Turret and Front Armor House Rules Part 4

I hate to beat a dead horse here or say "I told you so"...

I recently played in my first Flames of War tournament, and we played 4 games.  It was great fun, don't get me wrong...but:

I didn't once see anyone turn their turret.  I faced one Soviet Battalion (Bryan) that had something like 30+ tanks.  He never once turned his turret.  It made zero difference if the vehicles were hull mounted or Turret Mounted.

I really don't have a problem with the 180 degree thing for simplicity.  The problem lies in the fact that there is very little difference between hull mounted and turret mounted weapons.  Nor do you ever use any of the rules that pertain to turrets.

Guess how many times the soviet player had to use limited vision?  None

Guess how many times I had to use slow traverse in all 4 games?  Once.

Yes I turned my turret once.  And it wasn't becasue I had to or needed to.  It was becasue I wasn't afraid of being damaged by anything on the board.  and his tiger ace skill was rapid fire.  With any other tank I would have never turned my turret.  I had targets everywhere, it made little difference that I did or didn't turn it.

There has been a lot of talk of a Version 3 lately.  So Phil if you ever happen to make it to my blog, these are the 2 things I would change for Version 3.

1. 90 degree arc for Front armor and shooting weapons.  I have it all worked out. :)
2. Concealment to be uniform across the rules.   As it stands right now, if you are in forest or smoke, you only need to be slightly in to get concealment, yet for an other piece of terrain you have to be 50% behind it.  Even viewing "through" direct fire smoke you don't need to be 50% .  Although the wording would entail that you do.   

I really thought playing the long edges of the table would make a difference.  I figured with out playing in a tunnel scenario like hold the line, and guys spread out length wise...someone would get behind the 180 line...didn't happen.

I had hoped that I was wrong, and going to this tournament with 16 other players, I would see turrets turning all over the place.  Or at least a few anyway.  Unfortunately I was proven correct.

If FoW really wanted things kept simple then they might as well have not had turrets in the game at all.  And seeing how the MALFTF is as big as the rule book now, I hardly think keeping things simple is a viable excuse.    

Turrets Are Useless