Hi folks, I posted this piece on squadrons to the list a while a go but I don't think it got through due to daemonic interference. Apologies if you have in fact seen it before.
Hi all, I've been following this thread for all a while and wondering if you would decide for yourselves or whether I should wade in and give you my angle on the matter. However when I was thinking about what to say I started thinking 'just why did I do the squadron rules that way?' and once I'd remembered I thought you might be more interested in hearing the philosophy behind the squadron rules instead of a ruling which would just be based on what's in the rules anyway.
When I was playing with BFG I quickly came to the conclusion that I it was important for some ships to operate in groups - the escorts zippping all over the place independently were a pain and rolling seperate Ld for them all started to wear a bit thin after a while - rolling to see how good three or four cruisers are is good, exciting stuff and gives buckets of character to the ships right from the outset, rolling for twenty or so escorts is just tedium. I reckoned even cruisers would benefit from being placed in squadrons as it would give them a game dynamic where they maneuvered in line ahead or line astern and looked really groovy on the tabletop (just like in the naval battles I was reading about).
Initially I had quite tight rules to make squadrons maneuvre in line ahead or line astern, but it soon became apparent that the way the game worked made you want to keep them in formation so no extra rules were neccessary. The other quirk of early squadron rules was that I was keen on the idea of a cruiser or battleship being able to have escorts 'squadroned' with it for direct support (minnows and a whale). However this threw up difficulties with maneuvering the squadron (as their characteristics were very different) and enemy targetting (could you ignore the escorts? if not why not? which types and aspects were used? how were hits distributed?). Nothing that couldn't be handled, but the rules were getting longer and longer all the time. The other thing that showed up in games was that it simply wasn't very useful to put capital ships and escorts in the same squadron, they often wanted to do different things.
In the end I came to the conclusion that while escorts should always operate in squadrons to mass their firepower, increase survivability and generally make them run better in the game, in most small to mid sized games capital ships were better off being used independently . So I made their squadroning optional, with the added benfit of using the highest leadership so that in big games the failed command check rules could be balanced by using cruiser squadrons. I must confess that to this day I have never yet used a battleship squadron and I cannot really imagine that I ever will unless playing, I dunno.....4000pts+.
So the moral of the story is that the way the squadron rules are treated extends from wanting to keep the rules straightforward and not give an option to people that actually wasn't very useful at all - if you want escorts to give capital ships close support just manoeuvre them close by or into a position to intercept incoming ordnance etc etc. - no special rules required. The reasoning behind placing grand cruisers and battleships into seperate squadrons is that their speed and characteristics make them better at functioning independently, but if you want to try mixing squadrons of escort or capital ships of different classes/types then dive right in!
I hope this is of interest to the list and helps somewhat. All the best
AndyC