Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Two initial forces are ready, hopefully will test the rules in the near future.

Those look great. Nice to see some 10mm Sci-fi.

I look forward to some reports!

After intense firefight Rona Defense Forces were able to repel Empire's attack (25 points), but their attempt at chasing regrouping enemy was unsuccessful (10 points) and ended in colonel McDull's squad retreating before hostile reinforcements could show up and cut him off from the rest of the army. Commander Sazamai was able to link up with fresh reinforcements and is now ready to press on the attack.

Overall, we liked the game. The idea of managing your Momentum tokens and thinking which troops should be assigned ever depleting number of standing orders is actually surprisingly great, as is the possibility of quickly modeling and bringing almost any sci-fi miniature imaginable on the table. At first I wasn't sold on how abstract the stats were (tanks can shoot fast moving aircraft with their cannons and actually are better at it than infantry with AA rockets?), but after playing two sessions I think it didn't bother us much, they work fine for the scale the game has (I think even bigger games like Epic have what, like a couple of stats and a special rule to differentiate between units?).

What did bother us were things pretty much expected from an indie ruleset: poorly explained rule interactions, sloppy RAW, and really weird balancing and unit ablities. None of it critical, and, as I've already said, fully expected. Heavy vehicles seem to be much better at pretty much anything than almost any type of infantry and light aircraft - the latter unit types can be easily destroyed with lucky critical hits, while something like heavy tank literally doesn't care until it gets shot at with multiple units like seven times in a row. They can fall prey to close combat, sure, but close combat seems to be really unreliable and hard to pull off, and they still just outshoot you before you're able to close in. A7 Heavy Strider from second game was absurdly powerful and managed to withstand four full turns of units 3x its price shooting at it without interruptions, and was still standing by the end of the match. Also, air transports seem to take way too much time to properly unload and do anything, they waste a lot of activations to lower their altitude and finally drop the troops. All of these seem to be easily fixable; I think me and my opponent will just cut all the vehicles' A values in half, so that even tanks should rightfully fear critical hits, and maybe will test aircraft a bit more to see if we're fine with their behaviour.

The Imperial Guukar batallion and Federation forces get another pile of models, about time for the tank engagement to commence.

8 more points of light cavalry and scout striders are ready to serve the Empire. The only trouble is actually bringing them on the table - the schedule is filled with fantasy games for now.

Very nice!

We have finally managed to play another Horizon Wars engagement, this time relatively small, only 11 points per side. Two fast mechanized forces met near the desert oasis in an attempt to gather useful data and drive the enemy squad away. Although Imperial (white and red) troops were able to intercept one more data pack (-1 Momentum to the enemy force), their light cavalry units in the middle and on the left flank came under very precise long-ranged fire and almost completely lost the ability to move and shoot back. After Rona's (sand, yellow and blue) mobile infantry managed to strengthen their positions inside the building, they successfully destroyed one light cavalry and damaged both war striders. However, successful flanking maneuver on Imperial right wing and heavy pounding from all guns have managed to eradicate majority of foot presence inside the structure. Relief attempt from light vehicle ended in disaster with the support tank being disabled and blown up by infantry ambush inside the oasis. Although Imperial side lost another infantry squad (after terrible rolls in melee against medium strider) and light mech, they have managed to clear the field from enemy forces, except for a commander and immobilized light cavalry unit. Imperial victory, final score 10 Momentum VS 4.

Horizon Wars doesn't seem to attract a lot of players, but that isn't going to stop me. After finishing light striders for both of our armies, we're ready to test our biggest game yet, 30 points per side, sometimes next week.

They look great. Good luck with the game.

Almost forgot to upload the results of our last game. 30 points per side, 7 turns of active engagement, tactically indecisive. Both sides suffered heavily in light assets, but heavy vehicles ended up being relatively unscathed. Overall, a decent firefight, but after playing five games of Horizon Wars we came to the conclusion that the game seriously lags once the number of elements goes beyond 10. Also, the fact that infantry and light vehicles are the only things to die time and again is irking as a bit. After some consideration, we think we will try to modify and houserule the game's engine to make infantry and vehicles more even in their endurance and reduce bookkeeping.

Is your light infantry digging in a lot? That makes them much more survivable.

In our experience it doesn't help much. A single successful crit, and they're dead. Even nerfing the crits somewhat we came to the conclusion after 5-6 games that tanks and artillery heavy armies are just outshooting everything else. And range modifier upgrade on mechs is hilariously broken, while the air assets generally seem to be rather useless, especially transports.

After some consideration we decided to heavily rework the game's engine to suit our needs better. We really like the basic mechanics, but stat/unit type balance - not so much. Also, the game admittedly kind of drags once you go beyond 20 points per side.

Thanks for answering and the insights.

I never really played it with Mechs or Air Assets.

The actual problem (to us) are not the ideas themselves, many of them are great, and adding up D12 to match the range and combining them with simple mathematics to reach target number is actually a really fun mechanic. Admittedly it's more amusing than groundbreaking, but it's fun. A breath of fresh air after playing countless "roll 4+ on D6 90% of time"/"roll 7+ on D10 90% of time" tests from other wargame systems, gives totally different feel to how your shooting sequence gets conducted. Combining multiple troop types into a single force so they can support each other is also great.

The problem is that there's not enough depth for us to enjoy the game after ~5 games, which is why we're currently busy remaking the game's engine, while leaving its' core principles in tact - there are just not enough special rules, additions and unit types to our liking. We probably could've looked at another game at that scale, but 10 mm combined arms sci-fi is really far from being popular, especially in terms of mini agnostic games that are not dinosaurs from early 90s.

There are a lot of "cool" ideas that are just incredibly awkwardly realized in actual gameplay in our opinion.

Transport air assets are just atrocious. Transporting capabilites (and hovering upgrades - you need the possibility to land where you want and actually unload the troops, remember?) eat way too much points, making the actual plane absolutely pathetic and incapable of actually doing anything once the troops are deployed, so it's a dead Presence weight in your roster. The process of landing and deploying the transported elements is way too long and risky, basically anything can shoot the plane down.

What's worse is that the process of finding good spot to deploy your soldiers takes so much time it's sometimes faster to get there by land (remember, your transport aircraft can't be way too fast, and if it is, then that means it's also fragile - a couple of lucky crits, and it's dead).

Aircraft elements by themselves are also very weak. Stat-wise they're mediocre, they need to go through a lot of hassle to actually use their full F and not punish themselves for it, they're very fragile and oftentimes offer nothing a heavy tank or artillery doesn't do equally as well. Yes, they're fast and can be hard to shoot down, but do you really care if they're just as bad at actually shooting back? One game I completely ignored enemy P3 bomber, and it did literally nothing the entire engagement, maybe inflicting 2-3 damage total to some rearguard artillery troops, and that's it. Similar problems arise once you actually start comparing stats of different elements.

Critical hits are incredibly punishing for light elements and are basically "whatever" for heavy elements. We had an instance of a single Heavy Mech just crushing multiple infantry and light cav stands all alone from a distance, because high F VS low A means you're almost guaranteed to score 12 at least once per activation, and unless the enemy is lucky on their low D values it means dead troopers.

There are also some weird design decisions. You can put Deep Deployment troops into transports and deploy them from above, but it's actually worse than not doing that and utilizing normal Deep Deployment. Some of the upgrades are basically worthless, while the others are very powerful. We have very abstract troops sitting on a base, yet the game is TRUELOS, and I actually have to hide my guys behind trees in the forest to get cover? The game is company-battalion level, yet my land transports are actually just tokens denoting this infantry is Mobile? And they can actually move into buildings and sit there together with the infantry they transport? What?

Nothing of this is problem by itself, but the actual game layout is too pretzel-y for our liking, which is why we decided to rework it a bit. There are no alternatives anyway.