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This Page: Introduction  Marksmen Rules

The Stargrunt II game rules includes rules covering Snipers. These rules do quite a good job of simulating sniper actions, but unless you are playing single-platoon or perhaps two-platoon versus single sniper, you quickly discover how overpowering individual snipers can be on the battlefield if you use the RAW (Rules As Written).

The game rules are meant to cover highly-trained individual snipers or small two-man teams trained for independent operations and therefore are "overpowered" for players who merely wish to add marksmen (soldiers with some extra marksmanship skill and a weapon with enhanced sights) to their "regular" combat formations.

Marksmen often appear in modern forces, especially in counter-insurgency and urban operations situations. For example, the French Foreign Legion forces operating in Bosnia and Kosovo eventually included a marksman during patrols in urban areas as the squads had begun to encounter frequent sniper attacks. The presence of a marksman gives the squad a significantly improved ability to reach-out-and-touch-someone without leveling entire city blocks (a concern in operations in territories populated by friendly populations). It provides squads with longer-range effective fire, and organic counter-sniper capability.

A marksman is a member of a squad who, instead of being armed with an advanced assault rifle or a squad automatic weapon, is armed with a longer-ranged, accurate weapon with an advanced sighting system. This might be a laser rifle, it might be a conventional sniper rifle, a gauss sniper rifle, or even a heavy-anti materiel rifle, although this latter weapon is not usually regular-issue for any but very specialized formations. The marksmen may vary in quality, but tends to be at least slightly better than his peers at combat musketry.

Key distinctions between a Stargrunt II sniper and a marksman:

• Snipers operate alone (or as a two man team). Marksmen remain with their squads and may not freely attach and detach themselves from their squads.
• Snipers may become "hidden". Marksmen may not.
• Snipers fire using special rules. Marksmen resolve fire very similarly to normal squad weapons fire.
• Snipers cause suppression to a unit merely by firing at it. Marksmen must resolve fire successfully to cause suppression.

A marksman is considered a squad member for casualty resolution from hostile fire. He is in most regards a normal squad member, with the exception being some of the detail of how his fire actions are conducted.

A markman has two mutually exclusive options when it comes time to fire:

• To fire with the squad (as if he were an additional support weapon);
• To fire independently (as if a squad support weapon fired separately).

In the first of these cases, the marksman is simply another squad support weapon, and the Firepower (FP) of his weapon is added to the squad's fire action.

In the second case, the marksman fires independently, as if he were a squad support weapon firing by itself. In this instance, his fire action consumes one of the squads' actions. However there is a trade-off; The marksman may choose one of the following two mutually exclusive benefits when firing on his own:

• He may elect to fire with double range bands;
• Alternately, he may elect to choose his target figure amongst the enemy squad.

The marksman may NOT receive both of these benefits simultaneously.