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Received the AT-43 advanced rulebook yesterday, and thought I'd give a brief rundown for those without it.
Without wanting to turn into a complete fanboy, it looks spiffy-cool.

Design and Appearance:
Lovely. Great artwork, great background, great design. Rackham have clearly laid on the cash in terms of artwork etc. Nice mix of light-hearted stuff (UNA soldiers betting Munchy Choc bars on whether one of them can hit a Golgoth) with political intrigue. Goodies turn out not to be so good; baddies turn out not to be so bad...

Each army essentially has a 'good' 'neutral' and 'bad' faction: so the UNA (for example) has Central Command (archetypal knights in shining armour), MInd (technological gurus) and Union (evil power-hungry political types). It sells the fluff short to state it like that, but suffice to say it's proper involving and has a lot of potential for development and depth.

Karmans are particularly intriguing: not only are they monkeys in space, but they're Enlightened Kung Fu Monkeys in Space. Karman society is based on living in harmony and peace with their surroundings because they believe they are living multiple reincarnations at once*. However, rather than inaction, this leads one of their factions (called Flux) to go and beat the crap out of people on the basis that the net result will be slightly more peace than would otherwise happen. Ace.

Artwork and layout is great: nice and clear without feeling sparse; and a very useful appendix that combines a glossary, index and summary of the entry – which should make reference to a specific rule very easy.

Rules:
The rules look nice and tight: because it's all based around a single mechanic (Action vs. Difficulty gives your dice roll a modifier). It looks fantastically clear and simple.

In fact, it looks so simple, I was a bit sceptical, fearing the game might be a bit simplistic. However, looking at how the universal table of resolution mechanic interacts with the different units, there's a whole lot of variance involved; and then you add the Leadership system.

Essentially, each squad on the battlefield adds one leadership point to a collective pool. This pool is boosted by your commander (an Officer or Overseer [Therian officer]). The higher the rank, the more Leadership points he or she adds to the pool.

You organise the cards for the units before the turn starts, so that they're in the order in which you'd like to activate your units. You can then wager Leadership points to influence the die roll to see who gets the initiative. The winner activates his first unit, but must spend a Leadership point to move, shoot, initiate a close combat etc with that unit.

You can then spend additional Leadership points to do drills (unusual actions), like getting the squad to take cover (adds to cover save), knee to the ground (allows friendly troops to shoot through the squad without hitting them) split fire (allows the weapon specialists to fire at a different target to the rest of the unit) etc. Alternatively, you can spend LP to delay activation, and even move units around in the activation order: all very nice to simulate changes in orders, sudden reactions and so forth.

It gets even more interesting for the Therians – in addition to the drills, they can use Leadership points to resurrect dead Overseers, create special weapons in golem units, create new golems; and even create entirely new Golgoths (though that last one takes one hell of a lot of LP)!

The combat rules are nice and simple – you engage the unit and it's plenty deadly; but units are not locked in place – so you can move at half speed away from the enemy and shoot. While this initially had me thinking that close combat units were a bit useless, this approach means that an assaulting unit can actually drive an enemy away from an objective. Because they will almost always be able to catch a unit that falls back to shoot (since the retreating unit only moves at half speed); the attacking unit can either claim the position the unit moved off, stand and shoot, or re-engage the enemy – while the retreating unit can only move away slowly, firing. This means that close assault is fairly dynamic – and objectives can't simply be swamped with units to 'clog them up' and deny them to the enemy, adding to the tension.

Morale rules are simple: once reduced to three members (for * or ** infantry) or one member (for *** infantry); or all the vehicles in a unit are immobilised, the unit counts as disorganised. If they fail a second test, they are removed. Disorganised units don't produce LP, so you have to spend points from the pool to activate them; otherwise they simply remain inactive indefinitely – bummer if your officers are dead, because you'll have to use LP that could otherwise activate organised units.

Shooting rules are very interesting: each weapon type fires as a salvo, and salvos can be fired at the start or end of movement – so with a Split Fire drill you could fire your small arms at a nearby infantry unit, then move into cover and fire your heavy weapons at a vehicle. Screening is possible: units between a shooter and a target take hits (even friendly troops!).

Rules for line-of sight are very clearly laid out – all ranges to and from a unit are measured to the edge of the leader's (a member of the unit picked out at the start of the game, but otherwise identical to the other troopers) base. Line of Sight is drawn in a straight line from both sides of the individual model's base – if either line can touch the edge of another model's base, they're in line of sight.

The game looks very deadly: in addition to the fact that it's pretty easy to kill things, there are plenty of weapons that pick out individual models (so not a good idea to rely on one super-high officer), weapons with big blasts that not only hurt you, but knock you to the ground(!). I foresee lots of terrain being good. Speaking of terrain, you either move round it (if your base won't fit through, you can't move through), or over it at half speed. You can only move over stuff the same height as you.

I could go on, but in short: it's very clearly laid out; and every theoretical problem I foresaw had a answer clearly stated. I'm sure it's not perfect, but it looks pretty damn good.

*This made my head hurt when I read it, but it's certainly imaginative!

Sounds interesting. I've been looking for something to replace 40k in my life and this may be it. I'll have to check it out a bit more before I take the plunge.

A good review is news to me so I'm moving this to the N&R forum.

Good review!

Some corrections: All the subfactions have their good and bad boys. No faction is essentially bad or good.
Split fire allows you to fire at different times.

Also see

http://viewfromtheturret.com/2007/06/01/at-43-una-army-book-review/

and

http://viewfromtheturret.com/2007/06/01/at-43-the-rulebook-review/

I played a stripped down game of this a week ago, and came away impressed.  We ignored (or forgot) morale, drills, and probably a few other chunks of the rules. Don't take this as a pristine understanding of the rules, but here a few things that I liked as a player of 40K and WFB:

* Card based unit activation.
* No deployment.  In standard games each unit moves on as part of your first unit activation. 
* Weapon accuracy and range.  Your chance to hit depends on range.  There is no maximum range, though your chance to hit gets pretty slim at a distance.  Similarly, close range firefights are brutal.
* Role of Leadership.  Between leadership points, coherency, and targeting, it's nice to have greater use of unit leaders than wargear and better stats.
* Vehicle Damage.  Warmachine is the first thing that comes to mind, though I know other games have done it.  Checking off boxes on the cards for immobilization, weapon damage, and eventual destruction.  The firetoads weren't invincible, but it was nice that big models weren't dying after a single shot.
* Probability curve.  They make me happy.

I can't say much about close combat, the advanced rules, or game balance.  But there's a lot to like.

widder: maybe you'd like Battletech for its endless page o' damage circles and such.

I didn't.

I hear ya.  I thought Warmachine had a streamlined form compared to the Battletech idea, and this seems even a little simpler.  AFAIK, it's the same roll (propulsion, frame, weapon) for all the armour and only a couple boxes for each.  Maybe not perfect, but it's an improvement from chits marking the weapons on my landraider.

How are damage rolls worked out?

There are no 'armor saves', right?

You first roll for accuracy. If you hit you roll for damage. If you damage you roll which location on the walker got hit.

Armor saves are already worked into it with the Action-Difficulty=Number you look up on the Universal Resolution Table formula

Posted By Duncan_Idaho on 07/04/2007 10:57 PM


Armor saves are already worked into it with the Action-Difficulty=Number you look up on the Universal Resolution Table formula

So I guess its like GW's Lord of The Rings system then?

Hopefully it isn't as ridiculous as LOTR, It takes forever just to kill a puny Moria Goblin! 5 or 6's for pretty much everything... urgh

Are there modifiers? For example for cover or weapon strengh etc?

Do they have a point buy system worked in?

Posted By Gundammecha on 07/04/2007 11:53 PM

Are there modifiers? For example for cover or weapon strengh etc?

Everything works off the 'universal table of resolution', which compares the skill/power etc. of the action against the difficulty (e.g. range/resilience).

Thus, pretty much everything has a modifier; but since it all works off the same table, it's easy to remember.

The nearest 40k equivalent I can think of is if you combined the S vs T chart, the BS 'to hit' chart and the WS vs WS chart into one universal table.

 

In answer to the post above me; yes, there is a points-based system.

It´s still different and fast. There are modifiers for cover, weapon modifieres are already worked into the numbers.

The point system is straight and easy and you do not have much math to do, but still you have quite a range of options to choose from.

Posted By Gundammecha on 07/04/2007 11:53 PM

So I guess its like GW's Lord of The Rings system then?

Hopefully it isn't as ridiculous as LOTR, It takes forever just to kill a puny Moria Goblin! 5 or 6's for pretty much everything... urgh

Are there modifiers? For example for cover or weapon strengh etc?

It's weapon strength compared to target's armour (i forget the exact AT-43 terms).  But wound/save is one roll, so it is a bit more deadly than 40K in that regard. 

The only saves in the game are cover saves. This is awesome as cover really means something, even to the super armored Tac Arms and Goliaths. Infantry can even use a "Take Cover" drill to increase the default cover save of 5+ to a 3+. Additionally when you have super accurate weapons firing at close range, you auto hit, as with super high powered weapons shooting at low armor, you auto wound.

There are some really nice aspects to this game, the biggest down sides I see right now are that we are still waiting for basic army books. I currently have the Steal troopers but the Therain book is still not available here. The Red Blok and Karman army books are even farther away. Additionally some figures are you want multiples of are soid in pricey box sets. Think of when you wanted to get a Plasma gun in every unit in your 40K army but you had to by a blister with other special weapons in it and double or triple the price (although the other figures in these add on boxes are good and playable, it's just if you want to min/max your list the way you want it, your going to be buying a fair amount of addon boxes).

Over all, I really like this game so far. It has a very bright future.