Platoon Forward: The perfect Company Combat rule set?

Welcome to Platoon Forward!

Welcome to the site where the story of the battle is as important as the battle itself. Here we will focus on men thrust into extraordinary situations of life and death. They must lead other men with duty and honor to meet their countries objectives. Some will be blessed with great skill, some will carry great shortcomings. No matter what nation, no matter what war, no matter what theater, they are all called to move their Platoon or Squadron forward!

These are their individual stories as played out using my various campaign rules . Hopefully these stories will entertain and inspire you to use your own troops, airmen and sailors to accomplish your own great heroics.

Saturday, July 4, 2026

The perfect Company Combat rule set?

Happy 4th of July! To my English friends you are probably happy we broke away 250 years ago right now. As always spare a moment to think of all the service men and women away from their families today defending freedom. With all the polarization, America is still a democracy. We have bent before. I have faith the ship will stay afloat.

So I have been playtesting my Infantry Company rules and they work...

but I have found I have been playing them less and less. Turning to

SAGA

Boom and Zoom

Sports games.

I enjoy these other games but I use to play my modern land combat about 50% of the time. After an honest discussion with myself, the new system wasn't very fun. It replicated command and combat well but the pace was slow and surprisingly predictable.

"Since there is no randomization of actions, if I have the order and order 1st platoon to move, we know exactly when 1st platoon will arrive!"

So I went back to my list of what I am looking for in my "perfect rule set." [ April 2025 post]

1. Has to work with a company per side

2. Command and Control is paramount.

3. has to have smooth combat resolution.

4. Has to be solo friendly.

5. Battles have to be resolved in a relatively short amount of time.

6. Has to be flexible enough to cover WW II to Afghanistan.

My current "Fire Fields" still fails at #3 and isn't that fun. So I need to add a 7th criteria which should be obvious: Exciting!

If you went back to my April post I tried to combine PBI with Piquet and that worked pretty well. I like the randomization that the cards provide to the activation sequence and PBI provides a good foundation for the rest of the game. It is still too hard to pin troops in PBI and the C+C isn't robust enough for me. Then I went back to Fields of Fire. [ March 2026.] The biggest take away I like from FoF is that troops will fire at a target without being told. This just makes so much sense to me.

" Hey Sergeant, they are shooting at us! Should we fire back?"

"So after all this rambling, what are you going to do?"

I am going to have each Company CO roll up their orders and activate their units per Fire Fields.

The platoons will activate by cards per Piquet. This should add excitement and unpredictability. Platoon leaders will issue orders per Fire Fields.

I will use modified PBI combat resolution. This should be less clunky than Fire fields. Will need more pinning of troops. I do like that PBI has done away with "disrupted or paralyzed" status. You are either good, pinned or off the table; simple. PBI does this by dividing the squad into three parts. I will model "disruption" by having the parts break apart thus loose cohesion. This will have C+C harder to achieve.