Making a balanced 40k esque tabletop wargame

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TheNotoriousAMP
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Post by TheNotoriousAMP »

Set up a google docs for people to add in ideas and brainstorm.


Post your ideas with your username next to em, as well as posting suggestions and improvements below the ideas. It'll go a bit faster than using the forum.

As for casualty rates, I definitely agree here. The problem is that 40k has very boolian levels of gameplay status. A unit is either wounded or its not. And, only if its wounded, usually, it has to then take a morale check.

I would suggest these levels of damage: slowed (loses AP next turn), pinned (halts all action, engaging with unit) , casualty. From these damages, they then take morale damage and can flee.
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Post by TheFlatline »

OgreBattle wrote:On the modern 4 man fireteam, the roles (using loose terminology) are....

-Grenadier that can fire in an arc over obstacles
-Machinegunner that can lay down suppression fire with plenty of ammo
-Leader* that coordinates team and leads by example
-Scout/spotter/ammo carrying guy, sometimes becomes the MARKSMAN of the team with an enhanced accuracy rifle whose job is to pick off high value targets like enemy machinegunners and leaders.

*In the marines the fireteam leader is the grenadier, in the army the grenadier is not the fireteam leader.

Reading a book on fireteam tactics (I think US marine guide) it talks about how the grenadier+machinegun creates 'DILEMMAS'. If you are being shot at by a machinegun you find cover. If you have a grenade incoming you leave the area you are in. But if you are being shot at by machinegun fire AND a grenade is coming down on you you have a dilemma, either get hit by the grenade blast or venture out of cover into machinegun fire.

There's also been talk in the US marines to remove the machinegun and give everyone higher rate of fire riflesi instead, because the marines are meant for mobile strikes while the army is meant for occupying territory.
Are we going to have artillery in the game? At this level, battalion mortars and division artillery are more or less identical: they're off-map assets either way.
A grenade launcher would fill the role of "fires pieplates over walls". But pretty much any weapon that Solid Snake can get his hands on (like nikita missiles that can turn corners!), up to anything that can be mounted on an infantry fighting vehicle/Landmate is viable. The scale of combat be like this (Lost Planet 2, game with infantry, jetbikes, power armor, robot vehicles, and the occasional elephant sized monster):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6RsvtktipU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOPo1cHqsgs
Not to mention that the military is looking at retiring the M249 SAW because it's heavy at 17 pounds. The currently tested replacement weighs something like 10 pounds or so unloaded. That's actually closer to the 6.5 pounds an empty M4 weighs than to it's M249 predecessor.

I'd actually imagine that even in the "near future", the equivalent firepower of a LMG will be in a weight and size package of an assault rifle, and the two concepts will merge. Your "average" assault rifle will be capable of laying down suppression fire like an LMG and be more mobile like an assault rifle.
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Post by Voss »

TheNotoriousAMP wrote:Set up a google docs for people to add in ideas and brainstorm.


Post your ideas with your username next to em, as well as posting suggestions and improvements below the ideas. It'll go a bit faster than using the forum.

As for casualty rates, I definitely agree here. The problem is that 40k has very boolian levels of gameplay status. A unit is either wounded or its not. And, only if its wounded, usually, it has to then take a morale check.
.
That... doesn't really touch the problems with 40k, particularly modern 40k.
The problem with current editions of 40k is, despite the increasing large battles size (rather than the original skirmish design) almost everything still happens at model level, not the unit level.

A unit is never wounded (unless it is a single model vehicle or MC, and those don't interact with the morale system at all). Models in a unit are wounded, then save (or not, and are dead), and then at the end of that turn phase, a check happens, and then if models dead passes a 25% threshold, then morale happens. Unless, of course, they are fearless, pinned or other some random effect or other special rule which says fuck the morale system. And the flagship armies hit the latter case by default.

Now if you're going with the small skirmish game that 40k actually started with and Ogrebattle mentioned in the OP, this is less of a problem, but it still has knock-on effects throughout the rules.
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Post by OgreBattle »

So one of the main strategies in 40k is to spam one kind of unit ("Heavy infantry" "Hordes", "Light Vehicles", etc.) as chances are your opponent won't have enough of the anti-[your unit] weapons on hand to take them all out.

What are ways to avoid that in a skirmish game, and encourage a variety of units (and weapon types) be taken instead?
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Post by Username17 »

OgreBattle wrote:So one of the main strategies in 40k is to spam one kind of unit ("Heavy infantry" "Hordes", "Light Vehicles", etc.) as chances are your opponent won't have enough of the anti-[your unit] weapons on hand to take them all out.

What are ways to avoid that in a skirmish game, and encourage a variety of units (and weapon types) be taken instead?
In 40K the burden is on your opponent to have the appropriate weapons for the targets you present, which encourages build list spam. In WW2, combined arms existed because different unit types protected each other. Armored vehicles gave mobile cover for infantry to advance through machine gun fire, while infantry defended the flanks and tracks of the armored vehicles from being cheaply destroyed with explosives from enemy infantry.

If your resolution system punished you for not having the right kind of unit available when you were attacked rather than punishing you for not having the appropriate specialist weapons when attacking, then the optimal fighting force would have every type of unit in it.

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Post by Zinegata »

OgreBattle wrote:So one of the main strategies in 40k is to spam one kind of unit ("Heavy infantry" "Hordes", "Light Vehicles", etc.) as chances are your opponent won't have enough of the anti-[your unit] weapons on hand to take them all out.

What are ways to avoid that in a skirmish game, and encourage a variety of units (and weapon types) be taken instead?
The real problem with tabletop skirmish games as compared to real combat is that the latter revolves around spotting and reconnaissance.

In real life weapons are rarely cripplingly overspecialized. A towed anti-tank gun like the 88mm for instance may be a superb tank killer, but any infantryman that gets hit by an 88 shell is pretty much going to go *splat* too. Machineguns may not penetrate a tank's armor, but the constant impact of bullets is going to shake up the crew and prevent the commander from unbuttoning to properly direct the tank.

The winner of most real life fire fights is simply a matter of who spotted first, who fired first, and who started inflicting casualties first. And this is also why it was okay to have a spread of different kinds of weapons in real life - because even if you're shooting an 88mm gun at infantry instead of a tank it will still have a fair level of effectiveness.

Tabletop games... simply have never had any good spotting or stealth mechanics.
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Post by maglag »

I believe it's kinda the other way around. The problem with unit spam in 40K is that you can get units that are effective against pretty much everything, like riptides and plasma. Fragons have been a staple of Eldar not only because they're pretty good anti-tank, but they'll also melt heavy infantry and heroes and pretty much everything except horde infantry.


Meanwhile in the real world a tank costs a crapload more than an anti-tank weapon. On the other hand a soldier with a basic rifle in turn costs a lot less than a soldier with a fancy anti-tank weapon. But the soldier with a rifle can't really do much against the tank. So you need a mix of the three, or you'll be hard countered. As Frank said, the tank can defend infantry from machine guns, while the infantry intercepts any enemies with anti-tank weapons.


So I believe the solution is precisely to make weapons specialized, and avoid weapons that are effective against everything. Plus make infantry much cheaper thank tanks. Right now in 40K a tank costs about as much as 10-20 normal dudes. Heck, basic rhinos cost only as much as 7 guardsman. But meanwhile the real USA army, which is as mechanized as they come, has over one million soldiers for "just" some tens of thousands of tanks, meaning a 100-1 ratio of infantry-tank. So even if your anti-tank weapon makes an infantry go splat, in practice you've just taken out 1% of the enemy power if firing at infantry.
Last edited by maglag on Fri Feb 05, 2016 5:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by OgreBattle »

I could see a system where an anti-tank gun is not more effective than an assault rifle vs regular infantry, while a machinegun is many times more effective.

So spamming missiles means you're undergunned when fighting infiltrating commando infantry.
If your resolution system punished you for not having the right kind of unit available when you were attacked
Any existing tabletop games do this well? Your WW2 example makes me think of a Line of Sight oriented game where you'll want to position the infantry physically behind cover and advance them together while your jetbikes/jetpacks/ninjas appear from the flank to tie up the anti-tank missile launcher.

Now I'm thinking of weapon hyper specialization vs soft counter generalists in that I also like the idea of "if you're machinegunners are riiight behind the mecha they can blast it in its rear armor"
Last edited by OgreBattle on Sat Feb 06, 2016 4:43 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Lokey »

It's your thread, outline what you're looking for better (because a glance through doesn't tell me enough).

Does it have to be warhammer-like but playable by sane people with lives?
How interesting are the mechanics allowed to be?
What are you married to game-design-wise?
Do you have too much money in things that you absolutely must be able to use?

I'm not sure where a point is hit that just do it on the computer makes sense in general and that might be worth looking for. But to help you, need to know that crap.
Last edited by Lokey on Sat Feb 06, 2016 7:15 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Zinegata »

maglag wrote:But meanwhile the real USA army, which is as mechanized as they come, has over one million soldiers for "just" some tens of thousands of tanks, meaning a 100-1 ratio of infantry-tank. So even if your anti-tank weapon makes an infantry go splat, in practice you've just taken out 1% of the enemy power if firing at infantry.
Not really. The majority of the US Army personnel are not infantry. The majority are support personnel or artillery who would never see use on a squad-level tabletop game.

From a "tip of the spear" perspective the US Army was in fact morosely over-armored with about 2 armored vehicles for every infantry squad in the heavy Brigades. This was a big reason why policing Iraq ended up an even bigger fiasco - there just weren't enough trained riflemen to actually do the dirty city fighting needed against the insurgents. This was why the Army is presently moving towards more infantry-heavy Stryker brigades and why so many PMCs were hired.

Frankly the cost of tanks has always been somewhat overstated. The US Army in World War 2 in fact easily managed to supply two tanks for every platoon based on the organic tank battalion attached to every infantry division. This doesn't even count the tanks in the Armored Divisions yet.

By contrast keeping the infantry squads fully manned with trained replacements proved to be a much bigger problem. A trained infantryman is in fact quite a precious asset. Indeed, the British Army of WW2 got to the point where they would rather burn up tanks than infantry by late 1944.
The problem with unit spam in 40K is that you can get units that are effective against pretty much everything, like riptides and plasma. Fragons have been a staple of Eldar not only because they're pretty good anti-tank, but they'll also melt heavy infantry and heroes and pretty much everything except horde infantry.
The issue in real life is that super-effective weapons have to reveal themselves once they open fire, and at that point the enemy is going to be throwing everything at it to take it out. And unlike 40K, even heavily armored vehicles tend to get taken out rather easily in real life - because even if the armor holds the nerves of the crew inside don't.

A typical engagement is more like this: Your German WW2 infantry usually included a very effective LMG, which can mow down that unsuspecting Allied squad, but once it opens fire chances are an unspotted Allied tank is going to pop a shell to take it right out. That Allied tank may then get hit by an unspotted anti-tank gun, which causes the crew to bail and run even if the shot actually bounced. That sort of interaction is never what you see in 40k or pretty much any tableto game.

40K just can't do that. Everything is on the board except the reserves, and even those have to walk in from predictable angles. Heck, there was a time when winning a 40K game was almost entirely a matter of going first - because that side just screams "FIRE EVERYTHING" and pretty much knocks out half of the enemy army right at the outset.
Last edited by Zinegata on Mon Feb 08, 2016 4:07 pm, edited 5 times in total.
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Post by maglag »

My mistake, I should've clarified that the largest part of the USA infantry are actually people from other countries doing the dirty fighting for the USA's profit. It's actually quite the tactical genius, let some other nation bleed their manpower doing the brunt of the fight while your troops mostly hide inside metal boxes or in another continent.

That's why Iraq And Vietnam were kinda fiascos-the USA failed to secure some other nation to deploy large swaths of infantry to do the heavy fighting.

But in WW 2 the english speakers were mostly doing clean up duty after the russian tank rush with even bigger infantry rush wrecked pretty much most of the german armies. The USA spent the first four years of the war just safely teching up while building up their economy while somebody else actually did the fighting, only risking any troops when the german people started to consider learning russian.
Last edited by maglag on Mon Feb 08, 2016 4:17 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by Zinegata »

maglag wrote:But in WW 2 the english speakers were mostly doing clean up duty after the russian tank rush with even bigger infantry rush wrecked pretty much most of the german armies. The USA spent the first four years of the war just safely teching up while building up their economy while somebody else actually did the fighting, only risking any troops when the german people started to consider learning russian.
The Russians did not want to do infantry charges to begin with. The official Red Army Infantry Division in 1941 in fact mirrored the German Infantry division almost exactly; with the German unit having 16,000 personnel but of whom only 3,000 were actual riflemen. Everyone else manned or supplied the artillery and heavy weapons.

Indeed the official Red Army Division of 1941 had about the same proportion of riflemen but had even more big guns and tanks in support because... Russians.

The issue is that they didn't actually have enough ammunition or heavy weapons to actually equip their Divisions to German standards, which is why the typical Soviet Infantry Division of 1942 had less than 10,000 men serving as plain old riflemen with very little heavy weapons. Having one rifle for every two men (the popular British myth) wasn't a problem compared to the real shortages in heavy weapons and artillery that the Red Army faced in 1941-43.

This is why Russian losses were so heavy to begin with - they were using Napoleon/Civil War era tactics against an enemy that used modern artillery and machine guns. The Germans in fact used more ammunition than the Russians all the way to 1943.

It wasn't until 1944 that Soviet ammunition production finally reached a level where they could rely on artillery rather than blood; at which point Russian casualties to combat decreased dramatically (their "heavy" losses in 1944 were actually mostly caused by disease) while German combat losses correspondingly increased.

Even so, despite the oft-quoted Russian worship of artillery (and their huge number of pieces produced), the Americans in fact fired more shells in 1944-1945 than the Red Army did for almost the entire war; and the US Army correspondingly had comparatively light losses.

Swamping people with infantry was simply never that effective. The amount of bullets and high explosives you actually throw at the enemy is the greatest determinant of an army's lethality; and riflemen are in fact among the least efficient ways of delivering them.
Last edited by Zinegata on Tue Feb 09, 2016 3:43 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Chamomile »

I started making a thing. Now currently it lacks important balance considerations like actual units or equipment, but I wanted to make sure that my basic rules aren't broken before I start nailing down army lists.
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Post by souran »

have you guys looked at Warpath/Warpath firefight? Warpath proper seems like a very clever implementation. Much like their Fantasy analog (Kings of War) the game utilizes some rules concepts from warmaster/epic 40k while shifting the size of the confrontation just a little large than the typical warhammer
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Post by OgreBattle »

Chamomile wrote:I started making a thing. Now currently it lacks important balance considerations like actual units or equipment, but I wanted to make sure that my basic rules aren't broken before I start nailing down army lists.
Looks solid, though the choice between inches/hex/grid might get confusing as you add more to the document.

I like that the overwatch mechanic encourages a variety of units covering each other so a machine gun nest on overwatch is forced to plink off of an armored vehicle and not the infantry moving up after it.

Activating platoons in order also makes for strategies where you try to kill off units in the platoon that will activate next.

---

Warpath, taking a look at it. I haven't found a PDF for warpath: firefight though, is it available anywhere?
Last edited by OgreBattle on Tue Feb 16, 2016 4:38 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Grek »

OgreBattle wrote:
Chamomile wrote:I started making a thing. Now currently it lacks important balance considerations like actual units or equipment, but I wanted to make sure that my basic rules aren't broken before I start nailing down army lists.
Looks solid, though the choice between inches/hex/grid might get confusing as you add more to the document
The fuck? These rules are shit. Let's look at just attacking.

First, you declare an attack action vs a squad. The attack itself is not resolved until the Firing Phase, which occurs after all attack declarations. Once you've declared an attack action, that squad ends its turn. Reasonable enough.

During the Firing Phase, you add up the Rate of Fire for all squad weapons for which Weapon Damage ≥ Armour of Enemy With Highest Armour. Let's say you a 5 man squad with five rifles with Damage 1 RoF 1 and a single rocket launcher with Damage 5 RoF 0.5, and you're fighting an enemy squad where the enemy officer has armour 2 and the grunts are all unarmored. You've got three options:

A] Fire Rocket Launcher, ignore Grunts. This gives you an effective damage of 5 per person and an effective RoF of 1. You get to shoot one target, which is the officer for 5 damage. Huzzah.
B] Fire Rifles, ignore Officer. This gives you an effective damage of 1 per person and an effective RoF of 5. You shoot three grunts for 1 damage and automatically concentrate fire on #4 for 2 damage while ignoring the officer completely. Remember, weapons with damage value less than the armour of the most armoured enemy in the squad are ignored. You MUST exclude the officer, or all of your rifles whiff against everyone in the entire enemy squad.
C] Shoot EVERYTHING at the Grunts. Again, you exclude the officer (because otherwise you don't get to use your rifles at all) but this time they also get a rocket launcher to the face. Your have an effective damage of 5 per person and an effective RoF of 5. You shoot Grunts 1-3 for 5 damage and #4 for 6. But the officer is, again, completely unharmed.

You cannot, however, have your rocket launcher shoot the officer while your other guys engage the unprotected grunts. Because that's crazy talk.
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Post by Chamomile »

Grek wrote: B] Fire Rifles, ignore Officer. This gives you an effective damage of 1 per person and an effective RoF of 5. You shoot three grunts for 1 damage and automatically concentrate fire on #4 for 2 damage while ignoring the officer completely.
Concentrating fire increases damage against everyone, because it's the same roll made against all targets. I originally had a model-for-model targeting system but that involved making ~30 rolls per platoon. Keeping it to one roll per squad means that resolution time is somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-10 minutes per turn, minimizing the amount of time that the other guy spends standing around doing nothing (particularly in 3-4 army battles). The rule about bullets plinking off of high armor is important to prevent riflemonkeys and gunners from concentrating fire on a tank and blowing it to pieces.

Now, none of this solves the problem that you can't target a big gun at a power-armored super ape leading a squad and target all your little guns against the squad infantry, I'm just pointing all of it out to make sure the rules are clear going forward. And splitting your fire like that should probably be possible, so I can tweak the rules such that you can contribute RoF so long as the model you're targeting with it can be affected by the weapon doing the targeting. But you started by saying "let's just look at attacking" which would imply that you see other flaws that you haven't yet elaborated on, and "these rules are shit" certainly implies that there's more to your criticism than an edge case bit of wonkiness solved by a one-line edit, so.
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Post by Grek »

OK, how about the facts that sniper rifles make the best gun for leaping out of a closet to shoot someone with; that damage and accuracy are only distinct on paper; that overrun is an all or nothing event where only one side can ever take casualties; or that that the terms "break" "rout" and "wound" are undefined, making the entire system impossible to evaluate?

The attack rules are just a particular example of the flaws pervasive in the ruleset.
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Post by Chamomile »

Grek wrote:OK, how about the facts that sniper rifles make the best gun for leaping out of a closet to shoot someone with;
Sniper rifles do not appear anywhere in the document.
that damage and accuracy are only distinct on paper;
They contribute to the same end result - more dead doods - but they're called different things because they go up and down based on different things, so they get called different things for the sake of clarity. If this is some kind of actual problem then you are going to have to explain what that problem is. If all you're trying to do is convince me that my work is bad and I should stop, then fuck off. I'm looking to actually solve the problems, not just be notified that they exist, and in any case I'm not just going to take your word for it that they're there.
that overrun is an all or nothing event where only one side can ever take casualties;
Yeah, that's been bugging me too, I don't want to make CQC too complicated but it probably needs more than it's got.
or that that the terms "break" "rout" and "wound" are undefined, making the entire system impossible to evaluate?
"Break" doesn't appear anywhere in the document. For purposes of a single skirmish, "wound" and "rout" both just mean the model is removed from the field.
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Post by Grek »

By "Sniper rifile" I mean any weapon intended for use at long range. Since every distance closer to range gives +1 accuracy, the ideal use for a long range weapon is actually to get as close to the enemy as possible with it for massive bonuses.

When attacking, you compare armour vs damage to see if you are allowed to attack and then add accuracy + damage +/- range modifier to determine injury dice, there's no such thing as a high accuracy/low damage weapon - "accuracy" actually translates to "non-armour penetrating damage bonus" for all practical purposes.
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Post by Chamomile »

When attacking, you compare armour vs damage to see if you are allowed to attack and then add accuracy + damage +/- range modifier to determine injury dice, there's no such thing as a high accuracy/low damage weapon
Yes, that is correct. There is in fact no such thing as a high accuracy/low damage weapon. A bullet is accurate insofar as it is capable of maintaining a straight flight path over a long distance, which means being accurate across long distances necessarily means that it is traveling faster and will have an easier time penetrating targets.

Now, there is a sniper rifle problem, although it has nothing to do with what you're saying and is instead about using the sniper's high damage and accuracy and then dropping it into a squad of dirt cheap SMGs to increase RoF and hit an entire enemy squad with sniper level power. Which is solved by giving the sniper rifle a special feature that makes it incapable of combining fire, and instead either allow it to fire at a single target as a special action or have sniper rifles only wieldable by specific models with special features that allow them to break off from the squad you bought them with and act as an independent fireteam.
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Post by Username17 »

Chamomile wrote:There is in fact no such thing as a high accuracy/low damage weapon.
Very difficult to miss with a sawed off shotgun or a flame thrower within their limited attack cone. Neither is all that good at penetrating vehicle armor or even body armor, but they don't "miss" very often. High rates of fire translate into hitting more often in actual firefights because shit's crazy and most of your individual bullets are going to miss regardless so shooting thirty of them is the best chance you're going to be able to get. A physically heavier weapon has more inertia, which means it moves less passively - which makes it better at holding a shot that you have taken time to line up but equally makes it worse at bringing to bare on a target on short notice. So the extreme example is the howitzer, which can accurately strike a target two kilometers away, but is essentially useless at hitting someone running around within 30 meters of you.

So you're just totally wrong.

But we're actually talking about science fiction, which has additional weapons like lasers and gyrojets that are far more accurate than any bullet can be and yet have whatever damage profiles you say they have. A laser can be small like a 40k lasgun or large like a 40k lascannon, but in either case the beam travels at the intergalactic speed limit and goes as straight as the curvature of space will allow anything to be.

Within the context of science fiction warfare, you are more wrong. Which is an achievement, considering how very wrong you are just talking about 20th century weapon systems.

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Post by Chamomile »

FrankTrollman wrote:On the other hand, if accuracy was folded into armor penetration or damage rolls, the best weapons against an opponent could be more situational, which in turn leads to more interesting tactics.
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Post by Chamomile »

So, how does stealth work in a miniatures wargame? Can it work at all?
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Post by Schleiermacher »

I can see three options.

1. Hidden information, you know that there are units there but not what kind of units they are, until they reveal it by acting. Possibly they can perform some actions without revealing what they are, by sticking to lowest common denominator attacks and such. Probably not feasible in a miniatures game, but works well with tokens.

2. Stealth is an ability that units have that makes it more difficult to draw LoS to them. Whether by making them invisible at a certain range, by making cover or concealment more effective for them, or what not. This allows units to advance safely but other than that, acts very un-stealth-like in practice.

3. Stealthy units can be inserted onto the battlefield mid-fight by "coming out of hiding" where they "were all along" and acting as normal troops from then on. This obviously needs limitations for game balance, but those could work in a variety of possible ways, or be hybridized with version #1 for units whose "approximate" position is known and can potentially be "flushed out" before they reveal themselves. (By having an insertion point marker which can move around, but also be attacked to trigger and/or destroy it.)

None of these are perfect, which one works best depends on what role you want stealthy units to have in your metagame I think.
Last edited by Schleiermacher on Sat Feb 20, 2016 11:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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