@oriskany – FFoT has some nice TOE’s for both WWII and post 1950 forces, so makes it easy to build some pretty accurate forces. Then, remembering that each infantry stand is a platoon and a single vehicle represents 4-6, you can get the regiment 3 battalions of 6 miniatures each (the Soviet companies are represented by 2 minis, as they are smaller than Western MBT companies, as you know), so I can get the whole regiment with only 18 tanks. At the moment I have about 200 vehicles (including IFV’s, ATGM, etc.) for Western and Soviet forces, so that comes to a nice total.

I do believe they based the original game off of Team Yankee but they originally set it in a fictional region of Germany called Eisenbach. Now they went for the actual thing and have paired up with an author to write them a nove called “Storming the Gap: first strike”. They really did embrace the concept of the task force when building the game, so they’ve got the combined forces approach there 🙂

I did love Panzer Leader and still have it (though I missed the release of MMP’s updated version, which was sad to me), but truly the ability to not have to look up tables is rather appealing to me and the current World at War system makes it’s really easy – the counters are large (.75″) and the hexes are 1″, so they can accomodate the numbers:

The numbers work on a “bucket of dice” system, which I prefer, as it makes stuff tend to the average and thus feel more realistic to me than 1 single dice roll modified by stuff (though there are some modifiers here as well). So in the counter above, the lower numbers represent how many dice to roll and the upper right number is the score you need to equal or better.

As for the naval side, I only ever played Harpoon on the Macintosh sometime in the ’90s, which I certainly loved, but didn’t try it on an actual tabletop (or tennis court 🙂 – that must have been amazing!)

The Naval Command system abstracts scales to where 1 cm = 1 Nautical Mile (so our 6×4 table will represent an area that is roughly 120 NM x 180 NM) and is marketed as a game rather than a naval sim, so has more in line with, say, Victory at Sea, than Harpoon, but the game play sequence is interesting, as it has 5 phases:
1) initiative
2) movement
3) detection – including Active and Passive systems and ECM
4) attack
5) damage control

This one gets a “deal of the day” discount on Wargame Vault very often. I will be painting my stuff for it ASAP and try it out also over the next couple of months and will try to keep you posted.