Important Rules in Flames of War

Recent games of mine (and some others I game with) have pointed out some important rules in Flames of War that have some real impact, and that a people (including me) often don't know about.

Gun Tank

The Gun Tank rule, not to be confused with the various Mixed Platoon rules (which discuss hit allocation at a platoon that has different team types), deals with shooting at a platoon of Tank teams that consist of two different types of tanks. By types, I mean mark and model being different, such as a British Armoured Squadron consisting of Cromwells and a Sherman Firefly or a Tunisian Tiger Platoon consisting of Tigers and Panzer IIIs.

This rule allows you to force your opponent to allocate hits to those tanks they normally want to protect, so it is important to remember it so you can, for example, pick off that Firefly rather than having it be the last to die.

Smoke Bombardment

Smoke bombardments are not simply a lot of smoke rounds put together to cover an area; a smoke bombardment is almost like dropping a woods temporarily on the battlefield. The smoke produced by bombardments block line of sight beyond 6" and conceal within 6". This allows you to cut out a huge swath of the field from shooting at you. This is a great way, for example, of blinding long-range ant-tank fire.

For the Germans, the Company HQ with its two little GW43 mortars, can create a smoke bombardment; for the British, the new Armoured Squadrons have the Cromwell CS in the Company HQ for the job.

Shooting Was Too Successful

The first time I read about this rule was in the clarification of it in the More Again Lessons from the Front (MALFTF). That caused me to look the rule up to see what the heck they were talking about. This rule can easily give a unit 8" of extra movement in a turn (4" for the assault and 4" for the consolidating breakthrough), so it makes sense to learn it. I can also see this rule causing the most arguments, so before you roll for shooting, it might make sense to point out where your units are within 4" so that if this rule applies in the Assault phase, there are no questions about where an eliminated stand was and whether this rule can be invoked.

For those that say that Flames of War is a simplistic game I think they have not looked at how extensive the rules are or how nuanced it is.