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A quick one today, just to try to cast the net wider with my Phoenix Rising project. For those of you who don't know, this is my iteration of Firestorm Armada, based on the old SG game in terms of play flow and statistics, which I've spent a long time picking through both whilst working with Spartan Games as Spartan Alex, and since.

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https://discord.gg/q7GbgehGMm

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Phoenix Rising - Mines

Mines in FSA never really felt like area (volume?) denial weapons, their main use was typically as drive-by bombs. Mines also tended to be dangerous to smalls and mediums rather than large ships (though not exclusively and we all had the odd success more generally). Still, they were relatively easy to deal with - fly something relatively sturdy or disposable into the area, clear the mine and move on. The blast radius was big (4") and persisted in theory, but as that was too big to really drop a template, plus move models etc, it was generally "ruler around the marker" measuring, which could then get forgotten if the mine was removed after detonating. it was just a little clunky, though not necessarily urgently broken, it felt unsatisfying in many cases. Of course there was the whole issue of the "drive by" as well, and this does fix that, but actually my aim wasn't to address this specifically, but more how mines worked at a grass-roots level.

I wanted to go back to basics with mines, and think about their use as volume-denial weapons. They should be dangerous but not insanely so, forcing difficult choices on players. I've opted for the following solution;

1. Mines are persistent. They stay on the board during the game unless removed by a specific mechanic, so the "kamikaze minesweeper" is gone.
2. Mines have a smaller area of 2" radius, and as they're persistent, they can be indicated on the board by terrain (card circles)
3. Ships only have enough mines for seeding a single area, unless a MAR gives them more (preventing the board becoming one huge minefield!) (edited)

This (hopefully) has several effects;

• Mines are now true area denial weapons - or at least, they deter enemies from certain routes, allowing ambush techniques etc
• Mines become something you need to time appropriately, rather than just fart out whenever in the hopes of catching something at some point
• Measuring and effect determination becomes simpler, without cluttering the battlefield with things ships can't be placed on.
• Although more dangerous to small ships, they also have the speed and manoeuvring power to avoid them most easily, smoothing out their effects across ship types
• Facilitates minesweeper ship types to remove them

So how does this work? Well mines are laid after movement, placing a Mine Marker (a 2" radius circle with the mine value on) half way under the rear of the models' base. These mines remain inactive until the end of the parent models next activation. This prevents the unavoidable "drive by", as ships in the wake have a chance to manoeuvre away before these go live. I say a chance, because if the player can lay the mines late in the turn and activate before those in its wake, it could get a successful drive-by. Of course your opponent knows this and is going to try to activate before that happens, but then it's a matter of priorities - is that more important than activating your battleship and getting that killer shot?

I went for this as it provides more "meaningful choices" in a game, which good games are all about. It's no doubt that no-one wants to fly into an active minefield, but if those two frigates chasing down that carrier happen to do that because you have higher priorities, that's just bad luck for them, right? On the other hand, maybe those two frigates can take that wounded behemoth down, and they absolutely need to survive. You can imagine situations where a cruiser group could get an optimum RB2 shot if it went through the minefield, or attempt an unlikely RB3 shot by going around it...which is best? Only you as the player can ultimately make that choice, and given 100 people asked exactly that, each will have their own decision and rationale for it - it's not a given either way. I think this also allows some nice scenario possibilities, and adds some real value to the Minefield MAR. Aquan Drone mines become terrifying (though I've an idea for balancing that), but very thematic.

So what does everyone think? Feel free to comment below!

Phoenix Rising - Rationale and Musings

So those of you following the Facebook group will have seen that I've renamed the game I'm working on to "Phoenix Rising". It follows from a couple of comments made on some discussions, and I had a think about it and thought, "You know what, they're right, time to rename to something actually chosen!". I like Phoenix Rising because it symbolises the struggles of the broken parts of the human empire, reflecting the old FSA lore, and the Novus Populi symbol also kind of looks like a heavily stylised bird...so yeah...Phoenix Rising it is.

Now I've also been working with a sculptor to produce new models for the game, and I started off by "filling in" some of the blanks in the prior catalogue, as these were a "no risk" option. You'll have seen both renders and prints of them on Facebook again, I hope. Next is the NPN themselves - one of the main protagonists of the game. I wanted sculpts that would sit alongside existing models without looking odd, but also be my own visual style. I hope you like what's been done so far.

I've also been working on overhauling the rules. Working from scratch on such a complex project is tough, especially when you're busy at work with two product launches in the continuing pandemic, but one of the things I have to lean on (and I don't want to lose in my game) is the sound statistical bedrock of what went before. This means I can tweak (or in some cases completely change) mechanics whilst not totally breaking the game.

Another thing I always wanted to do was to link the models much more visually with their game stats. It never made sense in game that these models had the same HP

That's just one example - there are many more. That's because there was a fundamental disconnect between model creation and stat generation - models were made to be cool with a general remit of what was wanted (by Neil), and then the stats were created to fit the remit in a balanced way with the game....it should ideally be the other way round, creating a model that fits the pre-determined, balanced stats which fit the areas in the game needed. 

This was most starkly revealed to be coming unstuck with the taskforce reinforcement boxes towards the end of Spartan's demise, with various "light" versions of models which, while showcasing some of the improvements in multi-part model making and casting spartan had achieved, were put in the area of the rules which had the least room in terms of design space. Here's a graph just to illustrate what I mean, with ship mass (x axis) plotted against Hull Points.

You can see there is a rough correlation, but it's just that, and it really starts to fall apart when you start to focus on individual areas - look at the spread in mass of 10 Hull Point ships - there is a three fold difference between the smallest and the largest which is hard to reconcile visually in game (at least for pedants like me!). Now you could say "Oh well, different races have different ways of doing things", but the inconsistencies aren't restricted to the broad picture, but within races too - here's the same graph with only Aquan ships;

Again, you can see a 4 HP ship which is smaller than a 2HP ship and a 5HP ship, 6HP ships significantly smaller than 5HP ships and 9HP ship smaller than a 7HP. That doesn't really make much sense and doesn't even take into account the "old" sculpts either, which were generally smaller than the more recent Spartan designs.

As I've been looking at this since v1 of the game, now seems an ideal point to implement this adjustment, and it has some interesting effects on factions that make thematic sense. It also leads to some adjustments in stats to make things more predictable and balanced. In fact, when you look at it across the spectrum of models, it actually leads to some fairly indicative racial traits that provide additional flavour to factions. Here's a plot of all FSA ships with HP adjusted by mass;

Now of course the exact distribution here can be tweaked, but broadly speaking the levels are set to change the minimum number of ships possible - so in short, most things stay the same, some change. One of the most notable areas is at the bottom, where a number of smalls drop from 2Hp to 1HP. Whilst some might balk at that change, it actually helps with a couple of aspects in SG FSA, those of the complexity of dealing with calculations for squadrons with high numbers of small ships with some damaged ships, and that of "zombie ship syndrome"...in smalls this is usually due to damaged and reduced squadrons becoming ineffective. Reducing a lot to 1HP wonders makes them die faster, but will also be reflected in their points cost - more on that in the future.

Going back to this example;

This now means that the small corvette has 1HP, whereas the large Frigate has 3HP, which "feels" more in line with the models.