IMPORTANT House Rule - Long Range Buff For Mid-Range Weapons

Alpha Strike does a decent job of converting standard rules weapon stats, but there are a few that fall short (no pun intended).

According to AS, range brackets translate as follows:

• Short = up to 6" (or 3 hexes)
• Medium = >6" to 24" (or 4 to 12 hexes)
• Long = >24" to 42" (or 13 to 21 hexes)
• Extreme >42" (or greater than 21 hexes)

Pretty straightforward, but a few weapons get nerfed in the process (ie. they deal no long range damage despite reaching the "long range" bracket in AS):

• AC-10 (15 hex long range) = 1/1/0
• Large Laser (15 hex long range) = 0.8/0.8/0
• Clan ER Medium Laser (15 hex long range) = 0.7/0.7/0
• Thumper Artillery Cannon (14) = 0.5/0.5/0
• Medium Rifle (15) = 0.6/0.6/0
• Binary Laser (15) = 1.2/1.2/0
• Bombast Laser (15) = 1.02/1.02/0
• Plasma Rifle (15) = 1/1/0
• Snub-Nose PPC (15) = 1/0.65/0
• Large X-Pulse Laser (15) = 0.99/0.99/0
• NOTE - there may be others not listed here, but anything that can reach ranges of 13 to 17 hexes should count.

This house rule helps to give these weapons (and ones with similar ranges) a little buff by adding 35% of their medium range damage to their long range damage when calculating AS damage values. Basically, this adds a Minimum Damage modifier (*) to their individual damage values at long range. All other standard rules apply as normal. If this increases long range damage to a whole point or more (calculations ignore 0* values as usual), be sure to add the difference when calculating total PV.

Examples:

• one large laser would give you a long range damage value of .28
• two large lasers would give you a long range damage value of .56

NOTE: in the case of the second example, this would *functionally* give you the same long range damage profile as a single AC/5 using standard AS rules (yes, AC5's punch a little above their weight in standard AS rules). This house rule helps to put the weapons listed above more on par. It will also return you some limited ability to poke outside the range of more deadly short range weapons, such as Ac/20's or SRMs (just like in Classic BattleTech).