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.

Thanks to Salute, we actually managed to get almost all of the Spiral Arm Studios gang together in the same timezone for a while! So we're taking advantage of this to get in some brainstorming and playtesting for ideas for Maelstrom's Edge V2. Exciting times!

V2? There are only a few things in the rules that could use a bit of tweaking. Unless there is more goodness being added......

Nice to see some poor souls being enlightened, too....

Playtesting, day 2:

Looking forward to a hardback ruleset. That's been a wishlist of mine for MEdge.

Rules tweaks?

I only get to game with my wife. So my comments are pretty limited.

The only things we don't like...

1. Destroying units and the bidding war to bring stuff back. We use what we choose, once. When it's dead, it's dead. This causes a problem with an excess of command points.

2. The formula for melee shots. Yeah, it's easy really, and we figure it's to allow a weakening, but a single value would be good for us.


What we don't want.... Combat Vehicles taking over from infantry.

What we do want... Unit stats on cards like you do already. Some of the choices now are getting too large to fit on a card though. :-(
We like to play with all our stats on cards in front of us.

Just a few opinions from a couple of players.

Thanks for the feedback!

 Gimgamgoo wrote:
1. Destroying units and the bidding war to bring stuff back. We use what we choose, once. When it's dead, it's dead. This causes a problem with an excess of command points.

Being able to bring in reinforcements later can be a pretty big tactical boost, but if you're really not a fan, you should be covered - V2 will give a few new ways to use Command Points

2. The formula for melee shots. Yeah, it's easy really, and we figure it's to allow a weakening, but a single value would be good for us.

Yeah, that was right at the very top of the list of required changes ... The specific process is still being worked on, but it will definitely be simpler.

What we don't want.... Combat Vehicles taking over from infantry.

That's our goal as well. While we are planning on adding small vehicles into the mix when we can, these will be light vehicles like bikes, buggies and walkers, rather than full-on battle tanks. Heavy armour really doesn't fit into the scale of the game that we're aiming for.

Which isn't to say that we definitely won't see a tank or two added in somewhere way down the line, but it's not something that we're working on right now, and they would need to be implemented in a way that doesn't simply push infantry off the table.

What we do want... Unit stats on cards like you do already. Some of the choices now are getting too large to fit on a card though. :-(

The full unit profiles will be moving to an A4 page format, because (like you observed) some of them are getting a little unwieldy for a card and we want to include all of the rules on the pages to reduce the amount of rulebook flicking required. We're looking at some sort of roster builder to allow you to print an army list.

I agree though that having the cards in front of you is a handy resource, so will be aiming to keep cards available for download - they'll likely just have a bare-bones summary rather than the full unit entry.

Aw, man, I love the melee formula- and really, the way the physical/mental attributes of the model are so much more meaningful than in most games. I think it helps with learning the core rules, and makes the game more immersive. My only sticking point is parapets. I would love to be able to jump units occupying the parapets of a building with minnows and shadow walkers. My 2 cents, anyway.

The melee formula was one of those ideas that made sense on paper, but is just too clunky to be working out on the fly mid-game. The aim is to keep the same granularity, but without having to perform multiple-stat calculations.

Blastaar wrote:
Aw, man, I love the melee formula- and really, the way the physical/mental attributes of the model are so much more meaningful than in most games. I think it helps with learning the core rules, and makes the game more immersive. My only sticking point is parapets. I would love to be able to jump units occupying the parapets of a building with minnows and shadow walkers. My 2 cents, anyway.

I think you might be the only person in the world who feels that way about the melee attacks formula in v1! That was definitely the most requested fix/change we got from just about everyone who bothered to leave us feedback.

On the parapet front, you'll be happy to know that in v2 there aren't proper parapets anymore (just the top of a building). So if someone does decide to put a unit on top of a building and you have units which moves dynamically, you will most certainly be able to charge them!

If you haven't already, you can get a peek at the new v2 rules we're working towards right now in this thread:

https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/775150.page

Since you seem to be someone who really enjoyed the intricacies of the v1 rules, I am curious to know what you think of the more simplified/streamlined v2 rules so far.

 yakface wrote:

Blastaar wrote:
Aw, man, I love the melee formula- and really, the way the physical/mental attributes of the model are so much more meaningful than in most games. I think it helps with learning the core rules, and makes the game more immersive. My only sticking point is parapets. I would love to be able to jump units occupying the parapets of a building with minnows and shadow walkers. My 2 cents, anyway.

I think you might be the only person in the world who feels that way about the melee attacks formula in v1! That was definitely the most requested fix/change we got from just about everyone who bothered to leave us feedback.

I actually quite liked it as well. I particularly liked the way it changed for the larger models as they were beaten down, though it's been a while since I played now so I may be viewing it through rose-tinted glasses.

If the new rules clean up the cross-referencing back and forth I'm all in favor of them. Again, this is from memory so no details I'm afraid, but the old unit cards sometimes had a special attribute that you'd look up, and then find that the attribute was composed of some other attribute and really the actual effect could have just been written on the card. Some attributes were not grouped with others because they belonged in another part of the rules and it was very frustrating till you knew the rulebook inside and out. It seems you're doing away with this in favor of effects and rules being directly on the new unit cards/references so that's a good thing!

Edit: I dug up an old post in which I described my original issue. If this is fixed in V2 then it's already an improvement.

Mobile isn't an ability, instead it's the "type" of the model. This seems unintuitive (I spent five minutes trying to figure out where I remembered seeing that the Shadow Walker was a mobile unit). Worse, Mobile means that a unit has special abilities - in this case: Dodge. Dodge should just have been written on the Shadow Walker's cards, because spending five minutes looking for the mobile reference on the unit card, then having to flip through the book to find Mobile (which of course isn't in the Unit Abilities section) left me feeling like I was back in GW land ("Unit has Zealot, hmm.." - check special rule - "Zealot confers Hatred and Fearless on the unit. Aaggghh! Why didn't you just write that?")

From memory, at least one (maybe more) of the weapon abilities are missing from the Weapon Abilities section of the rulebook. Slow Projectile, for example. This means if you're using the summary sheets for quick reference instead of the Weapon section at the back of the rulebook, you'll never be able to find the rules for (e.g.) Slow Projectile because you'll automatically assume they're in the Weapon Abilities section and they're not.

angryboy2k wrote:
If the new rules clean up the cross-referencing back and forth I'm all in favor of them. Again, this is from memory so no details I'm afraid, but the old unit cards sometimes had a special attribute that you'd look up, and then find that the attribute was composed of some other attribute and really the actual effect could have just been written on the card. Some attributes were not grouped with others because they belonged in another part of the rules and it was very frustrating till you knew the rulebook inside and out. It seems you're doing away with this in favor of effects and rules being directly on the new unit cards/references so that's a good thing!

Edit: I dug up an old post in which I described my original issue. If this is fixed in V2 then it's already an improvement.

Yep, getting rid of 'nested' abilities was/is another major goal of v2.

Except for a handful of things that are super commonly used (and therefore make sense to keep their rules in the rulebook), such as the rules for dynamic moves, frag grenades and the most common 5 weapon 'type' rules (AoE, Heavy, Hit & Run, Pistol, Short Ranged), everything is else will be written out on the unit profile now.

This does mean some of the more complex special abilities (like Slow Projectile, for example) will have to be dramatically simplified to fit, but ultimately that's usually a good thing too!