Earth & Steel Design Notes

In Earth & Steel we included all the German forces from Bloody Omaha, Villers-Bocage, Monty’s Meatgrinder, and Cobra. The main change to these intelligence briefings was the updating of force selection process. All the forces in Earth & Steel now have the new company diagram for selecting your force. It is now a simple process of taking your compulsory platoon options from the boxes shaded black and selecting the platoons you want one each from the boxes shaded grey. This was first introduced in our last Normandy book, Cobra, and has since become the standard in all our books containing intelligence briefings, with a few refinements. The instructional text is now very simple and easy to follow.

The other major change was a review of the points. Two main factors impacted on these changes. One was that some of the older books didn’t include the differences we introduced to points of Motivation modifiers for Infantry teams over Gun and Tank teams. Compounded on this was the change to command teams in gun platoons. The cost of an infantry command team in a platoon with mostly guns teams came down, reducing the overall cost of things like artillery, mortar, machine-gun, and anti-tank platoons.

The third noticeable change was the cost of Panzergrenadiers. These came down for two reasons. Firstly we reduced the cost of MG teams. Motorised and mechanised platoons were just not getting the benefit of their ROF 3 MG teams most of the time. However, they are still more expensive than Rifle/MG teams. The second factor was the cost of armoured half-tracks. These have come down which reduces the overall cost of Gepanzerte Panzergrenadier Platoons and similar.