Angels 20 Tweaks Part 3....More on Special Abilities

You may recall from my previous post on the subject - Angels 20 Tweaks Part 2....Special Abilities - that I am somewhat less than enamoured with the existing sweet of special abilities employed in Angels 20 - the Axis and Allies WW2 aerial war game. I have been giving this some further thought in the light of playing experience and am now thinking further along the lines of tailoring these somewhat, to suit specific planes and nationalities. My current thinking is to allow permutations of abilities depending on pilot quality - based on the not unreasonable assumption that a better pilot would be a more effective one.  With this in mind I am thinking about the following:

• Ace pilots may have up to 3 special abilities
• Veteran pilots may have up to 2 special abilities
• Average pilots may have one special ability
• Poor pilots must have one 'negative' ability

These abilities apply to moving and shooting only and do not include aircraft based or tactical abilities. As it stands at present Poor pilots are automatically impeded in respect of flying as all of their manoeuvre scores are one point worse than the corresponding average or better pilots in the same aircraft. 

I am thinking that plane and tactical abilities should be automatically applied whilst flying and shooting can be determined randomly or assigned based on the historical counterpart. Pilot abilities then will take the form of additional combat dice bonuses or combat dice rolled for shooting whilst flying abilities could be modifiers to the difficult manoeuvre rolls or the allowance of additional difficult manoeuvres.

Ace pilots may have a maximum of two flying or shooting abilities with the third being the opposite so. for example, a pilot could have two shooting abilities and one flying or vice versa. The allowable abilities are as follows:

• Additional Difficult Manoeuvre
• Difficult Manoeuvre Dice Modifier
• Combat Dice Modifier
• Additional Combat Dice 

Another possibility would be to allow re-rolls although this is available for certain abilities already.

Of the above abilities I would probably reserve the Additional Difficult Manoeuvre and Combat Dice Modifier for Veteran/Ace types.

These are just a few ideas to play around with at the moment and I am hoping that the inspiration will translate into painted aircraft sooner rather than later!