Random Casualty Dice?

This Idea came up through talking to people here about avoiding infantry blobs. Spamming infantry is often the best way to play, but that can be boring. So to encourage more diversity in strategy, we came up with the following:

When taking Casualties, if you select the same unit type as a casualty 3 times in a row, you must take an extra casualty. So if you were defending with ONLY infantry and took 3 casualties, you must remove 4 infantry instead. [you may apply the same rule to all units or just infantry]

Players can adjust this to their liking. Every 4th unit must be different or even every 2nd unit must be different. I would love to play test this more online but not sure how to do that unless people use tabletop simulator.

@the-janus said in Classic game using d10 dice:

Attack 2: inf, CV (increase of 1 for both)
Attack 4: sub
Attack 5: arm, ftr
Attack 7: bmb, BB

Defend 2: bmb, trn (increase of 1 for both)
Defend 3: inf, sub
Defend 5: arm, CV (increase of 1 for both)
Defend 7: ftr, BB

Looking at this, I actually have half a mind to just go with 2/4/6/8 for attack and 1/3/5/7 for defense.

@The-Captain

Wow, that’s so awesome! 9 upvotes too…, I was about to upvote but given that 9 is your magical number I’ll keep that as it is :)

Lol my most rare dice moment was when I was attacking with nine tanks and they all missed, but this roll is even more bizarre! 😀

We like to use an “Arms Buildup” instead of setting up the game the same way every time. People spend 7 rounds gradually building up the forces they want before the action starts. This adds a lot of variation to the games as you have different hot spots in different areas of the map depending on how the setup went.

Yeah, I forgot about those weird situations where you have certain units that can’t hit other certain units - like planes and subs not being able to hit each other if no destroyer is with the planes.
In those situations, you have to do a little more figuring than usual. Still, even with rolling dice you still have to roll separately in those instances so it’s not that much different.

By the way, Low Luck can also be used for things like anti-aircraft rolls. Say you have 6 bombers attacking an IC. In regular dice, you would roll 6 dice trying to get ones. However in Low Luck, you can simply remove 1 bomber as an automatic hit.
The drawback here is that now the attacker still has 5 bombers to plaster your IC. If you rolled dice, you have a chance at getting anywhere from 0-6 hits.

There are many custom dice in regular game stores that have some symbol for a 1, you could use field marshal games custom combat dice, but as for a specific symbol… not sure where to get those unless you have them made yourself.

If you just want to change from D6 do D12, then just double all attack and defenses values, unless you want to edit costs and powers to satisfy historical details, such as better german tanks, etc. But then you have to mess around with initial deployment too (if russians are gonna have weaker infantry, then they need to start with more of them, right?).

I have a 30 sided die i got as a gift. So i’ll just multiply everything by 5 :D

Infantry at 5/10/3
tanks at 15/15/6 :D

I also prefer the roll of the dice.  I suppose I ought to be careful as I have never played out a game in LL.  I really enjoy the different directions that game often takes based on dice rolls.  Every game can be a different game whereas in LL I can see the game tending to play out along predictable ways.  That being said, re-rolls of early outrageous dice should be considered and I have allowed it and suggested it in my games when I was the beneficiary of the opponents bad dice.  If I win, it’s not going to be because my opponent got diced early.

I think it adds to the game when you have to consider and plan for unlikely outcomes.  It forces you to use more forces than you would like to and to hold some forces back for contingency plans.  Everyone is a competent general and planner when the dice are going their way.  The mark of a truly good tactician is the ability to build in flexibility to account for unlikely dice outcomes.  If dice are always determining the outcomes of your game then maybe you ought to play a bit differently.