Field trials commence, of a sort

Happy New Year!

Well, another calendar completed it's cycle, again without ill effects. ;-P
No painting today, I was a still a bit woolly and lazy from last night's celebration....

I did however, decide to pull out the modular interior/dungeon terrain a friend of mine put in "foster care" with me. Looking at the Appleseed artwork, there is a lot of relief in the terrain. I was wondering how to emulate that (preferally without having to build a fully contoured modular table...). I thought that separate modular "elevations" may do the trick. I could "proxy" the idea with his terrain modules.

Here's a quick experiment on a 2.5x3.5 foot board (the misses normally uses this for her puzzles):

The modular elevation idea seems to work quite nicely, even if they're a bit on the square side for Appleseed. I may need to introduce some non-90 degree bends and some curves.

As you can see by the dice and 2 Landmates (one painted, one primer black) on the board, I couldn't resist a little impromptu field test. :)
 I used the Mobile Frame Zero rules I told you about in previous posts, but with a base unit of measurement of 5 cm (instead of 5 studs).
I played the rules a bit fast and loose this time: I didn't bother formally calculating Asset Value and determining attacker/defender. I just wanted to test movement and combat/damage with this run.
It seems to work quite nicely for this sort of thing, with maybe some Appleseed-specific house rules needed.
And a bigger table is definitely needed with a 5cm base measurement! Speeds felt right though, scalewise.

One thing that bothered me was that there were a couple of instances where, in an Appleseed setting, the Landmate would have reacted to the other's actions. But they couldn't because they weren't the active unit at that time. I might seek a way to enable this. (As part of the Appleseed-specific house rules mentioned earlier)
Here is one such example:

The black Landmate in the background was already in that location when the painted Landmate darted across the open to get into the cover you see it standing behind in the picture. It just didn't feel right that the black Landmate couldn't squeeze of a snap shot in the hopes of a lucky hit as the enemy passed through view. 


What I am thinking of at the moment is allowing each Landmate/Unit to retain a maximum of one each of their unused white (general use), green (movement) or red (attack) D6 at the end of their activation.
They can use one of these dice in response of specific enemy actions: If an enemy moves into their line of sight, or if they themselves are attacked by the enemy unit. A unit may only do this once between activations.*
At the start of their next activation, all retained dice are discarded.
On the one hand I fear that this may promote reactive tactics (like Warhammer 40K 2nd Edition's "Overwatch" as an extreme example) which would de-emphasize the Mobile Suit Zero's focus on decisive, offensive action.
On the other hand, I may also rebalance the seeming over-effectiveness of the "half-frame infantry" I described in my December 22nd  post...

I'm also not entirely sure about how relatively fragile even armoured Landmates seem to be compared to half-frame infantry under the regular "one hit is one system lost" rules. It may need to be tweaked to "one die lost per hit" to redress this. But at that point, on top of al previous house rules I feel I'm crossing over from "tweaking the ruleset I chose" to "writing my own rules, inspired by the ruleset I chose"!


*: This is somewhat inspired by the Infinity game ARO rules. I've been lurking on their forums for the clean sci-fi scenery inspiration, but have gotten quite intrigued by the game itself (Yes, I'm hopeless, I know...).
I've also been messing around with the demo of Frozen Synapse (pc game) which also features this sort of responsive fire mechanic. (As well as abstracted, rectangular terrain representation. Could this have inspired my idea to pull out the modular terrain, I wonder? If not, it is at least a curious coincidence.)

The next stage

<Insert obligatory Post-Apocalypse quip here>

I had some spare moments to do a bit more on the two Landmates today. The Bunny Ears are now reality:

And, as you can see, I've built the frame for the two grenade packs (one is on the table, the other attached to the left Landmate's back), as well as the first set of launcher barrels. On the right of the picture is the pack I originally built for my first Landmate conversion.
I don't have the exact same parts I used last time, most importantly the discs that the barrels should mount on. So I'll need to find an alternate way of doing those, but that shouldn't be a problem.

Oh, and I've done a (solo) playtest of an idea I had for minifig-scaled infantry in Mobile Frame Zero yesterday.
My basic idea was this:
-Each 2 infantry count as a single Frame and they split the dice between them. As such, each infantry in the pair gets 1 white die, and 1 die from every 2-die system (mainly weapons) you choose for the infantry pair. Single die systems (Defense, Sensors) you allocate to one of the pair. (So, if you want both to be armoured, you need to take two Defense systems...)
-To counter the fact infantry only has a single white die (and so often has to choose between moving or defense), I ruled that infantry can't be spotted.
-Infantry activates in pairs (not necessarily the pair you created as a single frame, you can mix as you want during the game).
-It takes 2 infantry to claim an objective.

I played two games, one with both sides having equal numbers of Frames and Infantry, and a small difference in the number and type of systems. The second I played with one side consisting of 2 Frames and the other of 4 infantry to see how they balanced with each other. Let's just say the Frames took a beating in that second game...

Things I ran in to:
-The paired activation results in potentially confusing activation sequences if an infantry pair both target different Frames. Which Frame is forced into activation?
-2 Infantry appear to be more powerful than a single frame, simply because they get to use a larger portion of the dice you roll. And, because of the no-spotting, they can have turn in which they are effectively invulnerable (due to Defense 6).
I'm thinking of ditching the no-spotting rule and seeing how that goes as far as redressing balance.
Also, I'm not happy with infantry lacking ranged weapons suddenly turning into jetpack infantry through gaining a bonus green D8. I may need to knock the bonus movement die down to D6 for infantry.

Now if you'll excuse me, the zombies have closed in again and I need to fight them off. ;-P

Studs...

Real life has been taking precedence quite a bit lately...
I've been looking at my Warmachine again, but have yet to seriously start work on them.
However, earlier this week I stumbled across something called Mobile Frame Zero and my interest was piqued.

Big stompy robots, Lego's and wargaming rolled into one? I had to check this out.
So I took out the family Lego stockpile (I'm lucky, all three of us love the stuff!) and started building some bots, called Frames in the game.
I took the instructions for building the "Chub" Frame, and improvised where I couldn't find matching parts.
Here's what I built:

A Free Peoples force*, consisting of an Officer and two troopers, the latter using militarised construction bots.

 

The Authority* strike force, again, an officer in the middle, flanked by two troopers.

The next day, I built some filthy mercenaries*. (I was out of co-ordinated colours, and just bashed these together with whatever came to hand...) amd bashed some rudimentary scenery together.

I built all three groups with similar equipment: one heavily armoured officer, with a both melee and ranged weapons, an all-round soldier with some armour (the shield), a melee and a ranged weapon plus a "heavy" trooper with an artillery piece and spotting gear (only the merc heavy got extra armour instead of spotting gear).
(During the test games, giving the artillerist spotting gear turned out to be less than optimal, as sensors are medium range, but the artillery is long range only....)

*: I must admit I didn't read the game's accompanying setting background, but just built and named as I felt like.

These similar load outs caused some fudging when I ran some solo test games, as the rules work on the premise of the various parties not being equally matched... :P

The rules are quick, and once you get your head around them (the rules are very concise, and I feel they could be more elaborately explained to be more readily grasped.) surprisingly fun.
They work based on dice pools of sorts: Each Frame gets 2 generic dice that can be used for anything, plus each extra system installed (additional movement, defensive measures, sensors, etc.) gives you a number of extra dice for specific purposes. Damage is expressed in lost systems and corresponding loss of dice.
Which is extra fun with Legos because you get to physically rip the destroyed system from the little robot!
You can even damage terrain! (Isn't Lego's brilliant?) By the end of the game, your table will be littered with loose bricks and bits of robots, really showing off the mayhem that occurred.

I found I really like the way they handle turn order in this game.
As I mentioned earlier the game relies on asymmetry between forces. It  features here, in turn order, as well as the role you play in the game (defensive or offensive). Essentially, the number of Frames and systems each player has are calculated into a score. The stronger your force, the lower your score.
Getting the highest score means you will fight as the defender, allowing you to start the game in an advantageous position. You also get to go first and take the initiative each turn. Loosing Frames or objectives costs you points, capturing enemy objectives gains you points. The highest score at the end of the game wins.
So the weakest party also get a leg up towards victory by starting higher up the ladder.  Really nice.
The high level of integration of this system into the game seems to make it less flexible with regards to playing scenarios, but I don't have enough experience with the rules yet to judge this, I could be mistaken on this point.

Though the rules are written with Lego's in mind, they could be very easily adapted to any kind of fast paced Mecha warfare such as Gundam. You just need to adapt the measurement stick to the size of the models you're using. Once grasped, the rules are easy to explain, so I expect they would do well as a participation game on conventions too.
They've certainly got me thinking again about some Appleseed conversions I was working on a few years ago. :)

So, in conclusion, if you have a stack of Lego or a collection of Mecha kits gathering dust I can heartily recommend these rules!

As a farewell, a pic from the opening stage of a test game I played with my 8 year old son: