Testing the Summoning Mechanic in IF

[Adam]

I thought of something last night that'll help me a lot as far as designing Wraithsight goes. I'd like to test out the more unique of its mechanics (of which there are quite a few, I think) by gradually merging bits of it into Infinite Frontier to see what happens.

What I'd first like to test out is the summoning/magic points mechanic. We'll be using the IF rules and units, and just adapting Heroes a bit and making them tougher. Arrange 12 nodes around the playing area in such a way that no node is closer than 6" to another, the pattern is symmetrical across the line between you and your opponent, and while there are a couple in each deployment zone, the majority of them are towards the centreline of the board.

Your army list is, let's say, 200 points, and must include a Hero. Each unit in the army list must be different; you may only include two units of any particular choice, and if so, they must have different upgrades/unit composition. The Hero gets +2 Fortitude, as he's kind of the centrepiece, and wraithseers are damn tough.

At the beginning of the game, deploy only your Hero. The other units on your army list are summonable. You may summon multiples of any chosen unit, and may have a number of each unit in play at a time equal to 5 - (points cost / 10), to a minimum of one. But I'm getting ahead of myself; you need to know how summoning works.

At the start of each turn, before summoning, you gain magic points equal to the number of nodes fulfilling these conditions:
- Within 8" of your Hero and not within 3" of an enemy model
- One of your units is fully within 3" of it (no stringing them out for multiple captures!) and no enemy models are within 3" of it
You earn a minimum of 3 magic points each turn; if you earn less, add more until you've gained 3.

You can't have more than 16 magic points at a time. (I'm using a stock Will value of 8 here for all heroes.) Any excess ones are discarded.

During the game, you can spend magic points to summon units from your army list. Summoning is done at the beginning of the game and also can be used as an ability by the Hero during its activation (it may use this ability as many times as it wants). A summoned unit is placed fully within 4" of the Hero (8" for units with All Terrain, who are our scouts in this simulation), or fully within 3" of a node that you gained a magic point from at the beginning of the turn. A unit's Speed is halved in the turn it is summoned, unless it has Commando (which roughly makes it a hunter).

A unit costs an amount of magic points to summon equal to its points cost divided by 5, rounded up. Vehicles cost one additional magic point. Units must be summoned in cohesion. You may not have more of a single unit on the board than 5 - (points value / 10), rounding the division up.* So, if you have basic Clone Trooper units in your list, which are 9 points, you'd be allowed up to four of them alive at any one time.

...I think that's all - now let's get testing! ;D


*Yes, Wraithsight will probably allow more of each unit. 9 minus the number of magic points it takes to summon, is my current thought. This allows you 7 of each Rank 2 wraith, and 1 of a Rank 8. The scale is a little different here because in Wraithsight you're almost always summoning only one model at a time, whereas IF has units, and you need more miniatures and take up more board space. To tell the truth, something like Warmachine would probably be a better test-bed for the mechanic, but whatever. Summoning would probably break Warmachine's balance completely.

[Adam]

I should probably have written this up over a week ago, but I have actually tested this now. It works pretty well, it has to be said - the game flows quickly and the node-control mechanic is effective and reasonably smooth.

One immediately noticeable downside was the similarity to RTS games, particularly the also-summoning-related BattleForge: once your opponent has an advantage, you're a bit boned. Granted, this is with Infinite Frontier rules rather than Wraithsight ones, so the number of sudden dirty tricks is limited in comparison and there aren't any spells or whatever. But the general flow of the game was fairly one-sided, in my favour. The first turn saw Ollie summon a B1 unit and a pair of droidekas, leaving him with no magic points left, and I spawned some MagnaGuards (I was playing Grievous, why not), leaving me with 3. Forward moves were made. Next turn, we both gained two points and I wasted no time in summoning another MG unit and using Wrath to dump a whole lot of electrostaff attacks on the droidekas; within a turn or two they were gone and Ollie was severely on the back foot. The rest of the game consisted mostly of me pressing the attack, with Grievous semi-camping in the middle of the board to pull in five magic points a turn, with Ollie only ever getting 2-3. After the droidekas, he summoned little else of interest - B1s and B2s exclusively, as I recall - and although Sidious took quite some time to die, surrounded by infantry as he was, I kept up the assault using BX Commandos and then, finally, summoned some droidekas into melee with him - one survived to next turn, I got initiative and blew the last two wounds off the Sith with panache.

I suppose this does indicate that using up all of your magic points in one turn is a bad idea, but it was fairly clear that we needed more power throughout. Despite the fact that our seers had a maximum capacity of 16, Ollie never had more than one point persist into the next turn, and I only had a significant amount once (where I deliberately held off on summoning for a turn in order to get droidekas in the next). Units in Wraithsight will likely be quite a bit less resilient than IF's, meaning there's not such a problem with allowing larger-scale summonings. So with that in mind, maybe this would work:
- A node you've taken magic from remains under your control until an enemy model gets within 3" of it or an enemy Hero gets within Will-radius (8" here) of it.
- Nodes that aren't accessible to both players (you'll notice that if both Heroes are within 8" of one node, they each get power) provide two magic points instead of one.

This allows you to farm a constant stream of magic from the nodes in your deployment zone without having to leave scouts behind to babysit them. It more-than-doubles your influx of power, to the point where getting 10+ magic points a turn isn't entirely unfeasible. That might be a bit much. I think maybe testing it with just the first change to begin with would be wise - even allowing for Wraithsight's increased resilience of units, you don't want to be able to spit out a Rank 8 every turn. A 'cooldown' of 1-2 turns on certain summonings might be wise, but would be annoying to keep track of (without markable stat cards, at least) and easy to forget about.

[Oliver]

Perhaps the bonus points for uncontested nodes could just apply to ones which are in range of one of your models - then you would actually have a hard choice, when in a bind, about whether to keep on babysitting your rear nodes.

[Adam]

I thought about that, but briefly. Of course you'll leave things behind to babysit the rear nodes - Rank 2s. Take the Night Walkers. You only really need one Spite to be anywhere near the enemy; the others can hide away and stack the sight-range bonuses, assuming you've some way of keeping the forward one alive for a turn or two.

It's a possibility, though. Provided the majority of the nodes were in the middle, encouraging the seers to move forward, it could work well.

Edit: Perhaps this was an overly harsh response. Thinking about it now, I like the idea and will probably use it.