Post by Adam on Feb 27, 2009 11:09:43 GMT -5
Assuming anyone actually still reads this stuff... 
Last Sunday some playtesting went on. Important playtesting. Four Enforcers and four Etherites went toe-to-toe in two games that gave some surprising results. The overall impression, and the most important (and pleasing) thing, is that Duel of Steel is now not only playable, but is a surprisingly good ruleset. I think I've hit some imaginary nail on its metaphysical head with some of the new rules decisions. Alternate unit activations make the gameplay far better - and fairer - than before, and the new movement rules cut down on a lot of pointless crap. The game also has some surprising tactical sneakiness, mostly brought on by the creation system rather than the rules themselves.
Mechs have somewhere around the right amount of firepower. Mass damage, we felt, was a little over the top in comparison to serious; I fixed this by simply incrementing the Mass values for most of the chassis types by 20. Sorted. It's notable, though, that the D10/D6/D3 disparity is exactly as I wanted it: D10s cause loads of mass damage but almost no serious damage (certainly no significant serious damage), D3s lay the serious damage smack down and D6s sit happily in the middle.
A problem is that the lighter weapons - anything with a Strength value cheaper than 15-20 cogs! - are almost insignificant. I plan on rectifying this as far as solid slug weapons go (SS weapons suck right now) by buffing Grinder so it increments the shots' AP, to a maximum of +5. That should make single SS weapons halfway decent as well, where before you'd need 2 or 3 before they did anything. Heat weapons are cheap enough not to lose out to alien weapons (and Combustion is awesome!) whereas the aforementioned alien weapons have amazingly good statlines but lack the specialised WSRs other weapons get access to, which is how I wanted it. Gauss and heat weapons aren't entirely superseded by the "I do the same thing but with four shots" alien weapons due to cheapness and SRs.
Energy weapons didn't feature prominently in either of the teams, except for one mech which had four of them with Carve and killed two mechs in one game with them. Instant Pilot Killed and Reactor Overload due to one special rule is a bit mean. Carve is, needless to say, now rebalanced - if it hits more than twice, it now just treats all locations as having the target's majority Integrity. (This seems weird, but ties in to the new damage system. Let me yammer on about weapons first.)
Siege weapons are inaccurate but effective when they hit, as it should be. I've decided to reduce Body Mount to -1 instead of -2, so they aren't quite so inaccurate, and people won't feel bad about slapping something that isn't a missile launcher on the mech's shoulders. It's worth noting that most of the weapons I used were missiles or alien weapons, although many of the mechs (particularly on the Etherium team) only had one or two guns, which explains the phenomenon. I'm considering raising the weight limits on some of the weapons - a twitch higher on heat weapons and solid slug weapons, and maybe energy too. Missiles are fine, although might need to go up in cogs cost. Alien weapons should probably be a bit more expensive too, I guess.
Weight limits. These are fine; none of the mechs I built broke them. High Drain works perfectly as a rule, and isn't cripplingly bad - if your mech has two alien weapons, two melee weapons and very little else, you can easily get away with a standard reactor, even on a light. (The melee weapons were gun mounts. Oh yeah. Sadly Nasty Surprise didn't reach combat in either game.)
Shooting works well. The to-hit modifiers are good; they don't plague you all the time - in fact most of them do nothing in 95% of situations - and when they do take effect, have about the right amount of influence. It's slow, but doesn't feel like it drags (possibly partly due to the alternate activation thing); I do think the location/serious damage allocation needs revision though, because we got through two half-sized games in about four hours. Admittedly Ollie, fellow playtester, hadn't read through the rules properly and we kept discussing it and having to look up upgrades, so experienced players could probably trim that down to two or three hours. But the vast majority of that time is spent resolving shooting on different locations over and over again.
I do in fact have a new system, which I've typed up into the rulebook ready for testing this Sunday. You roll to hit, then you roll all the shots' damage as one massive roll. Mass damage is recorded and then you split up serious damage. Count up serious damage using the Integrity on the majority of the target's locations. Roll one D10 per two weapons in the salvo for location, then add Body rolls to make it up to the original number of weapons. (So basically half of it goes to the body and the other half is randomised.) Divide it up evenly. Locations with higher Integrity halve the amount they take; locations the weapon wouldn't be able to damage discard any they take. (It's this halving or discarding that Carve ignores.) It's an absolute bitch to explain in clear concise rule-ese, but should speed the game up a bit. If having to add up all the damage in one go proves too much, I'll throw caution to the winds and write a new soddin' damage system. Fine.
Close combat. CC proves a little one-sided in that if one combatant gets a lucky roll, the other doesn't get to attack at all no matter how skilled it is. So I want to test, if not necessarily implement, a new system where you essentially roll to hit with melee attacks in the same way as you do ranged ones. There are a couple of differences; the modifiers are obviously different, the model can divide its attacks up between models it's engaged with, and it can spend attacks to parry specific models. One attack spent parrying lessens the target's attacks by one during its activation; you can parry as much as you like, on more than one opponent should you so wish, but it can't take an enemy below one attack. Rules like Combat Master and Fury will need different effects, obviously; Combat Masters ignore negative modifiers to hit, might get a +1 here or there, and can spend one attack to parry everyone they're engaged with (or automatically parry someone when they hit them, or something). Fury is similar - spend one attack to make attacks against two models/everyone engaged with you/whatever. Possibly cannot be parried, too.
So, you're probably wondering, how did the games go? In the first, I took command of the Enforcers. Super-heavy Painkiller suffered a cruel demise at the hands of a lot of missiles early on, and did little in return, missing a lot due to bad rolls and Rn 6-instead-of-7. Mad Dog, a medium with a bastion system and a lot of firepower, locked itself to the ground on Turn 1 and proceeded to shoot a lot of health off a lot of enemies. Leader Annihilatrix contributed its alien and heat weaponry to Mad Dog's, the two of them successfully nuking the Etherii Harrower and Terrorbore. Nasty Surprise was in a building miles away, leaving Etherius leader Nightmare to continue its advance, protected by its arc shield. I jumped Sprite, light sniper, out of its vantage point, landed behind Nightmare, shot it in the back with a sniper rifle, then used Crowd Control and proceeded to demolish the heavy with Mad Dog. Nightmare exploded and Ollie conceded. Notable moments included the first turn, where we realised Crowd Control needed to be once-per-game and definitely not once-per-turn, and Nightmare threw 10 Strength 2D10 shots at Painkiller and blasted about 60 Mass off it; and the tactical trick I pulled off using Sprite to nullify the arc shield before killing the mech beneath it with Crowd Control.
The second game saw us change sides. As the last game involved no melee at all, I was determined to get some in this time. Early on, Nasty Surprise got slagged, and Terrorbore turned its four 'broken cannon' Carve lasers on Sprite and headshotted the poor thing. (Sprite had just missed a shot when it needed a 9-or-less to hit, so I guess it probably welcomed an end to its embarrassment.) With the mediumweight Terrorbore and light Harrower hiding themselves away behind arc-shielded heavy Nightmare, I was fairly safe from enemy fire - or so I thought. Two turns in, Painkiller moved out from behind its cover and slung a grenade launcher shot at the Etherius leader. The submunition round deviated behind the heavy, not only hitting the two smaller mechs taking shelter behind it, but damaging it and switching off the arc shield! Throwing the rest of its firepower into the Etherius, Painkiller charged. Impetuous got the super-heavy into combat, but it lost badly, Nightmare's giga melee weapon tearing about 80 Mass off it.
Terrorbore turned its lasers of doom on the bastion-locked Mad Dog, hit 11 times from 12 Carve shots due to the target's immobility, and blew it up spectacularly. It proceeded to charge Painkiller, hurt it, and use Brute to shove it backwards, disengaging Nightmare so it could charge the enemy leader next turn. That, however, didn't happen; I lost the initiative again and Annihilatrix shot the shieldless Nightmare up, temporarily disabling the mighty gigaweapon, before charging it. Fortunately for Nightmare, it rolled well and its other weapon was enough to get the job done, causing damage and avoiding pain from Annihilatrix's own weapon. Harrower joined the combat, the supporting-attacker bonus boosting it up enough to slug Annihilatrix in the face and destroy it with serious damage. Next turn, Terrorbore fortuitously finished Painkiller off (its third kill!) and brought the game to a violent end.
You can see why the combat system seems a little imbalanced; the Enforcers never got to actually do anything. I never rolled lower than an 8 for Combat Score, partly due to having at least four attacks most of the time, although Ollie only did so once or twice as well. Most of the combats were fairly balanced, and my slightly better dice luck let me win, which isn't the greatest way of doing things.
Ah well. Overall, though, I'm very happy! Duel of Steel is looking like a proper game now. It doesn't have the polish or balance I'd like, but plays fairly well. Okay, I've technically rewritten both the shooting and melee mechanics, but the shooting's not that different really - just an optimisation. It's nowhere near the magnitude of the previous rewrite. We picked up a few inconsistencies and stuff that wanted changing or clarifying, but those were the kind of errors that take about five seconds to fix. (This entire rules update, new CC system aside as I'm still undecided on it, has been applied as idle distraction in two Algorithms lectures.)
New pdf's where it usually is.
Last Sunday some playtesting went on. Important playtesting. Four Enforcers and four Etherites went toe-to-toe in two games that gave some surprising results. The overall impression, and the most important (and pleasing) thing, is that Duel of Steel is now not only playable, but is a surprisingly good ruleset. I think I've hit some imaginary nail on its metaphysical head with some of the new rules decisions. Alternate unit activations make the gameplay far better - and fairer - than before, and the new movement rules cut down on a lot of pointless crap. The game also has some surprising tactical sneakiness, mostly brought on by the creation system rather than the rules themselves.
Mechs have somewhere around the right amount of firepower. Mass damage, we felt, was a little over the top in comparison to serious; I fixed this by simply incrementing the Mass values for most of the chassis types by 20. Sorted. It's notable, though, that the D10/D6/D3 disparity is exactly as I wanted it: D10s cause loads of mass damage but almost no serious damage (certainly no significant serious damage), D3s lay the serious damage smack down and D6s sit happily in the middle.
A problem is that the lighter weapons - anything with a Strength value cheaper than 15-20 cogs! - are almost insignificant. I plan on rectifying this as far as solid slug weapons go (SS weapons suck right now) by buffing Grinder so it increments the shots' AP, to a maximum of +5. That should make single SS weapons halfway decent as well, where before you'd need 2 or 3 before they did anything. Heat weapons are cheap enough not to lose out to alien weapons (and Combustion is awesome!) whereas the aforementioned alien weapons have amazingly good statlines but lack the specialised WSRs other weapons get access to, which is how I wanted it. Gauss and heat weapons aren't entirely superseded by the "I do the same thing but with four shots" alien weapons due to cheapness and SRs.
Energy weapons didn't feature prominently in either of the teams, except for one mech which had four of them with Carve and killed two mechs in one game with them. Instant Pilot Killed and Reactor Overload due to one special rule is a bit mean. Carve is, needless to say, now rebalanced - if it hits more than twice, it now just treats all locations as having the target's majority Integrity. (This seems weird, but ties in to the new damage system. Let me yammer on about weapons first.)
Siege weapons are inaccurate but effective when they hit, as it should be. I've decided to reduce Body Mount to -1 instead of -2, so they aren't quite so inaccurate, and people won't feel bad about slapping something that isn't a missile launcher on the mech's shoulders. It's worth noting that most of the weapons I used were missiles or alien weapons, although many of the mechs (particularly on the Etherium team) only had one or two guns, which explains the phenomenon. I'm considering raising the weight limits on some of the weapons - a twitch higher on heat weapons and solid slug weapons, and maybe energy too. Missiles are fine, although might need to go up in cogs cost. Alien weapons should probably be a bit more expensive too, I guess.
Weight limits. These are fine; none of the mechs I built broke them. High Drain works perfectly as a rule, and isn't cripplingly bad - if your mech has two alien weapons, two melee weapons and very little else, you can easily get away with a standard reactor, even on a light. (The melee weapons were gun mounts. Oh yeah. Sadly Nasty Surprise didn't reach combat in either game.)
Shooting works well. The to-hit modifiers are good; they don't plague you all the time - in fact most of them do nothing in 95% of situations - and when they do take effect, have about the right amount of influence. It's slow, but doesn't feel like it drags (possibly partly due to the alternate activation thing); I do think the location/serious damage allocation needs revision though, because we got through two half-sized games in about four hours. Admittedly Ollie, fellow playtester, hadn't read through the rules properly and we kept discussing it and having to look up upgrades, so experienced players could probably trim that down to two or three hours. But the vast majority of that time is spent resolving shooting on different locations over and over again.
I do in fact have a new system, which I've typed up into the rulebook ready for testing this Sunday. You roll to hit, then you roll all the shots' damage as one massive roll. Mass damage is recorded and then you split up serious damage. Count up serious damage using the Integrity on the majority of the target's locations. Roll one D10 per two weapons in the salvo for location, then add Body rolls to make it up to the original number of weapons. (So basically half of it goes to the body and the other half is randomised.) Divide it up evenly. Locations with higher Integrity halve the amount they take; locations the weapon wouldn't be able to damage discard any they take. (It's this halving or discarding that Carve ignores.) It's an absolute bitch to explain in clear concise rule-ese, but should speed the game up a bit. If having to add up all the damage in one go proves too much, I'll throw caution to the winds and write a new soddin' damage system. Fine.
Close combat. CC proves a little one-sided in that if one combatant gets a lucky roll, the other doesn't get to attack at all no matter how skilled it is. So I want to test, if not necessarily implement, a new system where you essentially roll to hit with melee attacks in the same way as you do ranged ones. There are a couple of differences; the modifiers are obviously different, the model can divide its attacks up between models it's engaged with, and it can spend attacks to parry specific models. One attack spent parrying lessens the target's attacks by one during its activation; you can parry as much as you like, on more than one opponent should you so wish, but it can't take an enemy below one attack. Rules like Combat Master and Fury will need different effects, obviously; Combat Masters ignore negative modifiers to hit, might get a +1 here or there, and can spend one attack to parry everyone they're engaged with (or automatically parry someone when they hit them, or something). Fury is similar - spend one attack to make attacks against two models/everyone engaged with you/whatever. Possibly cannot be parried, too.
So, you're probably wondering, how did the games go? In the first, I took command of the Enforcers. Super-heavy Painkiller suffered a cruel demise at the hands of a lot of missiles early on, and did little in return, missing a lot due to bad rolls and Rn 6-instead-of-7. Mad Dog, a medium with a bastion system and a lot of firepower, locked itself to the ground on Turn 1 and proceeded to shoot a lot of health off a lot of enemies. Leader Annihilatrix contributed its alien and heat weaponry to Mad Dog's, the two of them successfully nuking the Etherii Harrower and Terrorbore. Nasty Surprise was in a building miles away, leaving Etherius leader Nightmare to continue its advance, protected by its arc shield. I jumped Sprite, light sniper, out of its vantage point, landed behind Nightmare, shot it in the back with a sniper rifle, then used Crowd Control and proceeded to demolish the heavy with Mad Dog. Nightmare exploded and Ollie conceded. Notable moments included the first turn, where we realised Crowd Control needed to be once-per-game and definitely not once-per-turn, and Nightmare threw 10 Strength 2D10 shots at Painkiller and blasted about 60 Mass off it; and the tactical trick I pulled off using Sprite to nullify the arc shield before killing the mech beneath it with Crowd Control.
The second game saw us change sides. As the last game involved no melee at all, I was determined to get some in this time. Early on, Nasty Surprise got slagged, and Terrorbore turned its four 'broken cannon' Carve lasers on Sprite and headshotted the poor thing. (Sprite had just missed a shot when it needed a 9-or-less to hit, so I guess it probably welcomed an end to its embarrassment.) With the mediumweight Terrorbore and light Harrower hiding themselves away behind arc-shielded heavy Nightmare, I was fairly safe from enemy fire - or so I thought. Two turns in, Painkiller moved out from behind its cover and slung a grenade launcher shot at the Etherius leader. The submunition round deviated behind the heavy, not only hitting the two smaller mechs taking shelter behind it, but damaging it and switching off the arc shield! Throwing the rest of its firepower into the Etherius, Painkiller charged. Impetuous got the super-heavy into combat, but it lost badly, Nightmare's giga melee weapon tearing about 80 Mass off it.
Terrorbore turned its lasers of doom on the bastion-locked Mad Dog, hit 11 times from 12 Carve shots due to the target's immobility, and blew it up spectacularly. It proceeded to charge Painkiller, hurt it, and use Brute to shove it backwards, disengaging Nightmare so it could charge the enemy leader next turn. That, however, didn't happen; I lost the initiative again and Annihilatrix shot the shieldless Nightmare up, temporarily disabling the mighty gigaweapon, before charging it. Fortunately for Nightmare, it rolled well and its other weapon was enough to get the job done, causing damage and avoiding pain from Annihilatrix's own weapon. Harrower joined the combat, the supporting-attacker bonus boosting it up enough to slug Annihilatrix in the face and destroy it with serious damage. Next turn, Terrorbore fortuitously finished Painkiller off (its third kill!) and brought the game to a violent end.
You can see why the combat system seems a little imbalanced; the Enforcers never got to actually do anything. I never rolled lower than an 8 for Combat Score, partly due to having at least four attacks most of the time, although Ollie only did so once or twice as well. Most of the combats were fairly balanced, and my slightly better dice luck let me win, which isn't the greatest way of doing things.
Ah well. Overall, though, I'm very happy! Duel of Steel is looking like a proper game now. It doesn't have the polish or balance I'd like, but plays fairly well. Okay, I've technically rewritten both the shooting and melee mechanics, but the shooting's not that different really - just an optimisation. It's nowhere near the magnitude of the previous rewrite. We picked up a few inconsistencies and stuff that wanted changing or clarifying, but those were the kind of errors that take about five seconds to fix. (This entire rules update, new CC system aside as I'm still undecided on it, has been applied as idle distraction in two Algorithms lectures.)
New pdf's where it usually is.
