So first I want to give you some feedback how the troops performed balancing-wise:
- The first thing we noticed was that big armored vehicles are die-hards. Almost the whole army had to fire on a tank for several rounds to destroy it. This made it possible for them to roam the battlefield freely, just driving around their enemy's emplacement and picking their targets each round freely.
Two tanks with each two Gun III may be able to damage each other effectively, but it would still take about 6 or more rounds for any of the two tanks to emerge as the victor. I guess this is intended, but the base CP cost for such fortresses seemed to be a little low.
- Machine guns were absolutely worth their CP price. Their various firing-modi made them versatile - big targets that are easy to hit? fire some more rounds! A whole infantry squad nicely accumulated in a middle-ringfinger arc? - take them all down with only -1 to the UR! Target so-so to hit? Well, just fire one shot then.
So basically, the machine gun can convert excess of skill/boni into damage/multikill, which is a pretty mighty thing for a weapon that is only marginally more expensive and can shoot a little less far as the normal gun.
In our game, machine guns did by far the most damage and the most kills. The lower distance didn't matter anywhere in the battle.
- The weapon type that was the weakest were big guns (size 3 upwards). Taken their high use rating, we thought of them as perfect anti-tank weapons. In the game however, they turned out to be pretty useless and not worth their CP price at all.
My assault gun IV missed the size 6 tank about every second shot, also at almost point-blank range which looked ridiculous. When it hit, it never pierced through the tank's armour without combined fire (chance would be less than 50%). The amazing distance a gun IV can fire turned out to be much less powerful than imagined as a target of a size that a gun IV can hope to hit will never be destroyed before it closes in to a distance where other/infantry troops can engage (too many hitpoints) - so the extra range only granted the gunner one extra try to hit at most.
So their performance against big targets was mediocre/bad and against infantry about impossible.
Attacking the tank with combined fire of infantry troops proved to be much more effective as they could only miss on a 1 (due to the big size) and dealt the same damage. (4x guns I = 1x gun IV -- as far as damage is concered) Plus of course, the infantry guns could also fire at other things than big tanks. So for the only use case for which big guns were made for, they performed worse than just infantry troops.
This rule makes small weapons over-powerful because actually, there is no need for big guns. It's just harder for them to hit something.
As for a solution to this, the new armored-property does clearly have the intention to alleviate this problem and give big anti-tank guns a chance. But it feels more like a crutch:
It is not clear to me when a tank is "armored" or "only" has a armor level of 3, or both. (From the builders perspective, ) how would an "armored" tank with armor level 3 look like, how would a "non-armored" tank with armor level 3 look like? Shouldn't it be armored everywhere (except for the weaker component-spots but which is already covered by the rules)? Isn't being armored the definition of armor level 3? - even the rulebook gives as examples for armor level 3: "concrete, mortared stone, armor plating, castle, armored tank, stone giant".
So with this property, suddenly there are two notions of armored - armor and some kind of damage consumption. This is confusing. And I can really not think of any MOC examples that should be heavily armored (level 3+) but still be vulnerable to many hand weapons fired at the same time at it. Either a shot pierces through the armor, or not, "armored" and "armor" seems to be too connected to each other than to treat it separately. Besides, there is the grinding damage rule for that.
So, in my next (test) game, I want to try out alternative rules that address these observations, but I am uncertain what I could change for that game. Here are some ideas I have but the whole sense of this post here is to get some input from you guys and especially from stubby, so please, discuss .
- Remove the combined damage and "armored" rule. Burst shots of MGs count as single shots. Explosions always add up. Infantry and other troops with small weapon will have to rely on other methods to stop heavily-armored vehicles - damage components (tank's weapons, tank's tires,...), throw a grenade into the hatch, climb onto the tank and deconstruct it,... or do grinding damage, which I guess is pretty much as effective as combined damage (which is why I'm not sure if I like this rule at all - didn't try it out yet)
- Connect the damage consumption with the armor level. Could be like this:
The better the armor, the harder to do damage with small weapons
Code: Select all
Armor level Armor Damage consumption (per shot) 0 0 0 ½ 1d6 0 1 1d6 1 2 2d6 2 3 3d6 3 4 4d6 4 5 5d6 5