Invasion: Earth was published in 1981, the fifth of the series of Classic Traveller stand-alone games. The premise is that the Third Imperium is invading Earth (defended by humans at the same tech level). The game covers space warfare across the solar system in low detail, and then orbital bombardment, landings, and corps-scale ground warfare on a hex-map of the Earth's surface in somewhat more detail. Turns are two weeks, with a special reinforcement turn roughly every 14 weeks, and the hex map is on an 1140 km scale. The projection is quite neat; it's a very nice map.
Overall verdict: very ambitious, some neat ideas, but a bit of a mess
The main pdf is 29 pages total, including the cover, front matter, rules, map, inventory of counters, counter-sheets, and combat resolution tables. The text itself is only about 12 pages, of which two are background information on the Solomani Rim War and one and a smidge deal with using Earth in Traveller campaigns separate from the wargame. So we really only get about nine pages of wargame rules, which is not much to cover so grand a conflict.
The rules start out relatively well with space combat, dividing the solar system into near-earth, far orbit, and deep space, and covering jumping in, closing through those distances, actually fighting, and going dark in deep space. There is some weirdness around System Defense Boats fighting space targets; SDBs are primarily atmospheric / low orbit (I'm imagining them kind of like SSTO spaceplanes but agrav) and have only a ground bombardment attack score instead of having both a space attack score and a ground attack score like many naval units. But because of this there's a whole separate space combat firing step just for SDBs attacking proper ships, and you have to divide up fleets being attacked by both SDBs and typical naval vessels, with part of the Imperial fleet fighting just SDBs and part fighting the regular navy. (How you divide your fleet is an interesting gameplay choice at least I guess?) I'm not really clear why SDBs don't just have an anti-ship offensive score and use the regular combat resolution table when attacking ships, and then have a bombardment score for attacking ground targets. Maybe it's so that they can add their bombardment score with the bombardment scores of planetary defense batteries when attacking ships doing landings? But SDB weirdness aside, the space rules seem basically reasonable.
Atmospheric stuff like bombardment and landings follow. There are some very weird things in this section. Space ships in low orbit can go on overwatch against SDBs coming out of hiding in the oceans (neat) but the action economy on it is very strange, where you get to fire against each SDB wing with every naval unit on overwatch? If the rules didn't say verbatim "All overwatch naval units attack each SDB wing that came out of hiding" I wouldn't think that that could possibly be the correct interpretation. In the following bombardment phase, each ship or planetary defense battery only gets to attack once ("Each unit capable of firing during this phase may fire once."), but in the contested landings phase after that, planetary defense batteries can get to fire at every unit landing near them. No saturating these air defenses up close I guess; that I can kind of buy. But the SDB overwatch thing seems trickier to justify.
Ground combat seems fairly reasonable; units are quite mobile because antigravs are assumed to be standard kit on both sides, there's a supply system which is fairly simple and based on space-dropping logistics bases which is neat, there are stacking limits on how much stuff you can fit in a hex but this is a wargame with counters so you get some super-corps counters that refer to an off-map sheet of boxes to say "here's all the stuff that is in that hex". There are some weird bits in the way that targets are selected during ground combat; the example of combat even provides a case where A and B are on the same side and C and D are on the other, and basically A shoots at C, C shoots at B, B shoots at D, and D shoots at A. And apparently that's fine, there's no conception of fronts and mutual engagement with particular units who are fighting you while you're fighting them (except inasmuch as you're all in the same 1150km hex, which I guess is just a big melee of anti-gravs and plasma weapons).
Reinforcement and scoring has some interesting bits; it is assumed that the Imperial player will definitely take the Earth, and he has access to as much replacement of lost units as he wants, but taking more time and using more replacement units costs him at scoring and may cause him to lose the game even though he has taken the planet. The actual details of reinforcement for the Solomani (hereafter Terran) player look somewhat fiddly and involve counting how many of his starting 60ish urban terrain hexes are not yet garrisoned by the Imperial player. The game also ends when the Imperial player has occupied 50ish of those urban hexes so you need to count them to determine if the game is over, in addition to reinforcements. The setup procedure for the Terrans to place all their starting units looks like something I might want a beer for (and I imagine the Imperial player might want a beer while he waits).
As I mentioned at the beginning, the map is neat. Sadly the counter-sheets are quite blurry and everything that follows about the units is working from the Counter Inventory rather than the counters themselves. (Also, I hope you like NATO symbology. Still, would it be a proper hex-and-counter wargame without it?) The unit variety looks painfully-high; the Terran player has nine different kinds of System Defense Boat wings, most of which have fairly small differences in stats between them. The Imperials have lots of one-off units; for example, they get five Colonial Lift Infantry Corps at TL12 and then one at TL11 with the same nominal stats but which takes an extra penalty in combat resolution because the TL is lower. I kind of question the inclusion of regiment-scale units with 5 combat power in a game where there are corps with 100 combat power rolling around. Could we have just... dropped regiments, divided all the combat power numbers by 5, and eliminated space transport capacity from cruiser squadrons?
Which is to say - there's significant room for simplification here.
(On the other hand, looking at it again, almost all of the regiment-sized units are elite, armored, or both, which means that their combat strengths are understated - they might use 5 points of transport capacity but then actually fight at strength 20)
I do appreciate that we get half a page on using this ruleset for conflicts other than this particular battle in this particular war in the Third Imperium Setting. It mostly deals with ground troops without grav vehicles; wheeled, cavalry, and foot, and the implications on supply and sealift of not having grav vehicles be standard. I'm here for this, it's exactly the kind of stuff that I want for mercenary involvement on Balkanized worlds in the course of a Traveller campaign, but... there are other blockers for that.
The combat tables are mostly OK but there are some under-explained modifiers next to the Surface Bombardment Table. It's interesting that bombardment damage on surface targets caps at 50% of the target's strength per turn - which means that splitting your fire and bombarding two targets with half of your firepower each for two turns can be more effective than concentrating it all on one target in the first turn, then the other target the next turn. So that's a bit odd, but maybe it doesn't actually come up in play.
The material on using Earth in Traveller campaigns is basically three patrons and a couple of deeper conspiracies to tie them into. Two were a bit trite and could happen anywhere but the third actually ties into something from the wargame so I liked that one.
Again, in conclusion - a very ambitious sort of conflict to try to tackle in nine pages of rules, and some rough edges are apparent as a result. If anybody knows of a ruleset that is to this what Azhanti High Lightning was to Snapshot, an expanded and cleaned-up version, please let me know in the comments.
On further reflection, the other thing that this game needs is Tyranids. It is excusable that it doesn't have them, because they may not have been invented yet when it was published, but nevertheless, it is the perfect use-case. "How long can 50,000 guardsmen and assorted aerospace assets delay the advance of the hive fleet? How much can they make it cost to devour this world?" are exactly the kind of questions that Invasion: Earth is aimed at answering. This is the kind of scale that a Warhammer 40k game should be operating at.
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