I'm looking for opinions on these. I have this cunning plan of graduating a casual wargamer friend to the real thing via Memoir '44 and Tide of Iron. To my utter bafflement it's actually worked out so far. He's thankfully bored by M'44 by now, and he loves those elements of ToI that (I guess) were stolen from (A)SL: Op Fire, suppressive fire, close assault rules, measuring LOS from the hex centers etc. etc.

So would the Starter Kits be a useful next step, complexity-wise? Also, once you've played all three of them, will you then essentially have mastered the actual ASL basic rules? Or do those require yet another major effort? (Besides the fact you also need Beyond Valor or one of the other gamettes.)

We could stick with ToI, but then a) there are few scenarios as yet and they're rather sucky, b) I'll be moving soon, and then we'd have to play via VASSAL, which doesn't yet have a ToI module and perhaps never will.