OgreBattle wrote:A more abstract means of stealth is the 40k 7e Genestealer Cult's "Ambush" and "return from the shadows" rule
https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Warhammer_40,0 ... Cults_(7E)
Basically any cult unit far away enough from the foe can enter reserves and then next turn you roll to see if they reappear. 40k 7e loves random tables so you roll a d6 to determine how your ambushers appear so it's not super reliable.
That's not really stealth however. That's basically teleportation with a hint of randomness.
* "Hidden": Deploy tokens on the battlefield, move them as infantry. If they're shot at or assaulted the controlling player can choose to remove the token or deploy stealthed unit. Potentially super powerful so should be restricted in use.
That's the old and traditional wargame method. But it's seen increasingly less use because you still know where the counters are and it becomes more of a mechanic of misdirection. The referee is really the best simulation of stealth.
And stealth is really OP IRL to begin with. This is why the
best units in most armies are actually their scouting units.
* "Scout" Unit gets a bonus move after deployment, before game starts
This is pretty much what's wrong with tabletop scouts as opposed to real-world scouts.
IRL your scouts are either your best troops or your most expendable ones; because their job is to spot enemy troops trying to be stealthy. They aren't necessarily guys with superior mobility so that they can get a pre-game move.
Expendable scouts are the sort of troops you just push into a position, to see if the enemy shoots at them. If they die - then it's okay, you didn't like them very much in the first place but you now know where the enemy is.
Elite scouts meanwhile understand the battlefield to such an extent that they know where to place themselves so that they can spot the enemy without being spotted themselves. From a game mechanic PoV in a double-blind game, it means that such scout units get a bonus to their spotting rolls and a bonus to their stealth rolls.
In the modern day only computer games with spotting-based mechanics are really able to simulate stealth properly.
In World of Tanks for instance it's very common to ask a player with a crappy low-ranked tank to scout ahead; because that allows the rest of the team to find out where the enemy is and shoot at them. Even if the crappy tank dies, the damage dealt to the enemy usually outweighs this.
Elite WoT scouts by contrast pick good positions where they can spot the enemy and remain unseen, or they drive around the battlefield and take calculated "peeks" at the enemy which maximizes spotting potential while minimizing the risk of return fire.
Yet you pretty much never see this kind of thing on tabletop games, because again it's a really bad environment to simulate the real advantage of stealth.