Reply To: Light Machine Guns as part of an Infantry Section and Medium Machine Guns

[L.T. Russell]

Howdy Ian!

On the one hand I agree with you.  Machineguns DO seem somewhat under-powered in the Bolt Action world.  I don’t feel it as much, since I play Germans almost exclusively.  I believe the suppression-fire rules are an attempt to alleviate that.  As a former machinegunner, I find it ludicrous that light, medium and heavy MGs all have/use the same ranges.  In the games I’ve played/watched I’ve seldom seen infantry in the open, which is where MGs would be most effective. It’ll be interesting to see if Warlord Games does anything with Version 3.0, whenever….

On the other hand, I gotta disagree.  While the Germans had the world’s first GPMGs and their squad tactics revolved around them, pretty much no other country had an actual LMG.  Their magazine-fed guns are just automatic rifles, IMO, I know Stuart disagrees with me.  For pretty much every other military in WWII, their actual belt-fed MGs were tripod-mounted MMGs, that were platoon or company-level assets….