I actually sat down and read through the whole CW5 rules today for the first time. There were a few surprises for me.

I was confused by the way the ramcar pivots in a T-bone collision. If it rams the rear half of a car, it actually pivots into the collision. I suppose this is because the ramcar's front is being pulled along by the car it hit.

Another surprise was the bootlegger's reverse rules, and how difficult they've made this maneuver. I was trying to think of situations in which it would be good to a bootlegger, and couldn't think of many. It's a D7 hazard, it hurts your tires, it drops your speed to 0, and it takes you two turns if you're going above 40 mph; one turn to drop your speed to 40 and then another turn to do the bootlegger, since you can't start one unless you were at 40 at the start of the turn. In those same two turns, you could just do two D5 bends and get turned around without losing any speed, without hurting your tires, and without a whole lot more hazard. I thought maybe the bootlegger would be handy for turning sideways to fire at a car that you're passing, but you can't aim a weapon while doing one. I guess it might be good if you were being tailed, and your big weapon was on the front of your car. Personally, I think it would make more sense to say that you can decelerate to 40 and do a bootlegger in the same turn, just at the additional low handling. As it stands, you have to have the foresight to know, a good 16 inches ahead of time, where you want your bootlegger to end.

I think Adam and I misinterpreted the deceleration rules when we played last. Since the rules say, "As soon as deceleration is announced, the handling status is reduced immediately and a control check is made at the original speed," we took that to mean that you took the hazard for decelerating, and you subtracted that from your handling at the end of the previous turn to decide whether or not you were possibly going to lose control. This made it very hard to decelerate. You had to drive carefully for a full turn in order to have enough handling left at the end to survive the deceleration, and then you had to drive with the hazard from the deceleration for the next turn. It essentially made deceleration a 2-turn operation.

On re-reading, though, I think what the rules actually mean is that you reset your handling at the start of the turn, then you apply the hazard from the deceleration, and decide, based on the original speed, whether you have to make a control check. Then you continue on at your new, lower, speed, with the hazard for the deceleration subtracted. So, your deceleration is not affected by how many maneuvers you made the previous turn, but it is affected by your speed in the previous turn. And, of course, any maneuvers you make in that same turn are affected by the fact that you decelerated.

A new thing for me was the rules about people being able to fire, even while they're in the car. Sure, they don't do much damage and they're at a -3 to hit, but still, if you only have front-mounted weapons then it still may behoove you on occasion to have your driver fire his handgun or lob a grenade at a passing car. Every little chance to blow out a tire helps. Though of course, you do have to decide beforehand that your driver and/or gunner will be carrying personal arms.

Another surprise was how hard it is to go into a roll. I'd been fearing high-speed maneuvers because of the possibility of going into a roll, which will make your car tumble over and land on its side or top, unmoveable, unless you were going 40, 80, or 120 mph, in which case it'll land right-side up (if you've got an ultra-low profile you're also safe at 30, 70, and 110). I don't mind so much taking damage to the armor on all the sides, but having your car stop on its side or its top essentially means GAME OVER.

However, it turns out to be fairly tough to roll. You have to fail a control check, and then roll 7 or greater on 1d6 + your speed's crash modifer, and then you have to roll exactly 6 on a spin roll. That's three rolls you have to fail. You can get the first two rolls to be pretty bad by doing tight maneuvers at high speed, but it's still only ever going to be a 1/6 chance on the skid roll.

So with rolls out of the way, the big danger from loss of control is collisions. That's still a substantial, but one which is potentially survivable. With this knowledge, I might be a little more daring in how I maneuver my car. Just throw a whole bunch of armor on the sides and you can handle skidding into the wall now and then.

I'm still undecided about how to modify the ram rules. Heavy ramplates and structural mods make ramming a very safe way to deal out lots of damage with little risk. At 60 mph you'll do an average of 33 points of damage, and take 0 points of damage. That's about the same as being hit 3 times with a 3d6 weapon, except that ramcars don't take nearly the same penalty in amount of armor they can carry as cars with 3d6 weapons on them do.

One possibility to rebalance this would be to reduce or remove the damage reduction from ramplates and structural reinforcement, especially when a car has both of them.

In addition to this, I think it would be good to make it harder to perform the Belanger maneuver. That's how I refer to a particularly clever Car Wars ramming maneuver I learned from a friend of my brother, who loves to ram and has no fear of high-speed maneuvers. In the Belanger, you approach an enemy car as if you're going to try to ram it head-on. The enemy driver, of course, sees your hot ramcar coming towards him and speeds up. Having the initiative, he then makes sure he's to your side at the end of the turn, so that you can't get your front in contact with his front, and thinks he's safe. You then surprise him by sidling up next to him and making a 75 or 90 degree turn at 60 or 70 mph, T-boning his car (assuming you make the turn okay). It also works when you're approaching another car from behind. The only ways to avoid this maneuver are to carefully angle and position your car so that all the rammer can do is sideswipe you, or to go fast enough that at the end of one phase your car is too far away to hit, and at the end of the next phase you're past the rammer. Otherwise, if your car is anywhere within the rammer's range of movement in a phase, you'll get T-boned.

Other types of ramming require some finesse in maneuvering. If someone's trying to ram your car from behind, you can step on the gas and try to shake them, so it becomes a question of who can maneuver better at high speed. If someone's trying to T-bone you from a distance, you can see them coming and veer away or otherwise make it hard. If they're trying to hit you head-on, you can again veer away, or you can speed up in order to get past them without giving them a chance to hit you. It actually takes some work to get someone else's car into a position where you can ram it through any of these methods. Plus, in a head-on collision, the ramming car takes a big penalty by being slowed down to 0.

But in the Belanger maneuver, you get the benefits of a T-bone collision (speed reduction by 1/2 instead of full stop), and all that matters is that the other driver ends their turn somewhere near your car. It's not even that risky of a maneuver; at 60mph a D5 turn in an HC-1 car will require a control check of 5 or less. That's not too bad, considering the payoff. Afterwards, you take a big hazard because of the amount of damage you do in the collision, but your speed gets dropped by 1/2 and you check for control at the new speed. Which means that, if you were going slow enough to be able to make the D5 to go into the ram in the first place, you'll almost never be so low on handling that you'll risk catastrophic loss of control after the Belanger maneuver. Moreover, any loss of control from the collision counts as a hazard rather than a failed maneuver, so you only roll for fishtail, and there's no risk of spinning or rolling.

I would increase the riskiness of the Belanger maneuver by making two changes to the rules. First, after a T-bone or a rear-end collision, I would make the control check based on the car's original speed rather than it's post-collision speed. This is because the biggest hazard occurs not after you've collided, but at the instant of collision, when your car is pressing against another moving car and you're still at high speed.

Second, I would make the control check for the ramming car as a failed maneuver, rather than a hazard. This means that it wouldn't just be a risk of a fishtail (though that can be bad in a small arena), but that you would also risk spins, tire damage, and rolls. And that makes sense. When you're making a tight turn at high speed, your car's grip on the road is somewhat tenuous. Add the destabilization of a collision, and it may be enough to make the wheels lose contact, or make the car tip over.

So, that's my suggested change to reduce the viability of ramming as a strategy. I like ramming, and it plays an important part in any game about fighting with cars, but it's a problem when it so over-powers all other strategies as to make them pointless. The weapons should be the main focus of Car Wars, otherwise it's just demolition derby.

Also, maybe make it so that if you roll and wind up on your side, you can turn your turret and fire against the ground to shake your car enough to wind up back on its tires.