Post by Adam on Jul 22, 2009 10:16:36 GMT -5
Hey all. I just thought I'd give a run-down of my decisions and ideas in going from the previous version to this one. I only wish I'd kept a version numbering system, because this would easily be version 20-odd by now.
Duel of Steel, through all its many incarnations, has never been a particularly fast game. Stuff dies at an unholy rate, but actually resolving rounds of shooting has, historically, taken bloody ages. This is mostly due to the complicated damage systems. Realistic and interesting they may have been, but they were just too much. This time round, I eschewed some of the realism - ditching the precise location system - and changed the stats so that they'd be more easily interpreted on the field. Also, you no longer need D6s, which is convenient.
Scale
A couple of days ago, I decided to scale the ranges down. Instead of using the 40k-style 6" range step, I slashed all the ranges by two thirds and cut it down to increments of 4". This means that 72" is now 48", 24" is 16", and so on. This is to tighten up the game and make the longer ranges a bit more worth buying.
Correspondingly, though, the mechs were now a bit too big (6" superheavy with 16" guns? Er). It also happens that finding parts for heavies is almost impossible, because the only model out there that's actually a proper 4" tall is the Wraithlord, and that's hardly heavy, now is it. We're also missing out on the possibilities of using heavy infantry to make mechs with. Fixing this was fairly easy - I just reduced all the sizes by about an inch. It throws my mech models off a little, but I'm not that bothered, as they're only guidelines really.
Stats
Sorry, Mass. You may have allowed my game to beat every other game's Wounds/Hits characteristics by an order of magnitude and then some, but then I came up with a better way. Mass is now System, a stat that (on the basic profiles) ranges from 1 to 7, with bigger mechs having higher values. System heals an amount of mass damage each turn - there's a standard mass damage grid now, of 24 boxes for a light mech, with an additional row of four boxes per size. (There's a similar serious damage grid, but it's half the size and has much nastier damage results at the bottom.) System also governs how many weapons you can fire after moving.
Psychology is gone entirely after I decided that morale in this context was rubbish, and only really spoiled a game. Reflexes is gone - there are no more Reflexes tests needed in the game now, anyway - in favour of Swiftness, which decides how hard the mech is to hit. I've thrown out almost all the to-hit modifiers except for the cover-related ones.
On the weaponry side, Strength and AP are replaced with Damage and Multiplier, both two-part stats (i.e. you might have a Damage of 4/3). The first number deals with mass damage, the second deals with serious damage. Damage is subtracted from the target's Armour, a value which you try and beat on a D10 to cause a point of damage. You roll the amount of dice in your Multiplier stat per hit. It's much simpler than the old Strength-dice-roll-stat system, and does pretty much everything that system did, too. Melee weapons have undergone the same change.
Turn sequence
Much the same, except that I renamed the Environment phase as the Situation phase - Environment isn't really as apt a name when the vast majority of things that will happen in it involve mechs undergoing damage control (healing with their System stats).
Terrain
No more weak terrain or dangerous terrain (I left flammable terrain in there because it's fun). Weak terrain's only going to slow a game down, and I'm pretty sure that if a ganger can build a mech by himself he can build it with good enough stabilisers to deal with old crappy tarmac that crumbles underfoot, or whatever. Dangerous terrain just struck me as something people would never use in a normal game - who builds mines in their house anyway? - and will be reintroduced as part of the fortifications section in the advanced rules (for base-attack type scenarios). Night fighting's also gone, because mechs have good enough sensors to ignore it, and if they can shrug off railgun hits they shouldn't be too bothered by the sodding night... Again, it was just something that players would never really use, and which wouldn't bring much to a game really.
Movement
You know all that stuff about jumping down from a height, crossing linear obstacles, stepping over gaps, smashing through terrain...? Yeah, I should have realised that was rubbish ages ago. Just situational page-fluff. Again, a 25 metre mech that can survive several hits from an anti-tank siege cannon shouldn't be too bothered about jumping off a cliff! The movement section now fits into a single page, including the rules for jump jets, being moved, and knockdown. That's better. Mechs can now run, too, which doubles their Speed but restricts them to firing only light weapons, and prevents charging. That's to help assault mechs get up the table reasonably quickly, and provide additional mobility wherever necessary.
Shooting
How many weapons you can fire is now governed by your System stat. You roll to hit using D10+Ranged vs Swiftness, and roll to damage using the new Dmg/Mul system. Why did I do it like this? Simplicity and speed. It's one more dice roll than the previous system (four, including the grid column roll, but that's only one D10) but they're entirely uncomplicated dice rolls. Hopefully, this will make the game a lot quicker.
Damage results on the serious damage grid are much the same, only compressed. Pilot Stunned, Reactor Disrupted, Joint Damaged/Wrecked and Weapon Offline don't exist there any more. (Weapon Offline snuck into the mass damage grid.) The mass damage grid has two WOs in the middle of the bottom row surrounded by six stat penalties. I took out the non-permanent results from the serious damage grid because the System... uh... system makes things slightly different now (well, and it's a bit annoying to have mechs wandering around with half their weapons inactive, or stunned, but otherwise fine - the new DoS is a bit more 'all or nothing'). There are no more non-permanent results; damage results apply until repaired.
Melee
I dropped charge interception from the rules. You're not going to remember it for a few games, and after that it's situational, but broken (or exploitable, rather) in the right situation. You can get a similar effect with the Counter-attack MWSR, but you have to equip the mech specifically for it that way, which is fine by me. Mostly though, I removed it because it's plain annoying - you might have to measure the reach distances to and from several enemy models en route to a target, making sure your mech's at the closest point each time... it could cause quite a lot of arguments mid-game, which is never good.
Melee to-hit rolls are now D10+Assault equalling or beating Swiftness, and parry rolls are the same, too - so mechs with a high Swiftness are more difficult to parry, as it should be. An advantageous side-effect of the new DoS system is that light mechs finally have some survivability. With Swiftness stats of 10 to 13, they're pretty difficult to hit. A light mech in combat with a superheavy will be able to parry its opponent quite easily - it won't do a lot of damage to the big guy, but it'll be able to avoid getting utterly demolished in return. Superheavies can really lay down the destruction in melee now - Power counts for a lot more than it used to, and giga melee weapons HURT. They're balanced out by their clumsiness relative to lighter opponents.
The creation system
This has had a bit of an overhaul, too. I liked the old weight system, but it takes a while. So I removed it, entirely. The only remainder is a premium cost applied to Shots and WSR upgrades, which makes the weapon more expensive, but doesn't count towards the points limit. I judged that, after all, it wasn't really necessary; weapons always ended up weighing roughly the same as their cost in points, and for simplicity's sake I might as well use points for the limits instead.
I took out the special rules for different sizes, as they were no longer relevant, and moved the locomotion types to the Leg Upgrade section, deleting Retrograde along the way, as it's unlikely to make that much of a difference and I don't want to have to pay 20 points more or whatever for my mech just because I thought it would look cool with two knees on each leg.
I'd been slightly bothered by the ease with which one could make an army of 15-20 light mechs with nasty melee weapons. Very few upgrades, no guns at all, but the enemy'd never kill all of them before they reached the other side. It sounds quite fun to attempt to fight against (I might write a scenario where one side is a horde of cheap drones), but as an team in itself it goes against the theme, background and desired playstyle of the game. I also realised that, in this new version, all the characteristic upgrades would cost about the same amount of points. So I added them to the base costs. I upped the chassis costs by 120 points, which pays for 14 characteristic upgrades. Voila.
I lowered the amount of weaponry a mech could carry. This is compensated for in that each weapon type is capable of unleashing large amounts of violence upon the foe; even Energy weapons are good now. It should also speed things up slightly, in both creation and game, resulting in fewer different weapons to resolve and fewer dice to roll overall, while giving each individual gun a more lethal feel to it. The system upgrades were duly updated also. I threw out some of them - ones that didn't do a lot, or were invalidated by the new rules. I didn't bother replacing them, with the result that there are only three Head upgrades at the moment, but I'll fix that another time. (Read: there's a sub-board called Rule Ideas for a reason...
)
The Business End
The weapon tables were duly rewritten with the new system, eschewing weight, using points limits instead. I also added a tweak designed to resist complete min-maxing: an upgrade which takes a stat to its maximum value, unless the maximum's only one more than the minimum, costs an additional 2 points. It's not a lot, but it counts for something when you're trying not to exceed the limit. Ordnance weapons encumber the mech by reducing its Swiftness (High Drain stuff, in the absence of a Capacity system, reduces your System if you're using a standard reactor, which I feel is more of a penalty) and taking up two points of System to fire.
Gigaweapons now have separate maximum profiles, incorporated into the weapon tables, and weight limits, which they can't exceed no matter what. I'm tempted to restrict ordnance weapons to 10 or 15 points over the heavy limit, too. The giga upgrade costs differently depending on which weapon it is, although most of them are +40.
I deleted a couple of WSRs I didn't like (Invisible Beam and Napalm) and changed some others (Disruptor became EMP, which is a bit less harsh, and Flamer became Scorcher, which owns). Alien weapons got toned down slightly - they're still the best multishot serious damage weapon, but not quite as godly as they used to be. What they do now is be weird. Alien weapons can choose from four of TWELVE WSRs, and are required to buy at least one. These include the weird and wonderful Phantom Bullet, Magneton, Gravitiser and numerous others. Oh, and Scorcher.
As for melee weapons, I did the same to them. I didn't remove any WSRs, although I did change almost all of them, and made Malefic rare and Decapitation non-rare.
Overall, I think things are somewhat cheaper now (except giga siege or melee weapons; those things are PRICEY). I lowered the points for a normal game to 5000, experimentally; it might go back up to 6000 after I've messed around with designing stuff for a while.
Well, there we go. Enjoy the game, and don't forget to give me your thoughts and feedback!
Duel of Steel, through all its many incarnations, has never been a particularly fast game. Stuff dies at an unholy rate, but actually resolving rounds of shooting has, historically, taken bloody ages. This is mostly due to the complicated damage systems. Realistic and interesting they may have been, but they were just too much. This time round, I eschewed some of the realism - ditching the precise location system - and changed the stats so that they'd be more easily interpreted on the field. Also, you no longer need D6s, which is convenient.
Scale
A couple of days ago, I decided to scale the ranges down. Instead of using the 40k-style 6" range step, I slashed all the ranges by two thirds and cut it down to increments of 4". This means that 72" is now 48", 24" is 16", and so on. This is to tighten up the game and make the longer ranges a bit more worth buying.
Correspondingly, though, the mechs were now a bit too big (6" superheavy with 16" guns? Er). It also happens that finding parts for heavies is almost impossible, because the only model out there that's actually a proper 4" tall is the Wraithlord, and that's hardly heavy, now is it. We're also missing out on the possibilities of using heavy infantry to make mechs with. Fixing this was fairly easy - I just reduced all the sizes by about an inch. It throws my mech models off a little, but I'm not that bothered, as they're only guidelines really.
Stats
Sorry, Mass. You may have allowed my game to beat every other game's Wounds/Hits characteristics by an order of magnitude and then some, but then I came up with a better way. Mass is now System, a stat that (on the basic profiles) ranges from 1 to 7, with bigger mechs having higher values. System heals an amount of mass damage each turn - there's a standard mass damage grid now, of 24 boxes for a light mech, with an additional row of four boxes per size. (There's a similar serious damage grid, but it's half the size and has much nastier damage results at the bottom.) System also governs how many weapons you can fire after moving.
Psychology is gone entirely after I decided that morale in this context was rubbish, and only really spoiled a game. Reflexes is gone - there are no more Reflexes tests needed in the game now, anyway - in favour of Swiftness, which decides how hard the mech is to hit. I've thrown out almost all the to-hit modifiers except for the cover-related ones.
On the weaponry side, Strength and AP are replaced with Damage and Multiplier, both two-part stats (i.e. you might have a Damage of 4/3). The first number deals with mass damage, the second deals with serious damage. Damage is subtracted from the target's Armour, a value which you try and beat on a D10 to cause a point of damage. You roll the amount of dice in your Multiplier stat per hit. It's much simpler than the old Strength-dice-roll-stat system, and does pretty much everything that system did, too. Melee weapons have undergone the same change.
Turn sequence
Much the same, except that I renamed the Environment phase as the Situation phase - Environment isn't really as apt a name when the vast majority of things that will happen in it involve mechs undergoing damage control (healing with their System stats).
Terrain
No more weak terrain or dangerous terrain (I left flammable terrain in there because it's fun). Weak terrain's only going to slow a game down, and I'm pretty sure that if a ganger can build a mech by himself he can build it with good enough stabilisers to deal with old crappy tarmac that crumbles underfoot, or whatever. Dangerous terrain just struck me as something people would never use in a normal game - who builds mines in their house anyway? - and will be reintroduced as part of the fortifications section in the advanced rules (for base-attack type scenarios). Night fighting's also gone, because mechs have good enough sensors to ignore it, and if they can shrug off railgun hits they shouldn't be too bothered by the sodding night... Again, it was just something that players would never really use, and which wouldn't bring much to a game really.
Movement
You know all that stuff about jumping down from a height, crossing linear obstacles, stepping over gaps, smashing through terrain...? Yeah, I should have realised that was rubbish ages ago. Just situational page-fluff. Again, a 25 metre mech that can survive several hits from an anti-tank siege cannon shouldn't be too bothered about jumping off a cliff! The movement section now fits into a single page, including the rules for jump jets, being moved, and knockdown. That's better. Mechs can now run, too, which doubles their Speed but restricts them to firing only light weapons, and prevents charging. That's to help assault mechs get up the table reasonably quickly, and provide additional mobility wherever necessary.
Shooting
How many weapons you can fire is now governed by your System stat. You roll to hit using D10+Ranged vs Swiftness, and roll to damage using the new Dmg/Mul system. Why did I do it like this? Simplicity and speed. It's one more dice roll than the previous system (four, including the grid column roll, but that's only one D10) but they're entirely uncomplicated dice rolls. Hopefully, this will make the game a lot quicker.
Damage results on the serious damage grid are much the same, only compressed. Pilot Stunned, Reactor Disrupted, Joint Damaged/Wrecked and Weapon Offline don't exist there any more. (Weapon Offline snuck into the mass damage grid.) The mass damage grid has two WOs in the middle of the bottom row surrounded by six stat penalties. I took out the non-permanent results from the serious damage grid because the System... uh... system makes things slightly different now (well, and it's a bit annoying to have mechs wandering around with half their weapons inactive, or stunned, but otherwise fine - the new DoS is a bit more 'all or nothing'). There are no more non-permanent results; damage results apply until repaired.
Melee
I dropped charge interception from the rules. You're not going to remember it for a few games, and after that it's situational, but broken (or exploitable, rather) in the right situation. You can get a similar effect with the Counter-attack MWSR, but you have to equip the mech specifically for it that way, which is fine by me. Mostly though, I removed it because it's plain annoying - you might have to measure the reach distances to and from several enemy models en route to a target, making sure your mech's at the closest point each time... it could cause quite a lot of arguments mid-game, which is never good.
Melee to-hit rolls are now D10+Assault equalling or beating Swiftness, and parry rolls are the same, too - so mechs with a high Swiftness are more difficult to parry, as it should be. An advantageous side-effect of the new DoS system is that light mechs finally have some survivability. With Swiftness stats of 10 to 13, they're pretty difficult to hit. A light mech in combat with a superheavy will be able to parry its opponent quite easily - it won't do a lot of damage to the big guy, but it'll be able to avoid getting utterly demolished in return. Superheavies can really lay down the destruction in melee now - Power counts for a lot more than it used to, and giga melee weapons HURT. They're balanced out by their clumsiness relative to lighter opponents.
The creation system
This has had a bit of an overhaul, too. I liked the old weight system, but it takes a while. So I removed it, entirely. The only remainder is a premium cost applied to Shots and WSR upgrades, which makes the weapon more expensive, but doesn't count towards the points limit. I judged that, after all, it wasn't really necessary; weapons always ended up weighing roughly the same as their cost in points, and for simplicity's sake I might as well use points for the limits instead.
I took out the special rules for different sizes, as they were no longer relevant, and moved the locomotion types to the Leg Upgrade section, deleting Retrograde along the way, as it's unlikely to make that much of a difference and I don't want to have to pay 20 points more or whatever for my mech just because I thought it would look cool with two knees on each leg.
I'd been slightly bothered by the ease with which one could make an army of 15-20 light mechs with nasty melee weapons. Very few upgrades, no guns at all, but the enemy'd never kill all of them before they reached the other side. It sounds quite fun to attempt to fight against (I might write a scenario where one side is a horde of cheap drones), but as an team in itself it goes against the theme, background and desired playstyle of the game. I also realised that, in this new version, all the characteristic upgrades would cost about the same amount of points. So I added them to the base costs. I upped the chassis costs by 120 points, which pays for 14 characteristic upgrades. Voila.
I lowered the amount of weaponry a mech could carry. This is compensated for in that each weapon type is capable of unleashing large amounts of violence upon the foe; even Energy weapons are good now. It should also speed things up slightly, in both creation and game, resulting in fewer different weapons to resolve and fewer dice to roll overall, while giving each individual gun a more lethal feel to it. The system upgrades were duly updated also. I threw out some of them - ones that didn't do a lot, or were invalidated by the new rules. I didn't bother replacing them, with the result that there are only three Head upgrades at the moment, but I'll fix that another time. (Read: there's a sub-board called Rule Ideas for a reason...
)The Business End
The weapon tables were duly rewritten with the new system, eschewing weight, using points limits instead. I also added a tweak designed to resist complete min-maxing: an upgrade which takes a stat to its maximum value, unless the maximum's only one more than the minimum, costs an additional 2 points. It's not a lot, but it counts for something when you're trying not to exceed the limit. Ordnance weapons encumber the mech by reducing its Swiftness (High Drain stuff, in the absence of a Capacity system, reduces your System if you're using a standard reactor, which I feel is more of a penalty) and taking up two points of System to fire.
Gigaweapons now have separate maximum profiles, incorporated into the weapon tables, and weight limits, which they can't exceed no matter what. I'm tempted to restrict ordnance weapons to 10 or 15 points over the heavy limit, too. The giga upgrade costs differently depending on which weapon it is, although most of them are +40.
I deleted a couple of WSRs I didn't like (Invisible Beam and Napalm) and changed some others (Disruptor became EMP, which is a bit less harsh, and Flamer became Scorcher, which owns). Alien weapons got toned down slightly - they're still the best multishot serious damage weapon, but not quite as godly as they used to be. What they do now is be weird. Alien weapons can choose from four of TWELVE WSRs, and are required to buy at least one. These include the weird and wonderful Phantom Bullet, Magneton, Gravitiser and numerous others. Oh, and Scorcher.
As for melee weapons, I did the same to them. I didn't remove any WSRs, although I did change almost all of them, and made Malefic rare and Decapitation non-rare.
Overall, I think things are somewhat cheaper now (except giga siege or melee weapons; those things are PRICEY). I lowered the points for a normal game to 5000, experimentally; it might go back up to 6000 after I've messed around with designing stuff for a while.
Well, there we go. Enjoy the game, and don't forget to give me your thoughts and feedback!
