Anti-Infantry Fire

One issue that I'm finding is a problem with the Tactical Addendum is that of infantry platoons.  The rules for Infantry are somewhat awkwardly laid out in A Time of War, so I'll summarize them in this entry.

There are two modes that infantry formations can be handled in under the Tactical Addendum Rules -- "Standard", in which an infantry platoon is considered 28 free-thinking and free-moving A Time of War characters, or "Infantry Cohesion", in which the platoon more or less uses the same conversion rules movement and weapons range that vehicles do.  They change somewhat in that a volley of infantry fire is considered a cluster attack against vehicles now.

"Standard" is pretty self-explanatory, but also amazingly difficult to handle if you happen to be dealing with actual full-strength platoons, lances, or companies.  Infantry Cohesion makes considerably more sense to me, even if platoons are broken into their component seven-man squads.  Alas, the Infantry Cohesion rules are spread out all over the Tactical Addendum, so I'll reference the passages that refer to them here:

Basic Information: p. 201
Unit Cohesion With PCs or NPCs Embedded: p. 202 (Choose Your Complexity sidebar)
Skill Clarification: p. 203 (footnote ** on the Tactical Skills Table)
Movement: p. 206
Weapons Range: p. 210
Damage Conversion: p. 211
Combat Modifiers: p. 217

The other key element in Infantry engagements is that regardless of the mode being used, each infantryman occupies a unique position on the battlefield; presumably with no two infantrymen spaced more than 30 meters apart.  The problem with this is that there's a lot of room in a 30-meter hex, so when the infantry are shot at with 'Mech scale weapons, they need to be almost directly hit to take damage (even a massive AC/20 round only have a splash radius of 2 meters.  To compensate, some weapons are now "Anti-Infantry", and put down large swaths of damage on infantry formations.  Indeed, machine guns can be even more effective Infantry-killing machines than they are in Total Warfare, although it can be lengthy to resolve the attack -- the Anti-Infantry weapons requires a roll against each and every trooper in the area of effect.

In any event, there are the major changes in handling Infantry in A Time of War's Tactical Addendum.  I hope you find this brief article useful if you ever end up running the infantry formations in your games.