That's the formations with shooting attacks - Defence lasers and their surrounding fortresses, Air Defence sites etc.

That limits you to only being able to place your defence lasers where your opponent wants you to place them. Really not keen on that!

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Currently doing a plastic scenery kickstarter

And yeah, any thought about removing all the surrounding fortresses, air defence sites etc?

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Currently doing a plastic scenery kickstarter

Well, you have three objectives to choose from for each installation; One of those is your Blitz, which you do control (and which is a pretty good place for a Defence Laser plus surrounding emplacements, too).

I have always disliked the placement of objectives at a point on gaming table purely to maximise in-game effects. I have always liked placing objectives on terrain such as hills, woods, building, a river crossing, a road etc. The sort of thing that armies would fight over in real life due to tactical importance.

In the same way having critical infrastructure as one of the game objectives is great idea- they are the sort of things that both armies hsould be fighting over in Epic.

Cheers

James

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So you have a maximum of 3 Defence Installations per game, regardless of game size?
...I dislike that.

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Currently doing a plastic scenery kickstarter

Well, no. There is at most only 3 Critical Installations, yes. But you can have as many Air Defence sites as you like (within Support formation restrictions). I've added the option for them to take curtain walls too; It should now be possible to set up a complete Hadrians Wall deployment, should one be so inclined.

Version 0.4 attached; Added a Missile Silo too; So you can now have a Missile Silo and a Defence Laser, to portray (a section of) Port Alpha...




No, I think they are key to making the installations work as formations - they provide numbers to the formation to prevent them easily breaking, and collecting the static elements in "operational" formations also lets them use the normal activation framework, with the usual tradeoffs - too small outposts are quickly suppressed and breaks easily, too large fortresses are too expensive, and can't spread fire over multiple targets.

We should perhaps try looking at possible armies? Some "sunshine" armies that portray the aspects of the defense that we're after, as well as some abusive armies that tries to break the list. I'll go first

Defence Installation: Orbital Defence Laser, 3x Air Defence Bastion, 5x Interceptor Guns, 15x Curtain Walls, Tech Lord [650]
Skitarii Demi-Century, 2x Praetorians [375]
Skitarii Demi-Century, 2x Praetorians [375]
Ordinatus Minorus, 2x QC, CLP [550]
Ordinatus Minorus, 3x Plasma [475]
Air Defense Site: 3x Air Defence Bastion, 10x Curtain Wall [250]
Air Defense Site: 2x Air Defence Bastion, 10x Curtain Wall [250]
Light Artillery Battery (Mole Mortars) [150]

How about it?

Can you please pull out all the units and lists that are not part of the PDF force so it's easier to evaluate?

And please also remove the friendly game units like vox, shield etc. to a separate page.

More thoughts later.

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Currently doing a plastic scenery kickstarter

Revived for testing during 3Q2012:

First test game:

http://sdahl.net/~sdahl/whepic/20120731/

I had a single Defence Laser installation (with ancillary structures), and it did play a central role in the battle, exactly as intended.

Overall, good game, and the list "felt" right. I'll be tweaking the structure rules to clarify their effects in the next version - in particular, infantry in the curtain walls should be targetable (in 3+ cover, but targetable).

Sounds like it was a fun game. Have you thought about updating the robots rule to match the squat and current skitarii list?

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-Vaaish

The one in 3.F? Frankly, it feels odd to me - why would a Castellan be less susceptible to dying from blast markers than a Crusader? And why would either be susceptible to panic/scatter (which is what blast marker damage really is) at all? I think Fearless is a much better rule, supplemented with something to represent their lack of initiative and pre-programmed behaviour.

yes. it's the same as in draft G. I'm not sure I follow you with the susceptibility. the BM covers a wide range of circumstances and a more lightly constructed robot would be more vulnerable to chance damage than a heavier one like the colossus. The current rule is a bit of fearless light. Instead of entirely ignoring BM and ZOC penalties when broken, the robots treat the bm's like a normal hit. Being that the robots are still relatively small, getting overrun still means your far more likely to get ripped apart, gummed up, or otherwise put out of commission regardless of if they feel fear unlike the larger fearless units like Titans.

The other problem is that the robots are not unique to AdMech. The cross over to Squats which have enough robot units that fearless is overpowered.

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-Vaaish

Quite so; This is exactly my objection. Robots are completely fearless (they don't have the glands to fear with), and the Fearless rule represents this well. They have other problems, namely an inability to adapt to unforeseen circumstances, and a predilection for doing as they are told, not as they are supposed to - this I think I represent well enough with the activation penalty.

Observe that with a blast marker, a Robot unit only activates on 4+. They are not particularly fearsome, then.



The new Thurgrimm list? It's just the Tarantulas and Robots, there, isn't it? They are slow, and easily destroyed by shooting. I don't see them as particularly OP, with either Automaton or my Robot rule.

Fearless did seem like a good option a while back when we were hashing out the rule for them, but there are a couple of things that don't sit right which is why the original direction was to use the ATSKNF. Ultimately, the statistics are pretty similar between that and the current version plus I think it makes sense for the robots to have a programmed function to retreat if X amount of fire has been taken and letting them treat the BMs as regular hits takes a good deal of the edge off being broken.



Yes, trials of this concept just made people leave robots at home it seemed. The poor activation seemed like a fluffy idea but the result just forced the robots to garrison duty if taken.

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-Vaaish