Classic Traveller: Striker

Rod Thompson suggested that I look into Striker for Classic Traveller's vehicular combat system.  I picked up the first edition and it turned out to be quite interesting!  My points for comparison are Stargrunt, Dirtside, Battletech, OGRE, and Epic.

If you want to do Hammer's Slammers with Classic Traveller, this is The Correct Thing.

This is the sort of system that I would have adored in high school and college.  Now...  maybe it would work better with a computer for a referee.  Looking at the structure of orders that you can give a normal-initiative unit, it looks a lot like writing a program.

The approach to dealing with orders and initiative is interesting and makes a lot of sense for a hybrid wargame-RPG.  I could definitely see it being frustrating and a fair bit of overhead if not automated, though.

I like that, compared to Stargrunt, infantry operates in stands.  I dislike that you still have to track the state of every infantryman.  The scale is generally more zoomed-out than Stargrunt but more zoomed-in than Dirtside, which I think is "about right".

Vehicle damage is more complicated than Dirtside and less complicated than Battletech.  I think Mongoose Traveller's vehicle damage system is a bit simpler.

The layout and organization do not lend themselves well to reading through and understanding the system.  All of the tables are at the very end, and the rules are depth-first rather than establishing general principles and then enumerating exceptions and special cases (so, for example, indirect fire missions come between infantry firing and resolution of damage).  A lot of things that I would ordinarily consider "rules" are sort of punted out into tables which are far from the relevant text.  I feel like after a cursory read I still didn't have a good idea of how firing on vehicles works.

I was ever so slightly disappointed that there was no fission powerplant option - it would've been funny to build a fission ramjet missile-drone where you don't even need a payload, just a powerplant that explodes on impact.  And support for AI, of course, is negligible (drones are remote-controlled).  Support for enormous OGRE-style tanks seems fine but they will need a lot of crew.  No mechs / walker suspension type but it wouldn't be too hard to add.  On the upside, I'm pretty sure you can build gatling mortars with nuclear shells.  Not that you should, but the point of design systems is designing ridiculous things (...  right?).

I'm...  not sure if there's a way to arm infantry with nuclear weapons.  I think it might be possible to put one in a man-portable missile, but there's the additional requirement for vehicle-carried nukes that they be shielded storage containers with a bunch of extra mass.  So it would be dodgy.

On the other hand, you could absolutely give an infantryman a 9kg 8.5cm mortar round and a detonator, and he could carry it around at full movement speed under the encumbrance rules.  I'm not clear on the morale implications of suicide units, but if you want to model ISIS, infested terrans, or banelings, it wouldn't be hard (though the bang on a single 8.5cm mortar round is not spectacular; at TL5 they're comparable to a TL11 rifle grenade, while at TL11 parity they have about double the blast area and slightly better armor penetration.  And that's before the errata that nerfed TL scaling on HE artillery like that).

No flamethrowers?  How am I to werf flammen and/or barbeque aliens?  Plasma guns with 250m effective range just aren't quite the same.

It would be funny to add a "biological metabolism" powerplant type to the design system for eg carnifexes and other vehicle-sized bugs, with range/endurance calculated based on carried fat stores (or...  alcohol bladders, since it's almost as energy-dense as fats, and alcohol-based metabolisms would be funny).  I guess it's also worth considering that if an animal can operate in vacuum, it must also be carrying its own oxidizers?  And in order to not overheat in the insulation of vacuum, maybe you pump your heat into your metabolism's exhaust gases, which you then vent?

I hadn't looked at the rules for combat on planets with odd characteristics until the oxygen question got me curious and Striker does indeed ban air-breathing engines in certain atmosphere types (and lasers are more effective in such atmospheres, for lack of scatter).  Also: rules for tiny worlds where the horizon might only be 2km away and there's very little gravity.

It tickles my fancy that on very small worlds, artillery pieces could attain muzzle velocities higher than escape velocity (eg, the Paris Gun had a muzzle velocity of almost 1700 m/s, while Pluto's escape velocity is only around 1200 m/s), and what goes up might not come back down if your smallest available unit of propellant is too big.  Not that Striker has rules for this, but it's the sort of thing the system gets you thinking about.

I like that you can equip a weapon with multiple types of fire control.  I suspect the intention here is to let you equip lasers with both direct fire and point defense fire control, but I like that it would let you do Starcraft-style siege tanks that can fire both as artillery and direct fire.

The whole initiative system might actually make adding eg AI and weird command structures like tyranids easy.  Your low-initiative AI troops need constant supervision and wedge (or revert to instinctive behavior) if not actively controlled.  Your normal-initiative AI troops, your armored vehicles with an expert system in them, need orders.  Maybe giving them orders takes double the normal time because you have to be very careful with your language, but they're immune to panic.  The existing Drone Vehicle rules actually work just fine for this sort of AI.  And then high-initiative AIs are just like high-initiative meatbrains, with full sentience and autonomy, but self-awareness comes at the cost of morale.

The inclusion of pikes and broadswords on the melee weapons table makes me want to abuse this system by running medieval combats with it.  We need shields, bows, and javelins too though.  Aaand maybe to change the ground-scale so that your stand of 4 guys with pikes isn't covering a linear area of 30m.

(Bonus: biological powerplant, legged suspension, megawatt plasma cannon "breath weapon" dragons.  Not that powering a megawatt with biological scaling laws is really workable, you'd need to mass a couple of hundred thousand metric tons to have that sort of output continuously, but it's fun to play with)

Come to think of it, since there are revolvers, early gatling guns, and rules for riding animals, Wild West combats might be viable too.  Tweak bolt-action rifles down to lever-action and add bows and you're good to go (pardner).

Zhodani teleport-commandos in battledress with plasma guns are a daunting prospect.

I think I mostly like the handling of infantry armor penetration here, where you roll 2d6, add the weapon's armor penetration score, subtract the target's armor score, and index into a table of hit severity.  You make tradeoffs in ammunition selection, since high-explosive ammunition does more severe hits but has lower penetration than sabot.  This is how they dodge the problem that Mongoose Traveller has with armor as DR, where anything that can hurt a guy in battle dress kills anyone else instantly - sabot ammunition does less damage to lightly-armored guys in Striker than HE ammunition, but has a better chance of hurting the guys in heavy armor.

I'm a little surprised that I'm not seeing any rules for readying actions, like Stargrunt's overwatch?  But I guess in a system that is all about orders, "go to that hill and fire on any enemies that come within xx range" is just a thing you can do without a special rule maybe?  Is that the intent of the segment of the fire phase where the other player's units fire, to do fire in reaction to your movement?  I wish the rules were clearer about this; the Indirect Fire section has a paragraph on "When Units Fire", but there isn't one like that for Direct Fire.  There are also basically no sidebar-style examples of how rules are supposed to work, and looking for after-action reports or youtube videos was, of course, fruitless.  I guess I the old Citizens of the Imperium forums are probably the right venue for this question?

I think the combat rules are rather heavy for use as a mass combat add-on to Traveller RPG play, and the command-and-control is a little heavy/annoying for use as a miniatures combat game.  But it's a thought-provoking set of rules and would probably be a fun toolkit to fiddle with.

Bonus: buried in the back of the Advanced Rules is a section on computing the planetary domestic product of different world types in Traveller, for the purpose of figuring their military spending, of course.  This would be a hilarious launching point for "domain" gameplay.

Maneuver Warfare Handbook

I read most of Lind's Maneuver Warfare Handbook this evening, and as usual when reading this prompted a few thoughts relevant to gaming (although, unusually, more ideas related to my job - maneuver warfare applied to software development looks like a particularly weird, German flavor of Agile I expect).  The quick summary is that maneuver warfare is a mode of fighting which emphasizes distributed action rather then central control, and which has a few standard tools (mission orders / commander's intent, schwerpunkt, and the search for gaps in the enemy's surface) to make that organizational structure work.  When used properly, the more rapid reaction times of unit leaders closest to the action (who no longer have to wait for high command's permission to act) allow them to out-react their adversaries, forcing confusion, panic, and defeat.  Also emphasized are adaptability to circumstances and initiative by small-unit leaders.  This allows a smaller force to defeat a larger one by capitalizing on failures in enemy command and control.

Which sounds a lot like the sort of thing a human force in Domains at War could use to defeat the numerically-superior orc force in Battle of the Teeth, for example.  Create and exploit weaknesses in their formation as a result of their poor command and control, punch through, kill their commanders and force morale collapse.

Some of the small-unit fire-and-maneuver examples also had me thinking about Stargrunt again (where suppress-then-assault is king), though to some extent using ranged units to disorder troops in Domains at War is similar, and the section on never doing the same thing twice reminded me of the Starmada metagame of old (and that one time I cloaked ships but didn't move them, because my opponents were used to cloaked ships reappearing on their flanks and rear and had started turning to counter).

There was an excellent line about how attrition-warfare forces seek to engage and destroy the enemy "where and whenever" possible via superior firepower, which reminded me of 3.x gamers and how hard it is to get them to refuse a battle when they start playing ACKS.

One thing that I haven't gotten much sense for while wargaming has been friction (and in general properly confusing fog-of-war), though.  To some extent Starmada's written orders created some of this, because it was easy to goof and put your ships out of position.  Unfortunately, that's about as far as serious fog-of-war and friction can go without becoming a huge pain on the tabletop.  Computers could handle the sheer volume of chaos required better, but most computer wargames these days are not for audiences interested in unpredictability (to the point where some players argue that a good competitive RTS should have no randomness).  Perhaps I ought to write one.

In any case, pretty good book.  Very to-the-point!

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:

• 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.

So if anybody from the old Starmada crew is reading this, hit me up via the usual channels if something here's interesting.

No News is... No News

Well, midterms happened, and now it's spring break.  No gaming for the last two weeks due to illness on various peoples' parts, and nobody's here this week, so not looking good for the immediate future either.  Lack of posting has been due to lack of energy, not lack of ideas.  Things kind of on the docket for when I get around to them:

• Dwarven Muleskinner class for ACKS - explorer meets venturer by way of Dwarf Fortress
• ACKS scripts - I wrote python scripts for automating annoying parts of ACKS (like settlement demand modifier generation) last month.  I should clean them up and put them in a repo somewhere for public consumption.
• Traveller ships - the Traveller game that has been on sickleave recently has humans at TL10, which is insufficient for Jump 2.  I've taken it upon myself to build a Jump 1 ship or two beyond Yachts and Fat Traders.  Unfortunately, I'm bad at deckplans.
• ACKS Wilderlands - putting domains on the map and nobles in the domains
• Midnight - I was re-reading parts of Midnight the other day and realized that while it would be really cool to run with ACKS, it would also be very difficult, because a whole bunch of assumptions about economics are invalid in Midnight (and magic is kind of different too).  Particularly troubling is providing PCs with a market and replacements henchmen, and the complete unavailability of high-power divine magic (ie, RL&L) looks liable to spike mortality.  Sooo...  I dunno.  On the other hand, once Domains at War is out, ACKS would be really sweet for running a guerrilla campaign against the Shadow on the borders of the elven territories; Fantasy F*ckin' Vietnam meets Empire Strikes Back, Lord of the Rings, and Indiana Jones (when the PCs go hunting for power nexuses).
• Custom treasure tables
• Stargrunt / Dirtside / Full Thrust - not really a creative project, but I want to play more GZG stuff.  I guess I could build Vassal plugins...  ?

I guess the real issue is that with graduation a single-digit number of weeks away and the current group scattering to the four winds, I'm leery of starting any projects too serious. For all I know I might not have time to game when I get out into the Real World with job and bills and whatnot, or the gaming scene where I'm going might not be to my taste...  So things here may remain slow for some time.  Sorry all.

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....).

Starcraft Stargrunt Playtest Report Part 2: Stuff We Did Wrong, Reprise

So at the end of the playtest report for the Stargrunt game I ran last night, I mentioned that I was concerned on a number of fronts, in that close combat, artillery, and possibly anti-air fire all felt just a little bit 'off'.  Went and re-read the rules this morning, and here's what I'm seeing:

First off, close assault.  The biggest thing, looking back at the rules, is that initiating a close assault takes two actions; thus, we can't do that thing we were doing where we make a non-combat move six inches towards the target, then initiate close assault, guaranteeing that you'll get there in one combat move.  This makes final defensive fire a lot more likely to happen, which is great for Terran.  On the other hand, it really exacerbates the problem with Zerg being suppressed - if you have to spend an action to try to break suppression at the beginning of your activation, there is no way you can close assault.  I really think a free suppression removal attempt at the beginning of Zerg activations at morale levels where they have to close is probably a good plan.

The other thing we did wrong with close assault was casualty resolution with regard for stunned troops.  The way we were doing it, we were resolving the status of casualties at the end of each round of close combat.  This in incorrect; the book states that a casualty is out for the rest of that "close combat resolution".  We interpreted this to mean that round; however, the Ending Close Combat paragraph opens with "After the first round of close combat resolution..."  Thus, a 'resolution' is the entire process from charging to one side breaking and abandoning an objective, while a round is the process of pairing off and making opposed rolls for each pair.  Therefore, casualties aren't resolved until one side breaks, and stunned individuals on the losing side may 'come to' out of unit coherency and surrounded by the enemy.  Thus, 'stun' isn't just "Oh hey, the squad leader's fine."  It's roughly on-par with being an actual casualty.

Finally, there's an important line in the close assault modifiers table that states that if in cover, the defenders get a 1-die shift during the first round of that close combat.  Oops.

As for artillery, I found a very important line in the artillery rules that the spotting unit must have line of sight to all three points nominated (the two dummies and the actual incoming).  This makes overlords and other aerial units excellent spotters, and also gives hills some value (besides as places to sit at the bottom of and fire up at the enemy who are trying to take it...).  However, we did do it wrong last time.  Still couldn't find a mention of the Observe action, though, outside of the list of actions at the beginning of the book.

Finally, I screwed up the firing at the overlord, in Terran's favor, actually.  We used the rules for firing on point targets with heavy weapons from page 39 and the guided missiles section on page 41, which seemed like the right thing at the time...  but we should've been using the "On-Table Anti-Air Fire" rules from page 49.  Under these rules, Terran would've needed a roll to acquire the overlord as a target.  Then the overlord would've had a chance to take evasive action, allowing it another chance to avoid the fire, after which Terran gets a chance to actually fire the missile, and has a third chance to miss.  It's kind of ridiculous really.  Terran gains two things from this: first, if an aircraft takes a hit, the pilot has to take a confidence check at +2 TL or decide to purple and GTFO.  This means you could potentially drive the overlord off the table, denying the Zerg their command squad, transport, EW, and artillery support.  The other thing Terran gains is that when hovering in place, the overlord suffers a negative die shift on its ECM roll.  But the Terrans now need more successful rolls in order to actually take a shot at it, so this is a really bad change for them.  Considering that their AA fire was already horrifyingly ineffective, we might not want to change the way we played it to this rule.

Starcraft Stargrunt: Playtest Report

Got together this afternoon for two games of 'grunt with Glisson, Matt, and Jared.  Glisson brought the paper rulebook this time, which was immensely helpful; I should probably print and bind my own copy from the pdf if I intend to play on a regular basis.  Glisson also brought a bag of green army men and a bag full of the original counters for the game, which were likewise wonderfully convenient; being able to mark the LD, quality, and morale status of a squad all on the board with the squad was a great improvement over tracking those things on a whiteboard, nevermind other things like In-Position and Suppression which were really problematic last time.

The first game we played was a straightforward battle between two forces of two platoons each of non-Starcraft units.  The game kind of dragged on, with units in cover remaining in cover and kind of poking at each other ineffectually, and with units who ran out of cover being mercilessly gunned down.  We did have a few rounds of close assault in some woods, and likewise managed to deny the enemy the hill on the south side of the map, but in general, it was a very entrenched kind of warfare.  On the plus side, we didn't see the kind of squad-wiping fire that we got in the previous game, but it was pretty slow and static, centered around defensive positions, nonetheless.

Not so the game with Starcraft Terran vs. Zerg.

There are several reasons that I believe this game went differently.  The first and most obvious was the availability of off-map artillery support to both sides.  This meant that sitting in a single defensive position the entire game was a recipe for attracting high explosives.  Second, the Zerg were compelled to close to melee by their morale rules.  The Terran player exploited this to great effect by putting a squad of firebats in the front, and managed to annihilate 8 zerglings with only two casualties.  Third, the general lack of support firepower meant that sitting and hammering at range was very difficult; the only unit with a SAW or SAW-equivalent on the map was the goliath.  Since ranged combat was relatively hard, we saw a lot more close combat, which required movement.  Fourth and finally, the availability of higher-mobility units, namely the overlord, goliath, and zerglings, encouraged players to make use of that mobility.

The game ran somewhat like this - a Terran force was set up on a hill on one side of the map, with the Zerg behind a hill on the other side, and a ruined town in the middle of the map (complete with hostile but terribly-ineffective villagers).  Zerg objective was to capture the Terran supply depot on their hill, while Terran's was to survive / prevent this outcome.  Both sides rapidly ran for the town, taking cover in the buildings, but quickly abandoning and hopping between buildings as the shells started to fall.  The goliath was primarily concerned with firing missiles at the overlord and suppressing two squads of zerglings, but the overlord's EW capabilities really put the nix on the missiles.  The firebats engaged and destroyed two squads of zerglings before being stomped into the ground by the hydras in melee, and the marines suppressed some zerglings before coming under murderous deviated artillery fire that they really shouldn't've survived - about 12 rolls between all three shells, impact d8, armor d8 should've been almost a complete wipe.  They took one casualty; Jared had some simply stupendous luck there.  However, that casualty was their squad leader, and when they were then close assaulted by zerglings, they broke and routed and fled off the map.  We finished with the hydras going up against the goliath and the last zergling squad being carried by the overlord towards the depot to assault Jared's command squad, who were holed up in the vicinity; they had been driven out of the depot proper by a dummy artillery marker.  We called it about then; it looked like the hydras would probably disable the goliath, and we ran the close combat out between the command squad and the zerglings; the zerglings took 50% casualties, and the marines were wiped.

Overall, we came away with one primary concern and two secondary concerns:

1) Hydras as powered armor are brutally overpowered in melee.  Matt and Jared agreed that they should not have been able to just stomp through the firebats like they did.  Solution: downgrade to normal armor (d8).  I'm still not convinced they shouldn't be considered armed with a close-combat weapon, but that's probably pretty acceptable.  Also considering upgrading their weapons to d12 impact to keep things on par with marines, but I think d10 impact and a CC weapon is probably a reasonable place to be.  Hence, Hydra 2.0 looks like normal infantry with d8 armor, 6" move, FP2, Impact d10, and a close-combat weapon for a 1-die shift in melee.

2) Goliath vs. overlord balance, and by extension electronic warfare.  The EW system was very dissatisfying, in that it ended up creating these ridiculous EW 'stacks' of Jared trying to counter Matt's counter to Jared's counter to Matt's jamming of the guided missile, which was annoying.  Then, had the missile actually hit (which it never did), it would have either totally obliterated the overlord or bounced off harmlessly, neither of which is a terribly satisfying outcome (in that squads, when hit, will likely survive to some degree.  Vehicles just go "Boom" or keep running fine).  There were also complaints regarding the infinite range and infinite movement of the GMS and the overlord; not sure what to do about these.  On the one hand, reducing speed / range is certainly an option.  On the other hand, it kind of sacrifices realism and breaks strongly from the SG standard of "VTOLs come in, drop off troops wherever, get out in two turns.  You need that infinite range to be able to even get a crack at 'em."

3) Zerg morale and suppression issues.  Zerglings, when suppressed and running on low morale, are a special flavor of hosed - even if they break the suppression, they have to keep running straight into the guns that suppressed them, whereupon they get suppressed again and eventually casualties add up and they just die off (whereas a normal squad might get a chance to break suppression and then fire back, suppressing their suppressors, or if morale got bad enough, it might break and run away from the suppressing squad, and then get far enough away to avoid being suppressed).  Matt proposed a rule similar to one by the Warbard for Xenomorphs, a similarly all-melee army, that each activation, a Zerg squad of a low-enough morale that it can't be in cover gets a free attempt to break suppression.  This seems fairly reasonable, but plays into the second concern that Jared had about Zerg morale, namely that as a Terran player, it was dissatisfying to watch the Zerg get bonuses for failing morale rolls.  On the one hand, yeah, they get bonuses to morale checks to enter close assault...  but on the other, they also have to close the range and try to get in close, even if it's a really terrible idea (one zergling vs. a squad of firebats for example).  I guess the thing was that while Jared was dissatisfied with the morale situation, he also used it to great advantage by provoking a squad of zerglings to engage (and be toasted by) his firebats, and was never really negatively affected by the changes, except possibly when his marines were assaulted by a squad of steady zerglings.  Since steady doesn't impede actions and grants a bonus to attacking in close assault for Zerg, it was actually strictly better than Confident for Matt (except in that it was close to Shaken, Broken, and so forth).  Not sure it's really a problem, but it was a concern which might need addressed.

But, other than those issues, the game went really well.  It was agreed by all sides that unit balance felt pretty right except on the hydras and in the overlord vs. goliath pairing, and the artillery kept the game moving quickly.  While artillery and close assault both involved a lot of rolling, neither side was bored during the process; with artillery scatter, it's always a "oh god oh god is it going to land on me?" type tension, and melee has many hand-to-hand opposed rolls.  It seemed to me that Jared and Matt became significantly more excited during close assault than during shooting; not really sure why that was the case, but hey, I'll take it.  I suspect that only having two players (I was reffing / advising, basically) improved gameplay because subsystems involving many rolls weren't horribly dull for the remaining players.  I do think we played CC wrong, in the handling of stunned units - we should've counted them as casualties for morale / withdrawing resolution, but didn't.  Likewise, I suspect there's something buggy in the way we played artillery, but I'll try to hunt it down later today maybe.

Starcraft Stargrunt, Part 2: Zerg

So last time, I talked about converting Terran to Stargrunt.  This time it's Zerg, and it's going to have to break from canon a little more to make it work within the system.

Morale and leadership are the hardest part of alien species in SGII, because we humans don't really have a particularly large dataset of real examples to draw from.  So this is where we have to make some assumptions.
Proposition 1:  Zerg battle-units are bred for killing.  They're hungry.  Their instincts tell them to go forth and devour, even without any mental urging from the hive mind.
Proposition 2:  The Overmind exerts its influence over the swarm through overlords, giant flying psychic transport whale-bugs (kind of).
Proposition 3:  Zerg units of the same genotype do vary to some degree in maturity / quality.  Ex: Devouring Ones vs. adrenal zerglings vs. zerglings.  All the same breed, more or less, but of varying quality.

These propositions suggest or imply the following:

• A zerg squad's leadership value is a measure of how strong its link to the hive mind is (receptivity, if you will).  Note that there is no single 'squad leader' element; leadership measures the reception each individual in the squad gets.  As a result, you never lose the squad leader (but you also never get leadership upgrades by replacing poor leaders).

• If a zerg force has a command squad, it's an overlord (which basically operates as a tank-sized VTOL vehicle with EW, transport, and command capabilities).

• Zerg units do have unit qualities just like human units, but based on the quality of their genetics.  Hunter-Killers are elite, upgraded grooved-spine hydras are veteran, bog-standard hydras are regular, and perhaps 'rush-job' hydras are green; the Overmind sacrificed quality for rapid growth, resulting in a wide variety of negative mutations which impede performance.

• As a zerg squad's morale deteriorates, they become less cautious and prone to close-assaulting the enemy against orders.  When they would be broken, they may turn against their own kind.

Morale is really the only complicated thing there.  Below I propose a modification of the Warbard's rules for Kra'Vak morale.
At Confident and Steady, or Calm and Irked, a Zerg squad may take any action normally available to it.
At Shaken, or Mad, a Zerg squad cannot enter cover or retreat from the enemy unless it passes a Reaction test.
At Broken, or Angry, a Zerg squad must spend one of its actions per round advancing towards the nearest enemy unit, and may not go in-position.  If fired upon, they automatically become Routed.
At Routed, or Furious, a Zerg squad must spend both of its actions per round either advancing towards or close-assaulting the nearest enemy unit.  If they attempt to rally and fail (or are passed an action by a unit up the chain of command, use it to try to rally, and fail), they fall to Berserk.
At Berserk, the squad must spend both of its actions per round either moving towards or close assaulting the nearest other unit, with no regard for side.

When making reaction rolls to initiate a close assault, Zerg units invert the normal modifiers; they take -0 at Confident, -1 at Steady, -3 at Shaken, and automatically make the reaction test at any lower morale level.  They do not modify the morale test for defending against close assault; it's an unexpected and scary situation, for the hunter to become the hunted.  Note, though, that even if you drive the Zerg from a hilltop when they fail their morale save to hold their ground, they might charge right back at you next turn...

Now I know what some of you are saying...  "But the Zerg want to be in close assault!  This just makes them do what they were going to do anyways!"  As Heavy would say, "Maybe, maybe...  but I have yet to meet Zergling that can outrun Bullet."  Put your marines on the other side of difficult terrain before enraging the Zerg.  Put firebats between your marines and the Zerg before enraging the Zerg.  Minefields are wonderful things.  If the zerglings want to remain in cover, make 'em mad and make them come to you.  Those hydras want to sit at range?  Make 'em mad and then they can't.  I think it may be workable.

Oh yeah, burrowing and regeneration.  Burrowing's easiest - it operates similarly to In-Position.  A Zerg ground unit may choose to Burrow as an action.  While burrowed, it cannot move or fire any weapons, but it gains a 1-die shift to its range die and its armor die, as if in soft cover.  These die shifts stack with bonuses from actual cover.  For purposes of spotting hidden burrowed units, a burrowed unit applies a two-die shift to its range roll; see Hidden Units, page 26.  A reaction test is required to Burrow successfully; the difficulty of this test is at +0 in reasonably-soft ground (most terrain, but definitely mud and swamp), but at +2 in areas which are more difficult to burrow into, such as concrete or through the root webs of trees (so in woods, inside buildings, on roads, and similar).  Moving out of Burrow operates exactly the same way as moving out of In-Position.  A unit may not be both Burrowed and In-Position simultaneously; they're mutually-exclusive states.

Regeneration's slightly tougher.  On the scales involved in a typical SG2 game, regeneration is completely ridiculous, so I intend to ignore it.  If, however, you wanted to apply a +1 bonus to casualty resolution rules in some circumstances to model regeneration and make up for the Zerg's lack of medics, go for it.  Alternatively, you could resolve all Zerg casualties immediately, rather than requiring a Reorganize action, but at no bonus.  Also, just for shits, the Zerg take the same penalties for leaving behind injured squadmates as injured humans do; those are their pack-brothers, of one mind and one flesh!

And so, without further ado, on to stats!

Zerglings are light / scout infantry (speed 8") with light armor (d6 armor value) and a close combat weapon (+1 die shift in close combat).  Simple, but dangerous in numbers and in close.  Note also that they're technically inferior to Firebats of the same quality in close assault, because flamers give a two-die shift.

Hydralisks are slow light powered armor units (speed 6", armor d10) armed with a biological equivalent of an advanced assault right (FP2, Imp d10).  Powered armor makes sense here, because they're twice the size of a man, and while they don't have specialized close-combat weapons (arguably...), they have raw mass and brute strength, as modeled by PA's melee doubling.  Compared to Terran marines, hydras under this conversion are tougher (d10 armor vs d8 for marines) and meaner in melee, but slightly less punchy at range (Imp d10 as opposed to Imp d12 for the Terran gauss rifle), and use twice as much transport space.  So the trouble with hydra deployment and use is that, on the one hand, they're pretty strong in melee, and tough enough to probably get there, but on the other hand, they're also all the ranged fire support your zerglings get.  Choose wisely.

Overlords are Size 3 vehicles with Armor 2, carrying capacity 8, and command capabilities.  Additionally, they carry an enhanced EW suite (3 EW counters per turn, d8 on EW rolls) and Basic ECM (1d6 on rolls against guided missiles and similar).  Movement is where things get really tricky.  On the one hand, they're probably best modeled as VTOLs like dropships.  On the other hand, they're also slow as anything in SC, which causes problems with SG's aeospace rules, namely that an air unit can move to anywhere on the table as a move action.  I'm kind of OK with that for overlords as a concession to reality - air transports should probably be reasonably fast, and they're still countered by guided missiles, which have "Anywhere on the table" range as well.  The real question is "Why is the overlord hanging out on the table at all?"  There's an essential conflict in its two roles of 'dropship' and 'command unit'.  I think a compromise position is this - feel free the move the overlord off-table, but you can't activate off-table units, which means you can't use its command capabilities to transfer actions.  So you can protect it, but you lose a hefty chunk of the benefit of having one if you do.

Most of the other Zerg units are just too damn big to have in SG...  Guardians are artillery support firing medium-caliber shells (4" blasts).  Mutalisks might qualify as gunships, but I never did understand how they actually flew...  I'm writing them off just like I wrote off wraiths for Terran.  Devourers and Scourges, as with Valkyries, just contribute to the Air Defense Environment.  Lurkers are an interesting problem...  I'm kind of thinking that unburrowed, they're mid-sized vehicles with no weapons, but when burrowed, they radiate a large minefield that doesn't attack friendlies.  Call 'em Size 3, Armor 2, walking propulsion with a speed of 8", and they radiate a 6" radius Mixed AP/AV minefield when burrowed.  Great for holding a position, and vehicle armor means that you might actually be able to get up near an enemy unit and then burrow.  Rather scary, really.

So that leaves us with Queens, Defilers, Ultralisks, and Infested Terrans to deal with.  Infested are probably easiest; they're Independent Figures (per page 27) with d8 armor, 6" speed, and the ability to detonate the equivalent of a Command-Detonated Mine (page 56) centered on his own position at any time, after which he is destroyed.  To model the effectiveness of Infested against armored targets like buildings and bunkers, we may want to let them apply 1d10 doubled against the armor of buildings and vehicles within the blast.

So we're down to Queens, Defilers, and Ultralisks.  Spellcasters and the superheavy tank.  The spellcasters I think could be modeled as variant off-board artillery; Dark Swarm, for example, might be a variant artillery shell type that creates a zone of soft cover in a radius about where it lands, Ensnare creates an area of difficult terrain, and Plague could do something interesting like inflict a penalty on casualty resolution rolls for units that were caught in it (or go with the simple solution of "It's a general-purpose artillery barrage, screw the flavor text.").  Battlefield control via unusual artillery, basically.  So that pulls those guys mostly off the table...  Parasite and Spawn Broodling are odd, in that they're single-target...  maybe light artillery?  Or just leave 'em out...  It also just hit me that I left out Science Vessels last post.  Off-board EW capabilities with Enhanced sensors, and whatever Plague ends up doing, Irradiate should end up doing something fairly similar.

And the ultralisk.  These should pretty much never be on the table, unless it's like the only unit the Zerg have.  You want to play the tank game, you're welcome to...  but use Dirtside and keep it out of Stargrunt.

So there are the Zerg...  thoughts?

(Proposed modifications following playtesting are here; this version is preserved in its original state for reference purposes)

Starcraft Stargrunt, Part 1: Terran

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago with the initial Stargrunt playtest report, I really want to convert the units of Starcraft to the SG2 rules.  Caveat the first: I only ever played SC1.  Hence, SC1 material.

Terran's pretty simple and probably not terribly controversial.

Marines are standard grunts with gauss assault rifles (FP2, Imp 1d12) in d8 heavy non-powered, but environmentally sealed, armor.  Move of 6", leadership and experience as for standard humans.

Firebats are effectively marines with flamethrowers; this gains them two die shifts in Close Combat and the Terror quality.  Firebat armor is also fire-resistant (handy!); if using the optional Fire rules from page 58, firebats need not test to survive near fire markers (though they can still be killed in close combat by a unit with a flamer; think TF2 pyros).

Medics in SC can't shoot...  this is no good in SG.  I suggest giving medics a PDW or similar weapon to defend their wounded charges (FP3, Imp 1d8, can fire in close band only).  In addition, medics grant a +1 to die rolls to stabilize casualties, per page 60.  Armor is kind of tricky; d8 is the heaviest non-powered armor gets, there are no rules for giant shields, and having mixed armor values within a squad complicates fire resolution.  I'm for giving them d8 armor and trading the defense of the shield for the offense of a weapon.  Not like the shield ever did them any good anyways...  If you're really concerned with being canon, go with d10 non-powered armor and no weapons, but don't say I didn't warn you.

Ghosts probably fall under the (hideously overpowered) Sniper rules on page 28 using conventional sniper rifles (FP 1d10, Imp 1d10).  Their cloaking is also, conveniently, modeled by the sniper's hidden unit rules.  Special ammunition is not within the scope of this post.  As with all instances of the snipers rules, I recommend not using ghosts.

Stimpacks can probably be modeled by increasing FP on Marines from 2 to 3, and increasing Marine, Firebat, and Medic movement from 6" to 8".  They require a reaction test to use, and, at the end of their effective duration (possibly 2 turns?  One action to stim, three actions of effectiveness), casualtying about 1 in 4 of the subjects, with a possible reduction to 1 in 6 with a medic in attendance.

So that about covers infantry.  Bunkers fall under the Buildings rules of page 57; probably Armor 5, with doors of Armor 2.  They're pretty small, since they can only hold 4 people...  Probably size 3 as far as vehicle / building stats go.  Sensor scans are off-table support (page 45) that generate EW counters (page 53); the difficulty of calling in a sensor scan, and the quality of the scan, will vary by scenario.  Likewise, siege tanks are off-table artillery (page 47), of large caliber (so 6" burst radius), and firing general-purpose shells (Imp 1d8 against both infantry and point targets).  Battlecruisers are just orbital fire support; massive shells for 10" burst, but general purpose (d8/d8) and a longer delay on arrival because they're in orbit, and the difficulty to call them in is higher.  Wraiths fall under air support, and are kind of an edge case that I'm not looking to develop presently.  Don't even think about calling in nukes; to paraphrase an SPI wargame from the 80s that I once read, "To simulate the use of nuclear weapons, dowse the playing surface liberally with lighter fluid and ignite."

Dropships, however, are actually an interesting topic; SC dropships are what SG would classify as small VTOL transports.  Their 8-man capacity could easily fit into a size 2 vehicle chassis, along with armor 2 and basic (1d6) ECM, and you'd still have 2 capacity points left over.  Me, I'd use those two points to put a pair of door-mounted Gauss SAWs on it a la various American transport helicopters in Vietnam, but if we're really sticking to canon, we can hold off on those.  Lord knows your marines need the fire support, though...

Goliaths are tricky.  I've got two possible implementations in mind.  The first treats them as Size 1 Vehicles with Armor 1, Speed 6", a pair of SAWs, a dedicated AA (page 49) Guided Missile/L launcher, and 1 leftover capacity point (maybe extra ammo for the missiles?).  Note that this makes them kind of scary in terms of raw firepower (see below).  Note also that, as in SC, the only thing they have going for them in melee is armor (and unlike in SC, vehicle armor only applies to the front; it's reduced on the sides, top, and rear.  Yes, vehicles have facing.)...  except that there are also no rules for engaging vehicles in melee in SG.  We may have to hack those in, treating Goliaths as powered armor for purposes of odds calculations (they're big and intimidating, and Size 1 vehicles are the same size as PA), but not for melee resolution (they're kinda squishy once you knock 'em over, crack 'em open, and eat the softlings inside).  Firing by Goliaths is resolved as follows: in a single action of firing, you can fire one or both SAWs at a single target, or you can fire the GMS at a single target.  When firing both SAWs at a single target, you roll your quality die and 2 FP dice, one for each SAW (per errata / clarifications on multiple support weapons in a single squad).  If you use both of your actions for firing, you can fire both SAWs at a target and the GMS at something, or one SAW at each of two different targets, or two SAWs separately against the same target (to suppress rather than kill), or one SAW and the GMS (though since there's no penalty for firing both SAWs, there's really no reason to only fire one).  It's fairly straightforward, really, but the SAWs give it dakka on par with a squad of marines, and the GMS makes it much better at cracking tanks and other vehicles than marines would be.  This makes sense, but is not strictly consistent with the numbers from SC.  They'd be great for fire support if you don't want to put SAWs on your dropships, and take up 2 marines' worth of carrying capacity...

The second, simpler, implementation is as heavy slow powered armored infantry (speed 6", 1d12 armor) armed with a Gauss SAW and Multiple Rocket Launcher packs (page 31).  Note that ML packs are also pretty darn scary by RAW, since they have unlimited ammo, and are excellent against infantry.  They are, however, not so good against vehicles, and therefore don't fit the canon.  Further, this version of the Goliath, while simpler, kicks ass in melee; another breaking away.  Therefore, the vehicle conversion is probably empirically a 'better' conversion.

Vultures I don't really care about.  If somebody really really wants 'em, maybe I'll stat 'em up.  Expect size 1 vehicles with high speed and crap armor.  The real problem is weapons; grenade machine guns are really quite scary in SG (they're like SAWs, but with an extra anti-vehicle / anti-building function), and single-shot grenade launchers are not considered.  There's no good middle ground.  So I'm holding off on vultures for a while yet.

And that's all for Terrans, unless I'm forgetting something important...  oh, right.  Don't bring SCVs.  Problem solved.  If you really want them for like a scenario objective, treat them as marines without guns, and probably Green experience.  Also Valkyries should not be atmosphere-capable if they're anything resembling a 'space frigate'.  Another problem solved.  If you really want 'em, make them off-map anti-aircraft artillery and increase the air defense environment score (page 49) of one side to account for their actions.

Expect Zerg in the next couple days.  I don't really intend to do Protoss for a number of reasons; they just don't interest me that much, I'd have to bend a ton of core-ish rules (Shields?  Psychic powers?  Wut?), and their psychology is trickier than Zerg.  But the Swarm is coming to eat your marines...

On Hiatus...

No tabletops last weekend, between Tim being sick, Ythir's campaign ending, people being out of town, and moving.  Not looking like a whole lot this weekend either...  so it's back to videogames, theorycraft, and planning for me.  Decent progress on all fronts, though.

My graphics card is doing poorly, so no TF2 for me.  This is saddening, because I was getting to be pretty decent at it, but also good, because the pyro dreams were getting old.  No Tribes or UT either, which is unfortunate...  so I'm back to Kingdom of Loathing.  Running my 8th hardcore ascension as an Accordion Thief to complete the Nemesis Quest ring for the trophy.  I kind of hate Accordion Thief as a class; buffs are a pain to manage and expensive to boot.  So far it's going well, though; I've just been playing like a Disco Bandit.  There have been a ton of changes since I left in February; the Knob Goblin quest, the Liver of Steel quest (fewer hellions :( ), the Crypt, moon signs, no stat days during ronin / HC...  most important to me, though, was the Valhalla update.  It's letting me perm skills significantly more quickly and with much greater flexibility, so that's cool.  Likewise, the replacements for lead-in gear and consumables are awesome.  Compared to previous runs, I'm currently at the end of Day 2 where I was at the end of Day 5 on my previous fastest hardcore run.  It's just nuts.  My goal for this run was initially 10 days, but since my previous best was 10 days and I'm currently doing much better than that, I think I'm revising it down to 7 (which would also beat my previous best softcore run...  I've picked up a bunch of skills, knowledge, and familiars since then, though.  I think it's doable).  After this run, I'm looking at picking up some +non-combat skills; that seems to be what's holding me back in a bunch of places.  I also want to bank some karma in Moxie runs and then do a Turtle Tamer run to pick up Tao of the Terrapin, Hero on the Half Shell, and Shieldbutt to make further muscle runs more bearable.  Then maybe a Seal Clubber run as to go basementing for a telescope...

But enough of that gibberish.  I've also resumed work on the Starcraft -> Stargrunt conversion.  Zerg morale seems to be the really hard part.  I'm kind of considering stealing Warbard's rules for Kra'Vak morale; they would very much deliver a "Your zerglings have slipped the Overmind's leash and gone berserk" kind of effect.  On the other hand, since the zerg seem likely to have the close-combat advantage (both in numbers and in terms of close-combat weapons per squad)...  so giving them the ability to charge the enemy rather than retreating when normal men would fall back kind of plays into their hands.  I guess playtests are the only way to determine what really works.  I'm also lacking a good model for stimpacks or adrenal zerglings presently.  Finally, squad composition in Starcraft is totally backwards compared to the expectations of Stargrunt; 12 marines with no support weapons, and a separate squad of 12 firebats?  What is this madness!?  So that's an issue to be overcome as well...

I've also been planning Wilderlands.  I've found a Dungeon Crawl Classics module that fits well into the Wilderlands, and I think I'm going to run it.  It's one I've played through before, so I have an idea of how it actually goes (though hopefully the party won't be so horribly overpowered this time...  oh, True Sorcery Dabbler-stacking, you so broken...).  It also ties in nicely with another module I want to steal inspiration from...  and so a campaign is born.  I think I'm moving away from the episodic and open-table focus and more towards the style of the Traveller game I ran last semester, where a fairly-fixed party of PCs travels and gets into trouble wherever they happen to end up.  The issue, then, is long dungeoncrawls...  I might cut out extraneous encounters to keep things moving.  I guess I'm looking for a better balance between dungeon and wilderness than we had in Traveller; Traveller focused really heavily on the travel, and while dungeoncrawls did happen (er, "Ruin and/or derelict ship crawls"), they were played very loosely, had only 3ish fights in a dungeon tops, and did not dominate gameplay as dungeons do in D&D.  So I guess I'm looking for a middle ground between the super-abstract dungeon and the super-detailed dungeon.

Stargrunt Playtest, Part 2: Stuff We Did Wrong

I was thinking about the SGII playtest last night (instead of sleeping...), and I realized that we did a couple of things very wrong.

First, foremost, and entirely my fault was small-arms fire resolution.  We had been adding up the total firepower and dividing by the armor die type.  We were actually supposed to use the range die type.  Next time you guys call me on something like that, be more vehement about it (or at the very least, make me look it up again).  To be fair, this is in part due to the poor example in the book; their sample target has both a d6 range and a d6 armor, which got me thinking it was armor rather than range.  This change has the important implication that even if your d12 range die is rolling like it was a d6, it still protects you by halving your casualties compared to being at a d6 range.  This also means that at long range, you're likely to score one, maybe two casualties if you're lucky, rather than the squad-wiping three casualties we kept seeing.

So that was The Big Mistake, which probably made the game significantly more swingy and less fun than it should've been.  We also accidentally downgraded our chest-high walls to hedgerows by making them soft cover, our handling of woods was most incorrect (from page 13 - "Units at the edge of woods are in soft cover.  Units WITHIN woods may only be engaged by others in the same wood, and then only by close assault, or by artillery."), and our handling of cover in general was quite wrong; cover apparently applies the one or two die shift to both range and armor dice of the target, according to page 14.  I had confused this armor die shift with the armor die shift for being In Position, which only applies against attacks from artillery; thus, the effective / casualty-inducing attacks against units in cover (and who wasn't in cover that game?) should have been significantly less deadly.

This last relates to an observation I made last night as well, while reflecting on the complaint that medics were useless.  I did some math, and with d6 Armor against weapons with d10 Impact, each casualty has about a .23 probability of being wounded, a .42 probability of being killed outright, and a .35 probability of surviving unharmed.  Thus, our choice of gear, namely d6 armored troops armed with d10 impact advanced assault rifles, contributed to the distribution of casualties.  We got pretty close to this ratio; there were a total of six kills (two from Glisson's Dwarf Squad and two each from Tim's Orc and Zombie squads), and four wounds (one in Orc Squad, and all three survivors of Zombie Squad (Yes, we were using D&D tokens instead of minis.  It was what we had)).  Armor d8 being hit with Impact d10 weapons has a .24 probability of wounding, but only a .31 probability of being killed outright, while Armor d10 against Imp d10 weapons has a .2 probability of wounding and a .25 probability of death.  Therefore, if we had been applying the cover modifiers to armor, or if we had had better-armored troops to start with, small arms fire would have been significantly less lethal.  While armor is still really swingy (it doesn't matter if you have a d12 armor die if you roll a 1), the expected ratio of wounds to kills would have shifted up significantly, making medics much more useful, and the expected ratio of casualties to uninjured effectives would have dropped.  So that would've also addressed the complaints of gun combat being either really lethal or totally ineffective by shifting it towards ineffective in the general case...

Finally, there was a caveat in the firing rules that fully effective fire (ie, casualty-inducing fire) also applies a level of suppression to the target.  This was bugging me last night too, because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for fire that causes casualties to be less suppressing than fire that doesn't, so I was glad to find a rule for it in a summary sidebar on page 37.  It is annoying that the full-text rules on 36 do not suggest or imply this, though.

I'm sure there's some other stuff we screwed up with morale, but I'll be damned if I know what it was.  That might be something to look at after breakfast.  Also, with all this stuff in mind, who's up for a rematch?

Stargrunt Playtest

So we gave Stargrunt a trial run today after we terminated the Trailblazer game early (we reached the Dwarven Lands, but our dwarf is at Otakon, so...).  We divided into two teams of two, with Jared and Glisson on offense (trying to capture a cat from a small church on a hill, then retreat and hold a water tower while waiting for extraction), and Tim and I on defense.  Tim put his troops in cover around the water tower, I had mine on the hill with the church, Jared's were on a forested hill to the north east, and Glisson's were holed up in and around a farmhouse on the south east side of the map.

Things immediately went south for Tim; one of his squads was behind a hedgerow but within range of both of Glisson's units, and they were quickly massacred as a result of some truly abysmal range die and armor rolls.  I advanced my green squad into some woods around the water tower to hold it along with Tim's command squad, while my veteran squad hunkered down in-position near the church and kept Glisson's green troops pinned down.  Jared's troops managed to close on Tim's last squad while keeping it suppressed, though, and it quickly became clear that my two squads were going to be outnumbered two to one in short order, so Tim and I ceded.  Tim was most disappointed, cursing the game for its swinginess and proposing to make the range die a flat Armor Class-like number.  There was also significant criticism of the lack of available options for each squad; the only ones we really used were "shoot, move, get in position, get out of position, try to remove suppression".  This may have been due to a lack of rules knowledge on everyone's part - I was the only one who had read the rulebook in its entirety recently, and they just kinda wanted to go do it, rather than going over the available options.  For what it's worth, Jared and Glisson did realize that value of the platoon command squad as an action-economy multiplier by the end of the game, though they didn't need to apply it.  Rallying also didn't come into play; generally by the time a unit achieved a low morale status (as did Tim's unit who got killed badly and Jared's greenies), it was thoroughly combat-ineffective already.  Finally, close assault was available, but by the time Jared and Glisson's troops got within close assault range, victory was imminent (especially given that Glisson's veterans with LD1 had a flamethrower...).

So...  yeah.  A little disappointed; it was not a painful game to play, and felt much faster-moving than Starmada (it sped up as we went, too, which was neat), but it was also not "rollicking good fun," by any means.  I think perhaps we started things off too close; putting units within shooting range initially may have been a mistake, because it meant things bogged down in gunfights from the start rather than being about maneuver.  In any case, I think we'd have a tough time getting another game together without some rules-hackery first; Tim was greatly dissatisfied, and Glisson and Jared were both more or less ambivalent, it seemed.

As a result, I think my current project of converting stuff from the Starcraft setting to the Stargrunt rules will probably go on indefinite hold.  This, naturally, means I'm back to waffling on what to run next semester...  expect a separate post on that soon.

See Part 2 for an analysis of all the stuff we did that we shouldn't've.

A Farewell to Starships

Jared, Eric Faust, Matt Glisson, and I played another game of Starmada last night using ships from the Imperial Starmada Sourcebook only.  Glisson and Jared had Imperials, while Efaust and I had Arcturans; 1200 points per side, straight-up 'to half VP' around a small planet with four moons.  We played this particular fleet matchup in response to a post here, which claimed that the Arcturans were underpowered compared to the Imperials.  Considering that in previous games, the Imperials had not pulled their weight, I found this surprising, and so we set out to test this hypothesis.  Upon a reading of both fleets, though, things do look skewed towards the Imperials - while the Arcturans do have 4+ weapons (with the Imperials stuck at 5+), they lack Fire Control and most of their 4+s are slow-firing.  Likewise, the Imperials all have Countermeasures and Fire Control, giving them a distinct advantage at long range (their 5+s were at 5+ to hit at long, while our 4+s were at 6+ to hit at long).  Finally, their close-range anti-fighter weapons were simply superior to ours in volume of fire, as they had a comparable number of mounts in any given arc, but with RoF3 compared to our 1.  Our lasers had Anti-fighter, but all of their ships had Fire Control for an equivalent effect.  The only things we had going for us were Armor Plating, larger hull sizes, and higher shields; it looks like the Arcturans have to get in under the Imperial long-range advantage to really have a shot.  So that's what we tried to do.

The Imperials deployed a few ships in the moons, but kept most of their fleet out at long range on the right edge of the map.  We pushed into the moons and destroyed their ships there, scoring about 290 VP of the 600 we needed to win, at a cost of 55 VP scored for them by destroying one of our independent fighter flights, and some damage to our carrier.  We were than at an impasse, though - they had no incentive to advance and fight us in the rocks, because they would lose their long-range advantage, and we had no incentive to run out into their guns.  We did anyways, though, because sitting around plotting movement orders of 0 until somebody breaks is terribly uninteresting.

We advanced through the cover of the moons to as close as we could get, but the carrier was out of cover for one turn and was mauled badly; it wasn't destroyed, but it lacked sufficient engines to actually make it to the front in time for the assault, and was worth enough points that we couldn't risk leaving out in the open for fire support, so it hid for the rest of the game.  Our fighters crippled one of their cruisers, but were then obliterated by their close defense cannons, and then we charged.  Emergency thrust was deployed to debatable effect; while the boosts did help close the gap from long to medium, the subsequent (higher than expected) engine damage was problematic later.  We had awful luck with our firing, with only one of our four ships hitting with any weapons.  In response, we took around 30 points of damage, though after damage allocation all of our ships were still functional as a result of armor plating.  However, between an unusually high numbers of 2s rolled and the emergency thrust penalty, we were dead in the water, running on Engines 2 for most of our ships, and our Slow-Firing weapons were shot for the next turn.  As a result, we ceded, as the sheer volume of close-range CDC fire they could bring to bear on our sitting ducks next turn would have been almost-certainly sufficient to win the game for them.

Conclusion: Hypothesis confirmed.

Secondary conclusion: In Starmada, ship design > luck > tactics.  Good ship design can protect you from luck (with 3+ or 2+ ACC, high rates of fire, Fire Control, things like that), and as long as you don't do something terribly stupid tactically, good ships can generally annihilate mediocre ships and win the game by VP.  With less good ship designs, where you start seeing 5+ ACCs and low rates of fire, luck trumps tactics - you can play as well as you like, but the dice will still keep you from winning.  Tactics come in a distant third as far as determining factors of victory go, in our experience.  When 'tactical decisions' do arise, the optimal course is typically to maintain range if you have an advantage over the enemy at range (as a result of ship design), or to hide behind terrain from the enemy's long range guns if you don't (as a result of your own ship designs).  This results in the kind of deadlocks that we keep seeing - short-ranged fleets take and hold the blocking terrain, then do nothing, while the longer-ranged fleet sits back and does nothing from the start.  There are both really dissatisfying outcomes.  And sure, there are counters for this type of thing - ship design counters include cloaking, stealth, and tons of engines, while tactical counters include evasive action and emergency thrust as means by which a short-range fleet can try to take the offensive and do its thing.  In our case, though, Evasive Action would have been no good - we'd've given them -1 to shooting, but since we would've ended up in their medium range bands and they had Fire Control, we just end up inflicting a -1 to our shooting and halving our speeds for no benefit.

So I guess that's a systemic criticism of Starmada for us; from the very beginning, from my first game against Alex, short-ranged fleets have perished to even slightly longer-ranged guns.  And there is very little we can do about it, and it makes things less than fun.  The current state of the ship design metagame here is "ships with as much forward firepower with range 15 and Inverted Ranged-Based Something as possible", because that's what wins.  And it's kind of a boring place to be in; I try to liven things up with short-ranged cloakers, but everybody knows that I do that, and I'm pretty easily countered by fighters (can't bring fighter cover with me, or it gives away my position, and can't fire anti-fighter weapons before enemy fighters get a chance to maul me after I decloak.  I've been using Point Defense, and it helps, but it's not nearly enough to save me if somebody decides they're going to launch a cloud of strikers to surround their ships and wait for me to come out of cloak).

In short, I think I'm done with Starmada for the most part.  Jared seems to agree.  It's been fun, and it's been really interesting to watch the ship design metagame evolve (from "fairly innocent" to "oh god so many strikers" to "all guns forward"), but...  yeah.

On a happier note, Glisson suggested StarGrunt II yesterday once we were done deconstructing our problems with Starmada.  I've been reading it, and it looks interesting...  still has the potential to be shafted by dice, but I really like their stance on point values for units (namely that there aren't any), and unbalanced forces / secret objectives.  I'm hoping we'll be able to muster a game of it before the summer's out.