On Sunday (2020-08-23) i set up a quick 4' x 4' board to give the new crew and rule adjustments a run.
The board used all the new terrain except the ship and was lacking a little cover for a 4x4. i'm intending to make a big batch of wire trees to pad areas if required. the bushes are good but don't fill as much area as they could, and when they're spread around they're not great at padding.
I set up for a Tier 1 mission, easy but a fair introduction considering i'm i) still learning rules, ii) testing rule adjustment.
As it happens the mission objective involved an abandoned vehicle so used the APC for that and adjusted the roads to suit.
I rolled up two Hot Spots (random locations (scatter dice) - slightly adjusted to fit the terrain features). basically at the centre of the map i roll a d10 for direction then roll 2d10 for distance and place the marker more or less where that ends up.
The crew started out from a little compound in the bottom-right corner. This was the 'as printed' list i made and includes, 2 veterans and 3 hardened characters.
Just as a note i adjusted the Zone Hostile Table, substituting the 'Drone Strike' for the 'rad ghouls' (though i didn't end up using this option).
The models scooted up the board aiming for the Mission Objective. The setup for this wasn't as great as it could have been. I had model to the front and side with some overwatch (sniper, scrounger and hustle) and triggered the objective.
Rolled a 6 and decided to keep it, so bandits (our sworn enemy) and an anomaly (a nasty burner) - all good for testing rules.
I'm using an adjusted rule that all zone hostiles are treated as individual models (as the player models are), and i've adjusted the deployment rules so that their reaction is randomised.
I mentioned the setup being not great. As the hostiles deployed the crew managed to kill two of the models which was nice, however two made it to cover (no one made the initial (randomised) attack).
So all my models had pretty much used their actions for the turn and the two bandits got to use their actions. Being Tier 1 they only had one action each and they shot at the sniper and scrounger respectively (assault rifles). fortunately they either missed or the targets made their armour saves.
In the subsequent turn the crew picked off the last two bandits without problem. Some members started preparing to take Hot Spot 1 (behind them, and on the path home).
The scrounger searched the objective and navigated the anomaly (+1 for Tier 1, -1 for leader in LOS) needing and rolling a 5. in the anomaly he found an armour artifact which was a sweet find.
the crew then moved into position for HS1. the next turn was pretty much every getting into overwatch and someone triggered the Hot Spot. Dogs.
None of the dogs rolled to attack and they were picked off the (by now at least) organised overwatch fire.
i think the scrounger discovered a med-kit here. I did manage to remember scroungers get two rolls for salvage (not for artifacts i think - or at least i didn't play it that way).
the crew then booted back to camp in the last turn, having taken no wounds during the mission.
There's not really an impetus to return to base (i.e. you don't loose your models or anything) i guess this was more a force of habit to move out of range of a second player's crew if there was one.
With so limited models on the table there really didn't feel like enough time to safely deal with all of the available objectives. Higher Threat Levels with more hot spots would probably be even less accessible. just the number of actions available to characters really limits what can be achieved. basically 1 turn is not enough time to move, trigger and deal with hostiles, search and med-kit if required. 2 is possible.
i have a feeling that adding more hot spots would feel more like danger points to be avoided rather than challenges to achieve. with 2 players playing adversarially they make sense as they're booby traps to launch at your opponent.
i possibly need to explore the use of the electric-juice item, though the limit to 1 action in the subsequent turn might be a crucial issue.
i'm liking the idea of kitting up the scrounger with a detector to make the anomaly search safer.
armour is also something i'd like to see more off. i gave most of the models electric juice simply because there isn't armour on the basic gear table.
I managed to include most of the modifiers i know of and remembered (red dot + steady hands) etc, so getting there.
so yeah, this was a bit of a milk-run. Tier 2 hostiles would definitely alter that dynamic with each of the hostiles having to actions to reposition and then shoot, or shoot twice. i'm sure there's far more ouch in the future.
i'm considering 1 more Tier 1 run just to test some post-game rule adjustments and basically lock the rules down.
Until next time...
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