Kampfpanzer Solitaire. August, 2002 Alan R. Arvold's rules for Kampfpanzer are interesting, but I think need some adjustment. First, his modification of weapon effectiveness may be unnecessary. I believe Dunnigan set soft target defense factors to deal with A class units firing at them. Tanks certainly could do harm to infantry, but if you look at unit attack factors compared to infantry defense factors, you'll see infantry is hard to kill, especially if entrenched. The doubling of M-class close support tanks against soft targets shows how the game makes HE weapons more powerful against soft targets than AP weapons. Arvold's rules makes tanks helpless against infantry, which is ahistoric. I like his close assault rules: even the spear-armed Rif of Morocco were able to take on FT-17s and beat them sometimes. I would add that an infantry unit close assaulting an armored target that fails to disrupt it should become disrupted itself, D1. Solitaire rules Kampfpanzer works well as a solitaire game. There are few units on the board at any time, scenarios are short, and some seem one-sided. However, the si-move system, while innovative (and should be ideal for PBM) is very hard to do well in solitaire. I modified Kampfpanzer using SPI ideas from October War, the next generation of platoon scale armor games. Turn sequence A. Direct fire phase. Roll a die to see which side shoots first. Alternate firing units (the side that wins the die roll makes one attack, then the other side makes one attack, then back to the winning side, etc.) All attacking units that wish to combine their fire onto a single target may fire at once. Both sides alternate firing until all fire is done. Remember, according to Kampfpanzer, just because a unit have been fired at doesn't mean that other units can't do so later in the same phase. B. Movement phase. Roll a die to see which side moves first. That side moves one unit. Then the other side moves one unit. Continue to alternate until both sides have moved all desired units. Opportunity fire may be made by any opposing unit that has neither moved nor fired. C. Panic suppression and removal phase. Under these rules, H-type fire doesn't work quite right. By the original rules, it is resolved on a different table depending on whether the target is plotted to move or not. In my modification, choose which table to resolve H fire on based on whether the unit moved last turn. (On turn one, consider the set up situation. Attacking units are usually coming down roads; these are considered moving. Defending units are usually considered stationary.) Panic rules: Are definitely a pain, but an important part of the game. The hex number system that originally came with the game is difficult to implement in this version, because it can be hard to be sure whether a panicked unit was going to fire or move (since panic would be determined before either), and leads to players making deployment decisions on the basis of hex numbers. Instead, I've substituted something based on October War's system, which works very well. I've computed the probability of any unit in Kampfpanzer to panic based on the panic level. Each time the player tries to do something with a unit (fire, move, opportunity fire), he checks to see if that unit panics. If the unit panics, then it responds as per the original rules: do nothing if it panics while firing, or move randomly if it panics while trying to move. Panic Level Roll to panic (Probability) 1 3 or less on 2d6 (.083) 2 1 on 1d6 (.167) 3 Roll 3 or less on 1d6, then roll a second 3 or less on 1d6. (.25) 4 2 or less on 1d6 (.333) 5 6 or less on 2d6 (.417) The probability of panicking is just about the same as for the original rules, but this system makes it feel less artificial. If you want to check my math, I counted the number of hexes that could panic on a given turn for each panic level (summed for all six die rolls), divided by six to get the mean probability on any one turn, and then divided the result by ten, since there is a 1/10 chance that a hex will end in that number. (Technically, there are slightly different probabilities for each hex because the hexes end at xx54, not a number divisible by ten.) These solitaire rules make Kampfpanzer much easier to manage, and updates the game just enough to keep the original tables. Robert A. Dushay rdushay@mindspring.com