OPR - 6mm - havoc brothers vs battle brothers

This is something I've been meaning to get around to after pondering my 6mm collection, pondering epic, and seeing posts about people doing Grimdark Future (GF) in smaller scales.

Had kind of spur of the moment game last night.

Whacked together havoc brothers (chaos marines) vs battle brothers (space marines) lists to the tune of 1840pt (or there abouts).

rolled out the 2x2' mat on the desert side, grabbed some ruins and called it a thing.

There is a suggestion in the core rules in the 'kitchen table rules" (i.e. for smaller games) and the option that I used is to "halve distances, rounding up".   while technically a 24" heavy rifle can shoot the length of the board I'm taking the distance as "effective and useful distance," or "distance with guaranteed potential." regardless.

chaos has 2 tactical teams, 1 heavy weapons team, 1 cultist group, 1 terminator team (ambush/late deployment), 1 tank and 1 helbrute (heavy walker).

marines had 3 tactical teams, 1 jetpack/assault team (ambush), 1 terminator team (ambush), 1 tank, and 2 landspeeders (ambush).

turn 1 was largely the deployed units moving up toward the objectives and into cover, with barely a shot fired.

start of turn 2 all the ambush unit arrived and teams started picking up the objectives.

while they weren't primary in holding objectives the armoured units (tanks/walkers/etc) were pivotal in holding areas. in fact none of the amour (on either side) ended up taking any wounds - there were other more pressing tasks (i.e. infantry holding or screening objectives etc).

by the end of turn 4 most of the infantry had taken substantial losses (on both sides) but the objective situation was fairly solidified.  the 'top' and 'middle' objectives were held by marines. 

conversely the 'bottom' objective was almost controlled by chaos (again the tank was a dominant presence) - however by the end of turn 4 the marines did manage to contest it.

so the final result was marines(2):chaos(0).

all this took approximately 1 hour and 20 minutes based on photo time stamps.

some thoughts...

armour

while there were some 'deadly' weapons on the field the armour was largely avoided. there were a few shots taken, and some melee/impacts were done but mostly the action took place around them, avoiding them where possible.

I was using '3D' rules for tanks so infantry can target armour 'over' an infantry unit in front of it, and vice versa.  so you can't screen a 'taller' unit behind a 'shorter' unit.

a tanks ability to split fire between its different weapons is a very nice option to have.

I'm thinking that a predominantly armour vs predominantly infantry matchup might have issues.

Focusing on taking out a tough(6) or tough(12) unit is a big task. That's a lot of actions that could be used on something more beneficial... depending on the situation.  Yep, there are deadly weapons for that but it needs to be a pre-planned consideration/loadout.  regular weapons are quite likely to just ping off the hull ineffectively. so you need AP and you'd likely deadly.  armour units are going to be at least 3+ def and quite likely 2+ def.  while this is the same for infantry marine eq it's still a large task.

you also don't get the benefit of whittling down infantry units, making them less and less effective in attacks etc.

distances

generally this was simple.   a weapon shoots 24" normally, now it shoots 12". fast adds 1" not 2". etc etc.

the only slight niggles were things like the "all units must be 1" apart unless charging" rule so 1" / 2 rounding up is 1"... ok.

terrain

this caused a moment of consideration... the ruins were both 'cover terrain' and 'difficult terrain', especially at 6mm which is very low-fi on detail.

in difficult terrain (rubble) you can move no more than 6" per turn, so now that's 3"... ok, easy enough.  "if any model in a unit moves in or through difficult terrain at any point of its move, then all models in the unit may not move more than 6" for that movement."

a comparison

this is not the same as epic. not at all. nothing like it.

you could probably up the points (a lot) and up the tank and knight/titan presence.  that might automatically skew the game/loadout selection toward deadly as well

it still wouldn't play like epic though. by comparison epic seems very 'shorthand' of the battle action despite having a preponderance of 'special rules' that complicate it. I probably like the idea of more tanks/armour, and i'll probably give that a go with the 6mm OPR.

I did try an epic-esque conversion some time ago with sub-par results. it technically worked, but the results could be described generously as 'clunky' or 'broken', and less charitably as 'unplayable'.

conclusion

this was fun. it was definitely OPR:GF, just smaller. there were minimal changes required by changing scale - certainly not enough that it should people off doing it.

i intend to do this again.

until next time...