One of my best holidays ever was to Normandy and the west cost of France. I found the Atlantic Wall (well, its remnants) absolutely fascinating. My family stayed in a holiday house near the beach, and the block next to us was vacant because it was some massive concrete artillery emplacement. Our view of the ocean was obstructed by a few large concrete bunkers which were slowly being swallowed by the sand…. If you haven't seen what the Atlantic Wall looks like, do a quick image search for it. http://goo.gl/k4fvx

I want to make a Dust Warfare scenario that represents a second assault on the Atlantic Wall or an invasion of Great Britain. Central to that idea are significantly built up fortifications. How would you represent large fortifications within the rules? I don't know if this stuff has already been covered in any Dust Tactics expansions, so if anyone can help me out there?

My thoughts are that a Bunker should provide a very high level of protection on units inside. This could be represented by:

• The bunker counts as Movement 0, Vehicle 7 HP 8 with carry capacity 6.
• The bunker has 4 sides, 1+ of which has an entrance, and 1+ of which is a firepoint.
• Can only enter a bunker from the entrance
• All models inside a bunker can fire from a firepoint, measuring distance from the edge of the bunker: alternatively, one can fire from the entrance.
• When shooting at the bunker, you can elect to target the bunker itself, or the models inside if over half the models in the firing unit are within the arc of a fire point/entrance
• Artillery and Air Strikes may only target the bunker.
• Models inside count as being 1 armor class higher (including when rolling armor saves), except from sniper, grenades and spray weapons. They get hard cover.
• When rolling to remove suppression, units inside count as scoring 1 extra hit (ala Armour saves).
• A bunker is a square of 6" per side. 

Bunkers and Trench networks may also have weapon emplacements like Victory MG's.

• If a unit has a model within 1" of a stationary weapon, that model may forgo firing all weapons it is equipped with an instead fire the stationary weapon.
• A stationary weapon is a Movement 0, Infantry 2 HP 1, and does not make armour saves or gain cover. 

There may also be heavy weapon emplacements where a weapon normally mounted on a tank or a walker is placed in a concrete bunker:

• A heavy weapon emplacement is Movement 0, Vehicle 6 HP 6, with its own operating crew. Turret has a 90* arc of fire. 
• A heavy weapon is a circle of 3" diameter.

A bunker I think should probably be worth 60+ points, a stationary Victory MG at 3-5 pts, and a heavy weapon at about the cost of a medium walker with the same weaponry. I'm also thinking +15 pts per side to protect a bunker with terrain.

What do you think of it on face value? Ridiculously ovepowered? Very powerful and representative of big German bunkers? Too weak? Got better ideas? Input very much appreciated

Trasvi said:

These rules are similar to what I made up for our group. I took the same route as you treating bunkers as vehicles with 0 move. Ive also made a damage table for the bunkers. So far we have just used them in scenario games so I havent made an attempt to point them out yet. I do think that 60 maybe on the high side though especially for something the other side may be able to take from you and use ;).

For shooting attacks we did things differently. All attacks beyond 6" must target the bunker (except snipers). Any attacks from within 6" may target the occupants instead. Troops in bunkers receive hard cover when targetted. I think that that your idea of treating troops as 1 type higher may be alittle OP as it means that most weapons can no longer harm type 3 models. If you think that they need a bigger buff then maybe give models inside damage resilient instead?

We just give them the stats of tank traps when we have used them.

I like the "must be within 6" to target occupants" idea. as it invokes images of troops rushing bunkers to drop grenades into firing slits and shoot flamethrowers into doors and ports. Something that happened in real life to take a bunker out…

Very "Saving Private Ryan" like.

Major Malfunction said:

Thats what I was aiming for. I also wanted to keep them minimalistic so as to not over complicate or slow down the game.   

DoomOnYou72 said:

I like that a lot. And now have a good reason to throw my AT-43 Bunkers back on the table. Good call all around. 

DoomOnYou72 said:

Agreed with the other posters, only targetting within 6" is a much more elegant solution. I think that models actually inside the bunkers should have a little bit more protection than units simply with hard cover - you an get hard cover from standing behind sandbags or whatever, a bunker with a 6 inch view slit and 2 feet of concrete protruding either side is a different story altogether. 

What kind of damage table did you make for the bunkers? How do effects like blind, weapon destroyed etc affect the troops inside?

Ive just converted my chart to a more useful format and uploaded my bunker damage chart to Google Docs. The file can be found here docs.google.com/file/d/0B3kbMzHKzSCqZnBSMUhYcDREY2s/edit . Another thing to note is that we did not allow rear attacks to negate the bunkers armor.