Has anyone used ITS mission or only these mission ? I was thinking of using a few ITS ones throughout the campaign. I wanted some feedback on how it went with ITS 32"x48" table. Did you add a 4th round to do the mission ? Have you kept HVT or not (CodeOne missions don't have the HVT) ? I was thinking of adding my own Twists to most ITS scenarios, as I think Twists are very interesting.
First test game yesterday. Played Backstab. Initial impression, I feel like maybe the choice of Attacker and Defender should just be part of the choice for who goes first (with Attacker always going first); my opponent picked deployment zone and chose to be attacker, so I chose to go first as Defender and tabled him by the end of the first round because even with the irregular orders split across many models, fourteen orders is a loooot more than eight.
14 orders in a 6 men squad, teach me :D i know some faction can spam cheap impetuous+irregular but damn!
The scenario gives the defender extra irregular orders per trooper. It's not something outside Mercenaries :)
You have to tune a bit ITS missions, as a specialist is usually strongly required, whereas Mercenaries matches are more forgiving on this aspect (so you risk to do miss specialists for the objectives). Thank you for the feedback. I discovered that contract is extremely difficult to balance, as I received very different comments until now. Some are saying it's too powerful to be the defender (for the additional orders), others that the attacker is too powerful (because he only have to put a barrier against the defender, so it could force the opponent in a SF and/or mine field)
Our locals are kicking off a little month-long Mercenaries campaign on Monday. Only alteration we're making to the rules is just having players pick one sectorial and play that as their company - purely for ease of access for new players (and to allow a company to be maintained in Army in addition to on the company tracking sheet). Looking forward to it. :)
One games night and two rounds down. Games play nice and quick and frankly I don't think a single game got to four rounds so we got two games in in one night. Praxis Rampage in particular felt very cool as a mission; the stun ammunition mechanic keeps the players engaging with each other while retaining a PVE experience. I'd suggest removing complexity from the mission, though; just get rid of the whole hacking to stop the suppressor and negative OP for injuring enemies etc and straight up say that any hit between players is stun ammo (and don't worry about template weapons; the template injures the experiments and stuns the enemy troops - that's fine). All the extra rules etc doesn't actually need to come up or add much; the scenario is already a wonderful hot mess with experiments dodging everywhere etc. Leveling up, spend and injuries after the game felt very good - the level up matrix in particular is a really awesome design with just enough choice to give the player an interesting decision to make without removing the good vibes of Mordheim/Blood Bowl style random progression. We've made two core changes to the rules, one at the start of the league and one after last night. We're just straight playing 'pick a sectorial' because it's reasonably balanced, allows players to track their companies inside Army, and most players have an attachment to the existing sectorials and like playing them. We're also adding a rubber-banding mechanic. As follows: Underdogs When playing against a mercenary company with higher renown, the player with lower renown gains +2 XP per troop deployed to the battle. Against an enemy mercenary company renown more than 20pts higher than the underdog player, this amount increases to +4 XP per troop deployed to the battle. I'm also leaning toward six games rather than eight being the sweet spot or at least a good alternative option for a 'short' campaign. Companies progress very quickly (which is awesome) but I'm only two games deep and I already have multiple troops in heavy armour including the terrifying monster that is a libertos with two wounds, ARM4, BTS3, a plasma carbine and hidden deployment. I can only imagine that by the end of eight games the entire company would look like this! We did have one question about experience - do troops gain experience per kill they score during a mission, or 1XP if they score at least one kill in a mission? We've played the latter and I think it works better in terms of the overall curve (again, experience accrues nice and quickly already) but you might want to check the language to clarify.
While a good option and likely default for sectorial players (+1wip), i feel pick two is important for players attached to their vanilla faction. They'll have to cut down but not too much.
Speaking as a player attached to my vanilla faction I was happy with the rest of the crew suggesting we just go to sectorials (with no WIP bonus). Without fireteams, just going with 'pick a sectorial' forced some choice and offered some identity.
Just as a bit of a personal lesson learned from running narrative campaigns with complex elements in the past, the biggest lesson learned was to always ask 'can I simplify this without losing something essential?' and if yes, to do so. Fan creations are almost always a little too complex for their own good (because we have so many ideas we want to include). There are a bunch of elements inside the Mercenaries framework that I reckon Lareon has knocked out of the park. The leveling up especially is just excellent but pretty much everything else functions well with as few rules questions and nice future features (that he's highlighted). But still - always simplify if we can. And the mercenary company creation rules introduce both front-loaded and ongoing complexity and tracking/management difficulty.
Thank you very much for your feedback! Few random answers and thoughts: Praxis Rampage: I appreciate the idea to keep the things simple, and I generally agree with your comment. I decided to add this further layer of complexity (suppression hacking and killings) in order to give an additional tactical or strategical choice. In my thoughts it could be a sensible choice trying to completely remove an enemy unit from the game (knowing I will pay the price losing an objective point) rather than disabling it from a round. Or, if I'm very mean and play the long game, trying to hurt the enemy Company injuring their members, so they will be disadvantaged in the next match. However I agree that it could add unneccesary complications if those points are not achieved. I'm gathering several feedbacks right now, so I'm going to simplify a bit the contract if I'm not satisfied with the results. Underdogs mechanic: it's a great addition! I was working on a similar mechanic, but still I'm not satisfied with it. Adding XP to the deployed troops seems a good idea to give a little nudge to the disadvantaged Company without impacting too much on the balance. If you don't mind I would like to steal your idea and thinker a bit on it :) Experience: the troop gain 1XP if cause at least a killing in the game (so 1 point regardless of the number of troopers killed by the unit). So you did the right thing. I'm going to check how's written on the document and clear any doubt. For the personal development matrix I have to thank all the feedbacks I received until now, especially @WiT? for the suggestions on the roll mechanic! :)
We'll be running a two-month league locally and will let you know how it goes. My only modification was to increase the bye reward as we don't want to ask players to commit playing all 9 games (once a weak). So we'll go with 15RP and 3XP for the up to 6 units that would have participated, but no further XP bonus. We haven't discussed how to play Peripheral. The current rule is 1 Peripheral(Servant) max, to an existing doctor/engineer. Doesn't count in the Lt+5 units slots. And doesn't count as a mercenary (XP/skills/equipment). Has to be payed every time it dies. I'm not sure about the other type of Peripherals, though, like the puppets Peripheral(Control), Zondnaut Peripheral(Synchronized), Pupnik (also Synchronized) and Post-humans (who stayed Ghost:Jumper while the other Ghost (G:Synch, G:Servant) got moved to Peripherals). For the zondaut, which is just the other form of the transforming bike, I think it shouldn't count as a unit as it is the bike's other state. And I don't see it as a need to be repurchased considering that aragoto don't need to buy a new bike every time theirs get destroyed. (although 5Pts is not too much too complain about.) For the puppet, while they don't take order pool slots in ITS 12's limit of 15, I think they should take slots in the 6-man mercenaries limit... they are more costly and powerful than servants. Still, not gain any XP, as the are directly controlled by the puppetmaster. No comments for now on g:synch pupnik/devabots/auxbot and g:jumper PROXY Mk 1-5. I understood XP as any (1+) killing was worth a single XP but it could be written more clearly I suppose. I would like a line in RP saying to remember the booty bonus RP, and a remainder in Personal Development to remember the Metachem bonus. Also, I love the Personal Development table and the choice between 2 results from the same pair of dice. There is only 6 weapons to be gained in Downtime events but 7 in the Exotic Equipment Table.
Round two (or more specifically, games three and four) of our local campaign were played yesterday. Some takeaways: we're accelerating at a rapid rate. We'll probably wrap the event up with game 3 being the final game because there's already one troop who's hit level 3 (as a result of me rolling Training twice) and we're starting to see troops who've variated so far from their base profile that it's tricky to remember all the changes, and also some missions can just be blown through in turn one with a sufficiently advanced company. The advancement is very cool, but the permutations are also hard to mentally track after a certain point. we found a weird quirk in praxis rampage. I deployed a krazy koala and an antipersonnel mine so they could hit pupniks. When my opponent activated and those pupinks had AROs, I could choose to reset with them, causing the mine/koala to hit automatically. We counted those as kills for me but maybe we shouldn't have? You could specify in the scenario (pupniks killed with deployable weapons don't count for either player, for example) - although to note we still tied on pupnik kills because my opponent easily cleaned up the rest with his elite phalanx company. We've had a couple games of The Mole now and think you might want to rework it to either make it take longer or not have players fight over the same HVT. Assessing three HVTs in a turn (the absolute maximum required to make one HVT appear as the mole) isn't actually that hard and odds are you hit your WIP roll inside the first two or three. By the end of the campaign I expect I'll have some suggestions on rebalancing equipment costs but so far I'm feeling the 20pt Heavy Armour as an extreme value buy especially when attached to certain troops. I mentioned Libertos above but I'm also going to consider buying it for e.g. my Hulang, which will take him from an ARM3 BTS3 no wound incap trooper to an ARM4 BTS3 2W no wound incap trooper - expensive, but ridiculously durable. Marksman rifles are also extremely popular although we're seeing a mix of them and other guns. General consensus is that the extra RP from booty is fun but contributes a little to snowballing (our TAK player took three irmandinhos and they paid for a bearpode very quickly) - it's honestly probably fine just to let booty use its normal rules where you roll at deployment. Don't let booty troopers keep their equipment between missions, they just get something new every mission the same way they would normally. A netrod spent enough time alive on the field that it levelled up, rolled +2 BS and was given a gun. This isn't a problem, we all think it's hilarious.
that is what i thought would happen if you track the single sectorial company in army. You eventually reach a point where you need pen and paper (or a spreadsheet). i didn't play it yet but i felt it would be better to let booty and metachem rule as usual (not keeping results between games). I like metachem on the specop but 5xp for having 4 choices instead of 2 on level up table is hmm... netrod are interesting when they get a small bonus. Not game changing but gets a smile.
Point of clarity, we're all already using the paper army rosters with everything written down, with Army as an additional aid to make buying new recruits easier - but there's still just a lot of permutations to remember. I can keep my own company in my head but then once my opponent deploys I find I just have to enter the 'well let's fuck around and find out' zone. It's not the worst thing in the world especially where we currently are but we are going to cap out at 6 rounds and just see what nonsense we've created.
ah ok i see hmm... makes me wonder if we should get characters cards like in N2. (In N2HS we'd write our stats on 3x5 note cards, but eventually someone made available CCG style cards)
A quick question, making sure I understood. Lt is always Open Info. That only means that Lt is to be removed from the list of private info ? If the Lt is a camo+minelayer, he can still make use of this skill as camo gives Private Info to everything under the camo ? Or does the Always open rule modification means you place the Lt Order next to the real camo ?
