Trench Warfare in Crossfire

John McLennan and I had long conversations about how to do trench warfare in Crossfire, and came up with the following system .

  • Each trench feature would be effectively a building sector, and part of a building complex, thus creating terminology of a trench sector and trench complex.
  • Depict the trenches with flat 2D, top view, representations. These would each be a 15 cm (6″) long and 3 cm wide. (The effect would be kind of like how Combat Mission shows trenches, if you’ve seen that).
  • Troops would be assumed to be in the trench if the centre of stand was anywhere on top of the 2D trench sector.
  • Stands in a trench sector are assumed to be out of sight except that …
    • Stands can be declared to be looking over the edge (can fire out of the trench, and be the subject of fire yourself), in which case we’d put the stand in a convention 3D CF entrenchment (sandbags or some such) to indicate their status; once again this could be positioned anywhere as long as the centre of the stand was inside the 2D trench sector.
  • Movement between adjacent trench sectors would be like movement between building sectors in a building; ditto for shooting.
  • I would ignore enfilade fire into a trench sector, on the grounds that this system is representational rather than exact; if I played 1:1 CF then I’d allow enfilade fire if touching the end edge of a trench sector (nasty).
  • Communication trenches would be the same as fighting trenches, but you might not be able to poke your head over the side to shoot.
  • Possibly allow FOs to target stands in trench sectors, even if they can’t “see” them at the moment.

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