The Commander Series Forum

Good morning chaps!

I've not ventured here in a long while, and to cut a long story short I've been without my BKC miniature forces for over a year now and have had neither the time or money to replace them. Sadly this means my wargaming has also diminished, without miniature battalions to push around and shout bang! with, or a regular opponent who has their own toy soldiers.

While spending many a long dark night crying myself to sleep at the magnitude of my first-world problems, I came across a website called 'roll20'; a virtual tabletop for role players and armchair generals. It's totally free, very versatile and had rekindled my passion for grand-tactical wargaming. After a brief play around with the features I've slapped together some tactical map symbols for the various units of WW2, based on the NATO standard to use as unit tokens on the virtual tabletop. I'm hoping to play both solo and head-to-head games with roll20, but first I need to get my head around playing BKC with a grid-based system.

Roll20 gives you complete freedom to resize the virtual play area and you can configure the unit of measurement and how many units per grid space, but the system is fixed with using the grid.

In order to make the unit footprints look right and get the distances correct I'm thinking of very roughly taking a BKC scale of approximately 1cm=20m and approximating 5cm grid squares. This gives a platoon 100m square footprint, at a limit of one unit per square so they'll be quite spread out, but I could allow adjacent units to directly support one another to simulate closer coordination. For movement and ranging I'll just roughly chop the distances in the book to match up to square on the grid.

How does this all sound? Sorry for the rambling

Thanks,

Paul F

I spent many years (pre BKC) converting rules to play on a gridded table, as it has many advantages, well, to me as a solo player, anyway. The game plays much faster without the need to measure and you can't favour a side by fudging measurements. You don't say if the grid is square or hexagonal. I used a "brickwork" offset square board as this was easier to make but had the geometry of hexagons. Big problem was getting terrain to fit the grid.

You have started me off thinking about converting BKC now, oh why did I read your post! Doh!

You can choose whether the grid is square or hex , and even the diagonal movement mechanic. It's all rather versatile!

Sounds pretty good, Paul!

I might change the ranges, and base them all proportionately on infantry ranges. For example, if we decide that an infantry platoon can shoot across one grid square, so from the centre of our 100m squares gives 200-300m range... Sounds reasonable. Everything can be fudged around that. Same with movement rates.

Another house rule I'm thinking of, based on the tactical scale of the game, is treating MMG units a little different. I'm toying with the idea of having them deployed with a 'primary fire direction' for grazing fire. They can fire at any visible unit in their front arc as normal, point fire, or they can set up for grazing fire, giving them a narrower fire arc but firing upon any unit that passes thr

..through the cone of fire. Just some thoughts!