Making a balanced 40k esque tabletop wargame

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OgreBattle
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Making a balanced 40k esque tabletop wargame

Post by OgreBattle »

We've got lots of great info on the pillars of game design and concerns of making a balanced D&D game ("monsters first, know the RNG" and so on), so how about the pillars of wargame design?

A 40k-esque game where armies are points based and you have a wide array of army and unit types to fit in. Where do you even begin with the balancing? Is there a particular wargame that's a good starting point? I get the feeling that 40k, though I'm familiar with it, probably has some horrible inherent flaws that are better off discarded.

What I mean by the feeling of 40k is you have squads of dudes, some vehicles, and heroes that can turn the tides but are still vulnerable to being swamped. The smallest army possible has 3 squads to control (1 HQ, two troops in 40k terms).

The aim I have is a game that resolves within 3-6 turns, each turn lasting 15-30 minutes per player (shorter than 40k average I believe, I haven't played in a while). I feel like 3-6 decision points are enough to make a game feel like it has a distinct beginning, middle, end, with turning points here and there without feeling like it drags on too long. What level of squad sizes to manage and detail/liteness of rules can achieve this goal?

Where do I even begin? In my mind I have the not-Orks (horde), not-space marines (durable), and not-DarkEldar (speedy) conceptualized.
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Post by Foxwarrior »

From my Warhammer 40k experience, I give you two pieces of wisdom:

It is extremely important that you have an interesting objective, mass slaughter makes the game drag on too much.

Morale checks have a high return in amusing story moments when retelling battles.
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Post by Laertes »

I would be really, really interested in participating in this project. Just sayin'. I came to the Den to take part in interesting design stuff, not to rant about geology and left-wing politics. This would be a lot of fun.
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Post by Dean »

A few things would serve as huge boons when designing a new tabletop game.

1: Units should have multiple different abilities and modes of attack. A single unit should be about the complexity of a low to mid level D&D monster. One thing that Privateer Press does a bit better than 40k is it makes used abilities more important to the game which helps eliminate the problem that 90% of the strategy in a 40k game has occurred by the end of deployment. Making the use of an armies abilities important rather than just selecting the units with synergistic abilities would improve the game. This also prevents boredom during the game because the choice element can be quickly eliminated once forces have closed and every unit just attacks forever until dead.

2: The minutia of movement should matter as little as possible. If you want turns to be done in 15 minutes (and you do) you cannot also say that only models within 1/2 an inch of an enemy get an attack and a model within 2 inches gets a support attack. If it takes an extra 10 minute of planning out lanes of charge to get 3 more models into base contact that is something people will do. The less your rules reward micromanaging every inch you can get out of a model the faster turns will go. This also applying to minimizing rules that focus on a models angle, back arc, and line of sight. Things like Necromunda that put tons of focus on these things are largely unplayable without a lot of kludging.

3: Cards bitches! The biggest thing I want in the tabletop game of tomorrow is the ability to modify units and important models with equipment that can have big impacts on the abilities of that unit. The Fantasy Flight X-wing tabletop game does this and it's fantastic. If each unit has a card that lists it's relevant stats you should also be able to pay extra points for equipment cards that modify that unit. So if I have a unit of 5 Space Marines that cost me 75 points I should have a card for that. Then I should be able to buy Combi-Bolters for 10 points which gives me the ability to shoot off a huge group flame attack once per game. "Combi-Bolters" would be a card with that effect and it's point cost listed which I would then place next to the primary card. By allowing models to buy equipment and abilities very freely you would create many more interesting and synergistic combinations in your games.
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Post by Laertes »

So here are my thoughts on initial design principles:

A) Decide right now whether or not suppression is going to be a thing, and whether units are going to "lose" by withdrawing or "lose" by dying. This sort of thing is really painful to see when they've retrofitted it onto a game, but works well when it's put in as part of the basic mechanics around which it's designed.

B) Decide how much terrain is going to matter. Necromunda is a game about terrain. Mechwarrior is not.

C) Decide what the size you're designing for is and then write that into the fluff. Part of the reason 40k turned out as clunky it did is that it was designed for small-unit commando skirmish battles and then people kept using it for immense meat grinders instead and they didn't have the guts to rewrite the core assumptions of the game to reflect that.

D) Decide whether the game is going to be about specialising or about generalising. I'm going to use the word tentpole here, which is a term in my industry but maybe not in yours so let me define it: a tentpole is the highest point in your framework, so the tent ends up that tall. Other tent poles of a lesser height are meaningless. For example, in D&D the guy with the best Pick Lock score is the tentpole for that ability. If someone else has a lesser Pick Lock score then they wasted their points: the group already has its level of competence in that sphere defined.

40k is a game about specialising your list. Your entire army needs to be fast, or hard, or tanks, or whatever, because that shuts down your opponent's threat management. Bringing an entire army of Guard with bayonets makes their lascannons useless. Bringing an entire army of Leman Russ tanks makes their heavy bolters useless. If you mix both together, then all their weapons get to fire and you've played into their hands.

By contrast, Shadowrun is a game about generalising your list. If your shadowrunner team does not contain a decker, go home. If it does not contain a mage, go home. You can customise each of these and have them have different flavours, but unless your force has a tentpole in each, you are potentially going to have your ass handed to you very quickly.

E) Decide whether the game is won in chargen (like Magic the Gathering) or in play (like Battlefleet Gothic.) I much prefer games that are won in play, but they're dull to discuss on the web. By contrast, games that are won in chargen generate huge amounts of discussion on the web but actually playing them is often a secondary concern.
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Post by Koumei »

You have your own mini production facilities? Awesome!

(I can only assume you do, seeing as nobody would try to make a minis game without this.)

Don't pretend you can scale from 3 units up to 200 units. Pick a ballpark and force them to stick to it. This also lets you define the kind of table size that should be used - when working out basic ranges in your head, you can think of it in "percentage of the table that this should be", then you can translate that into real values later.

So you want the average totally-not-space-marines army to have one commander, three squads of doods, two transport trucks and one tank? Great, you're probably talking about a table size of 4x4', 4x6' or 6x6'. But picture the layout on a square. One such army can take up "around a quarter of the table" right from the start. Let their movement and attacking range take up "half the table" combined, so that front-liners can attack other front-liners on turn one (assuming no intervening terrain), and everyone is definitely in the action by turn 2. Now you can say "Cool, so the game should be on a board that is 6' wide but 4' long, and you can set your guys up anywhere along a 6' edge out to 12 inches, and they can move one foot and shoot another foot or whatever".

Also, make sure the rules actually encourage what you want the game to be about. Otherwise the game will not play the way you think it should be played, and then you can call it Iron Kingdoms.

You should probably just have a unit act "as a unit", where they all use the same weapon and reach the same point and the whole unit is in or out of cover and they can either all attack in melee or all stand there uselessly, and it's not made up of individual guys. Because that saves a lot of time.

Edit: Laertes has some really good advice there. Dean's advice might depend on the type of game you want, but for what you're after, I would recommend following it. But trust me on actually having the ability to churn out your own minis for this.
Last edited by Koumei on Tue Jul 08, 2014 7:00 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Username17 »

Close combat is generally bullshit, and close combat in open spaces is super bullshit. If you want to get people to stop arguing about half inches all the time, have close combat be a thing that only happens when enemy units are co-occupying a terrain piece. If you take a terrain piece and hold it, then you get to blast away at a squad trying to take it from you before close combat starts, and if you both move in on the same turn, you just do close combat. Under no circumstances should you be measuring model to model distances to figure out who can engage in close combat.

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Post by Laertes »

I have a friend whose brother runs a company that makes 3D photocopiers. They're still in prototype but it's a nice idea: basically a 3D scanner and a 3D printer all in one. That might be an idea.

I'm thinking on mechanics while my SQL is running and will post something with some ideas a little later.

Also, while it pains me to admit that Frank is right, I agree with him that measuring close combat is bullshit. I wouldn't use terrain pieces to be the defining thing unless you're hardcoding the size of terrain features into your game rules, but the idea of having it be an abstracted affair which features movement and aggression rather than "my guy stabs your guy, now this other one of my guys stabs your other guy" is basically a good idea.
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Post by Username17 »

You're going to need units to hold terrain pieces abstractly. Your models have 25 mm bases on them so they don't fall over, but buildings and trenches that are even remotely to scale will be far too small to get models into. Go over to your window and think of how many bases worth it is vs how many soldiers could shoot out of it during a siege.

So combat over a bunker or a farmhouse is necessarily going to be abstract. Pulling in arbitrary CQC rules for that seems fine. But resolving sword fights the rest of the time is just dumb.

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Post by PhoneLobster »

I took an incomplete (very incomplete) shot at this and presented HERE it in the form of a work in process thread that goes through step by step all the decisions I made, and changed and why I made them as I went.

Some of those decisions might be interesting. particularly things like the command resources and a lot of the mechanics for movement/ranges/etc... which were intended to be formal but fast. Certainly I'm already disagreeing with a few of the suggestions here.

Koumie is entirely correct that you have to pick a scale and stick to it at least somewhat. And as an extension of that Dean's idea that every unit has to be a fairly large D&D monster of complexity and that Privateer Press "got complexity right" is really massively incorrect... depending on the scale you want to work at. And if your intended scale is anything like 40K... then he is wrong. SOME units can be that complex, armies can be that complex, factions certainly should be complex and full of options, but large armies/faction lists SHOULD have some simple one trick pony options that are on the table to quickly and simply do just one damn thing.

But Dean is right about movement minutia... or wrong depending on scale, and at 40K scale, he is right. My quick solution if I recall was to measure movement, and other things, for ONE model in a unit, then just freely move the rest in loose "formation".

I agree with Dean that cards as references are sort of awesome. But it has again got issues with scale. If he wants every unit in a 40k scale army to have reference cards AND have additional modifier cards that might be problematic. Also without an existing miniature range, and in order to support custom miniatures better in general, the more customizable your units and their equipment/options are the better. A point based custom unit builder provides that flexibility, chunking that customizability into card sized lumps might be doable, but will likely just end up needlessly limiting.

I agree with Frank that close combat measuring is often problematic, but I think there needs to be SOME way to engage an unwilling target in melee because "Unleash The Dogs" should not be responded to with "They can't get me, I'm not in a building" or "I choose for my gunners to never ever opt in to the melee combat with the dogs".
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Post by Laertes »

Abstract terrain alienates the type of people who like to make terrain, which tends to be the sort of people who buy models. It is therefore more than merely a rules decision: it is a business decision. That said, I'm the sort of person who plays with unpainted models and LEGO standins and third-party minis, and adores his abstracted terrain so you'll have my vote whatever you do. But I'll probably only buy a rulebook, not many toy soldiers, so my vote isn't worth much cash.

Abstract terrain also limits the types of battles you can fight. For example, I once spent an enjoyable few months with a friend building a 4'×4' ruined cathedral board. It was awesome. You could drive tanks down the nave and there were vaults whose ceilings had been blasted open and stuff like that. It looked really good and we were really proud of it and you could not abstract that away in any meaningful way.
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Post by Username17 »

Ruined cathedrals absolutely require abstract terrain holding rules. There are going to be rooms and shit, and the number of people they will obviously hold is going to be a much larger number than the number of models which can fit in with their giant plastic bases.

As soon as infantry have to be inside something, whether that thing is a troop transport or a ruined cloister, you need to pull models off the table and use representations of your groups of models. It's a simple physical necessity.

As for war dogs and shit, it is very difficult for me to imagine a situation in futuristic war where people with ranged weapons were seriously threatened by enemies with claws in any kind of open field scenario. A xenomorph can leap out of an air duct and a mimic can pop up from the sand, but neither one of them is much of a threat to future marines if it has to run across an open football pitch. I honestly don't have a problem with 'monsters' being essentially useless save for holding objectives.

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Post by PhoneLobster »

If your starting point is "no terrain abstraction, it must be that what you see is what you get bullshit or else no one will make trees or boxes with windows in!" then your ending point is GW style "I can shoot him because I see his nose through that window I swear, fuck you lets take this outside!" style system resolution.

There HAS to be some terrain abstraction. That means things like ability to pick the base of the forest piece up off the table, put your units in there and have a 2D base or something so you can say "these guys are now in that forest and get in the forest rule", at a minimum. And piling your guys next to a box with windows in and saying "they're inside it now, they use the inside it rules" is way better, and makes terrain like that box with windows in MORE interesting and desirable to have at the table than not being able to do that because the box with windows in is not actually hollow and going inside has been banned by the gaming venue anyway because of too many punch ups about whose nose could be seen through the tiny gothic arrow slits even if it were.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

FrankTrollman wrote:As for war dogs and shit... I honestly don't have a problem with 'monsters' being essentially useless...
Basically that's the short of it. I can certainly see it working as a design decision. But I don't think it's actually what people after "40k but less bad" are after, or even what altogether many people actually want at all.
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Post by Chamomile »

Is there any way to model the Zerg rush, wherein the enemy's primarily melee-based army works because they have such a numerical advantage that they can just keep running into the machine gun nest until they overwhelm it, in a tabletop wargame?
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Post by Laertes »

Then you need some quite flexible terrain abstraction rules. You'd need to determine what counts as a "piece of terrain" and how cover counts and flanking works. People are absolutely going to bring everything from modular map segments to one-piece fixed tables to interior space-hulk style tunnels, and want to use it all. And you'd be a fool to deny it to them because player enthusiasm is the most valuable thing a designer can find and you absolutely do not want to stomp it out.

That said, if you can do it then I'll enthusiastically play it. I like abstractions; I just think they cause difficulties when they're used to cover situations they aren't intended for.

Edit:
Chamomile wrote:Is there any way to model the Zerg rush, wherein the enemy's primarily melee-based army works because they have such a numerical advantage that they can just keep running into the machine gun nest until they overwhelm it, in a tabletop wargame?
Real life zerg rushes don't kill, they push back. They force people to withdraw from their fixed positions once the zerg get too close. If they have a prepared second line this is known as defence in depth; if they have no prepared second line it's known as a rout. The only way for a zerg rush to actually cause casualties is if it overruns positions and prevents withdrawal, either by speed or by artillery suppression or something else.
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Post by Username17 »

Chamomile wrote:Is there any way to model the Zerg rush, wherein the enemy's primarily melee-based army works because they have such a numerical advantage that they can just keep running into the machine gun nest until they overwhelm it, in a tabletop wargame?
Well, you can and probably should have an overrun or shock maneuver. That's where you push into your opponent's line and try to make them abandon it. Basically, you draw your movement through the enemy, you get off a limited amount of shooting and they get a lot of shooting (presumably increased if they are high morale or have a good defensive position in the first place), and if your forces aren't broken by the enemy's opportunity fire, you push them back.

Now obviously, that has real utility when you are shocking a position with a tank or giant monster that laughs at the opportunity fire of a normal squad. And one could see the draw of shocking with flame troopers or engineers who could potentially pull ahead with their assault shooting vs the target's sustained fire. But if you have zerglings, you are going to take a lot of losses and inflict no casualties at all - so you better be seizing some very valuable real estate or pushing the enemy back where they have nowhere to go.

In any case, in the shock maneuver, you definitely are not measuring melee range on models, you're measuring movement through the target.

Although an important thing to consider for a game like this is that zerglings cost money and time to field and paint. Hordes of garbage troops without so much as a sidearm between them may sound cool, but few players can physically put as many minis on the table as such a tactic would require.

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Post by Lokathor »

Quick post before work:

1) We're not talking about real life zerg rushes, we're talking about space monsters with armored hides that eat people. It may not be appropriate for all unit types to be able to pull off the maneuver successfully, but some unit type should be able to (either by having armor better than the enemy weapons can deal with or by having more units than they can shoot at).

2) When it works, it should totally kill things. The idealized zerg rush is something like This (watch from about 0:25 to 2:00), where there's an overwhelming number of fast moving bodies that get into melee and eat you. I expect that normally in a "balanced" matchup you wouldn't be able to just go that route, but there should be a situation where it's appropriate, such as if there's a lone unit in a table quarter and you've got 3 units in the table quarter, where you can rush down the remaining enemy and eliminate it quickly while accepting heavy losses and then have control of a capture point on that turn instead of several turns out.
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Post by Username17 »

While the good old fashioned bug swarm has plenty of proponents, it's very hard to do in table top minis games. How many physical models would be required before 'swarming' against defenders with automatic weapons even seems like a plausible thing? A hundred? More? That's a lot of fucking models and a lot of fucking painting.

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Post by rampaging-poet »

You'd probably be better off having that one Zergling mini represent a swarm of Zerglings. I could see some kind of swarm rule where each bullet does at most N damage to the swarm while explosions and other AoE weapons deal full damage. That could make rushing machine gun nests viable without providing any real protection against weapons that should be good against swarms. It could also be generalized to a general rule for multi-entity units like small infantry squads.

EDIT: Of course that rule assumes you're tracking HP for each model, which could be cumbersome with large numbers of models on the field. It might still work with Toughness saves or the like, but that could result in swarms that can usually shrug off large numbers of bullets without being affected but sometimes keel over on the first shot.
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Post by Laertes »

The thing about a zerg rush is that it's a dull tactic. There is no actual strategy going on, just rolling loads of dice to see who wins. This makes for a dull game, and therefore should be mechanically disincentivised. In an RTS it is a very difficult and exacting feat of reflexes and coordination to pull off, but in a turn based game there is no such feat of athleticism to admire. It's just rolling the dice and seeing who wins.

Or, to put it another way: during a zerg rush, which meaningful choices is each player making? How are they outplaying one another? How are they responding to each other? If you can work out a way to get these things to happen in a zerg rush, you can make it fun and therefore it should be part of the game. If not it should not be.
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Post by fectin »

That's not perfectly accurate. Zerg rush is uninteresting, and takes a long time to resolve. If the entire rush is equivalent to a unit shooting, then it's no longer a problem.

Say, for quick caricature, zergling swarms have a very long movement. If you move them through another unit, the swarm takes damage automatically. The other unit may immediately move out of their way, and takes damage if they can't.
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Post by Dean »

I would incentivize zerg rushes through a unit ability. The special Zerg squad has an ability called Unlimited which lets you set the unit back up on your table edge once its destroyed. This way you didn't have to paint a billion miniatures but could still send your limitless hordes to their doom. There would also have to be some rule, based on how your game is decided, that they stop when the rest of your army breaks or that they grant victory points if they were killed at least once or whatever.
PL is right that I should specify scale and my preferred scale is small. A game with 200 minis on the table has to scrap most tactics because moving a hundred minis takes 15 minutes anyway. The scale I want to work in would be something akin to a 750 point 40K game or a 25 point Warmachine game. Small forces of a few dozen models grouped mostly into squads. In a game that small a squad of Marines and a squad of Marines with all heavy weapons would be much easier to show with a single equipment card which would also cut down on the excessive number of model types.
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Post by Username17 »

Dean, there's totally already a 40k rule that works like that (from the 3rd edition meat grinder mission) and it does not even remotely feel like you're facing an unending horde. First of all because battle is quite limited in the number of turns allotted to it. Secondly because reinforcements necessarily trickle in and have large gaps between them and the front line. And thirdly, because it creates a perverse incentive for the other player to avoid actually destroy your units.

Once you conceive of zerg rushes as shock attacks rather than very short ranged trading of volleys, then zerg rushes become tactical automatically. Zerglings, then, are expendable troops that you use up to force enemies to cede ground and take morale checks. If your opponent has troops that are low morale, you might be able to spend a bunch of zerg lives to route them. If your opponent is holding a particularly valuable piece of dirt, you might be able to expend a bunch of zerg lives to take it. And of course, if the enemy has nowhere to go, you might be able to spend your zergs to destroy them outright. But if the enemy is disciplined and has places to fall back to, you'll end up spending your zerglings for worthless centimeters of dirt.

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Re: Making a balanced 40k esque tabletop wargame

Post by Josh_Kablack »

OgreBattle wrote:Where do I even begin?.
You begin by ignoring the minutae in this thread so far and describing the game you want in a bit more detail than "Warhammer, but not owned by Evil Workshop".

Is it 2 player only? Does it scale to more? Do you need rules specific enough to allow competitive play or will you roll with a neutral referee for serious matches?

Is victory by attrition, by kills, by territory taken, by scenario-specific objectives or by some hybrid point scale?

How long should the game take?
How big a table should it be played on? Do you want to use actual minis or are pogs acceptable? If you are using actual minis, how will players get enough to play the game (are you gonna 3d print them yerself or will you use existing components from other games?) What about terrain - will players be expected to sculpt foam-core and have model railroad setups or will you just go with grids and colored zones?
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