Established altitude ranges?

[maestrostewart]

I'm developing multiple campaign threads at the moment that all involve urban or heavily structured areas that will impact flying and targeting - starting with a 7 scenario War of the Worlds campaign.

I've got a BETA of most of the custom rules down, but I have a question about altitude ranges. Is there a standard height for each peg? Level 1 = X, Level 2 = XX...etc. or should I establish those within the campaign? I'm leaning towards custom altitudes.

[Naharaht]

I do not remember Ares ever publishing an official list of altitude ranges but you can gain an idea of them by comparing the official number of pegs different planes may have with their maximum altitudes from another source.

[flash]

I don't recall seeing anything either, many key off the max alt as David suggests which would make a peg roughly equal a 1000ft.... with the scale of the Tripods you'll be better off doing your own thing. I'm looking to use my simple rules as a basis to make some low flying rules where a peg equals 25', BS would then have an effective altitude of 50' at 2 pegs rather than 2k' as it would suggest using WoG Alt rules.

[matt56]

Yeseterday at our monthly gaming session, we tried some house-rule altitude rules for T&T...

Using pegs as altitude levels:

1) Planes at ALT 1 or 2 are affected by Black Smoke (per the T&T rules). Planes at ALT 1 and 2 fire at tripods normally (2 cards at short range, 1 card at long range).

2) Planes at ALT 3 or 4 are not affected by BS (again, per T&T rules). Planes at ALT 3 and 4 fire as for different altitudes in WoG (1 card at short range, 0 cards at long range).

3) Tripods suffer no altitude range restrictions - they determine range per their range sticks and the rules.

4) Collisions can occur between planes and tripods at ALT 1 and 2. When a plane's peg (or red dot, if using a card) end up on a tripod's base at the end of the movement phase, a collision has occured. Each vehicle involved draws a C card. If the plane enters the tripod base on an unshielded side, the tripod suffers full points damage shown on the card. If the plane enters the tripod base on a shielded side, the tripod suffers energy damage if indicated on the C card - no points damage occurs unless the tripod's normally shielded side is unshielded.

It worked well in the game:sAprvd: Planes at different altitudes had more opportunities to fire at tripods which would otherwise have been blocked when using no altitude. This caused more damage to the tripods, so we are thinking about how to even that issue out a bit. Were the tripods able to use their H-Rs more often, we might have seen somewhat of an equalizing effect. Collisions were also interesting, both between planes a couple of times and between planes and tripods a couple of times. The shielded/unshielded side collision rule worked nicely.

So we are going to keep using these next time we play and tweak as necessary. I will report back any peculiarities as we encounter them.

All the best,
Matt