teensywars

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#epic 40k #wargaming #legions imperialis

[teensywars]

Anima Tactics: The High Powered Anime Skirmish Game That Wasn't

Once again, someone is trying to bring back Anima, the Spanish anime-inspired fantasy RPG IP.

... And that has me thinking about Anima Tactics, the tabletop skirmish spinoff game.

Anima Tactics sounded so great on paper. A skirmish game between anime demigods! Mechanics inspired by Final Fantasy! Some of the most gorgeous metal miniatures ever cast! Aesthetics like watching a pro wrestling match between Vtubers!

Anima Tactics, on the actual table, was boring as heck, and I keep coming back to it to try to figure out why.

My current theory is that Anima, as a setting, is based on spectacle. Screen filling anime powers! Incredible artwork! Impossible scale! Skirmish games have a lot of trouble expressing that in mechanics. When there's only a handful of miniatures on the table and a few pieces of terrain, "power" can only be expressed by how characters interact with the terrain or interact with each other.

In Anima, the figures barely interacted with the terrain at all. The game used the typical 6" moves, with basic terrain rules that didn't have that much effect on gameplay. I charitably think of it as the characters being too powerful to care about terrain, but it wasn't great design either way.

The characters don't do a much better job of interacting with each other. They can attack for various amounts of damage and there are Final Fantasy-style status effects, but none of it feels particularly substantial. For the most part, powerful attacks are the same as weak ones, but with bigger numbers. Without something extra to give narrative impact to the big hits, it felt like you were watching Vtuber wannabes take turns bopping each other over the head with sticks.

In short, Anima Tactics was a dull game, and the only value I've gotten out of it has been thinking about how to do better. It is odd that so few skirmish games have even tried at making super-powerful characters feel powerful, outside of the flavor text.

#anima #anima tactics #skirmish #wargaming #game design #Youtube

[teensywars]

One Perfect Mechanic: Eatin' Dirt in The Great Rail Wars

In most wargames, damage is done the same way. Get hit, check to see if you've taken enough damage, and that causes most units to die.

Deadlands: The Great Rail Wars was a squad-based miniatures wargame that did things a little differently.

The default effect of damage in The Great Rail Wars is "Eatin' Dirt". (A crit still wounds and ALSO leaves a multi-wound character Eatin' Dirt.) A figure who is Eatin' Dirt is plinked onto his back, until he makes a vigor check to recover. Eatin' Dirt has the following effects:

A character in the dirt can only crawl and try to recover.

That character counts as prone, so he's harder to shoot.

That character is VERY vulnerable to melee attacks, with the next hit being an instant kill.

This simple rule added so much depth and flavor to the game. Firefights tended to end with one side pinned down, but melee ended with casualties. You could tell the losing side in a fight immediately, even if no one was dead yet. Every once in a while, a squad would grit their teeth, recover from a bad fight, and come back to win the game.

But the biggest impact is how this rule works with hero units. Heroes can take a lot of damage, but taking any damage still results in Eatin' Dirt. If they didn't have a way to get back up immediately, they could be executed by a melee attack. The best way to prevent a quick, embarrassing death is to have a friendly unit nearby guarding them until they get up.

You could be the toughest damned undead gunfighter in the game, but if you needed to still fight smart. Otherwise, one lucky shot to the leg and next action you could be beaten to death by a man with a shovel.

Savage Worlds, an RPG using The Great Rail Wars' mechanics, expanded on this system with the Shaken status, which doesn't include the melee vulnerability or being prone. It works for a generic RPG, but it doesn't have the immediate impact on the game the way that Eatin' Dirt did.

#wargaming #Deadlands #savage worlds #Great Rail Wars #skirmish

[teensywars]

Game Design Concept: Dead, Damaged, Wounded, and Inconvenienced

I'm going to be writing a few posts about rules systems I love, and they'll be much easier to read if I can define a few terms I'll be using first.

In games with combat, your people, tanks, giant monsters, and eldritch monstrosities tend to get hurt. Handling this requires designing a system for taking damage to decide what happens to your poor unit.

The simplest way to resolve damage is death. The unit is removed from the board entirely, and no longer contributes to the game. It worked for chess 1500 years ago, and it works today.

If you want more granularity, either because your game is zoomed in to focus on individual characters or because you want your units to feel tougher, combat can damage the unit instead. This is when a unit gets closer to death, without necessarily being taken off the board yet. The most common way to do this is a unit has a pool of hit points that they lose as they take damage. If their hit points reach zero, they're dead.

This still leaves your game with a binary "dead or not dead" state, so many games also implement wounds. As a unit takes damage, their ability to fight degrades. For example, you could use a table showing the unit's abilities at different levels of wounds. Another common way to do it is by randomly deciding consequences of damage through a critical hit system.

Finally, there is a level of damage below wounds that gets used mostly in skirmish games and games with extreme scale differences between units. Units are inconvenienced when an attack temporarily degrades their abilities, usually until the end of the turn. Almost always, this degrades their defensive capabilities, so inconvenienced units can be damaged and killed more easily by concentrating multiple attacks. Sometimes, this also comes with a penalty to their other capabilities, as well, like being unable to swing a sword or run while being knocked down.

Are we all on the same page now?

#game design #wargaming

[teensywars]

Legions Imperialis Strategy: Titans

You ever want to go straight to slaughtering your enemies without anyone of that boring "maneuvering" or "strategy" getting in the way?

Boy, do I have an ally faction for you.

Advantages

Titans pack the most firepower in the game, and it's not even close.

They throw more dice, they have more armor penetration, and they do it from longer range than anyone else. Point the shooty end at something you don't like, and enjoy watching its last moments.

On top of that, Void Shields protect Titans completely from light AT fire, and rapidly regenerate from anything larger. Taking out a Titan will require concentrated heavy firepower.

Disadvantages

This is going to sound weird, given that we're discussing what are technically the toughest units in the game.

Titans are fragile.

Titans can be destroyed quickly by large quantities of heavy anti-tank fire, and every army in Legions Imperialis will be bringing exactly that. A titan may be tough in absolute terms, but it's also 10-30% of your entire army in a single model. It's not as tough as the dozen platoons of infantry you could have gotten instead.

This entire post also assumes that Titans will be given an exception to the rule that units cannot split their fire. If they cannot target multiple units (like in Epic Armageddon), their usefulness drops very quickly. Having the firepower to destroy an entire army is useless if you can only target one formation a turn.

Conclusions

In a very literal way, Titans define the battlefields they fight on. A single combatant that powerful ends up being treated as an objective rather than a unit. If you feel comfortable building a game plan around guarding the giant gunboat, then a Titan can dominate whatever part of the table you place it on. If you're looking for a more flexible gameplan, you're best looking elsewhere.

#epic 40k #wargaming #legions imperialis #strategy guide #I dig giant robots #you dig giant robots #chicks dig giant robots

[teensywars]

Legions Imperialis Strategy: Imperial Knights

Imperial Knights are one of the two Ally-only factions, and probably the faction that's gone through the most changes between editions.

So, you may not be able to bring a lot of stompy mecha to the table, but they provide something no other faction has.

Advantages

Thanks to their Ion Shields and pinning class, Knights are legitimately hard to kill.

In a game where overpowered weapons are plentiful and armor is a "nice to have," there is very little that's hard to kill in Legions Imperialis. The toughest units take a little extra effort to kill, but still die to massed tanks. Knights are the exception.

First, Ion Shields mean that Knights get a pretty solid pseudo-invulnerability save against shooting from the front. Normally, this is a hint to charge into close combat, but Knights have the second-highest pinning class in the game. If they don't want to be in close combat, they can walk away.

Their only real weakness is getting surrounded, but Knights are reasonably fast as well. If you're playing smart, you're not going to complain about your opponent overextending his line to try and trap an oversized flanking unit.

Plus, Knights are just about the cheapest unit in terms of Dollars-to-Points.

Disadvantages

Knights are tough and fast, but they don't bring a lot of firepower for their points.

A stock Knight Paladin can shoot as well as two Leman Russes glued together... at the cost of 4 Leman Russes. It can outfight 10 Space Marine Terminators... at the cost of 80 Terminators.

Also, Knights' weakness to being flanked means they can't stay still long enough to hold objectives. Knights are not part of your front line.

Conclusions

There's two ways to think of Knights, depending on your style. You can think of them as a fast attack / response unit that can provide support across a large area of the battlefield while being too tough to bother stopping, or you can think of them as overpriced, undergunned Swiss army knives that can't earn back their points.

I'm personally in the first camp. A few knights in your second line provide a reliable answer to many different strategies, so your main faction can focus on what they do best.

If you're in the second group and are looking for an ally who can provide serious firepower, we still have one faction left to cover. I think you'll like 'em.

#wargaming #epic 40k #legions imperialis #strategy guide

[teensywars]

Legions Imperialis Strategy: Why Play Solar Auxilia

Screw the superhuman space angels! Sci fi warfare is all about boots on the ground, logistics, and guns that go "pew pew!"

Advantages

You have more troops than anyone else, more tanks than anyone else, more armor than anyone else, and they're all pretty good! In a pitched battle where everyone lines up to shoot at each other, you will win!

And if the enemy isn't being so nice as to give you one, that's what the artillery is for! We can just bring the battle to anyone impolite enough to hide from us!

Disadvantages

You're the second slowest faction in the Horus Heresy (I'm expecting the Mechanicum to be even worse.) and by far the least agile. You don't get those fancy double-move flanking maneuvers and charges into melee that the Space Marines and Imperial Knights get. Instead, you get a limited number of officers who are able to give those orders, and everyone else gets to move once and shoot once.

After setup, the vast majority of your army is going to act extremely predictably.

Remember that glorious pitched battle that you want? The one that shows off all of your Mathhammer advantages? You're not getting that if your opponent is paying even a little bit of attention.

Instead, every Space Marine player is going to introduce you to what "defeat in detail" means, and it means hurting.

Conclusion

There are three types of players drawn to Solar Auxilia. The first consists of players who've done the math and know that Solar Auxilia armies are more efficient point-wise than any other faction. These players are going to lose a lot of games.

The second are players who realize that a reputation for being slow and predictable means they can come up with tactics that no one will see coming. I'm in this category, and I'm looking forward to pulling off big, sweeping Leman Russ maneuvers.

The third are the players who are sick of all the damn Space Marines and want to knock them down a few pegs.

All are valid reasons to play the Auxilia.

#wargaming #epic 40k #legions imperialis #strategy

[teensywars]

Legions Imperialis Strategy: Why Play Legiones Astartes

Sure, I could go on about Horus Heresy lore, the traditions of the Space Marines, and how cool commanding a legion of post-human super soldiers are.

Here's the real pitch for playing Marines: 50-inch charge range (with a Thunderhawk).

Advantages

In a game without Eldar and where the Custodes don't have a book yet, Space Marines are the speed faction. They have the best transports, the fastest tanks, the biggest flyers, and the most Deep Strike options. While Solar Auxilia advances 5-8" a turn, your transports can zip you around nearly 20".

On top of that, every Space Marine has armor to survive at range and bonuses in close combat. They can come out of skirmishes fresh enough to immediately redeploy to the next hot zone.

Find a weak flank, murder everyone there, and take the objective. If your opponent responds in force, pack up, redeploy and do it again somewhere else.

Disadvantages

The Astartes are outgunned by every other faction. Not in an "elite heroes vs the swarm sense," but in a "splattered across the map if they pin you down sense.

"That's okay! I'll just move away from the killzone with my super-fast transports!" This is where the game mechanics matter. Legions Imperialis uses alternating move activations. You move one unit, they move one unit. Your units making big, high-speed moves at the end of the turn can get away with it. Anything you do at the beginning of the turn, your opponent will have time to react to.

If you make your big move early in the turn, they'll usually react with enough firepower to leave post-human super soldier corpses at the bottom of a crater.

You can make spectacular, daring high-speed assaults, but you can't do very many of them in a game. The rest of the time, you'll be camping objectives and trading shots, which is not your strong suit.

Conclusion

Play the Astartes if you want to win with high-risk maneuvers that will leave your opponent calling bullshit. Or if you're a Space Marine fanboy.

#wargaming #epic 40k #legions imperialis #strategy

[teensywars]

Strategy Guide: Legions Imperialis Basics

Legions Imperialis isn't technically out yet, but veterans of previous editions of Epic have a pretty good feel for where it's going. To keep competition fierce when the game's released, let's start talking about the basic.

Get on an Objective and Sit There.

It looks like Legions Imperialis's scoring system is primarily objective based (with some possible bonus points for wiping out enemy formations.) This means that your army's main goals are:

Get to the objective before anyone else.

Survive sitting there while being attacked

Dislodge enemies from an objective they got to first.

This means to plan for attacks into ground favorable to the defender.

Armor is Nice. Not Getting Shot is Better

The previews have shown a LOT of weapons with Armor Penetration in Legions Imperialis. On top of that, Close Combat ignores armor entirely.

Having armor is better than nothing, but your best defense in Legions Imperialis is to not be attacked in the first place. Move out of range. Hide in cover. Use Assault Transports to tie up ranged attackers in melee.

Ceramite power armor is great in 40k, but in a game with multiple Titans on the board, it's a bit outclassed.

Survivability Means Extra Bodies

In a game where armor won't save you, a survivable formation is one with enough extra bodies to be casualties.

This goes double for units in close combat. The stacking +1d6 bonus for outnumbering is massive. +1d6 is roughly equivalent to the gap between "Guy with bayonet" and "Transhuman super soldier in Terminator armor with a Power Fist."

Giant robots and superheavy tanks can do real damage, but remember their real job is to support your teensy swarms.

#wargaming #strategy guide #legions imperialis

[teensywars]

The Gremlin Game Designer's Creed

Rules are toys, and the process of rules-mediated play consists of smashing their faces together like little girls making their Barbies make out. Unless a rules module is explicitly intended to be enacted solo, it should present a generous surface area for other rules to bite into. The most elegantly self-contained piece of rules design is, collaboratively speaking, also the most useless.

The principal function of "player characters" as discrete collections of mechanical traits is to furnish each player with an assemblage of shiny things to show off to other players. Mechanical abstraction is well and good, but if you abstract away the act of curating one's collection of shinies, player engagement will suffer.

The GM, if present, is a fellow player. Ensure that they have their own toys and shinies to play with. The failure of a game to provide these is often a major contributor to why nobody wants to run it!

The most effective way of encouraging players to do what you want is to make a number go up. This applies to both to rewards and to misfortunes; a number counting up to disaster a much more visceral motivator than a number counting down to zero.

Crunch is good. The defining feature of tabletop roleplaying is that rules produce stories. The act of interpreting the outputs of the rules and the act of telling the game's story are the same activity. Be mindful of what kinds of stories your rules want to tell; you may find that their opinion on the matter differs from your own!

Actually assembling your game's rules is as much a process of discovery as it is of invention. In the course of designing and playtesting, you may find that your own game has rules that you didn't know about. Where did they come from? It is a mystery.

Randomised outcomes should be made mandatory with care and restraint; randomised outcomes should be made available with delirious abandon. As far as is practicable, players should always have the option of asking the dice what unhinged bullshit should happen next. Corollary: lookup tables are your friend.

Players don't need your permission to depart from the rules as written; granting it is arrogant. By the same token, however, it should never be unclear to players whether they're departing from the rules as written. Let the thought process behind what you're writing hang out for all the world to see; folks will be rummaging in the game's guts anyway, so give them easy access.

If your game has a default setting, explain it as little as possible, but always let the rules and presentation reflect it. Seeing an entry for "poorly made dwarf" in a table of player character backgrounds will fire a group's imagination more strongly in three words than a chapter stuffed with worldbuilding lore could in ten thousand.

You don't need to be good at naming things as long as you're good at puns. Wordplay, alliteration and rhyme may also serve in this capacity, as, in a pinch, may a well placed dick joke.

#gremlincore

[teensywars]

Why You Should Be Worried About Legions Imperialis

Remember when I said how Epic 40k's 4th edition was considered one of the best tabletop wargames ever made?

Legions Imperialis is not based on that version of Epic. It's based on Space Marine and Epic Space Marine, the 1989 first edition and 1991 second edition.

Now, don't get me wrong, there is a lot to love about Epic Space Marine. So many 40k staples, from Whirlwinds to Stompas got their start in that era of Epic. 2nd edition was probably the most popular the game's ever been, and it was an exceptionally fast, simple system for the time.

Operative words are "for the time." It had many mechanics that beg to be streamlined for faster play. Two of the biggest culprits were Armor Penetration modifying every Armor Save, and every single individual close combat needing to be resolved with a 2d6 vs 2d6 dice off.

Both of those mechanics are in Legion Imperialis, untouched.

Honestly, looking back at the old editions, I'm not even sure the system was fast playing, or if it played fast because the units themselves were simple. Nearly every tank, for example, only had the one type of cannon with no special rules.

I really hope that isn't the case, because Legions Imperialis units are not so simple. I'm still trying to figure out how many separate dice rolls being shot by a Baneblade is going to require.

There's a lot of evidence piling up that suggests Legions Imperialis will be a slow, clunky game. I genuinely hope that's not the case, but it's a risk to prepare for.

#wargaming #epic 40k #legions imperialis #cynicism

[teensywars]

Why You Should Be Excited for Legions Imperialis

Legions Imperials is Games Workshop's first new edition of their Epic game since 2003.

Epic certainly wasn't the first teensy scale sci fi wargame, but its emphasis on swarms of tiny infantry backed by colossal war machines defined an entire subgenre on its own. The sheer scale of its gameplay captures the fluff of Warhammer 40k's unstoppable military-industrial complexes far better than its larger-scaled cousins.

Epic didn't just provide spectacle either. The 4th edition (Epic Armageddon) often makes it onto lists of the best tabletop wargames of all time. The rules managed to be both deep and fast playing at the same time, making it one of the rarest things in wargaming: A Warhammer game with rules that stand on its own merits.

Now, after the tease us with Adeptus Titanicus and Aeronautica Imperialis, GW is bringing Epic is back. For the first time in two decades, we'll be seeing new rulebooks, new plastic miniatures, and official support!

Are you excited yet?

#epic 40k #legions imperialis #wargaming

[teensywars]

A Brief History of Epic - Codex Compliant

#epic 40k #legions imperialis #wargaming

[teensywars]

Why Skirmish Games?

There's a story about how roleplaying games were born from skirmish games. The first time someone declared their fighter would be using a short sword, even though it had worse stats, because he wanted to look their opponent in the eye was the moment RPGs were born.

That kind of cool moment is only possible in a game where you're able to care about each of your figures individually.

Skirmish games aren't about the sweep of war or grand strategy. They're little tabletop factories where your characters go in and stories come out. By the standards of wargames, they're random dice-fests, but you aren't going to remember your dice hating you months later.

You're going to be telling the story of the time your medic held off Vulgar Thrice-Cursed for two turns using only a shovel.

You're going to be telling the story of your Frostgrave hireling who worked his way up to becoming your wizard's major domo through sheer tenacity.

You're going to be telling the story of your little dudes, who are yours and yours alone. That's why you should care about skirmish games.

#wargaming #kill team #frostgrave

[teensywars]

Why Tiny-Scale Wargames?

For me, a wargame succeeds or fails based on how it makes me think. When I look down at the pieces on the table, am I thinking about strategy? About the drama of my little guys? Or am thinking about little plastic toys on a table?

The default scale for miniatures games is just close enough that you can see your individual figures doing things. That makes sense. The companies want to sell toys, so you want to make a game where the toys do cool things.

But, once you zoom out far enough that individuals no longer matter, something amazing happens. Your perspective shifts, and you begin thinking of your little tabletop battle in the same way you'd think of a real battle. The game is no longer about individuals, but lines of battle, flanks, and C&C.

Space Marines in Epic Armageddon don't win because Lieutenant Ironpecs is really good at hitting things with a sword, they win because they follow orders when other armies would be struggling with morale.

Battles in Drop Zone Commander aren't won on shooting, they're won by seeing ways to use the terrain to create a place for your transports to land.

Darth Vader may be terrifying, but in Star Wars Armada, he's one guy in one TIE Fighter among hundreds.

That's something you can't get from squad-scale wargames, and that's why you should care about games with tiny miniatures.

#wargaming #epic 40k #legions imperialis #Dropzone Commander #star wars armada

[teensywars]

Welcome to Teensy Wars, home of tiny tabletop wargames... in both directions!

Whether it's epic sci-fi battles at 1/300th scale or a handful of desperate mercenaries fighting over a mysterious box, it has a place here!

#epic 40k #legions imperialis #wargaming #frostgrave