Follow Me ! World War II Combat Wargame Rules by Peter L Rice

Follow Me ! - World War II Combat by Peter L Rice

Many many years ago an old friend of mine George Carhart brought me a copy of these rules back with him from America (originally published in 1979).  For several years we used them until we moved onto other faster sets, purely because we wanted to use more tanks on the table, but they remain in my view, the benchmark against which all other rules are judged in terms of the detail and the accuracy of the fire resolution tables.  Long out of print they remain my most cherished rule set.

Working on percentages, you first calculate the target size (relative to the range involved), the virtual speed of the target factoring range and angles to calculate a base to hit chance.  This is then modified by speed of the firer.  Subtleties are woven into the rules in terms in terms of:

1.       Gun velocity which affects the virtual speed of the target.

2.       Specialist optics (which reduces the drop off in target size over 500 metres).

3.       Crew training (speed of target and target size adjustments).

4.       Bonus for subsequent shots at the same target (increase in target size).      

5.       Defensive armour bonus for 45 degree armour hits.

What got me thinking about these rules is that my chums at the local Harrogate club have been playing a few tank v tank games using the Bolt Action rules in 20mm.  As I’ve said before, IMHO the Bolt Action rules work ‘okay’ but certainly in armour v armour aren’t anything special.  In Follow Me working out the ‘to hit’ percentage you need takes a little bit of effort (although not as much as it might sound) but when your only using a few tanks each you can use a quality rule set IMHO.  I’m going recreate the tables in Excel and some vehicle stats and plan to run a game in a few weeks.  I’m playing with the idea of programming Excel to do all the calculations, but by the time you have typed in the factors, you could probably have worked out the number you need to roll ! LOL    I shall be doing a few postings over the coming week or so to report how things go.