Making a balanced 40k esque tabletop wargame

[K]

I was recently playing Brink of Battle and I noticed how much fun it was when someone had an actual choice to make that was either as an out-of-turn response to other people's actions and/or a floating extra action on your turn.

BoB is interesting to me because it's a game that is supposed to be for all kinds of models, but it does seem to be a clone of a lot of other wargames.

[Username17]

I was recently playing Brink of Battle and I noticed how much fun it was when someone had an actual choice to make that was either as an out-of-turn response to other people's actions and/or a floating extra action on your turn.

Response choices need to be prompted and rare. Nothing slows the game down more than asking another player if they want to use their interrupt now or now or now...

So in that shock maneuver that was being discussed, the player whose troops were being shocked might have the option of ordering their troops to stand fast, which would give them a bonus on their defensive sustained fire but cause them to take cqc casualties if the shock succeeded anyway. But that choice should come at a specific prompt - the player whose turn it is shouldn't have to put a lot of elipses into their sentences in case the other player has an interrupt.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

I recently tried out Deus Vult, where a lot of units have responses to being charged or shot. Most of them are no-brainers ('would you like to use your spears to fend off the cavalry, or would you prefer to be trampled into a shallow grave?'); the only one which seemed like an actual choice was one which let a unit boost their defense against ranged attacks in exchange for not being able to move on their next activation. That seems like it could work in a pseudo-modern context, hitting the dirt for a kind of voluntary pinning.

[OgreBattle]

I want to completely avoid off turn prompts ( so it can be played online asynchronously), reactions would either be baked into the unit stats or determined on that players turn. Basically "you activated my trap card!" Is acceptable but " I tap two islands and counterspell" is not

[Lokathor]

You Activated My Trap Card is an off turn prompt that prevents easy asynchronous play via PbP/ email, you'd have to have it all worked into a specialized client. Not saying you can't do it, but that it might run counter to your goals.

However, not having any off turn stuff at all is boring as hell, and makes people go play other games or read books while they wait 15 minutes for you to do your thing on your turn. So if there's no off turn stuff, turns should be really short to keep everyone paying attention.

[OgreBattle]

You Activated My Trap Card is an off turn prompt that prevents easy asynchronous play via PbP/ email, you'd have to have it all worked into a specialized client. Not saying you can't do it, but that it might run counter to your goals.

I was thinking of tablets and phones, where trap cards would go off automatically.

However, not having any off turn stuff at all is boring as hell, and makes people go play other games or read books while they wait 15 minutes for you to do your thing on your turn. So if there's no off turn stuff, turns should be really short to keep everyone paying attention.

Could have folks rolling saving throws, and aiming for a scale where the turns are quick. Though personally for me I'm invested in seeing things like "lololol he missed every shot" and "wtf cheatydice how can he roll so many 6's"

[Judging__Eagle]

Wow.

Just. Wow. I never really realized just how Epic 40k worked; but it seems like it could have taken some notes from Warmaster's orders issuing and turn-ending mechanic.

In WM, the ending a units actions could be done voluntarily; or until the commander failed their Ld check (and which became more difficult the more were issued, the further the distance, etc.). Which kept the commander from issuing any more orders. When your army commander failed their check; your army could issue no more orders.

Some sort of hybrid "switch sides" and "Leadership burnout" mechanic is one way of approaching this.

The idea of using Titans and 40k armies as chess pieces is actually pretty fascinating. The idea of being able to be deceptive about the application of a titan is interesting. I could even see wargaming use as a rangefinder for indirect fire weapons that the IG is famous for like mortar teams and basilisks.

[TheNotoriousAMP]

Considering we are talking about a platoon sized game (750 points 40k) I would suggest using the command stance system from Fantasy Flight Game's Battles of Napoleon, Eagle and the Lion: Here's the rulebook, skip[ to page 23. Essentially you draw command chits from a cup for each of your unit groupings (in this case, a couple of units and a commander, in the case of what we are talking about, individual squads). Each chit has a number on it, which is its initiative, adding a little randomness to the game. Each chit has 4 options, attack (must move towards enemy, slower), defend (must stay in place, with bonus towards morale), move (move to an objective, bonus to movement, can't get in contact with enemy and reserve (huge malus if attacked, bonus to command cards).

An addition to this system is something I thought of earlier today when I should have been working on getting traffic tickets prepped for court: reference point based movement. Pack the gameboard with terrain and then each player gets a certain number of reference points to work with. Each piece of terrain gets a reference point (forest, bunker, ect), and the players then get an additional number of ref points based on armies (more heirachal and pre planned get more, more improvisational get less). These ref points are then used to move units. Each of your personal ref points are are placed on the board, but the number should be hidden from the enemy and they cannot use them for their own units. Sort of how platoon and company sized operations are planned today, with goals being to take that farm house and then exploit the attack into the gully outside, ect.

That way, you start off the game with each unit having a stance and a ref point. These stances and ref points can be subsequently changed by the CO, or by intermediary officers, but this should 1- be a managed resource and 2- incur potential dangers if the leaders aren't up to snuff.

I would place a gameboard as 4x4 feet, with it representing one square kilometer. Be careful of making combat range too large though. Most firefights are fought at about 100 meters anyway. Its not weapon range that counts, its the ability to spot and aim at the enemy.

[Username17]

I want to completely avoid off turn prompts ( so it can be played online asynchronously), reactions would either be baked into the unit stats or determined on that players turn. Basically "you activated my trap card!" Is acceptable but " I tap two islands and counterspell" is not

This is pretty much totally wrong. Trap cards are completely incompatible with asynchronous play. They require the game to be continuously observed by something or someone who knows the trap card's trigger conditions who is also empowered to stop play and adjudicate its effects. You can't do that asynchronously with a table top game at all. A computer could handle it, but only by simulating the entire game - at which point we are not talking about a tabletop game and can discuss shit like fog of war and 3dimensional space.

There are times when you hand the dice across the table, and the time for your opponent to make a choice is then. So when you force your enemy to make a morale test, that is when they have the option to have one of their commisars shoot a dude instead of rolling, or spending one of their limited inspiring speech tokens for a reroll or whatever. Making response choices is fun and interesting, but it should happen when it's time for you to have the dice fort some other reason. You should never be interrupting the other player's declarations with your own.

-Username17

[Laertes]

Making it totally asynchronous is another interesting design mechanism. As Frank points out this makes direct interactivity difficult - you have to think in terms of "freezing" your army in place when it's your opponent's turn, and then "freezing" their army when it's your turn.

I think a fun mechanic in that case might be lots of speculative orders. You would tell a unit to hit the dirt if you thought they might get fired on, or tell them to flee if they got charged. You could make this fun either as a perfect information game or an imperfect information game. If it was perfect information, you would be dummying them, giving units subtly wrong orders to deceive them as to your intentions and draw them into traps. They would be sitting there thinking, "he told those guys to withdraw if charged but those other guys to stand and fire if charged. Why? What's he planning?" That would be fun.

Alternatively, you could record your speculative orders on face-down bits of paper. This would create an imperfect information game, which has a lot more uncertainty and a lot less mind games in it. It's much less a Game and much more a Simulation, and you might want that or you might not.

NotoriousAMP:
A 4'x4' table is roughly 1.2 metres on a side. If a 28mm model represents a 1.8m tall human, then that 4'x4' table is the equivalent of 80m on a side. As a result, if you're doing it to scale then this is firmly in close quarters firefight territory. There is no real difference between a battle rifle and an assault rifle on such a size of table, and most heavier weapons are going to be grotesquely oversized for it. You either need to go out of scale, or have comically short ranged weapons and get ready to taste the salty tears of the sort of paramilitary nerds who rage that Shadowrun weaponry "is totally unrealistic and the designers completely dropped the ball."

[TheNotoriousAMP]

NotoriousAMP:
A 4'x4' table is roughly 1.2 metres on a side. If a 28mm model represents a 1.8m tall human, then that 4'x4' table is the equivalent of 80m on a side. As a result, if you're doing it to scale then this is firmly in close quarters firefight territory. There is no real difference between a battle rifle and an assault rifle on such a size of table, and most heavier weapons are going to be grotesquely oversized for it. You either need to go out of scale, or have comically short ranged weapons and get ready to taste the salty tears of the sort of paramilitary nerds who rage that Shadowrun weaponry "is totally unrealistic and the designers completely dropped the ball."

To be fair, every single game not made by morons or those with really huge basements abstracts unit size and board scale. Fantasy Battles does this more than 40k though. The 28mm scale is mostly so that people can make pretty models without them being too huge, as well as actually allowing you to view your models. If you went purely to scale, then a 6 foot wide board would contain a single ten man squad scattered across it. If we are going for a platoon level game, or even a company level game (which is also possible) then you can just have the ratio be man to man and the distance scale be on a different level.

The core problem seems to be in managing the scale at which firefights occur while also making terrain building reasonable. Terrain, if you go for a platoon style game where its very much wysiwyg, needs to be relatively on scale with the models. Which naturally compresses dead space in between the pieces of terrain. Firefights, on the other hand, cannot be taking place across the board as that nullifies movement and bringing firepower to bear. GW seems to like 12 inches (rapid fire range) as the ideal firefight range, with 24 inches being less effective long range stuff, and 3-4 feet being heavy weapon and harassing fire stuff.

So, lets bring the board size down scale wise to 500m x 500m, which is reasonable for a futuristic platoon scale warzone. Human detection range without special equipment is about 100m (grounds never truly flat), so reasonably one model can only impact about 25% of the board, easing movement.

This places the difference in scale between board and model at about 5-6 to 1, which is fairly reasonable. You can traverse a 500m distance in about 3-5 minutes jogging/marching at a decent pace. Even walking, you're still covering it in 6-7 minutes. If you keep this in mind, it actually makes a very different game than most.

Right now, most movement in games occurs at a snail pace, with the danger coming from active engagement and the enemy causing casualties to you. If you want to stop a squad from occupying a post, you can shoot it to death before it gets there. Essentially, movement and everything is active, since its all unopposed.

However, if you combine this rapid pace of movement with simultaneous action, both players are forced to consider what their opponents are planning on doing much more seriously. Lets say a game represents an hour long period of contact. That means that a turn is about 7-10 minutes depending on how many you want. Essentially, a model, unopposed, can make it all the way to the other edge of the board in one turn. If you take this into consideration, now movement becomes much more reactive.

Now, if you want to stop an enemy squad from taking an objective, you either need to have a squad on the objective, or a squad already in a position that can cover the open ground between where the enemy squad is and where it needs to go. Essentially, blocking enemy movement occurs from decisions made in the previous turn, which means that it becomes a much faster moving game, with the player's intentions determining the flow of movement and combat, not artificially slow movement rates.

As a final note, a way around I go you go, would be for both players to alternate who moves first, and who decides combat first and then for casualties to occur at the same time.

[Laertes]

I support your ideas regarding movement and distance; I think it needs to be possible to move "up to contact" very quickly but then move much slower across ground which is being watched by enemies. It means that small scouting sections or sniper/spotter teams can really hold back enemy movement in a way that's quite fun.

Something that I'd like to design for, as you can see in my Chews On Scenery thread, is the idea of a battle consisting of multiple short contacts rather than a single decisive one. Combining that with flowing movement would result in something which I think is very fun.

[OgreBattle]

I've been looking at Infinity's gameplay explanation videos and it looks like a fun game. Anyone have experience with it?

[Dean]

Yes. I found its pace to be much to my disliking, a sentiment the person I was trying the game with agreed to on review of the game. My memory is that Infinity's rules allow very powerful reactions, seemingly more powerful than their actual actions. This can make the game feel very punishing. Imagine two 3-man squads fighting each other. If the first squad walks up to the other and shoots it will generate three shots. If the second squad doesn't die they can all go on overwatch. If the first squad then moves or shoots each man will take an overwatch shot from every member of the opposing squad which is 9 shots.
While this might accurately portray an environment where suppression and area control are important it does make just doing anything seem extremely punishing. And that not doing anything and waiting for your opponent to do something seems like the better move.

[TheNotoriousAMP]

Yes. I found its pace to be much to my disliking, a sentiment the person I was trying the game with agreed to on review of the game. My memory is that Infinity's rules allow very powerful reactions, seemingly more powerful than their actual actions. This can make the game feel very punishing. Imagine two 3-man squads fighting each other. If the first squad walks up to the other and shoots it will generate three shots. If the second squad doesn't die they can all go on overwatch. If the first squad then moves or shoots each man will take an overwatch shot from every member of the opposing squad which is 9 shots.
While this might accurately portray an environment where suppression and area control are important it does make just doing anything seem extremely punishing. And that not doing anything and waiting for your opponent to do something seems like the better move.

I've had very similar experiences with infinity, the main problem I've always had is that its a very terrain heavy and wysiwyg type of game, yet they don't really take advantage of this. People move slowly and its assumed that if the person can see you through the terrain, he saw you first. Personally, infinity could be made better with a spotting system. If the person who gets a chance to overwatch was spotted first, the guy moving 1-shoots first and 2- gets a bonus for surprise. That way overwatch still remains powerful, while also rewarding recon and aggression.

[OgreBattle]

With infinity, the simplest solution to that would be to make reactionary fire less accurate.


Fleshing out the stats and resolutions system

The stats need enough variety for a diverse array of troops; infantry (from crappy to elite commandos), powered armor, 3 meter tall robots, and maybe some infantry fighting vehicles, maybe. Here's some visual inspiration:

Plus having room for space orks and space dinosaurs, so there should be a difference between "human protected by hard armor" you shoot with a high velocity armor piercer and "heavily muscled fungus wearing scrap metal" that you hit with a shotgun slug. What kind of stats would I need to get that granularity, without being too complicated?

Should an infantry fighting vehicle or 2.5 meter tall robot use different 'hitpoint' rules than a regular infantryman? I don't really like how 40k has armor values as something entirely different from toughness/armor save.

How about resolution systems for handling multiple fireteams of 1-4 guys shooting at one another?

[TiaC]

Hey, Appleseed! Awesome inspiration.

[Username17]

If you want to distinguish between two types of toughness you need at least two stats. What those stats are called is immaterial. They could be armor class and hit points, armor save and toughness, armor value and strength - whatever. Your casualties per shot are simply one divided by the number of shots to penetrate armor and by the number of shots to overcome the target's hit points. With most rngs you might use, increasing your attack's bonus against the defense that is relatively high will be a bigger boon that increasing your bonus against a defense that is low. For example: if your gauss rifle needs a 4+ on a d6 to overcome an armored trooper's strength and a 6+ to overcome their armor value, then getting +1 ap would double inflicted casualties, while getting +1 damage would only increase casualties by 33%.

So at the most basic, differentiating between armored soldiers against whom you want to use armor piercing lasers and space dinosaurs against whom you want to use explosive needle shells is a solved problem. Wargames stumbled on the solution to that issue before I was born.

The actual issue is what you want to apply against armor value and strength. The simple games workshop method is to give each weapon a damage and armor penetration number, which in turn means that it is a simple mathhammer exercise to determine what weapons are best against the enemies you have. 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.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

The actual issue is what you want to apply against armor value and strength. The simple games workshop method is to give each weapon a damage and armor penetration number, which in turn means that it is a simple mathhammer exercise to determine what weapons are best against the enemies you have. 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.

-Username17

What do you mean by this? I understand how Strength/AP works for warhammer weapons, but I'm not entirely clear what this 'more tactically interesting' approach you mention is. Do you mean something like "a highly trained marksman can penetrate power armor with a pistol shot, but a conscript can't" situation?

So if you need a 5+ on a d6 to hit and roll a 6, your shot has "armor piercing 1"
But if you need a 2+ to hit and roll a 6, your shot has "armor piercing 4"

Then you add in accuracy modifiers for cover, movement, velocity trackers that ignore movement modifiers, thermal scanners that ignore cover mods, flanking modifiers, vehicle armor facing, etc...

[Laertes]

Applying Trollmancy for a moment:
I think in this case "situational" means stuff like range and position on the battlefield, which target is moving, whether either is attacking from ambush, et cetera. It's the sort of thing that makes for a tactically interesting game but unsatisfying list-building.

[Username17]

Let's say you add accuracy to damage, and that accuracy is one higher at short range than at medium range. Let us also say that we can get 5 weapon carrying dudes for the price of 3 weapon carrying dudes with a weapon that does +1 damage. Now let us posit a space dinosaur whose strength is overcome by the normal dudes at medium range on a 6+.

So at medium range, the guys with bigger weapons are twice as good. At close range, they are only fifty percent better. At medium range, 3 big gunners has the offensive output against the space dinosaur of 6 regular gunners, but at close range only four and a half.

This makes in-game tactics matter more, and list building matter less, as Laertes said.

-Username17

[Laertes]

Ogrebattle:

When you talk about your three faction ideas, could you go into a little more detail about how you foresee these things?

For example, Marines being durable. Okay, cool. There's two ways I can think to model that in a game, both of which would be fun: by having each marine be absurdly tough and difficult to kill so that each marine's death becomes a big deal and a potential turning point in the game; or by having marines able to soak casualties so that a squad which has lost three of its eight members is still able to fight as though they're nearly at full strength? The first gives us individual marines which are durable but an army which is pretty fragile, while the second gives us individual marines which die pretty easily but an army which is really durable. Each is cool, each is workable and each is flavoursome, but they're very different.

I was thinking about having marines work in little fireteams, where each guy has their own role and so the squad is made much stronger by their inclusion. So a five man fireteam that goes NCO, antitank, grenadier, LMG, marksman would be amazingly good since it would tentpole off each of them. This does strongly lead to a "durable marines, crumbly army" paradigm though, since every loss is a specialist the others were relying on and so it's hard for the others to cover the gaps. If this is what you want then cool. If not then not.

[Username17]

I was thinking about having marines work in little fireteams, where each guy has their own role and so the squad is made much stronger by their inclusion. So a five man fireteam that goes NCO, antitank, grenadier, LMG, marksman would be amazingly good since it would tentpole off each of them. This does strongly lead to a "durable marines, crumbly army" paradigm though, since every loss is a specialist the others were relying on and so it's hard for the others to cover the gaps. If this is what you want then cool. If not then not.

Not necessarily. If you run on a "defender removes losses" model (which speeds up play, because you have the person physically picking up the models and placing them in the box also choosing which to remove), then having squads with different roles and powers for each model would make the squad quite durable. If you need to shut down the anti-tank guy or the comms specialist, you're going to have to wipe out the whole damn squad, because obviously the other player is going to choose the most vital team member for the situation as the last casualty.

-Username17

[Laertes]

Not necessarily. If you run on a "defender removes losses" model (which speeds up play, because you have the person physically picking up the models and placing them in the box also choosing which to remove), then having squads with different roles and powers for each model would make the squad quite durable. If you need to shut down the anti-tank guy or the comms specialist, you're going to have to wipe out the whole damn squad, because obviously the other player is going to choose the most vital team member for the situation as the last casualty.

It depends on the rhythm of the game. If two units meeting and exchanging fire is a thing that goes on until one of them is annihilated, then yes I agree with you. If units are bounding in and out of fights with relatively low losses and frequently change their targets, then the loss of any guy is going to remove that tentpole and result in that unit now being weak in that particular way - which then means that the enemy can now target them with the thing that they're weak against.

The second possibility is based on the assumption that individual units are fairly multi-role and that there is an array of target types on the field. If this stops being true then you're back to Imperial Guard style squads where you have a heavy bolter and nine spare lives for it.

[TheNotoriousAMP]

It depends on the rhythm of the game. If two units meeting and exchanging fire is a thing that goes on until one of them is annihilated, then yes I agree with you. If units are bounding in and out of fights with relatively low losses and frequently change their targets, then the loss of any guy is going to remove that tentpole and result in that unit now being weak in that particular way - which then means that the enemy can now target them with the thing that they're weak against.

The second possibility is based on the assumption that individual units are fairly multi-role and that there is an array of target types on the field. If this stops being true then you're back to Imperial Guard style squads where you have a heavy bolter and nine spare lives for it.

To be fair, even today most combat squads are basically "the machine gunner and his far less useful buddies". I think the core question in this is whether or not we want to have vehicles playing an important part in the game. If no, then the squads have to be designed around what their weapons do to enemy infantry and the individual roles in ensuring movement and establishing a base of fire. If yes, then individual roles matter a lot less and its more about rifle/bigger faster firing rifle/anti tank shit.

Personally, I don't think that armored vehicles belong in games under battalion level. It just makes it too much about list building, as you're not sure whether your opponent is taking armor or not and thus have to plan accordingly. Plus, armor would mess up the normal flow of movement, considering they can basically cross the field of play in about 45 seconds. I'd keep the core of things infantry vs infantry and maybe include vehicles later.