Rapido Fire! An Update to Rapid Fire!

In a previous post I mentioned that Dean had rewritten the Rapid Fire! firing rules. We found that the firing chart slowed down the game, which is otherwise excellent. So Dean took the table's algorithm and broke it down to basics then rebuilt it. The following is his version of the firing rules and replaces all small arms, high explosive and vehicle machine gun (and similar) rules. It uses lots of dice, rather than the single die in the original rules but proves to be a very quick way of achieving results!

Note: a maximum of five firing groups are allowed from any single unit (Battalion, etc.).

Step 1: Determine the number of Firepower dice to be rolled

a) Small Arms: number of figures firing (maximum group size is 8)

b) HE fire and other individual weapons with a firing value: Use the point value from the appropriate rules.

Step 2: Determine the Table Number depending on the cover the target is in

Open Cover: Table 3

Soft Cover: Table 2

Hard Cover: Table 1

Then add the range value to the table value to calculate the final table number:

Short Range: +2

Medium Range: +1

Long Range: +0

Step 3: Gather dice equal to Firepower points as above

If a CO or similar 'personality' figure (Artillery Observer, etc. etc.) take another coloured dice to differentiate hits against these men from the rest. 

Step 4: Roll to hit

Roll the amount of firing dice as calculated above, then check against the quality of the firing troops and based on the minimum score required to hit, each score over this minimum number is counted as a hit.

Elite Quality 4+

Average Quality 5+

Poor Quality 6

Step 5: Determine the maximum casualties caused by the firing group

Table Number      1        2         3         4         5

Small Arms          1        2         2         3         4

HE Fire                 2       3         4         5         6

If the target is in Hard Cover reduce the amount of casualties by 1 if using HE.

The number in the table is the maximum amount of casualties caused by the firing, ignore any hits above this number.

Example: 6 Average Germans fire at 4 British soldiers in soft cover at medium range (6 dice and table 3: Soft Cover = (Table) 2 +1 (Medium Range) = Table 3).

The German player takes six dice, and rolls: 5,3,2,6,6,1 = 3 hits (Average Quality = 5+ to hit). Checking this against the table gives a maximum casualties of 2, so 2 British figures are removed as casualties and one hit is completely ignored.

These rules changes make tactical thinking more imperative in the game as you are only allowed a maximum of five firing groups in a unit. This means you have to decide whether you use more smaller firing groups which may cause more casualties overall, but with less chance of hitting, or fewer but larger groups giving more chance of hits, but causing less casualties overall. For example, in the above situation, the Germans could split their fire into two groups of 3 with a chance of causing a  maximum of 4 casualties, but with less chance of hitting. 

Try them out and let us know how you get on with them, we think they really speed things up. So far there are no rules for things like grenades, but they will be added in future. Thanks for reading!