Domains at War: Another Test Battle, More Piledrivers!

We ran a test combat the other day of platoon-scale Domains at War Battles, with rough approximations of the PCs in my Midnight ACKS campaign leading a mixed force of elves, dwarves, and woodsmen against a column of orcs.  The PCs were handily victorious.

We did screw some stuff up, however!

• No generals, just independent and interoperating commanders.  This is relevant, because generals apply half of their morale to the rolls of all units, and can force a morale check when killed.  Their leadership also limits the maximum number of divisions (independent commanders) available to each side. This mistake favored the orcs, who lost both of their commanders (which would've forced morale), and denied the PCs' units their general morale bonus.
• James the Dwarf, having Morale +3 and Leadership 4, is probably the best choice for the PCs' general at this point.  I could see Skorn the Varangian being an excellent general in time, between her Charisma bonus, class features, and potential class proficiencies, but she is yet unlevelled. 
• No lieutenants, but the PCs didn't really need them.  The orcs should maybe have had them at platoon scale.  Each platoon is roughly a warband of orcs (~35), which should have a subchieftain qualified to lead it.  This would've made the orcish command situation much less tenuous and enabled ready replacement of slain orcish commanders.
• Applied commander morale bonus to all units in their division.  Again, this favored the orcs, who had more units per commander, whereas the PCs had three commanders and four units.
• Although the only PC with a morale modifier was James; the Elder Bear inflicts a morale penalty on enemies but provides no bonus to his allies, and Scarth the wizard has excellent strategic ability / mass combat initiative but no bonus to morale (which made him a fine leader for the archers in the rear to disorder the enemy early in the turn).
• When a commander is slain, his division's remaining units are not reassigned to other commanders until after the next morale phase.  We reassigned immediately.  Whoops.
• We did not permit a fireball to be directed at an orc chieftain personally, even though he was within visibility range for a man-sized hero.  This one cuts both ways, of course.
• The rules were unclear on whether or not retreating units can pass through threatened hexes; an orcish unit whose only path of retreat laid through one was ruled to be routed.  This, it turns out, is not correct.  So that one favored the PCs, and pretty handily, since that was a command unit.
• Retreating, recoiling, and withdrawing units can be pursued, and irregular infantry like orcs must pursue.  This would've brought an orcish command squad back into melee with Scarth's longbowmen, and prevented him from firing on his next activation (granted, they're about as good in melee as at range, but that would've been a more concerning situation for the PCs).
• Loose Foot cannot withdraw from units which have equal or greater marching speed, so actually the longbowmen couldn't've withdrawn from the orcs and should've taken the damage after all.
• Initially we forgot that the longbowmen could withdraw, but we figured that one out and it was OK.
• Our deployment was not doctrinaire, with the PCs coming at the orcish column from both sides and without a clear rearguard, vanguard, and main body.  On the other hand, it's platoon scale.  Meh.
• Terrain was not handled rigorously.

We handled most of the 'core' combat mechanics of the game OK, though - movement was much more intuitive this time than last, hitting and damage are easy to start with, and shock and morale went way better than previously.  Last time we were running from a .doc draft of the Battles rules and it was cumbersome; this time I had the paper book in my hands, with bookmarks for the shock and morale modifier tables, and those went very quickly, which pleased me.  The heroes were all very effective in different ways; the Elder Bear shredded orcs with 4 attacks at 3+ while shape-strengthed, James' morale bonus kept the outnumbered dwarven infantry from breaking despite flanking attacks, and Scarth's fireballs did excellent damage on this scale, forcing shock rolls wherever they landed.  The fact that heroes engage heroes attached to their target unit instead of the unit itself did influence targeting decisions some (in that the Elder Bear really preferred to shred half a unit of orcs instead of trying to hit one chieftain once), but with generals working properly the incentive to kill enemy heroes should be stronger next time.

We also played an extra-large game of OGRE!  We had three players, so David and I each took a MkIII while Matt ran a double-strength defense.  It was a brutal game, with David stripped of all weapons but his AP guns and no movement about six hexes from the objective, while I lost all of my non-AP guns and was down to speed 1 at the end.  Matt almost stopped me one hex short of the objective, but the dice turned against him on the last turn of firing at my treads, and I succeeded in destroying the command post.  For our part, we destroyed most of his forces (of 24 armor units, he had 2 heavy tanks, a missile tank, and a howitzer out in the boonies remaining at end of game), but it was the closest game we've had yet.

Mechmusics, OGRE, Morale

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?

Board Games IV: OGRE, Lords of Waterdeep, Alchemists

Was at the Gamerhaus yesterday for a playtest of an RPG combat system some friends are working on, and ended up also playing videogames and OGRE and then coming back today.

OGRE: Matt played defense again, this time with three howitzers clustered in the rear-center and six heavy tanks spread out in front of them, with infantry in front of them.  I considered attacking straight down the centerline, but shifted to attack from the left when I reached howitzer range, and was engaged first by three of the tanks and supporting infantry.  I burned my missiles to disable two of the tanks, and lost my main gun to the first round of stacked fire.  I overran probably three tanks in the next two turns and surrounded three hexes from the howitzercluster at 31 tread units (ie, the least possible number of treads with which I could reach and overrun them in one move).  Matt had some horrible luck attacking my treads that turn, and so I did succeed in overrunning one howitzer and destroying the other two with my secondary weapons, leaving three tanks and some infantry on the field.  The tanks did a number on my secondary batteries, but because they had to be at range 2 to fire I was able to chase them down and ram them.  The infantry then succumbed to antipersonnel fire.  At the end of the game I think I had one secondary cannon and seven AP weapons left, and was probably at 25ish tread units.  A much better showing for the defense than last time; heavy tanks mean business.  I think three potential mistakes were not engaging and doing tread damage before I was in howitzer range, not moving the right-side group sooner (which let me engage the two groups not-exactly separately but also did not force me to ever engage his entire force at once) and clustering the howitzers so tightly that if I got one of them I was going to get all of them.

Today, we played Lords of Waterdeep, Sentinels, Niagara, and Alchemists.

Lords of Waterdeep: This was my first time playing.  I enjoyed this game; it was slightly work-replacement-y, and felt sort of like a cross between Manhattan Project and Colosseum, in that the worker allocation model was similar to Manhattan Project and the many-resources allocation model for completing quests felt somewhat similar to Colosseum's resource allocation to shows.  My Lord gave bonuses for commerce and warfare, but I drew a thief-engine plot quest in my opening pair and so ended up doing a lot of skullduggery instead, which ended up hurting me a little; I had a good lead in the midgame, but after lord bonuses were factored in I tied for 2nd/3rd of four players, with 1st place winning via completing a pair of 25-point quests in the last two turns.  Honestly saving up adventurers and then nabbing a pair of good quests near the end, rather than completing lots of small quests, is probably not a bad strategy.  The game also left me with some food-for-thought regarding the ACKS domain game, namely that a simplified subsystem for resolving "we hire some adventurers to take care of X for us" would be pretty handy.  I also sort of wish I'd taken the time to read the flavor text and have a chuckle at the emergent narrative (of, for example, the City Watch building a thief engine), but it was a long enough game as it was.

Sentinels: We got wrecked by villain board-clear after a fairly promising start and due in part to lack of board-clear or healing of our own.  Happens.

Niagara: First time playing this as well, and was not a fan.  Felt very treadmilly; oh I'm down at the top of the falls again, maybe I'll actually make it one tile upriver this turn...  nope.

Alchemists: A relatively new game, and a pretty hilarious simulation of academia.  The conference deadlines are always one turn too close, and the results you end up publishing to meet them are usually wrong, but the grant committee doesn't care.  I'm not a huge fan of the reliance on a smartphone / mobile app, but the "information hidden from all players, which they must actually deduce for themselves" element that it made possible was really good.  It was the first real game for all of us, and Mistakes Were Made - Drew used the wrong two ingredients for something, Matt misrecorded an experimental result early in the game and ended up with some incorrect deducations later, I misunderstood the rules for debunking an incorrect published result...  but these things happen.  I was behind all game because I was focused on correctness over meeting conference deadlines, and was pleased to discover that this actually worked out alright at the end of the game, when my fewer-but-correct publications were worth more than inaccurate publications that were produced early for grant points, and so I came back to second place by a point (it was a very tight spread overall, with third and fourth only a few points behind me).  Would play again.

Pandemic, 5e Multiclassing, OGRE

Last night there were games!  And it was good.

First was a game of Pandemic with the In the Lab expansion active, and we actually won on the last possible turn.  Having never won a Pandemic before, that was pretty neat.  Part of it was obviously that we didn't need five cards of one color on a single person and could spread them out over multiple people, which helped, but I think part of our success was also that we built more research stations than we usually do, which made getting to troublezones easier than it is in most of our Pandemic games.

Then I read 5e's multiclassing rules while others played Smash.  I approve of these multiclassing rules - spell slots scale with multiclass total caster level in a Trailblazeresque fashion, you don't necessarily get all the proficiencies with your first level of a new class, and there are minimum ability score reqs to multiclass - 13+ in all of your classes' main stats (typically one per class).  I was originally skeptical of the minreqs, but on further reflection this seems like a good way to reign in the "dipping for class features" issue common in 3.x, since your odds of having a 13 in everything are fairly low.  Sort of a blunt/brute-force solution, but I can appreciate that.

Finally, there was a game of OGRE with Matt.  We rolled for it and I drew the OGRE.  His armor picks were two GEVs, two howitzers, two missile tanks, and four heavies.  I initially wanted to go down the left flank, but he came after me there.  The GEVs engaged first near the edge of the howitzer bubble and did a little tread damage before being chased down and destroyed.  Meanwhile the rest of his armor moved forward, and I caught some of his infantry and two tanks without having to come under howitzer fire.  I moved back around to the other flank, hoping to spread his units out a bit, and then pushed down the one column of hexes on the right flank that were outside of the range of the left howitzer (so as to only take fire from only one howitzer as a time).  I managed to spread out being engaged by the remaining tanks over two turns - took fire from the lead elements, overran and destroyed them, took fire from the tail elements, then overran and destroyed those too, with a missile for the right-flank howitzer.  This reduced the firepower that could be stacked against me on any one turn; I did still lose my main battery to heavy+howitzer fire, but with all of my other systems in good order and no remaining mobile armor units, we called it.

We concluded that the main tactical error was Matt's eagerness to engage me at the edge of the howitzer bubble rather than making me "tower-dive" into howitzer fire in order to attrit his mobile units (at which point I might as well just go for broke and drive for the command post...).  Concentration of force was an issue too, as with splitting firepower across turns.  There was some discussion of running a very GEV-driven defense, possibly foregoing howitzers, for a "light cavalry" mass of GEVs that could encircle and engage as a group, stack firepower, and then scatter out to the sides, requiring the OGRE to move laterally / not towards the objective in order to attrit the armor.  Such a force would work much better with an "offensive defense" posture than a howitzer-bound one could.  On the other hand, the OGRE counter to such tactics is probably to hug the edge of the map, to limit the number of directions you can be engaged from and force the GEVs to get in each other's way.  This does suggest a deployment area for the defense's infantry deployment, I guess.

On the other end of the scale, I think a fixed-ish defense of howitzers and missile tanks with a mobile reserve of GEVs might also work.  We're still not really sure what to do with infantry; there was some speculation about using them en masse to attack treads.  I definitely think it's winnable for the defense, but it also seems to me that you want to have everything hit the OGRE all at once to improve your odds.  At the end of the day the main asymmetry is in concentration of force - the OGRE is inferior to the defense in terms of total firepower, but it's much more concentrated.

In any case, an interesting game; would play again, though I should probably play defense next and give someone else a change to OGRE.

Free the OGREs!

I am sad that I missed the OGRE 6e kickstarter, but SJG has been so kind as to release the rulebook and everything else except for the counters and maps to the internets.  Mighty nice of them to finally give me a chance to read the rules, which I found interesting.  Coming from the Domains at War and Stargrunt tradition, the thing that struck me as I was reading was "Where are the morale rules?"  Which, naturally, would be a poor fit for the sort of 'humanity's last stand against their own best weapon' engagements that the game models.  Other than that, though, the rules seem pretty reasonable; ranges in particular are plausible given the 1.5km hexes (one of the things that grinds my gears about BattleTech).  I also like how tread damage is handled as gradual attrition and a cost for ramming.  Could use some air support rules too.  The rulebook gives enough detail of the OGRE map for me to probably set it up on my hex mat, so that might be a fun solo game this weekend...  I'll probably also pick up the pocket edition when it comes out, because for that price, why the heck not. 

It might be fun to write a program to run the OGRE while I play humans...

Starmada Sunday: OGRE Nova

By way of Steve Jackson Games

 Does look kinda like a spaceship, don't it?

Way back in the ancient days of Starmada: AE, before my time with it, a crazy fellow did a conversion of OGRE to AE.  A couple of weeks ago, I decided to convert his conversion to Nova.  Note that I don't have a copy of, and have never played, OGRE itself, but man do I love the premise.

So, some units.

OGRE III-class Cybertank (277) (pictured above)
Armor: 6 5 * 4 3 * 2 1
Hull: 12 11 10 9 * 8 7 6 5 * 4 3 2 1
Thrust 3 2 2 1 1
Weapons 0 1 2 3 4
ECM 0
Shields 5 6 6 6 6
Weapons:
Main Battery (Dmg 3 Acc ) 3/6/9 FF0
1 1 1 0
Secondary Batteries (Dmg 2 Acc ) 2/4/6 FP2 FS2
4 3 2 1 | 1 1 | 1 0
AP Batteries (Acc Pnp ) 1/2/3 PH2 SH2
8 6 4 3 | 2 1 | 1 1 | 1 0
Missiles (Exp Gid Skr Acc Dmg 3 ) 10/20/30 FX2 FX2
8 6 4 3 | 2 1 | 1 1 | 1 0
Specials: Fire Control, Reinforced Systems


OGRE V-class Cybertank (436)
Armor: 9 8 7 * 6 5 4 * 3 2 1
Hull: 18 17 16 15 14 13 * 12 11 10 9 8 7 * 6 5 4 3 2 1
Thrust 3 2 2 1 1
Weapons 0 1 2 3 4
ECM 0
Shields 5 6 6 6 6
Weapons:
Main Battery (Dmg 3 Acc Prc ) 3/6/9 FF0
2 1 1 1 | 1 0
Secondary Batteries (Dmg 2 Acc ) 2/4/6 FP2 FS2
6 4 3 2 | 2 1 | 1 1 | 0
AP Batteries (Acc Pnp ) 1/2/3 PH2 SH2
12 8 6 4 | 3 2 | 2 1 | 1 1 | 0
Missiles (Exp Gid Skr Acc Dmg 3 ) 10/20/30 FX4 FX4 FX4 FX4
16 11 8 6 | 4 3 | 2 1 | 1 1 | 1 0
Specials: Fire Control, Reinforced Systems


HTK-class Heavy Tank (20)
Armor: 1 * 0 * 0
Hull: 3 * 2 * 1
Thrust 3 2 2 1 1
Weapons 0 1 2 3 4
ECM 0
Shields 5 6 6 6 6
Weapons:
Main Gun (Dmg 2 Acc ) 2/4/6 FX0
1 1 1 0


HWZ-class Howitzer (18)
Armor: 0 0 0
Hull: 3 * 2 * 1
Thrust 0
Weapons 0 1 2 3 4
ECM 0
Shields 0
Weapons:
Cannon (Dmg 2 Bls Skr ) 8/16/24 TT0
1 1 1 0


MTK-class Missile Tank (18)
Armor: 0 0 0
Hull: 3 * 2 * 1
Thrust 2 1 1 1 1
Weapons 0 1 2 3 4
ECM 0
Shields 6 6 6
Weapons:
Missile Pack (Acc Skr Slo ) 4/8/12 TT0
3 2 2 1 | 1 1 | 0


GEV-class GEV (15)
Armor: 0 0 0
Hull: 3 * 2 * 1
Thrust 7 5 4 2 2
Weapons 0 1 2 3 4
ECM 0
Shields 6 6 6
Weapons:
Main Gun (Acc ) 2/4/6 TT0
1 1 1 0


INF-class Infantry Platoon (12)
Armor: 0 0 0
Hull: 3 * 2 * 1
Thrust 2 1 1 1 1
Weapons 0 1 2 3 4
ECM 1 1 1 0 0
Shields 0
Weapons:
Small Arms (Acc Dif Sct ) 1/2/3 TT0
1 1 1 0

I have omitted the OGRE IV because with the huge number of missiles it carries, I was actually unable to fit things into its SU cap by hull with the conversion strategy I'd been using.  The other main difference from the AE conversion rules is due to the change in the seekers rules - OGRE missiles, missile tank missiles, and howitzer rounds are now delayed-impact weapons, and can be shot down.  I think this change mostly benefits the OGREs, which have dedicated point-defense weapons.  I experimented with adding point-defense weapons to non-OGRE AFVs, but realized that they'd be mostly shooting at OGRE-launched missiles, which incurs a -5 modifier to firing (-1 for seekers, -1 for accurate, -3 for triple damage), meaning that they wouldn't've been able to effectively target them without increasing the base attack strength, which I didn't really want to do.  There is, however, definitely room for a dedicated point-defense vehicle on the conventional side; currently infantry fills this role the best, allowing it to fulfill its traditional role in OGRE of guarding the howitzers.