There's always room for one more system

Hi fbruntz, appreciate you taking the time and thank you for the honest review.

1. Is there any required unit coherency within a Century? - Yes 30cm
2. In a close assault do the defenders get any kind of countercharge? I was primarily thinking of how vulnerable defenders are to 'clipping' manoeuvers in a close assault. No, this is intentional
3. Can a regroup be used to clear damage taken in previous turns? Yes
4. Can a regroup be used to bring back stands removed from play? (in both cases the regroup activation rules simply state you're rolling for each point of damage the 'century' has taken rather than damage taken on a specific stand) No, once they are gone they are gone

Putting some further thoughts into point 2 on clipping, each stand can have twice the number of counters on it than it's starting wounds. So it's potentially not too unrealistic to assault a few stands from a century, max out their potential suppression, win combat, and then leave the attacked unit suppressed while doing minimal damage to the attackers. If this is kinda the point then fair enough though! Ironically in this case the unit may 'un-suppress' at the end of the turn due to the units being removed i guess. This is exactly what is intended with the rules, except that if the total number of damage on a single maniple can be more than twice the damage capacity and this might need to be reworded to make this clearer

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Unfortunately no time to try this out last night. I was doing a EA bat rep and writing activation notes takes ages. But some of the guys are going to read through and we will hopefully try soon.

Thanks for the reply on regroup action. I think RL is touching upon similar exploits - ie. load up 2x damage on a elite unit, roll double the dice gaining more chance of gaining damage back on the century as a whole. If this can be allocated to any stand, a bunch of damaged spods can be kept at the back damaged while “feeding” damage points to a more heavily armoured stand at the front? However in reality this may not work in practice, so i need to playtest. If i have learnt anything its that rules never play how they read! :-)


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One other question - how do mechanised units interract with the AT and AP rules? (i.e. do mechanised count as infantry, tanks, both, or neither for the purposes of being shot at?

Both.

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Page 9 - Special Rules - Basically as a combination of Infantry and Tanks they suffer from both AP & AT however they do have a larger Damage value.

Oh, another couple of questions (sorry!) sprung to mind on terrain

1. is the modifier to ROF only when shooting into terrain? (i.e not when shooting out) and presumably if two forces are in the same piece of area terrain they both just count as being in terrain for the purposes of shooting each other?

2. If a unit is in terrain, can the unit be seen by anyone who can effectively draw a line to it? (i.e. not blocked by another piece of intervening terrain), or is there a maximum distance you can see through terrain (as in Epic).

3. If a unit is deep in cover and shooting out, do they get a RoF penalty?

Sorry, more things - just to check, when allocating hits from shooting against a mixed century (so let's say 3 infantry maniples 2 scorpion maniples, and a challenger (ignoring cover for a moment), and let's say first off that there's no modifiers going on as well, and everyone is out in the open. The way i read it is that i would work out my ROF, and roll all of the dice. Once that's done i can start allocating them as i want. So for instance i might put all the 6s against the challenger, all the 4+s against the scorpions, and any 3's against the infantry. Is this correct?

Next off, let's say i've got 6 maniples of scorpions, half AT and half AP. So going by the rules i'd roll them separately. Do you still allocate them all at the same time though?

Finally, given terrain gives a ROF modifier, does that mean that you opt before shooting as to whether you're shooting into or out of cover, and if into you can hit both, but out you can just allocate against units out of cover?

I know i'm going through a lot of questions at the moment, just trying not to make assumptions based on year's playing Epic that certain elements would be played the same way

Its fine mate on the first one

1. is the modifier to ROF only when shooting into terrain? (i.e not when shooting out) and presumably if two forces are in the same piece of area terrain they both just count as being in terrain for the purposes of shooting each other?
ANS: Yes and Yes.

2. If a unit is in terrain, can the unit be seen by anyone who can effectively draw a line to it? (i.e. not blocked by another piece of intervening terrain), or is there a maximum distance you can see through terrain (as in Epic).

ANS: Yes any unit that can draw direct LoS to a unit in terrain can shoot at it, that is what the modifier is for. It doesn't matter how far into terrain you are, just that you can't shoot at stands behind it.

3. If a unit is deep in cover and shooting out, do they get a RoF penalty?
ANS: No penalty to shooting out of terrain.

When allocating hits from shooting against a mixed century (so let's say 3 infantry maniples 2 scorpion maniples, and a challenger (ignoring cover for a moment), and let's say first off that there's no modifiers going on as well, and everyone is out in the open. The way i read it is that i would work out my ROF, and roll all of the dice. Once that's done i can start allocating them as i want. So for instance I might put all the 6s against the challenger, all the 4+s against the scorpions, and any 3's against the infantry. Is this correct?

ANS: All hits are allocate nearest to furthest. So if the infantry are first you must allocate damage up to their DAM value then move on to the next stand.
Example:
Unit Order is 2 Infantry, 1 Scorpion, 1 Infantry, Challenger 1 Scorpion. if you roll your 15 attacks you score 1,2,2,2,3,3,3,3,4,4,4,5,5,5,6. Scores under the lowest Arm value are discarded (all the 1,2,3) that leaves 7 hits that can damage. The first Damage is to the infantry up to its DAM value of 4. The next three are allocated to the next unit. the next stand will receive 3 damage. Damage cannot be placed throughout the unit unless a specific rule allows it.

Next off, let's say I've got 6 maniples of scorpions, half AT and half AP. So going by the rules i'd roll them separately. Do you still allocate them all at the same time.

ANS: yes roll them separately. they are allocated at the same time but the AT are allocated to nearest armour first whereas AP is allocated to Infantry first. Mech stands can receive hits first from both.
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the cover one I'll get back to you with.

*edit* after re-reading the shooting rules, i think i've got the basics down now

More questions on some carryover thinking from Epic and how it would be handled in this game below though

Haven't had a chance to read the actual document yet, but I had a couple comments on this







Overall I really like this take on the Bolt Action initiative system, it adds a measure of uncertainty and requires you to think about the benefits vs risks of your activations, however



I agree with Doomkitten that reducing the chance of loosing an entire round would be good. While it may not happen often, it will happen occasionally and when it does it would likely be a total game ending event, not to mention a massive, table flipping annoyance to whoever it happens to. Not making your players angry at your rules is a good thing.

Something that occurred to me, similar to DK's idea of the 1st black die fiddling with the turn sequence, was to have the first black die change the battlefield circumstances in some fashion. Instead of having it trigger some game-meta event like loosing a turn as DK suggested, I thought it could trigger some in-game event. I don't know exactly what, but there are a lot of factors that should occur during a battle, but rarely are taken into account in games; weather, day/night, civilians, terrain changes, etc... If you could figure out a way to have that first black die potentially trigger some events like that during a game it would be cool and provide a dynamic that other games lack. Possibly a table that is rolled on, which could be unique to each scenario.

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Thanks,
Troy


Once Upon a Midnight Dreary....

A couple of other things on shooting come to mind:

1. If you have a century of say 3 infantry stands with a single challenger. You shoot at an enemy century, who's forward unit just within 30cm, and there are further 2 units say at 50cm. Does the challenger 'extend' the number of units that can be hit in this case, allowing the infantry to effectively hit all 3, despite only being in range of 1, or do you have to split the dice at that point?

2. As above, but now with say a scorpion unit rather than a challenger, as the scorpion would have a different dice pool given it has a special attack. Would that make a difference?

3. Thinking of hit allocation, the front seems to be measured from the attackers closest unit. Does this mean you could for instance potentially drive a mech infantry around the side (strung out even with another to keep coherancy) or even the back so that the 'front' changes, despite the majority of the century shooting is originating from another side?

4. In addition to this, let's assume some of the units being shot at are behind cover, if that plucky mech inf can now see some of them, does that mean they can be hit by all the century's fire, despite only one stand being able to see any of them? (effectively giving the core century bendy shots)

5. On the issue of cover, if you're silly enough to be under 50% in cover, would this mean you can be seen and get no cover bonus, even if someone was shooting from the other side of the terrain piece?

6. Just to check on the rules for regroup and take cover, do you roll for each stand within a century separately, or just all at once and remove damage however you like? i.e. if there are 12 damage broken down over say a challenger (with 4 on), and two infantry companies (with 4 on each), and i rolled to regroup and got really lucky and rolled 6, could i then take off all the damage from the challenger and one from each of the infantry companies so that they weren't removed as casualties, or are there any specifics, such as one off each of them, then one off each of them again etc? I guess the bigger one with this is that if you had a stand with loads on and some more peppered a bit, could you use all those dice being rolled to use successes on the peppered unit and leave the one that's definitely dead to go down and take all those excess counters with them?

@RichardL

On the shooting questions you originally asked

1. The hit was allocated to the Challenger if the retool is less than the Arm it is a miss.

2. The hits are passed on to the infantry.

Thanks Troy we have many ideas for the End Turn D6, but or idea is to keep it as simple and effective as possible, we'll chuck this into the mix. thanks.

Richard, I'll be back.