good things.

THIS

Intredasting. Can you point me to a writeup or a video of a game being played with it?

check it out yourself
mega.nz/#F!b5tgXRwa!mzelRNrKPjiT8gP7VrS-Jw

If you don't find a suitable tabletop game, just play the Combat Mission video games to your heart's content. They are everything anyone could want and more.

I actually play quite a few tanksims, I just want to be able to do some north african theater tank battles t b h

Also I find it a lot easier to be not-tactically-stupid in a tabletop setting

CM is sorta turn-based combined arms, mostly WW2, roughly at the company to a few batallions level. Morale is a big factor, as is experience.

I mite give it a shot. I play a lot of SABOW right now, though.

That being said, now that I've slept on it, the idea of homebrewing a system that might also be used for a sit down pen-and-paper RPG kind of thing is seeming more and more appealing. At first glance that seems like it'd be hella boring, but then Planes and Mercs took off pretty well and this would likely be largely the same thing, just on the ground.

Schwere Companie from Ritterkrieg. /hwg/ has the rules in their database.