Better late than never, though admittedly it has been a pretty rough month so not much to report. Because of various issues, I spent the month focused on working on scale models and painting miniatures, with almost no opportunities to play games with other people and limited chances to play solitaire. The worst bit is I haven't pulled out the lightbox so I don't even have pictures. Review of goals:
Uncommon Valor/Proving GroundsUnfortunately, no progress because of the issues preventing play. Pretty disappointing. I'm probably just going to have to bite the bullet and play some solitaire games. I have to admit I found my inability to use the Plamo vs Plamo solitaire rules in PG very discouraging, meaning building another A.I. from the ground up for Peacekeepers which will probably be difficult. I kind of like writing Automata, but PG is a complex game with many decisions points that will make emulating people difficult. For Uncommon Valor, the Vehicle and Beast rules need the most testing, so I should probably do some of that. The biggest issue is I don't own very many vehicles! Some USMC stuff and, if you consider them vehicles, a few Infinity TAGs... otherwise, I've never been into 28mm vehicles. I might just play with the PG miniatures at a smaller scale, which would provide lots of options. Skies Far BeyondPretty crushing to miss BOTH this month's group games. I did make a lot of small refinements to the rulebook and the tier 3 aircraft. But obviously nothing compares to the post-game rush for revisions and refinement; after the two groups get their games in, I always make a whole bunch of positive changes. This means up to another month before another round of changes! It hurts. There's also some major rules changes, the biggest being to the way Mastery successes work now in that they can only be cancelled by other Mastery successes in contested rolls. This makes a huge difference in prioritizing Mastery and I feel it makes a lot of sense thematically, and the option to add Bonus Dice is still there instead of taking a Mastery success. It kind of makes the tradeoff getting more successes vs secure successes. I like this change a lot! There were also some big changes to categorization of weapons (for example, all the Ir missiles now have the same category, making later aircraft much easier to list hardpoints on: they can just take all the IRMs) and aircraft, especially he MiG-19 with got a solid balance pass. Danger CloseI did work up the Farm Gate campaign, but playing it a bit more has me questioning some things. For example, the weapons all have a lot of detail in them which is kind of cool but also requires you to have a reference sheet out to track their effects. The enemies are in the same situation, and the aircraft are too. All considered this makes it less "heads-up" than something like Thunderbolt Apache Leader which is probably the closest thing to DC. Is this really so bad? My impulses scream "yes", but I'm conflicted. Infinity, for example, is a game I really like but has almost all information needed to play it kept off the (huge!) table in various charts. Fields of Fire, a traditional and popular wargame, demands that you keep like six charts out at all times. DC, by comparison, requires three (at most): the weapon reference, the enemies reference, and the rules summary. I've never designed a game that needs that much stuff without information on tokens and cards. It feels off to me, but when I really think about it, it's not that different from Afterglow or whatever where the weapons were all on cards. I don't know if I'm going to implement huge changes on this aspect of the game, but otherwise, things are proceeding as planned. A-26 strafing runs are fun, using C-47s to drop flares and propaganda leaflets is working, and the Trojan can't carry enough weapons but it sure is nice to turn on a dime. The basic game works well right now, it's the stuff like mission assignment and campaign rules that will need some more refinement. But that's inevitable, and will come with more time spent playing. I'm going to stick with Farm Gate for the time being because of it's relative simplicity, though I'm dying to break out the Skyraiders. Goals for JulyThis is tragic that I even have to write these out:
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