My local gaming group has gotten pretty hooked on WoG, and specifically we've been getting into WWII as well.
Most of them are very experienced gamers, and as they begin to master the Basic and Standard rules for WGS, I'm looking towards the Advanced Rules to add some additional tactical interest to the game.
We're fortunate in that, between my own collection and the burgeoning collections of the other players, we've got a pretty good cross-section of the entire WGS product line.
Which means that, as we look towards transitioning to the Advanced Rules, we need to deal with Altitude and hence climb rates.
I have a copy of the original WoW Dawn of War box, the WoW Deluxe Starter, the WoG WGS RAP pack, and the WoG BoB Starter, and lastly the PDF download from the Ares website containing maximum altitude and climb rates.
Upon comparison, my two big impressions are:
- There are big discrepancies in the list of aircraft included / excluded
- There are very big changes in the climb rates and maximum altitudes from edition to edition
It seems the original intent around maximum ceiling was to reflect the prototypical aircraft's maximum ceiling in meters via its maximum "flying higher" ceiling in game, dropping of the "000". So a maximum real-life ceiling of 10,000m would become a maximum "flying higher" ceiling of 10 in-game.
Climb rate is a little more amorphous, but it seems that a you take the real-world statistic and figure out how long it takes to climb 1,000m, not accounting for altitude, temperature, fuel load, external armaments, etc. Aircraft that could climb at around 4,000ft/min or better get a climb rate of 2 (eg. Bf109K), 3,000ft/min (15m/s) usually get a climb rate of 3 (eg. A6M2 Zero), ~2,200ft/min get a climb rate of 4 (eg. F4F-3 Wildcat), etc. This varies significantly depending on which edition you look at, however.
Which leads me to the crux of my dilemma: it seems like the climb rates and maximum ceilings in older editions hewed more closely to the aircraft's actual real-world performance, whereas newer editions seem to vary significantly.
For example, in the original WoW rulebook (available via PDF on the Fantasy Flight website, link below), the A6M2 Zero used to have a climb rate of 3 and a maximum of altitude of 10 (matching its realworld ceiling of 10,000m and climb rate of 15m/s). In the new WoG WGS WW2 PDF on the Ares website, it's a climb rate of 3 and a ceiling of 11, and in the BoB starter released last year, it's now a climb rate of 3 and a ceiling of 13 (???).
In that same time, the F4F-3 Wildcat has gone from a climb rate of 3 and a ceiling of 12 (WoW PDF), to a climb rate of 4 and a ceiling of 12 (WoG PDF). The F4F-4 was a slower climber than the F4F-3 in real life, and this was reflected in the old WoW rules, but now in the BoB starter both the F4F-3 and F4F-4 have the same exact climb and ceiling stats.
Fantasy Flight Wings of War WW2 Rulebook PDF:
https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgame...2-Rulebook.pdf
Ares Wings of Glory WW2 Rulebook PDF:
http://www.aresgames.eu/get/WGS001-Rulebook_EN_web.pdf
So... what do you do? Go with the most recent published stats, aka the BoB starter? Go with whatever you've bought and ignore what came before and/or after? Or something else?
My inclination is to try to stick to the realworld stats as much as possible, using the ceiling in meters as the maximum altitude in WoG (with the 000s removed, obviously) and dividing the real-world published climb rate to see how long it would take to climb 1,000m, using the rough rule-of-thumb that 3,000fpm (aka 1,000 meters per minute) = a climb rate of 3 as the baseline.
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