If I were going for postcount, this could probably be multiple (unrelated: initially typo'd "multiple" to "mule pile")
Point the first: some decent background music for SF ground combat. Gave me the "tech-heavy military SF" itch again.
Which OGRE sort of fills but also sort of doesn't. The only design is in defense force composition, which while still an open problem is a very different animal from Starmada, Battletech, or Traveller-type design. One thing I will say for OGRE though is that it handles attrition nicely - as soon as one side can't take an action, the game is over. The nature of the battle between implacable machine and humans making a last stand mean that morale is immaterial, so you have neither forced actions ("failed morale, must retreat towards map edge") nor denied actions ("pinned, can't fire this turn"). In this way, it avoids complexity.
Admittedly, a lot of wargames ignore morale effects, but it's nice to have a reasonable excuse. Should find more wargames with war machines and slavering aliens born to die ("this for the swarm!"), and I guess human troops either heroic, desperate, or hopped up on combat stimulants. Maybe that's part of why 40k is popular; they have morale rules, but they're not nearly as central to gameplay as in (say) Stargrunt, and plenty of things basically ignore them.
Also wargames are problematic because of scalability (often hard for 4-5 players at once to play with quick turn lengths), tendency to minmax in competitive environments, and somebody always loses. These are things which RPGs handle relatively well. Do people play wargames in the 3+ vs 1 "coalition of players and a referee in non-competitive campaign" mode?
Showing posts with label BattleTech. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BattleTech. Show all posts
Monday, April 20, 2015
Sunday, August 17, 2014
Logistics
I've been thinking about grand strategy games recently, and it occurs to me that supply rules are a lot like encumbrance rules, in that they're a pain in the ass but also worthwhile because they convey the same concerns the character experiences up to the player. A dungeoneer worries about how much weight he's carrying; a general worries about how to keep his men fed. What's more, as Keegan's History of Warfare suggests, supply concerns dictated the largely-coastal structures of campaigns in the Hellenic era. Without supply, you get all kinds of crazy long-term unsupported actions in the enemy rear (this is a problem I have observed in, say, the Civilization series of games).
But the difference between supply and encumbrance is that we're reached a reasonablish compromise between complexity and realism in our encumbrance rules, with encumbrance by stone or with Traveller's low-kilos threshold. I don't know if supply is amenable to simplication... but until I find a set of rules for it which are really light-weight, I expect that it will remain one of those much-begrudged rules which is ignored by the players whenever I forget about it.
(Been thinking about wargame campaigns again, since I'm back in Collegetown and one of my main wargaming opponents / buddies is still around)
But the difference between supply and encumbrance is that we're reached a reasonablish compromise between complexity and realism in our encumbrance rules, with encumbrance by stone or with Traveller's low-kilos threshold. I don't know if supply is amenable to simplication... but until I find a set of rules for it which are really light-weight, I expect that it will remain one of those much-begrudged rules which is ignored by the players whenever I forget about it.
(Been thinking about wargame campaigns again, since I'm back in Collegetown and one of my main wargaming opponents / buddies is still around)
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
A Return to Wargaming?
Jimdad suggested on the recent organizational resources post that it would make sense for me to do some test runs of all the tech before trying to run a full-blown campaign with it. This is sensible, but one-shots are unsatisfying as a rule. Unrelatedly, I've had VBAM and space wargaming on the brain recently for no apparent reason. But they do suggest an alternative means for tech-testing, in that wargames are primarily one-off affairs (at least in our group) which work well with a small and irregular player pool. Playing one-off wargame scenarios also leads nicely into campaigns, which might beget universe generation and lead to workable RPG settings.
I'm sort of looking back at the Starmada Summer of 2011 as a model, but hopefully with a less flexi-fragile system (or a gentleman's agreement that if something is broken, you use it to win once and then can it). I think Full Thrust in one of its several incarnations would probably serve us well, as it is a very simple core game with lots of optional things to experiment with (I for one would be curious to try Colonial Battlefleet's initiative system on top of FT's general mechanics; I'm just not a huge fan of pre-plotted movement). Full Thrust is also old enough and well-enough vetted that its exploitable flaws are known (documented and discussed in the expansion books) and can hopefully be avoided. It also has a nice-looking sample campaign in the back of the FT2E manual.
Other options:
I'm sort of looking back at the Starmada Summer of 2011 as a model, but hopefully with a less flexi-fragile system (or a gentleman's agreement that if something is broken, you use it to win once and then can it). I think Full Thrust in one of its several incarnations would probably serve us well, as it is a very simple core game with lots of optional things to experiment with (I for one would be curious to try Colonial Battlefleet's initiative system on top of FT's general mechanics; I'm just not a huge fan of pre-plotted movement). Full Thrust is also old enough and well-enough vetted that its exploitable flaws are known (documented and discussed in the expansion books) and can hopefully be avoided. It also has a nice-looking sample campaign in the back of the FT2E manual.
Other options:
- Starmada: Nova - we never really gave this one a fair shake, and the seeker rules are pretty neat. On the minus side, forum reports that stacking up weapon traits is still pretty broken.
- Colonial Battlefleet - sort of hampered by lack of good shipyard spreadsheet. I have one half-thrown together, but got bored. Good stealth and initiative rules, and the Raider type from the expansion book looks like fun. On the minus side, fairly heavy bookkeeping for shields.
- Battleshift - Fleet engagements with some cool tactical warp mechanics. If I recall correctly, though, it needs a pretty big playing area, and I've seen roll20 lag out under less.
- Space Hulk. The problem with Space Hulk is that it's unusually stressful, because there is some serious "oh god oh god we're all going to die" going on continuously (... holy cow, this must be what it's like to play in my ACKS games. No wonder they keep disintegrating! On the other hand, if you play ACKS well, it's less of a problem than if you play Space Hulk well, because the DM is slightly less actively malicious than the 'stealer player). Also the maps are deceptively expansive.
- BattleTech Lite - light to medium mechs from the earliest time period only, and perhaps no melee. Could be fun as long as you keep the total number of armor / structure points low.
- Domains at War: Battles - Our experiences so far suggest that DaW:B is too heavy unless there's some significant investment in the outcome (ie, a PC realm at stake). On the other hand, two games between inexperienced players is not a whole lot to go by. I've been meaning to write some scenarios for this - the system could definitely use one highlighting the fortification rules, and everybody loves Helm's Deep.
- Hell, a sample DaW:C campaign would be fun too, and if the battles were resolved using the Campaigns rules, it might work alright for one-off afternoon games (though I sort of expect a lot of overhead from the recon rules - TODO automate recon). I could steal something from Crusader Kings and keep the magic-and-wyvern-cavalry level historically low for ease of use.
- Anything in the 15-25mm infantry sphere - I have my doubts about how well roll20 would handle these, and Vassal suffers from limited plugins. Options include Stargrunt, Gruntz, WH40k, and many many others.
- Dirtside or other 6mm microarmor games - Again, I don't think this one would do well on roll20. Also chit-based damage.
Friday, November 16, 2012
On Wargame Campaigns (and BattleTech)
As I read back through some of the BattleTech material I have around which has been collecting dust, I'm led to reflect on our experience with Starmada campaigns and with some of the campaign systems I've seen in other wargames. Looking back at our attempts at 'mada campaigns, I can't help but think that we drastically overcomplicated them. We built a grand strategic game system, not a campaign system - we had star systems with planets with their own productivity values and infrastructure and population and stuff, we had spies and treaties and hostile natives and pirates and research and all kinds of crap. We had Master of Orion. A wargame campaign, though, in its purest form, eschews most of these things. You have some forces which persist through multiple scenarios, which you have to direct and allocate, and which grow, shrink, or otherwise change composition as a result of those scenarios. Continuing the video game analogy, Homeworld is a good representative of this model - you're always trying to eke as many resources out of each scenario as possible so that you can carry it over to the next in the form of ships, and if you haven't completed all research available in the scenario when you finish, you sit around and wait for it to complete before declaring victory and hyperdriving out. Starmada's Simplest Campaign System is a canonical example of this as well.
Moral of that story - when embarking on a campaign, make your intentions clear, choose a system that matches them, and make sure everyone's willing to carry through with the sort of time investment that the chosen system entails.
Before I move on to BattleTech, there's another campaign system I happened on once that I think is worth mentioning as interesting. It was from MechWar '77, an old SPI hex-and-counter game portraying the Arab-Israeli War(s) of 1977. It had a very curious campaign system. You had two players, each of which had some pool of forces to secretly divide between each of three fronts - north, south, and center. A single battle was then fought on each front with the forces each commander had assigned it, and the victor of the campaign was determined based on who had won which battles and to what degree. I found this campaign system to be unusual in that it split battles and forces across space rather than time; most of the time when we think of campaign systems, we focus on the "over time" aspect, rather than the allocation aspect.
This brings us to the BattleTech bit. I found, in the Combat Operations book, a very nice and fairly simple campaign system. Each campaign turn, each player assigns each element (depending on the scale of the campaign) an order to Fight, Defend, Scout, Repair, or Supply. The relation between the number of Fighting, Defending, and Scouting units then determines what scenarios are fought during that turn and between which units, while Repairing and Supplying units can fix damage or purchase new equipment and are vulnerable to combat only if the other side's attacking forces drastically outnumber and swamp their defending forces. Campaign points are scored based on the degree of victory in each battle, and lost for defeat, with the three ways to win the campaign being to destroy the enemy to a man, to capture his base of operations, or to amass a sufficient morale and supply advantage by winning many battles, as represented by gaining enough campaign points.
Overall, I think this system strikes a good balance. It has unit change over time, with units taking damage and being repaired between scenarios, but it also has MechWar '77-style unit allocation to different tasks; thus, but operational and tactical resource management. In BattleTech, there is very little hidden information built in; hidden unit assignments does create a degree of hidden information, and turns the campaign into a light lateral-thinking game which the wargame itself is not. It has a means of unit advancement, both through pilot improvement and using the Supply order to purchase new units, which limits the potential for Starmada Simplest-style degeneration (where each side ends up with units which are barely fieldable). Finally, it seems that for a reasonable small force (say a company of four lances to each side), the game would likely be very reasonable to run, complexity-wise and in terms of number of games required to complete the campaign, especially if one limited the availability of supplies. Salvage then becomes imminently important for getting ammunition and replacement parts - it keeps striking me as odd how heavily BT emphasizes salvage compared to other wargames, but I think I like it. It emphasizes the "we just can't build stuff like this anymore" aspect of the setting from the early Succession Wars. That might be another post, though.
But yeah - I think I might want to run one of these. Heck, multi-faction might work too; the only really critical addition would be making Fight and Scout orders specify a target, though the scenario determination rules might need a bit of tweaking too, and with limited supply I feel like such a game might get very treacherous very quickly. But I can kind of see it, if you replace the setting; in the ruins of post-apocalyptic Earth, the only units capable of operation in the blowing dust of the radioactive wastelands are ancient mechs, the likes of which can no longer be produced, and those who have such mechs war amongst themselves for control over those which remain...
Moral of that story - when embarking on a campaign, make your intentions clear, choose a system that matches them, and make sure everyone's willing to carry through with the sort of time investment that the chosen system entails.
Before I move on to BattleTech, there's another campaign system I happened on once that I think is worth mentioning as interesting. It was from MechWar '77, an old SPI hex-and-counter game portraying the Arab-Israeli War(s) of 1977. It had a very curious campaign system. You had two players, each of which had some pool of forces to secretly divide between each of three fronts - north, south, and center. A single battle was then fought on each front with the forces each commander had assigned it, and the victor of the campaign was determined based on who had won which battles and to what degree. I found this campaign system to be unusual in that it split battles and forces across space rather than time; most of the time when we think of campaign systems, we focus on the "over time" aspect, rather than the allocation aspect.
This brings us to the BattleTech bit. I found, in the Combat Operations book, a very nice and fairly simple campaign system. Each campaign turn, each player assigns each element (depending on the scale of the campaign) an order to Fight, Defend, Scout, Repair, or Supply. The relation between the number of Fighting, Defending, and Scouting units then determines what scenarios are fought during that turn and between which units, while Repairing and Supplying units can fix damage or purchase new equipment and are vulnerable to combat only if the other side's attacking forces drastically outnumber and swamp their defending forces. Campaign points are scored based on the degree of victory in each battle, and lost for defeat, with the three ways to win the campaign being to destroy the enemy to a man, to capture his base of operations, or to amass a sufficient morale and supply advantage by winning many battles, as represented by gaining enough campaign points.
Overall, I think this system strikes a good balance. It has unit change over time, with units taking damage and being repaired between scenarios, but it also has MechWar '77-style unit allocation to different tasks; thus, but operational and tactical resource management. In BattleTech, there is very little hidden information built in; hidden unit assignments does create a degree of hidden information, and turns the campaign into a light lateral-thinking game which the wargame itself is not. It has a means of unit advancement, both through pilot improvement and using the Supply order to purchase new units, which limits the potential for Starmada Simplest-style degeneration (where each side ends up with units which are barely fieldable). Finally, it seems that for a reasonable small force (say a company of four lances to each side), the game would likely be very reasonable to run, complexity-wise and in terms of number of games required to complete the campaign, especially if one limited the availability of supplies. Salvage then becomes imminently important for getting ammunition and replacement parts - it keeps striking me as odd how heavily BT emphasizes salvage compared to other wargames, but I think I like it. It emphasizes the "we just can't build stuff like this anymore" aspect of the setting from the early Succession Wars. That might be another post, though.
But yeah - I think I might want to run one of these. Heck, multi-faction might work too; the only really critical addition would be making Fight and Scout orders specify a target, though the scenario determination rules might need a bit of tweaking too, and with limited supply I feel like such a game might get very treacherous very quickly. But I can kind of see it, if you replace the setting; in the ruins of post-apocalyptic Earth, the only units capable of operation in the blowing dust of the radioactive wastelands are ancient mechs, the likes of which can no longer be produced, and those who have such mechs war amongst themselves for control over those which remain...
Friday, November 9, 2012
One Last Starmada Post
Well, I happened by the Starmada forums recently just to see how things were doing with Nova. It looks like the community has diminished somewhat, which I'm sad to see. What's more, several of the threads I skimmed seemed to suggest that Nova has been having the same issues with weapon traits that Admiralty Edition did, namely people stacking all kinds of stuff on one gun and then destroying everything with it. Further, much as we suspected when Nova first came out, fighters have been weakened to the point where they're no longer an effective counter. And naturally, Expendable, Nova's one-shot replacement for Ammo, has been found to be broken as well.
I'm starting to see a pattern here. When you let people build their own weapons, things start getting really ugly really fast. It's like True Sorcery in D&D; you build all of your own offensive capabilitites, and if you know what you're doing, you can do ridiculous things. Except that in D&D, there's not a direct contest between players, so you can kind of get away with it, and you have a DM to kill you if you get out of line. In Starmada, where players are directly competing, arms races develop, global optimums are found, the design game is won, and the actual game is over.
But, the converse is that designing stuff is fun. So, says I, what wargame do I have sitting around that has buildy options but doesn't permit users to design their own weapons?
BattleTech. The 4th Edition Starter Box, to be specific, though missing mapsheets and minis :\
Granted, if I were to run some BattleTech around here, I think I would try to avoid the mistakes I made the last time I tried it, as well as some of the mistakes we made when we first tried to play Starmada and Stargrunt. First off, start people off with 2-3 light to medium mechs, rather than a single assault mech each (one thing Starmada and Stargrunt made apparent is that giving new players a single unit means that when that unit starts getting pounded, they get frustrated, then bored). And second, use a wet-erasable hex-map so there can be terrain (because, as is often said, terrain is an essential part of wargaming... though Matt has this mat, and is out of town ): . Pre-copying a great pile of mech sheets for the classes available beforehand is probably advisable as well, as is making copies of the reference tables (the Stargrunt reference card was fantastic enough that this seems a good plan). Then after a few games with 3025 stock mechs, open up the 3025 design rules with the same tonnage limits (for those unfamiliar, 3025 refers to a tech year in the BT universe, and is the lowest / simplest. There's also 3035, 3050, 3075, and probably more with which I'm not familiar, which add variant weapons and equipment like extended-range lasers, artillery cannons, and giant mech shotguns). And if that takes off, well then maybe we start picking up later tech years.
Am I actually going to get a chance to do this while running ACKS? Not sure. If a significant portion of players can't make it to ACKS one week and I have advanced notice, maybe. Now that we're in to the domain game, having people just disappear on a drinking binge for a couple months of game-time is no longer really workable...
I'm starting to see a pattern here. When you let people build their own weapons, things start getting really ugly really fast. It's like True Sorcery in D&D; you build all of your own offensive capabilitites, and if you know what you're doing, you can do ridiculous things. Except that in D&D, there's not a direct contest between players, so you can kind of get away with it, and you have a DM to kill you if you get out of line. In Starmada, where players are directly competing, arms races develop, global optimums are found, the design game is won, and the actual game is over.
But, the converse is that designing stuff is fun. So, says I, what wargame do I have sitting around that has buildy options but doesn't permit users to design their own weapons?
BattleTech. The 4th Edition Starter Box, to be specific, though missing mapsheets and minis :\
 |
| This mech has a cigar. This cigar is a laser cannon. Your objections are invalid. |
Granted, if I were to run some BattleTech around here, I think I would try to avoid the mistakes I made the last time I tried it, as well as some of the mistakes we made when we first tried to play Starmada and Stargrunt. First off, start people off with 2-3 light to medium mechs, rather than a single assault mech each (one thing Starmada and Stargrunt made apparent is that giving new players a single unit means that when that unit starts getting pounded, they get frustrated, then bored). And second, use a wet-erasable hex-map so there can be terrain (because, as is often said, terrain is an essential part of wargaming... though Matt has this mat, and is out of town ): . Pre-copying a great pile of mech sheets for the classes available beforehand is probably advisable as well, as is making copies of the reference tables (the Stargrunt reference card was fantastic enough that this seems a good plan). Then after a few games with 3025 stock mechs, open up the 3025 design rules with the same tonnage limits (for those unfamiliar, 3025 refers to a tech year in the BT universe, and is the lowest / simplest. There's also 3035, 3050, 3075, and probably more with which I'm not familiar, which add variant weapons and equipment like extended-range lasers, artillery cannons, and giant mech shotguns). And if that takes off, well then maybe we start picking up later tech years.
Am I actually going to get a chance to do this while running ACKS? Not sure. If a significant portion of players can't make it to ACKS one week and I have advanced notice, maybe. Now that we're in to the domain game, having people just disappear on a drinking binge for a couple months of game-time is no longer really workable...
Monday, June 25, 2012
O, For Sci-Fi...
Disclaimer: ACKS is fun. I'm enjoying running it, and I think that my players probably don't hate it either (quoth Tim - "I want to try running an old-school 3.5 game in the fall. Wait no, ACKS is more fun.").
But sometimes, you just want to go all-out with the kind of shit we pulled in Starmada two springs ago. To find a crunchy, buildy wargame and go to town with it. Also because tanks and mechs and lasers and tech is just fun sometimes.
Basically, I've got two itches that I want to scratch:
1 - Gritty, nasty man-vs-aliens dungeoncrawling. Could be Space Hulk with expansions (namely: thunder hammers, autocannons, and the force bidding rules), could be a Star*ACKS one-shot with whole platoons of L1 marines-at-arms. Deathwatch is built for this, but it's too heavy for me. StarGrunt could work too, but it's lacking strongly in the aliens department, and our previous attempts at them... well, maybe could be tweaked into a workable shape. It also doesn't seem well-suited to indoor combat, though indoor games would be short and fast since close assault is where casualties really happen in SGII. SG also, of all of these candidates, has the least hidden information (though their artillery mechanic is a beautiful exception).
2 - Crunchy, heavy mechanized warfare. OGREs and other supertanks, mechs, guided missiles, attack helicopters (or antigrav equivalent), tactical nuclear weapons, ideally some form of campaign system, the whole shebang. BattleTech seems to be the most popular option for this in this part of the country, but what it possesses in wonderful construction rules it makes up for with a painful damage resolution system and a model of futuristic warfare inconsistent with modern facts (BT cannon ranges top out at under half a mile (~2400 feet), compared to modern cannons with effective ranges of upwards of two miles) and sometimes physics (melee mechs make me sad). BT's Operational Campaign system from Tactical Handbook is pretty sweet, though. Wardogs inherits a lot of BT's problems, and while generally lighter, is not well written and rather confusing. Dirtside would probably be great, since it has a construction system and seems relatively lightweight, but the randomization using chits is just... arg. There is also here the persistent problem of lack of models. Dirtside has more hidden information built in by default than most of the games in this category, though, between its beautiful objectives system and decent artillery rules. Epic suffers a similar miniatures problem, but does at the very least not use chits. You do have to deal with the default (crazy) assumptions of the 40k 'verse, though, and the rules are hard to find these days since the Specialist Games page was taken down. CAV could work too, but I'm pretty much unfamiliar with it except for a few reports from Sergeant Crunch. It does seem to be lacking in the construction system department, but the damage model is really simple and reminds me of Starmada Nova's to some extent. Guess I could hack together a S:NE ground project like I was looking at doing with Admiralty... Certainly the new Seekers rule would work nicely for guided missiles.
Anyway, I think part of this speculation and grumbling is that running ACKS twice a week means I'm prepping all the time. Switching one game a week to something more wargamey would mean that I could have a few days off to come up with ideas, rather than strictly reacting to my players. Variety being the spice of inspiration and all that. Or, if I can't convince people to switch to one RPG night and one wargame night a week, I might have to do something dangerous, like throwing Expedition to the Barrier Peaks into my ACKS world (though with the average Int score of this party, particularly Drew's henchman brigade, that would be absolutely hilarious. Hmmmm....).
But sometimes, you just want to go all-out with the kind of shit we pulled in Starmada two springs ago. To find a crunchy, buildy wargame and go to town with it. Also because tanks and mechs and lasers and tech is just fun sometimes.
Basically, I've got two itches that I want to scratch:
1 - Gritty, nasty man-vs-aliens dungeoncrawling. Could be Space Hulk with expansions (namely: thunder hammers, autocannons, and the force bidding rules), could be a Star*ACKS one-shot with whole platoons of L1 marines-at-arms. Deathwatch is built for this, but it's too heavy for me. StarGrunt could work too, but it's lacking strongly in the aliens department, and our previous attempts at them... well, maybe could be tweaked into a workable shape. It also doesn't seem well-suited to indoor combat, though indoor games would be short and fast since close assault is where casualties really happen in SGII. SG also, of all of these candidates, has the least hidden information (though their artillery mechanic is a beautiful exception).
2 - Crunchy, heavy mechanized warfare. OGREs and other supertanks, mechs, guided missiles, attack helicopters (or antigrav equivalent), tactical nuclear weapons, ideally some form of campaign system, the whole shebang. BattleTech seems to be the most popular option for this in this part of the country, but what it possesses in wonderful construction rules it makes up for with a painful damage resolution system and a model of futuristic warfare inconsistent with modern facts (BT cannon ranges top out at under half a mile (~2400 feet), compared to modern cannons with effective ranges of upwards of two miles) and sometimes physics (melee mechs make me sad). BT's Operational Campaign system from Tactical Handbook is pretty sweet, though. Wardogs inherits a lot of BT's problems, and while generally lighter, is not well written and rather confusing. Dirtside would probably be great, since it has a construction system and seems relatively lightweight, but the randomization using chits is just... arg. There is also here the persistent problem of lack of models. Dirtside has more hidden information built in by default than most of the games in this category, though, between its beautiful objectives system and decent artillery rules. Epic suffers a similar miniatures problem, but does at the very least not use chits. You do have to deal with the default (crazy) assumptions of the 40k 'verse, though, and the rules are hard to find these days since the Specialist Games page was taken down. CAV could work too, but I'm pretty much unfamiliar with it except for a few reports from Sergeant Crunch. It does seem to be lacking in the construction system department, but the damage model is really simple and reminds me of Starmada Nova's to some extent. Guess I could hack together a S:NE ground project like I was looking at doing with Admiralty... Certainly the new Seekers rule would work nicely for guided missiles.
Anyway, I think part of this speculation and grumbling is that running ACKS twice a week means I'm prepping all the time. Switching one game a week to something more wargamey would mean that I could have a few days off to come up with ideas, rather than strictly reacting to my players. Variety being the spice of inspiration and all that. Or, if I can't convince people to switch to one RPG night and one wargame night a week, I might have to do something dangerous, like throwing Expedition to the Barrier Peaks into my ACKS world (though with the average Int score of this party, particularly Drew's henchman brigade, that would be absolutely hilarious. Hmmmm....).
Monday, May 23, 2011
Thought for the Evening: Starmada as Ground Combat
Last night's game with the Searchlights really got me thinking about using Starmada to simulate ground combat. There's been a previous attempt at this, converting OGRE to Starmada, but it was a little simplistic and was developed in the early days of the Admiralty Edition, before there were many supplements (whether this was good or bad is somewhat uncertain). I've been having a BattleTech / giant stompy mech game with tanks itch recently, and I've been thinking about buying Wardogs, but I don't know that I really want to buy Wardogs if Starmada can do the same thing with a little conversion work. So I think that's going to be my project in the near future, since the campaign rules are in a playtestable state (and thus are released into the wild to remain fairly static, leaving me free to create other stuff)...
Some preliminary notes:
I'm looking to make things armor-centric, whether that armor is tanks or mecha (I'm a tank guy myself, but hey, if mecha draws a larger playerbase, I'm not one to stop 'em). Movement should probably be Basic Movement, and possibly alternating rather than pre-plotted, but pre-plot would work fine, too. My thought is that most vehicles should be flotilla ships without normal SU caps (with hulled ships being reserved for big things - OGREs, superheavy tanks, titanic mechs, naval vessels, fortresses, and the like), but with some other restrictions... I guess what I need to do is build 'templates' for what is legal and what isn't. Something like the following:
Light armored vehicles: flotilla ships, max engines 6, one weapon of up to ## SU mounted in an ABCD turret, max armor 2.
Medium armored vehicles: flotilla, max engines 5, one weapon of up to ## SU mounted in an ABCD turret and a coaxial weapon of up to ## SU, also in an ABCD turret, max armor 3.
Heavy armored vehicles: flotilla, max engines 3, one weapon of up to ## SU in ABCD, one coax of up to ## SU in ABCD, up to two sponson weapons each of up to ## SU in AC and BD, respectively, max armor 4.
The purpose of these templates, naturally, is to create some degree of verisimilitude. Land vehicle design is just different from naval ship design (which is the assumed basis for starship design). Tanks covered in guns facing in all directions have been out of fashion since World War I, and G-arc tank destroyers haven't seen a whole lot of use since World War II. I think the existence of templates might help facilitate a minimally-painful transition from normal ship design practices (read: as many range-15 G weapons as you can fit in your hull and CRAT limits) to some that are slightly more believable through the lens of modern armored warfare.
Mechs are going to be a little tougher, but probably arms should map to ABC and ABD. I think shoulder-mounted weapons may be just A and just B... GH and GI feel wrong, since they shouldn't be able to fire directly left and right. Maybe just AB regardless of the shoulder mounted on. Also considering mandating Overthrusters for the torso twists, or maybe just the Grumm Pivot ability (which would match the BT fluff, where the neurohelmets enable faster reaction times).
Finally, infantry is looking like fighters. Slooow fighters and inexpensive fighters, but they do get to react, and you can carry, embark, and debark them (going to modify retrieval so that you can retrieve and then relaunch - doesn't make much sense otherwise). Not planning on using marines, boarding, teleporters, or any of that... likewise, I guess strikers and seekers could be used for guided missiles, but I'm not sure it's necessary. I've also considered using them for airstrikes - you have a HQ unit near the rear of the map with strikers. You call in an airstrike, which is launching the striker in-game, and then the enemy has a chance to shoot down the incoming aircraft before their weapons impact. So that's a thought... might also have to use seekers, but secretly designate a target hex instead of a target unit. That makes sense with calling in coordinates.
This leads into artillery. I really want to use a variant of the searchlight rules for spotting for artillery. I want to have range 30 minimum-range artillery pieces where you basically need to have spotting units (going to need some "Indirect Fire" and "Can't fire while moving" traits for those, too), and I think that can be achieved with searchlights. Terrain's going to effect this, too - that's the other tricky part of ground combat games, terrain. Something to work out tomorrow / later today / in the near future.
Some preliminary notes:
I'm looking to make things armor-centric, whether that armor is tanks or mecha (I'm a tank guy myself, but hey, if mecha draws a larger playerbase, I'm not one to stop 'em). Movement should probably be Basic Movement, and possibly alternating rather than pre-plotted, but pre-plot would work fine, too. My thought is that most vehicles should be flotilla ships without normal SU caps (with hulled ships being reserved for big things - OGREs, superheavy tanks, titanic mechs, naval vessels, fortresses, and the like), but with some other restrictions... I guess what I need to do is build 'templates' for what is legal and what isn't. Something like the following:
Light armored vehicles: flotilla ships, max engines 6, one weapon of up to ## SU mounted in an ABCD turret, max armor 2.
Medium armored vehicles: flotilla, max engines 5, one weapon of up to ## SU mounted in an ABCD turret and a coaxial weapon of up to ## SU, also in an ABCD turret, max armor 3.
Heavy armored vehicles: flotilla, max engines 3, one weapon of up to ## SU in ABCD, one coax of up to ## SU in ABCD, up to two sponson weapons each of up to ## SU in AC and BD, respectively, max armor 4.
The purpose of these templates, naturally, is to create some degree of verisimilitude. Land vehicle design is just different from naval ship design (which is the assumed basis for starship design). Tanks covered in guns facing in all directions have been out of fashion since World War I, and G-arc tank destroyers haven't seen a whole lot of use since World War II. I think the existence of templates might help facilitate a minimally-painful transition from normal ship design practices (read: as many range-15 G weapons as you can fit in your hull and CRAT limits) to some that are slightly more believable through the lens of modern armored warfare.
Mechs are going to be a little tougher, but probably arms should map to ABC and ABD. I think shoulder-mounted weapons may be just A and just B... GH and GI feel wrong, since they shouldn't be able to fire directly left and right. Maybe just AB regardless of the shoulder mounted on. Also considering mandating Overthrusters for the torso twists, or maybe just the Grumm Pivot ability (which would match the BT fluff, where the neurohelmets enable faster reaction times).
Finally, infantry is looking like fighters. Slooow fighters and inexpensive fighters, but they do get to react, and you can carry, embark, and debark them (going to modify retrieval so that you can retrieve and then relaunch - doesn't make much sense otherwise). Not planning on using marines, boarding, teleporters, or any of that... likewise, I guess strikers and seekers could be used for guided missiles, but I'm not sure it's necessary. I've also considered using them for airstrikes - you have a HQ unit near the rear of the map with strikers. You call in an airstrike, which is launching the striker in-game, and then the enemy has a chance to shoot down the incoming aircraft before their weapons impact. So that's a thought... might also have to use seekers, but secretly designate a target hex instead of a target unit. That makes sense with calling in coordinates.
This leads into artillery. I really want to use a variant of the searchlight rules for spotting for artillery. I want to have range 30 minimum-range artillery pieces where you basically need to have spotting units (going to need some "Indirect Fire" and "Can't fire while moving" traits for those, too), and I think that can be achieved with searchlights. Terrain's going to effect this, too - that's the other tricky part of ground combat games, terrain. Something to work out tomorrow / later today / in the near future.
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