This web page is a playing aid for Death in the Trenches, a strategic-level simulation of World War I, by Schutze Games. You can see more information about the game at the designer's support site.
While not difficult, the game's combat system is fairly math intensive and can sometimes deal with very large numbers, which is particularly troublesome in solo play where you must track both sides. So I was excited to see that Mike Welsh posted a program to handle combat at BoardGameGeek. Unfortunately, it's a Windows program that won't run on my Mac laptop. Hence this web version of the same program.
To resolve a combat using the page, enter the basic strength of the attacker and defender into the so-labelled boxes, and select the terrain class of the defender using the radio buttons. The page will automatically compute the modified strengths for the combatants, and display that value divided by 3, 3.5, and 4 under the labelled columns. Then enter the number of dice to roll for each side and click the [Roll] button to show the resulting number of hits inflicted on the enemy and the combat's winner.
As a shortcut for entering dice, you can simply click on a numbers under the Div 3/3.5/4 columns to use that number of dice.
As each combat is resolved, the relevant information is added below the form. This is for testing, tracking, and/or analysis. If you like, you can label each line using the Label input -- just fill it in before rolling the dice. The format of each line is:
label attBasicStrength terrain attModifiedStrength attDice attHits defBasicStrength defDice defHits winner
I'm not affiliated with Ben Madison (the games' designer), Schutze Games, or Mike Welsh, except as a fan of their work.
Dave Townsend / townsend@patriot.net
05-Sept-2007