Typhoon of Steel

Company-level Pacific combat, hex by hex. This page is the whole of the rules you need to start; the manual in docs/manual.pdf carries the tables.

1. How to begin

Launch the game from the library. The opening card offers three actions, the side you will command and the grade of the opposing commander; choose them and take the field. You command one side of a company action, the machine the other. Each action runs 14 turns at longest. Your own bodies are on the sheet from the first turn — there is no deployment phase to work through before the fighting starts.

2. Controls

Click one of your own bodies to take it in hand. Amber rings show the ground it can reach this turn and a chip prints the cost of the route under the pointer; click that ground to march there. The orders card carries March, Fire, Work the ground, Close, Charge where the body is trained to it, Call fire where a mission is left, and Dig in. Drag to pan, wheel to zoom about the pointer, pinch on a touch screen, + - 0 and the arrow keys, Enter to end the turn. Put #seed=1988 in the address to fight exactly the same ground again, or #fast=1 to remove the pause while the machine moves.

3. Turn order

Turns alternate, and each side moves everything it has before the other side begins. At the start of your turn every shaken body rolls to rally, broken bodies fall back, and any fire mission called last turn comes down. Then each of your bodies may move, or fire, or go in with the bayonet, or dig in. A body that has fired may not then move; a body that moves and then fires does so at ×0.6. End the turn and the machine takes its own — during which your bodies fire on their own initiative, under the standing orders you have given them.

4. Movement and the ground

Movement points are spent hex by hex on the cost of the ground. Wire halts a body on foot in the hex it enters, and so does moving next to an enemy you can see. Jungle, mangrove and coral will not take tracks at all; the amphibian tractor swims the lagoon and the surf. Ground also gives cover against fire and hides a body that stays still. A ridge crest sees over a palm grove; sight is worked out both ways, so if you can see him he can see you.

5. Concealment and the contact board

You do not see the enemy: you see reports. A still body in the grass is found at a much shorter range than one that has moved (+2) or fired (+4). Daylight reaches 7 hexes before cover is taken off it; night reaches 3. A report you have lost sight of stays on the board, ageing, for 3 turns, and is drawn with a ring that widens as it gets older. Work the ground fires at a hex rather than a body: half effect, and it gives you away like any other shot.

6. Standing orders and opportunity fire

Every body carries a standing order that decides whether it fires at an enemy moving in front of it, during his turn, without being asked. This is the game.

A body gets 1 opportunity shot an enemy turn (veterans two). Firing puts it on the enemy contact board for 2 turns.

7. Combat and scoring

Fire is worked out as firepower against cover. Rifles cannot touch armour and nothing under HE 6 can reach into a pillbox — that is work for a tank gun, the battalion gun, naval fire, or an assault squad at the embrasure with a flamethrower and a satchel charge. Losses are counted in men. Suppression pins a body at 2, breaks it at 4 and routs it at 6; a routed body streams to the rear and an officer within 3 hexes may get it back on its feet.

A massed charge covers up to 4 hexes at the run, needs an officer up, goes in at ×1.7, and draws ×1.5 the fire on the way. Mortars and grenade dischargers may be laid on ground somebody else can see; naval gunfire is called on a hex, arrives 1 turn later, and scatters up to 2 hexes.

Ground pays 2 points to whoever holds it at the end of every half-turn, and control persists until somebody else stands there. Bodies pay their own requisition value as they are destroyed, in proportion to the men lost, and part of it again when they break.

8. Winning conditions

There is no sudden victory: the action runs its clock and the points decide it. Your total is read against par — the mean score for your side over forty machine-against-machine actions with a veteran officer on both seats — so taking a beach you were always going to take is not a victory, and holding a ridge you were always going to hold is not either.

Bands run Decisive at +45, Substantial at +20, Marginal at -5, Indecisive at -30 against par, and Repulsed below that.

9. Losing conditions

You lose by finishing far enough under par — Repulsed, below -30. In practice that means one of three things: an attack that never reaches the ground it was sent for, a company shot to pieces crossing the open, or a defence that gives up its posts early and pays for them for the rest of the clock. The action also closes at once if either side is destroyed outright, and any body still routed at the end is counted as lost. There is no draw: the points always separate the two sides.

10. Saving and restarting

The position is written to local storage after every half-turn, including the machine's, so closing the tab loses nothing. The opening card offers to resume whenever a stored position exists. New action starts again from the opening card and discards the stored position; finishing an action clears it too. If the browser refuses storage — a file:// origin, or a private window that declines — the game says nothing and plays normally, but it will not save.