Classic Traveller: Invasion: Earth Review

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.

Classic Traveller: The Imperial Fringe Review

The Imperial Fringe was published in 1981 as an "introductory adventure" included with the Deluxe Traveller boxed set.  I acquired it on the "Classic Traveller" CD from Far Future Enterprises, which makes it a little hard to evaluate its value for money.

Calling The Imperial Fringe an adventure is somewhat misleading.  It is actually the sketch of an enormous, sector-spanning, 20-year campaign.  It is also, however, brilliant documentation on the designer's expectations about how a Traveller campaign might be run.  I wish I had read this like 10 years ago when I was first getting started with Mongoose Traveller.

The pitch, basically, is that a senior member of the Scout Service contracts the players to do a survey of the sector and provide up-to-date UPP codes, based on in-person observations, of each of the 440 planets in the sector, with a time limit of 20 in-game years (1040 weeks).  Reminder: a subsector map is 8x10 hexes and usually about 30-40 planets, and a sector is 16 such subsectors.

This sounds extraordinarily ambitious to someone coming from Mongoose 1e - our games have usually been confined to single subsectors and maybe two years of game-time.  Occasionally a plot point would take us a little bit off of the edge of the subsector but the assumption was that this was a temporary state of affairs and that we shouldn't expect additional subsectors of prep effort.

The players get paid a fixed sum per world surveyed on submitting survey reports at Scout Service offices.  This sets up a brilliant incentive to actually travel - you don't get paid for visiting the same planet a second time.  And this leans into something I've liked about Traveller, which is that "planet of the week" allows a lot of variety.  One week you can do Alien on a derelict, the next week you can do Blade Runner in the big city, the week after that you can do Mad Max stranded on a desert planet looking for water to run the reactor on, all with the same set of characters, without breaking continuity or suspension of disbelief, while continuing to build campaign capital.

I also really appreciate that this setup shows rather than tells you a lot about the Third Imperium.  It is so huge, and travel so slow, that they do the census basically every 20 years, and official records about the state of whole planets can fall completely out of date in that time.  And their solution to this problem is contracting the census out to a handful of retirees on a shoestring budget and a deadline measured in decades.  The implications about the state capacity of the Imperium mark it as a very different situation from ours.  Imperial subjects probably aren't filing individual tax returns with the central Imperial Revenue Service every year.  The empire can just lose track of millions of people for decades.  What does the response time of Imperial law enforcement look like?  Weeks, months?  If your ship gets "pulled over" by the Navy and they want to "run your plates", how out of date is that particular patrol cruiser's database of ship registrations?  Is there even a standard Imperial-issue identification document like a passport?  So it raises lots of fun questions.

Returning to gamier matters, The Imperial Fringe also makes explicit:

The assumption in the adventure is that one character has possession of a type S Scout/Courier and thus provides transportation for the group. The referee should suggest that one player attempt a scout career. If, after all character generation has been performed, no scout has a scout ship, one of them should be arbitrarily given a scout ship in order to further the adventure.

Obviously, I'm not thrilled at the suggestion to respect neither the oracular power of the chargen dice rolls nor the consequences of the risk/reward decisions of the players during chargen.  But it is interesting to see that even this early, the official Word of Miller was "give 'em a ship," at least for introductory campaigns.  And with a campaign of this scale, I have to wonder how many people started "introductory" campaigns and then ended up playing it for years of real-time.

Giving a known ship makes setting up appropriate rewards a lot more viable, plannable; if you know what their monthly ship costs are, and you know the rate at which they can survey, then you can set the pay structure up to keep them under light monetary tension, without it spiraling either down into overwhelming debt and desperation, nor up into huge piles of cash.  And this makes sense in the world; your patron also knows what it costs to run a Scout/Courier and wants to encourage you to actually get the job done, rather than either failing due to lack of funds or retiring due to excess of funds before finishing.

The combination of the known-small cargo hold of the Scout/Courier and the strong incentive to keep moving on to new systems to write fresh survey reports probably constitutes a workable solution to the Golden Pair problem (though not a very general solution).  It doesn't matter if there are two planets with strongly-complementary trade codes next door to each other; you barely have the means to exploit this opportunity on any single transit between them, and you have strong incentives to not do anything in a loop.

And while the initial setup procedure may not be maximally respectful of player agency, once the game has started they're just let loose upon the sector.  No further railroads here...

Until you start inserting other published CT adventures into suggested systems, per page 19; then you might run into some small-scale railroads.  I salute the hustle of using the introductory adventure to advertise the rest of the product line.  But still, even if you do go buy all of those adventures and drop them into the sector map, you still have a big sandbox with a couple more-detailed points of interest rather than an adventure path like The Traveller Adventure, which came out a year later in 1982.

This suggestion to drop in modules throughout the sector does highlight one obvious weakness here, which is that there are a lot of worlds described with UPPs and no further details, and this is very much not a ready-to-use, "grab-and-go with no prep" kind of product.  Significant Assembly Required to make each world interesting, to keep the game from turning into a "we jump, we descend, we check the survey boxes, we take off, we jump..." routine.  Religious observance of the random encounter rules is probably wise, but not mentioned here; it might be easy for a new Traveller GM to miss.  Maybe at the time knowledge of their use was more assumed, from old-school D&D?

The other difficulty that I have with The Imperial Fringe is a less universal one - it probably doesn't handle open-table play particularly well.  You're going places well away from the main routes, so justifying characters appearing and disappearing out in the boonies strains disbelief a bit.  And the ship doesn't have enough stateroom capacity to justify a "you're carrying everyone but half the crew has food poisoning this week" approach.  A bigger ship with more space and enough crew for PCs to fade into and out of the background might be a way to do it though; basically a Star Trek-style "survey cruiser" sort of thing.  But then you start having to think about command structures and payroll...

So yeah, I wish I'd read this back when I had a stable set of players in college, rather than adults with lives doing master's degrees while working full time jobs and raising kids and taking long vacations.