Shoot & Scoot

[Hawk Kriegsman]

It seems to me that shoot and scoot was not a very effective tactic pre-extreme assault.

It is not an effective tactic now either if you are on the offensive. it is more used in my experiences by a defender to pick off incoming attackers.

In general one was better off shooting until the defender was disrupted and overrunning, thereby capturing the enemy or pushing his LOS back and thus hiding your own forces. Thus, those extra APs were more often used to close and overrun not run away.
However, extreme assault has had the (perhaps) unintended consequence of promoting tactics associated with direct fire effectiveness, and thus shoot and scoot is promoted.

In actuality direct fire is even more important with the extreme assault rules as now you have to disrupt the unit and then start to reduce his morale. Those AP's are not spent on moving away but in fact on more direct fire. In the 10 years I have been playing the game the level of shoot and scoot I have used and have had used against me is pretty constant.

However, to counter this unintended consequence with as minimal impact on other aspects of the game as possible could perhaps be achieved by changing opfire as below:
1) Instead of all SPs of a defender firing opfire at once only a portion do per opportunity (perhaps half)
2) the AP cost to opfire is calculated as (APs to fire)*(SPs firing)/(SP of unit)

Why not all SP's firing at half FP and have it cost half the normal fire cost?

This way there is no issue with odd SP units (1SP, 3SP, etc) not getting half fire.

In this way the total volume of opfire is not increased, but it becomes more difficult to drain opfire and predict when it will happen.

I believe half SP at half cost would be the same.

There are two effects:
1) Opfire becomes slightly less effective overall (because the attacker fires first his chance of inflicting loss or disruption on the defender before all the defender SPs have opfire is higher)

Would it not be the same as now? The attacker still fires first at all the SP.

2) Shoot and scoot becomes less predictable as an attacker cannot know with certainty how much opfire face him.

Not really though. Assuming you keep the same opp fire percentages the same an attacker will only face a max of 4 opp attacks from a unit (6 from those units with a 33 action point cost to fire). Most likely will lead to even more gamey tactics like having ATR's, scout cars and other low value units moving back and forth between two hexes until the defending unit expends his Opp fire.

Thanx!

Hawk