Surprise Update: Aerospace Simplified, Defenses Diversified, and Base Building

Inspiration struck and made the last blog here a liar. Here is a new update for Ground War. I figured out a much more simplified way to handle BVR combat that doesn't remove any of the player choices while removing a large chunk of the bookkeeping and math. This has allowed me to remove whole paragraphs of explanation required for the old system and now naturally encourages real BVR tactics without having to spell them out.

While I was adding that I touched up on some other systems. Body armor matters now, but its treated the same as energy shields where it acts as an additional form of cover rather than a hard stop like vehicles. By opening this category of defense to more than shields, it also let me handle other forms of defenses like APS systems and ERA. There will be a later pass over all the vehicles to add diversity to their defenses but I wanted to get this into the hands of players to mess around with earlier. Should make infantry a bit more survivable and add some more flavor between nations.

Element organization in the book was also changed with a new way to display their stats and moving them under a new section for their respective faction's order of battle. The new charts take up about a third less space and make it much easier to add descriptions for vehicles. Orders of battle were also something I had planned for a while. I like the idea of fleshing out each nation's military divisions and I think it adds a lot of flavor. Should also act as a good starting point for new players. Something to say armies should generally look like this at a given size. I've got a cleaner representation of the orders of battle planned, complete with NATO symbols, but that'll be made after individual orders of battle have been finalized as its much harder to change graphical charts than text.

Finally I added a new system for building fortified trench lines and military bases. A handful of prefab and other structures are ready for the military bases but you should get an idea of where this system is going. This is also how planetary and orbital defenses will be handled.

There's a lot more in this update but those were the big highlights. You can find the (mostly) comprehensive change log below, but I know I definitely forgot to add some changes to the list with 30 new pages.

A number of Cavalry weapons moved to corebook as part of the drone/frame rework

Added more mega corps

Added dismount activation rules

Renamed Hand-Fire tag to No Reload

Updated weapon strengths to match changes in corebook

Fixed missing cost of Political Officer trait

Added Tactical Officer and Paras traits

Added Light ATGM

Added E-Case Drone

Added self destruct detonator and Omereth drone that uses it

Added magnetic and pressure explosives detonators

Added biological and chemical weapons (initial rules set)

Added Cauterization Strike option for select orbital strikes

Reworked display of Force Organization

Added battlefield infrastructure

Vehicles and infantry elements moved under their respective faction's TO/E and given new cleaner stat blocks
BVR aerospace combat has been reworked along with altitude. This should be much easier to track without losing the ability to use real BVR tactics

Stealth tag reworked for new BVR rules

Orders of Battle added to faction to detail their organizational hierarchy

Infantry elements moved under their respective faction's Order of Battle

Added systems for building trenches and prefab based, more to come in future update

Cover provided by physical shields has been rebalanced to account for overlapping defense values now