Let's Write Some Rules

 Rationale 

I was sitting, trying to decide which miniatures to base up in multi-figure bases for Horizon Wars (instead of repairing my damaged stands that the kids at school were too rough with). I ended up with a Ferret, some AMX tanks (can’t remember which ones), some pickup trucks with figures shooting from the back, and an assortment of random Sci Fi figures from various manufacturers. I pondered. I thought. Finally I decided to just leave it as I really wanted to make a rag-tag militia but also have them fight like one. Horizon Wars doesn’t really have a built in mechanism for that (other than just knocking stats down, but that doesn’t feel right. It just makes them more squishy/less offensively effective). I got thinking about some of the offerings from Nordic Weasel Games, but I don’t really have any of his rules that are geared towards multi-figure stands. Wait, isn’t Laserburn an NWG game? I have had it for ages but haven’t used it because it calls for so many stands of infantry and vehicles. Could I just use Starport Scum, or Blast Pistol, or Clash on the Fringe and just fudge it so the stand of figures counts as the one character? Not sure.

 

So, let’s write some rules. 

 

What do I want? 

Simple combat mechanics but still a handful of cubes (polygons) 

Minimal book keeping. 

Morale. 

Some sort of troop quality system that links into morale. 

I might steal the Battle Rating (BR) system from the Battlegroup rules. This is the mechanic whereby your army has a numeric value (BR), and after unit loss or objective loss you pull chits. Each chit has a number, and once you hit your BR the game is over. You have lost.

 

The past 

A couple of years ago, in an attempt to help the students who struggled with literacy, yet who had chosen to do the wargaming activity, I wrote my first set of rules. It was a sort of amalgamation of elements of Horizon Wars, aspects of Flying Lead, and probably some thoughts I had had to come up with quickly, in order to write them and have them ready for the next day. They were one side of A5, and were a very bare-bones set of combat mechanics. They are devoid of morale, win conditions, unit costs, unit quality. Here they are:  

 

Combat rules. 

Each unit will move then shoot, OR shoot, then move, OR sit still and shoot. 

At the start of each round, each player rolls 1 dice. The person who rolls higher chooses who goes first. You then take it in turns to activate ONE unit until all of your units have been activated. Then repeat this whole thing. 

 

Infantry 

Move distance – 6 inches. 

Firing – Roll 3 dice.  

Range – 12 inches. 

Defence – roll 3 dice. (2 hits kills infantry) 

 

Vehicles – tanks/armoured cars. 

Move distance – 10 inches 

Firing – roll 5 dice if sitting still. Roll 3 dice if you have moved. 

Range – 15 inches 

Defence – roll 1 dice. (3 hits kills a vehicle) 

 

Mechs 

Move distance – 8 inches 

Firing – roll 4 dice if sitting still. 3 dice if you have moved. 

Range – 13 inches 

Defence – roll 3 dice (3 hits kill a mech) 

 

How to do shooting! 

Measure the distance in inches between attacker and target.  

If the target is within the range that is good. If it is outside the range then roll one less firing dice. 

If the target is in a building or behind cover, then you roll one less firing dice. 

If you roll 5 or 6 you get a hit. The defender rolls their defence dice. Any 5 or 6 they get cancel your hits. 

 

If someone has been hit, then they stay hit until the end of the round. This means you can gang up on a unit to get lots of hits, in order to kill it. When the round finishes, if a unit has a hit and is still alive, get rid of the hits and start again.  

Analysis 

There is no room for morale here. I like the idea of a handful of cubes where you add or remove them based on certain criteria. Long range? Remove 1D6. Target in cover? Remove 1D6. Is there room for troop quality here? Perhaps. This is perhaps reminiscent of NWG’s Starport Scum where Goons cannot roll more than 2D6 in an attack, whereas Heroes can roll 3D6 or more, and that also goes for armour saves. Troop quality might be represented here. But then if I go with the idea of a unit being pinned, it needs to be unpinned. And then if it is double pinned it is KIA? Not sure.  

Here is an idea for some infantry stats, and possible abilities, if that is the route I want to go. I get strong Starport Scum vibes from this though.

So regular infantry can move 6 inches. They roll 3D6 while attacking under 12 inches, and only 2D6 for anything over that. They also get to roll 3D6 defensive roll. If they are pinned, you can unpin them on a roll of 4+. If they are double pinned then 5+? Can I spend a resource to get it back to 4+? Man, now I am thinking of this, it is harder and harder to keep it simple.

My issue is that my brother said that game designing is playing a crap game hundreds of times until it becomes a good game. 

Well. Here goes nothing. 

A Poor Man's Fleet: A Billion Suns pt. 4

That moment when creating something when you finish it is quite special. Today marks the end of the beginning - my three junk built, prototype, experimental spacecraft are complete. They are not combat ships. I do not want to have to handwave a bunch of in-universe lore as to why combat ships are not the same. Now I know that wouldn't be too difficult, thinking back to tank development and probably ship development, where new technologies and streamlining of things mean each has potential to be different and older models need to be sent back for refit. But I just want to buy miniatures and paint them, then fight them.

 

Here we have the transport ship with a full load. It turns out weathering spaceships is difficult. I mean scorch marks around the engine is easy. But rust? Dust? In space? Not sure. I went for it anyway.

I really want them to look beaten up. My flight stands aren't all that bad either. In total each ship has cost me pennies in terms of materials. 

The same class of freighter but unloaded. I really love this.

I went a bit too heavy with the drybrushing here. This is my least favourite ship, but it is still fine. I am just happy to have them done. Now to start sourcing up some money in order to buy some fleets.

A Poor Man's Fleet: A Billion Suns pt. 3

 Progress has been made on this project. Firstly my internal maths keeps telling me that if I spend x on this bit of junk with which to build a spaceship, and y with which to build flight stands, then I may as well just fork out the cash on buying a Brigade Models fleet or two. 

The second progress is actually flight stands. I have a large box of assorted MDF bases and a stash of nails. I hammered a nail into a base to see what would happen and it sticks pretty well. 

The third part of progress was the arrival of these tiny little magnets. They stick nicely to the nail head and are small enough to just look like a greebly on my home made freighters.

Here are my freighters on flight stands. They do the job. I am actually quite pleased with myself and how this turned out.

These magnets are like 1mm x 3mm I think. Maybe 4mm. They are tiny but strong. I bought 25 on eBay for a few quid.

Excuse the poor focus but I wanted to highlight that the flight stand is literally just a nail, nailed into a 3mm MDF base. I will paint them black at some point.

A Poor Man's Fleet: A Billion Suns

My search for inspiration has taken me all over. A picture I found was of scratch built ships that looked kind of like flying WW2 ships, but they were different enough that they looked non weird. I have decided that I might be able to do something similar. I had the idea that I would draw half a shape, fold the paper over and then cut out a template. Template goes on card, card stuck together. I have been looking at 2mm thick card. 

So each colour represents different layers. The red is boosters which will probably be Hama beads. Then I will stick some other stuff on it. This is all until I can afford to buy a bunch of Brigade Miniatures ships.
 

A poor man's fleet - A Billion Suns

 So I picked up A Billion Suns the other day. It is time to dive into space ship combat. I thought about it a few years ago and almost bought some fleets at Colours 2016. I am sure Tony at the Brigade Models stand was wondering who that weirdo was who kept casually walking by sneaking a peek.

So I have the rules and no miniatures. Great. I have a large collection of Star Wars Pocketmodels and had an idea to use those, but the capital ships have such a large footprint on the table that I don't think it would work very well. Still, I might give the rules a spin using only fighters and just claiming they are frigates and gunships. I also can't find flight stands for love nor money.

This past week has been spent researching things. I have a friend with a laser cutter so I reckon I can spend about £20 on materials and make myself over 100 clear flying stands. So that is mission semi accomplished.

I can't really justify dropping £70 on spaceship miniatures though. This has led me to my bits boxes and wondering if I have anything that can be transformed into spacecraft. Turns out I do, sort of. Last night was my second attempt to sit down and build, and it was only successful through hours of scrolling through Pintrest and Google image searches to find a way to make small sized capital ships. I have a few ideas, but last night I wanted to try out making some civilian cargo ships. This is what I came up with:

The longer two ships are made from a nail. A random white thing on the end for an engine, which I think was designed to hide screws in furniture. The front end is a bead with some random junk stuck to it. The central ship has no cargo load, the other one has two large interstellar containers, although the more I think about it, the more I have to ask how the containers became attached to the ship. 

The shorter ship is a similar design but the central pole is a plastic thing that pinned a toy into its box or something. I had to drill the holes to be bigger in the flat circular beads, and just stuck some random bit of crap on the front. I don't like this one as much.

I will paint them up over the half term holiday and see how they look. Come July I might have some money available to splash on some Brigade fleets. Or I might spend £30 on the PSC grab bag of 50 plastic spaceships meant for Red Alert...if they are ever in stock again. 

Wolf 359 - A podcast recommendation.

Having moved house a month ago, my modelling and wargaming stuff is all still boxed up in the garage. My aim is at some point to have a few games, as I can find space for a box of miniatures and terrain, but I can't really unpack all of my stuff for a while until decisions have been made regarding decoration.

I wanted to update and recommend this podcast: Wolf 359.

Via Wikipedia

 I just finished it. It ended up being about 60 normal episodes with a plethora of smaller episodes and a couple of bonus extra long ones.

The premise is that each episodes are the audio log of the communications officer on the USS Hephaestus: a space station run by Goddard Futuristics that is orbiting the star Wold 359. Crew of three. It begins with 15-20 minute episodes and they slowly grow in length and leave behind the format of communication logs as the story unfolds and gets bigger and bigger. And while it never stops being funny, it evolves from short, sitcom-esque episodes as a larger drama and story emerges.

It begins with hijinks and funny situations that one would think might happen on an isolated space station with three very different crewmembers. But at time goes on things happen, story develops, and it sucks you right in. 

I recommend it highly. In fact, I cannot recommend it highly enough. I have now searched out any other projects by the creators to see what else they are making.

Moving House

 I had planned to expand my use of Platoon Forward! by having a couple of games of A Sergeant's War and seeing if it fits better with those rules. However, we are in the throes of moving house and I have packed all of my hobby stuff. It has been good going through it all, disposing of long-unused junk. I have gotten rid of my pile of packaging materials that were going to see a second life as terrain. I no longer have broken bits of children's toys that looked like it could be a terraforming station.

The deal made with my wife is that I will have a corner of the dining room as my devoted modelling and painting station. So there is that. Although to have a dining room we will have to convert the garage, so I will have to store all of my other junk in the attic, making it less accessible. 

There is the never ending question: do I get rid of my giant collection of WotC Star Wars Miniatures, Wizkids Star Wars Pocketmodels, and Pirates of the Spanish Main. These take up loads of space and haven't been played with in years.