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Anyone here have recommended links for Cruel Seas houserules? A buddy goon brought over a starter box yesterday and we played through a couple scenarios, but ran into a few things that seemed wonky through outright broken. Torpedoes: the activation of them feels really gamey and arbitrary. Is there a better system, or unforseen problem, with just making them all move at the top of the round in a torpedo phase? Any good fixes for how fiddly and easily disrupted they are on the table (beyond use a better mat with good grip)? What about tamping down the extreme swinginess of their pile of rolls? Planes: WTF warlord, aircraft can't strafe coastal boats, just drop bombs? And the rules say you can shoot them with 'flak' guns but no guns have flak nor do the rules say which guns counts-as, and while it's clear you can use MG weapons can you react fire if you used them earlier in the round (we houseruled on the fly NO, because the FAQ doesn't have any of that which just further confused us). Movement: so you turn the same no matter what speed which seems real weird from my own reasonable amount of experience with small boats. Surely there's some more interesting movement mechanics out there to use, right? Overall we had fun with Cruel Seas, but not without reservations.
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Oct 9, 2022 14:18
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hot cocoa on the couch posted:a lot of old british game designers use that same point as a crutch. Lotta young ones as well. It's gotta be something societal, or cultural, this aversion to editors the British have. BTW, I'd love to see a counterpoint, someone British with good clear technical writing, and a sane approach to errata/editions. Because I'm wracking my brain going over miniature wargame rules I know well and checking nationalities on BGG and I'm coming up zilch so far.
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Oct 28, 2022 02:37
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Arquinsiel posted:Infantry at 15mm are crazy easy to paint. And then I crank out some sub 15 platoons in the same time it'd take me to do a fireteam of 28s. Except for horses. gently caress horses. Mine never look right at any scale.
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Nov 10, 2022 02:03
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Just finished Millennium Con today in Austin Texas. Any of y'all in the region, I highly recommend it. Austerlitz using Quelle Affaire  I'm a sucker for big Napoleonic tables. I sat in the wrong chair and wound up as French division commander Lannes, for which I apologize. We were ordered to take the hill between two roads in front of us. Infantry and artillery advanced straight forward in formation on the center and left flank, with the right taking the cavalry and swinging wide. The Russians, Bagration commanding, built a classic tiered defense on the hill covering it with cannons surrounded by infantry, with Cossacks and more infantry in reserve. The Russian cav ran in a large sweeping arm, looking for a lucky breakthrough vs the French cav. I think turn 3 was when we finally saw the effects of fire, artillery barrages placing fatigue and morale losses on the French center infantry. Turn 4 was when our right flank collapsed, getting trounced by the Russian cav, while the infantry went mostly ignored. Turn 5 was when both of those situations worsened, Russian cav breaking ours, running straight through and well behind our lines, which themselves now had a gap large enough our cannons could fire clear through as the Russian infantry kicked the living poo poo out our lines. Turn 6, we ran out of time, but it was agreed the French were about to get charged by heavy cav in the back while eating grapeshot in the front. I prefer the command system from Et Sans Resultat, but the combat resolution was infinitely better in Quelle Affaire. Much fun was had, despite the loss. Clash of Ironclads using A Game of Admirals  Slightly ahistorical ACW riverine game of ironclads. I took the CSS Patrick Henry and Tennessee, sailing up the James river to shell some union depots. I had fun with this game, but I've got more complaints than compliments. But they're all easily fixed and improved and I'd play it again next year and I expect the guy running it to fix most if not all and more of them by next year. There, caveat delivered, let the thrashing commence. T Y P O S, E V E R Y W H E R E. The presentation of information was frankly bad, with a mix of dumb typos and insidious typos all over the ship sheets and references. There were numbers with no explanation attached, constant flipping of pages to cross reference stuff, an order of operations to firing that seemed backwards, unclear modifiers, unclear classifications of ships and weapons. We could have fit 50% more turns in with clearer sheets, easily. The scenario was also immediately obviously a problem, and the guy running it realized this while setting up (after running back to find the dice and pencils he forgot to bring). The Confederate ships were slower than the Union ships by a good margin, sailing against a strong current. This meant we were moving at a snails pace towards our target. Meanwhile, the Union was barreling down river crossing a third of the map (and literally 4 times as many hexes as I did) in one turn. Our ships were so slow, we couldn't afford to waste speed on things like turning or maneuvering when we needed that for just getting up the river. Which combined with our weaker guns and rams to mean the most effective solution we had to the monstrous monitors the union had was virtually impossible to pull off. There was also some confusion regarding how movement resolution worked, but it disappeared into the other noise of the game. Again, fun, but needs to get its poo poo together. So I can play again next con. Cold War Gone Hot in '75, using Fistful of Tows 3  15mm mostly-tank battle, Britain vs the USSR over a German countryside. Smarting from my loss to the Russians at Austerlitz earlier that day, I wanted another crack at them. Heavily houseruled and simplified FFT3, with extremely homogeneous sides. There were a lot of changes to artillery and terrain to make them more simulation and less game-like, and it had the intended effect. It was a slaughter from turn 1. British started off having their asses handed to them, and the Russians never lost momentum, though they lost a few tanks. It was a simple overrun objective, and they did. There were so many tanks, and so little cover or concealment that it was basically a shooting gallery at front armor, and we were outnumbered 3-to-1 after the opening volley. Artillery being changed to not scatter also meant it pretty much guaranteed our infantry carriers were stuck sealed up and waiting ducks. I can't say I had that much fun with this one, and neither did my partner. We conceded before the 2 hour mark, with I think 6 tanks on the table and easily 20+ headed towards us. I feel like I still don't understand the game all that well after having played it, so I'm reserving judgment on FFT3, and writing this one off as a scenario that just wasn't as much fun as it was intended to be. It felt like an excuse to chuck dice, fill a table with tanks, and swap stories. But there wasn't much game to it, no interesting decisions to make. Perhaps an expectation mismatch. Battle of Phillora, IndoPak War 65' using Seven Days to the River Rhine  Another microarmor game, 100% 3D printed, and another heavily houseruled game with tons of tanks and little else. Just like the previous FFT3 game, it started out one sided and just got more lopsided as it went. Our Indian tanks had tabled the Pakistani forces by the 4th turn. Interestingly, the guy that ran that very same previous FFT3 game was across the table from me commanding the last holdout of Pakistani tanks. Again, the rules were so stripped down and units so homogenized that the game went by incredibly fast and I couldn't come to a clear a feeling about the ruleset. I won, massively, but it wasn't a very interesting victory. And then I had this huge gap in my schedule because this game was over in 90 minutes in a 210 minute slot. We drove forward. We rolled dice. There were more of us. The End. Played a bunch more games, but they were SF.
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Nov 14, 2022 00:36
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SpaceViking posted:I briefly poked around Milleniumcon on Friday and did some shopping. Managed to snag hard copies of Chain of Command and O Group, as well as some rivers and 15mm mdf stuff from the warlord booth. Definitely gonna make a real game plan for next year, I only heard about this year's from one of the local game shops about a week and a half ago. It's only my second year, but it's easily my favorite gaming convention I've attended. Just the right size. It's not hard to schedule two and a half days full of games of a huge variety. At least as long you just want to play games. I've been to cons with more vendor areas, with panels and presentations, with lots of dioramas to gawk at and short demo games from vendors, and that's just not MCon. The Sunday flea market is also really special, I had to make two trips to my car with all the cool stuff I found.
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Nov 14, 2022 20:41
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JcDent posted:The gently caress are these grogs doing, isn't Seven Days already a light ruleset? I can understand wanting to houserule FFoT3, but this is just weird. I say that, there was apparently a game of Rommel I entirely missed (saw photos of it posted later) that looked like the game I was hoping to sign up for.  Next year, when I set my alarm for the correct day and actually sign up early, I've got that guys name on a list to sign up for whatever he's running.
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Nov 15, 2022 14:25
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I think the accurate read is that including Native Americans in that list was an attempt at edgelord shitposting. But Imma turn around and agree with it. I grew up in a cultural wasteland in Northeast Louisiana. Every field trip we ever took for school was to the Poverty Point archaeological site but that place is ancient and unsolved enough the people working there also teach you about the later Mississipians who were a peaceful trading and building civilization in the SE US that were exterminated by the other Native American tribes right before the Europeans invaded. Like years, not decades, the blood still fresh.
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May 21, 2023 01:17
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It's really hard to make a wargame about poorly recorded warfare.
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May 21, 2023 01:44
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Endman posted:Tell that to the people writing 'ancient' and 'biblical' rulesets I won't defend biblical, but mediterranean ancients are vastly better understood than native American wars. More records and artifacts.
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May 21, 2023 02:09
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It may not be a satisfying answer, but this is the truth. The only kind of wargame you get for the vast majority of North American precolonial warfare is skirmish sized ambushes of civilians by identically armed and loosely organized forces. I can't readily think of a more boring kind of wargame than that.
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May 21, 2023 03:03
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StashAugustine posted:I mean a limited raid of like 50 guys using broadly similar equipment is a good description of SAGA. It's even also historically dubious!
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May 21, 2023 05:49
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Indolent Bastard posted:Is Konflikt 47 discussed here? It's an alternate history game based on Bolt Action and apparently has fairly spotty resources in forums (as fast as I have found). K47 is discussed about as often in this thread as in the thread it belongs in - https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3253037 which is to say it's been like 5 years since a real conversation about it, as opposed to an offhand reference.
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May 21, 2023 16:40
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Cessna posted:Well, no, unless you're going with the "All warfare is attrition warfare at the fireteam level" methodology, which is legit. Cessna posted:some big movements of armies, big battles, etc. Slyphic fucked around with this message at 17:19 on May 22, 2023 |
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May 22, 2023 17:17
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Every acquisition I can think of has been at best no change, predominately accelerating enshittification, and in literally no instance has any aspect of the product or service improved.
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Jul 14, 2023 01:35
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IncredibleIgloo posted:If I paint my Luftwaffe reserve force and their Flak 88 purple and blue the response to that is going to be very negative. Heck, if I paint them the wrong Dunklegelb the response from other people can be negative. We're all here to recreate a tableau of historical battle. It has to look approximately right. A general period. A similar scale. A coherent palette. Purple planes ruins that in an antagonistic way that the difference between light grey and pale gray just doesn't. Yeah, you're going to catch flak for that for sure, and you probably deserve it. By all means paint em purple and run a high fantasy weird war game. But don't bring a rack of ribs to a vegetarian potluck.
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Sep 13, 2023 20:17
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I would not tell someone they were wrong if they shared an anecdote about a color presciptivist rear end in a top hat. But the idea that they're ubiquitous, inevitable, and a reason not to get into historicals is a misconception I will argue against.
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Sep 13, 2023 21:50
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"soviet green"
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Sep 13, 2023 22:26
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All my armies are uniform because I've painted ragtag insurgent forces before where every single model is slightly different and it drat near killed me. Looked great. Burned me out something fierce.
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Sep 13, 2023 22:45
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I've contemplated setting up a scenario based on the family stories of my great great grandfather. He was a 'Revenuer' in Louisiana during prohibition, we've got a few news clippings of his exploits, the oral tradition, and a pair of matched gold inlaid tommy guns with drum mags we've managed to hold on to by passing them down a line of LEOs. So a deep woods still raid, subsequent chase of a truck hemorrhaging hooch, and a final stand in a hideout in the city.
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Sep 14, 2023 04:22
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Southern Heel posted:Oh I don't doubt it. I'll field the child soldiers with AK47s and RPGs, you field the special forces and the off-table drone strikes? Nah - I think I'll stick with 6pdrs and tricorns.
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Sep 14, 2023 16:35
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Arquinsiel posted:From reading the magazines, I get the impression that Henry Hyde is very much of the wargamer mould where just spending your weekends in a rented church hall with a bunch of other middle-aged nerds is kind of how he expects life to be.
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Sep 20, 2023 21:10
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Y'all need to up your hustle. Spacious places I've wargamed: church, rec center, corporate boardroom, library, VFW hall, lodge hall, detached sheds, all kinds of university spaces. Probably more I can't recall off hand. I really, truly, don't think it's some kind of bourgeoisie extravagance to be able to set aside all day Saturday once a month and gather up a half dozen friends to play a big long expansive wargame. And if it is, we need to setup up a fundraiser or something for y'all.
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Sep 21, 2023 20:22
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spectralent posted:So thanks to the goonhammer review I've seen the rules for ESR, and the concept of a game at that scale interests me a lot. How much do you need to play, basewise? Is it adaptable to 19th century generally? I really liked the command phase, but even more really hated the combat resolution. The most about-face change of opinion I've ever had with a ruleset. Just went from having a great time to when will this slog end precisely when the bayonets met. From my notes on the game: quote:I loved the first 2 of 4 hours of this game. It has a great system for issuing and resolving commands that gives you the feel of organizing such large armies with little more than voice and paper and horse and flag. Friction without feeling arbitrary. And logistics! I really enjoyed the maneuver period, the skirmishing fire, the falling back and rallying... and then we made CQ contact and the game ground to a halt in minutiae and pointless busy work. I know there's a 3rd edition, and I'd love to hear if any of that has changed. It's a ruleset I have flagged for fixing because the good bits are really worth saving. Slyphic fucked around with this message at 15:32 on Sep 25, 2023 |
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Sep 25, 2023 14:51
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INinja132 posted:Oof, that sounds brutal to work through, what a shame as the rest of the system sounds quite good. Is ESR broadly the same scale as Blucher?
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Sep 25, 2023 19:34
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Arquinsiel posted:Does it fall back from the position it occupied at the start of the fight or the position you've wiggled it to afterwards? If it's just "remove the stand" then yeah, change the order of operations there for sure.  That's the battalion combat resolution table. You resolve all the combat base-by-base with individual positioning, BUT THEN, you assess those states collectively and get one of these outcomes. Half the outcomes I saw during the two rounds of combat in the demo I played had all that careful positioning rendered meaningless because the whole division had to be picked up and rearranged. quote:https://thewargamingcompany.com/combat-changes/ OH, cool, they trashed that poo poo! Alright, that's got my attention in a big way. I wonder if I can get an upgrade discount for my prize book. Slyphic fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Sep 25, 2023 |
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Sep 25, 2023 19:51
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Arquinsiel posted:Fuuuuuck measuring in yards. Give me arbitrary units of blorpos, something I can just declare to be the length of coffee stirrer or whatever. It's not as bad as it seems there. The game publishes QRF sheets for 6/10/15mm scale, and all of those have the distances in inches. There was no mention of yards nor sign of them at the table.
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Sep 25, 2023 20:30
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hot cocoa on the couch posted:ive been meaning to take a break from my other projects and do some stuff for nimitz. daunted by the prospect of printing a bunch of boats and painting and basing them, i've opted to pick up the topside miniatures guadalcanal sheets and am gonna print them today. looking forward to giving nimitz a go on the tabletop I've similar plans of my own.
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Oct 19, 2023 13:42
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StashAugustine posted:Paint your levies in 6mm, the warriors in 15mm, the guard in 28mm, the heroes in 32mm
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Mar 5, 2024 19:27
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"From the foreword to 'The Complete Compleat Enchanter' by L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt posted:As a history, military, and naval buff, Pratt devised a naval war game, to which his friends were invited once a month. In odd moments, he had whittled out scale models (55 feet = inch) of the world's warships, using balsa wood, wires, and pins, until there were hundreds of models crowding his shelves. The game called for the players to crawl around on the floor, moving their models the distances allowed on scales marked in knots; estimating ranges in inches to the ships on which they were firing; and writing down these estimates. Then the referees chased the players off and measured the actual ranges, penalizing ships hit so many points, according to the size of the shells, and depriving them of so many knots of speed, so many guns, and so on. When a ship had lost all its points, it was taken from the floor. There were special provisions for merchant ships, shore batteries, submarines, torpedoes, and airplanes. Randomly stumbled across talk of old miniature wargaming while reading last night.
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Mar 18, 2024 18:57
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