After a pretty short but intensive testing session last night I have some early pointers as to what works and what doesn't. Results are:
Shooting is as dominant as I expected.
Movement and positioning are vital, and decisions between moving and shooting can be very difficult in the case of support weapons, however, a good shooting unit that's found some solid cover can be a serious problem for it's opponent.
Brawling is, when it occurs, basically devastating. It's difficult to pull off, but frequently destroys the target. This is more or less what I intended. Only had one drawn brawl last night, the others were decisive.
The size of the board and the quantities of terrain I've manufactured so far seem pretty much spot on, without the right cards it feels like a huge space to have to cross, but when you start building up your deck things speed up nicely (My Sarge made a 4 hex dash to diffuse a bomb on turn 7, if I'd had to go one hex at a time there would have been a big bang shortly after).
It is occasionally tricky to manipulate models, but nothing terribly problematic as everything can be picked up and taken out of the way temporarily.
Some early amendments include:
Added restriction to infiltrate rule to avoid deploying on top of objectives. Reduced restriction range to 3 tiles not 4.
Reduced ASU Durability to 7 to prevent immunity to Dam4 weapons when in cover.
Autons dropped to only ever benefiting from intermediate cover due to inability to duck and hide (also, effective durability 15 behind cover was virtually un-hurtable, 12 is manageable). This should hopefully avoid autos sitting in cover while sergeants stand around in the open, which is fairly counter-intuitive.
Reduced Soldato Squad to 3 man @ 30 points due to hex tile real estate space issues.
Added situational auto move rules for mobs based on faction special characters to avoid horde lists being too immobile (a big problem for a few test games with Bluechipp and UC).
Messengers now Bikers-2 @34 points and Burst 7 to avoid serious suicide squad problems, may reverse this after testing, or offer it as an option.
Clarified Biker movement and character BP influence.
Various stat tweaks.
Seriously considering randomising advanced cards available for each game, limiting to six or so out of the possible 18. Will test this in future to see how it feels.
The basic rules seem to work, and to be reasonably well balanced when playing the same faction on both sides. However the factions have a definite hierarchy at the moment, RSE being dominant. In order to tweak that and even it out I'm redistributing starting deck cards slightly (more varied movement cards in play at the start for horde factions), and re-balancing points based on performance rather than the mathematical starting point I used pre-play-test (which happily wasn't a million miles off).
Most of all, it's fun, which is what I'm really happy about. The games are short and punchy. The missions are exciting and unpredictable. Had a fantastic time playing "The Bomb". The "demoralised' cards are genuinely demoralising when they turn up in your hand instead of that vital Move or Shoot card you needed. I really enjoyed that side of it, but I guess some players might not like, however these are short games, so it's not long before you get to have another crack at it. Setup and tidying away don't take all that long. If you had an hour, you could easily get a game in. Its a nice, light introduction to mini war-gaming with a bit of minor deck building to flavour it.
Comments
Looks promising
I read your rules the other day and thought that it looks promising. I enjoy skirmish-scale games, especially ones that involve meaningful decisions instead of just dice rolling, and also want a single battle to be less than 1 hour.
Your deck-building rules for command looks interesting. The balance between the cards seems good, in that the more advanced cards you accumulate the harder it is to purchase more advanced cards. I imagine that the game would have the feel of a slow build-up at the start, and then accellerate as the players get more high-powered cards in their decks.
I like the descriptions of the factions. Quite entertaining and adds flavor.
Good luck with your playtesting.
Regards,
kos
Thanks kos, I appreciate you
Thanks kos, I appreciate you taking the time to read through my rules.
The first round of play testing didn't see too much intensive use of the higher value cards, the players found it more useful to pick up a couple of medium-high value cards and then play the odds, but I've yet to fully test the UC faction which has a bit more potential for interfering with other players decks, thus forcing the issue on them. But yes, the game does have the sort of arc where the acceleration of the action picks up slowly over the course of the game.
More testing to follow, but I'll post some pictures of the prototypes soon.
Thanks again for your comments,
Fred