Focus on YouTube

 Well I guess if you're visiting here you'll see we're not posted anything for a while, and that's because my main focus has been on developing the new YouTube channel. That's going to be our primary outlet for the foreseeable future, so go ahead and check it out if you've not discovered us already. See you there!

Mann's Model Moments YouTube Channel

We're back!

The Hub Systems Podcast is back!

The Hub Systems Podcast Episode 36: Reloaded!

We talk about films, D&D and Phoenix Rising...join us!

Firestorm armada and Phoenix Rising equivalence - How?

So I wanted to give people something of an insight into the process I'm going through before I release the first version of Phoenix Rising. The whole basis of PR is to utilise the wealth of data from FSA v2, which was widely lauded as being one of the most balanced games out there. So how do you do that when you're creating a new game?

Well the basis of this is statistical analysis - lots of it. Modelling a game like Firestorm is a fearsome process, because there are so many variables. In chess, there is a constrained 8x8 board, a set number and type of pieces and modelling that is difficult enough. There are a couple of hundred different Firestorm Ships, and a multitude of different interactions between them and their weapons, MARs etc....it's close to infinite in variation.

However, there are some restrictions that can be imposed - Scenarios impose limits on where ships can be at the start, movement limits where they can get to, turn limit and weapon arcs constrain weapon lethal zones....it's also not necessary to model EVERYTHING, just a representative selection of conditions that each ship can be examined under.

Now this still means there's a HUGE number of things going on, but it allows ships to be compared using actual criteria that are present in the game, rather than an arbitrary "feel". Once this has been done, all that's needed in the new game is to produce similar statistical results, and you have your ground level ruleset balanced for the prior edition - plus or minus any "tweaks" desired - the important thing here is that you can make these modifications with an actual idea of their impact, rather than just "winging it" - which is, to be fair, how most games development is done!

So - as I've mentioned in the past - the way I've approached this is by evaluating ships on two main criteria - how survivable they are against other ships, and how able they are to destroy enemy ships. When you boil everything else away, this is the crus of the value of most units in TTGs - how mean and tough are they, and how able are they to project that power (it's no good being super destructive if you never get in range to use that power). Now this all needs doing TWICE, of course - once for the old Firestorm Ruleset, and once for Phoenix Rising's rules. The great thing about doing this is that it's dynamic - when you change something, you can clearly see the impact that has on that ship and others.

So just how involved is this? Well, here is ONE cell from the Firestorm Armada calculator, used to calculate how many ships are able to damage it in one range band;

This is repeated for every ship in every range band for both DR & CR, main and supplementary weapons (torpedoes, mines etc). It takes into account firing arcs and speeds of the ships weapons used to target the ships over the course of a 6-turn game, as well as MARs, ship type etc etc. Has this driven me completely insane? Well, maybe!

The point here is that Firestorm Armada v2, whilst extremely flexible, has rules which affect how the ships interact and behave, and these constrain possibilities within the game. For example, a ship with a Primary weapon that only fires into RB1 and has a speed of 5" and Turn Limit of 3" is really not very dangerous, even if that weapon is enormously powerful, because in a 6-turn game it will probably only get a single shot in. That's probably less dangerous to a ship that has half the AD but a move of 12" and TL1, because that ship can project the threat of those AD more freely. All of this can be modelled, and whilst an approximation, if you cover 85-90% of the statistical incidences in the game, and because you're using this to compare ships against each other in the same framework, you get an unbiased and mathematically measurable value out  the other end.

Now once you have that "benchmark" of FSA v2, the "easy" part is (once you've done the same for PR, or any alternative ruleset, actually), you can start adjusting things to get THE SAME END RESULT. This is the important bit. What matters is that end set of numbers, and once you're there, because the whole thing is "live", you can then make further adjustments to amend specifics of how factions play and "feel" in the new ruleset, ratehr than making adjustments from "gut feel" and seeing how things play out. Of course, playtesting and player experience are still critically important, since this is what the final objective is - create a game that plays and feels like FSA v2, but (hopefully) ironing our some of the wrinkles in that ruleset.

The other by-product of all this is that it allows ship value to be based on actual gameplay impact, rather than (once again) what "feels" right. That in turn allows you to have a custom ship generator that doesn't have the problems associated with the fun - but flawed - v1 generator.

DIY Weathering Pigments - dirt cheap!

Weathering pigments are a great way to add, well....weathering, to your models - large or small. There's a plethora available from many manufacturers...and I've never bought a single one. "Why not?", I hear you cry...well, because I'm old enough to come from an ancient time before such things were really a thing, and I had to resort to other methods, and was taught this particular one by an expert modeller friend of mine who used to paint professionally for model companies, do a lot of military dioramas for model magazines, and who currently works for Forgeworld. His tip was simple and highly effective, as well as very cheap. I can pass it on in two words - chalk pastels.

Chalk pastels are available all over the place - from discount book stores to art supply shops and lots in between. You can buy a set of 25 to 48 of them for around £10 or less - and often much less. Don't get confused with oil pastels, however, or you'll get yourself in a real mess! here's a set I picked up from a local supermarket for about £4 or so.

So these square-profile blocks are very much like chalk - as the name suggests - but if you scrape the edge of one with a hobby knife, you get a fine pile of dust that you can apply exactly the same as a weathering powder. 

Use a damp brush and the pigment will dissolve in the same way two, meaning you can use them dry or wet to create stains or streaks - exactly like weathering pigments. I've used them to create everything from exhaust streaks to rust and oil stains. You can use white to create fading or colours to create tonal variations too - the advantage of a set of these pastels is you get a huge range of colours, so don't feel limited by the usual greys browns and black.

So these are great, but one of the pains of using them is scraping them each time you want to use them. Now, many of us can agree that Citadel paint pots suck at storing paints in - the design of them makes the paints dry out, the lids can be awkward and it's too easy to knock them over. I've transferred mine over to cheap dropper bottles, which makes them much easier to use. That leaves me with a lot of citadel paint pots. But wait - before carting these to the recycling, there's another use...holding my DIY weathering pigments. It turns out that a standard Citadel paint pot holds one full stick of chalk pastel...nice coincidence! Drying out isn't an issue for dry pigments, and the lids can be made less fiddly with a few hobby blade "adjustments" to them.

  

Now I'm not going to spend hours scraping chalk pastel sticks into powder, so I need another method...fortunately I have to look no further than my kitchen to my handy pestle and mortar.

 

Breaking the pastel into smaller pieces to work on helps here, thirds or quarters seem to be fine, and grind to a nice, fine powder. I do this on a sheet of paper so I can simply pour the resulting powder into the citadel pot after grinding. Tapping the pot on the table half way through helps the powder to settle if you're getting close to the top.

Using a stiff make-up brush also helps to dislodge the ground powder and get the last bits out

And that's it! A set of as many weathering pigments as you desire, for a fraction of the cost of "purpose made" commercial ones. Enjoy!

Join the Rising!

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.

Join the Facebook group using the QR code here;

There's also a link to my Discord Group 

https://discord.gg/q7GbgehGMm

Come and Join the Rising!

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.