kestral wrote:I haven't played either version, (though I have some of the models), and this was an initial half hour readthrough, so take these thoughts with a grain of salt.....
These are somewhat critical but really I love seeing "indi" miniatures in game design, so keep up the great work!
Thanks so much for the feedback. I've responded to a few of your points below. Feel free to follow up if you have the inclination to do so.
3) It seems odd to have a "Command" pool and not have it interact with activations.
Command Points are representative of the number of command models you have on the table, as well as by other abilities that represent how connected to off-table
HQ your force is. In turn, Command Points are spent on either things connected to your force's off-table
HQ (reinforcements, blocking enemy reinforcements) or abilities that are essentially triggered by command models. The "Command Point Pool" is just where you keep the command points you've earned until you spend them.
I know other games use things like a "command pool" to determine unit activation orders, etc...is that what bothers you about the name? Because while I do understand how other games work activation order into the chain of command, I've never found it to be a wholly enjoyable mechanic, so we've kept the activation order pretty basic in
MEdge.
If you think the name "Command Point Pool" is flawed/confusing, what would you suggest instead?
4) Dice flips is an interesting mechanic - however it seems like it interacts in strange ways with the size of the unit. I preferred the old resolution chart which seemed very elegant.
I totally understand the feeling. As a longtime
40k player, the chart we used in v1 felt very familiar to me. But we did get feedback from people complaining that they had to 'look at a chart' everytime they went to resolve a round of shooting, and I realized that not every player is as intimately familiar with it as many of us are.
The dice flips mechanic may seem novel, but I can assure you even those amognst our internal playtest team who were quite skeptical about it at first ended up relenting after a few games that it does the job it needs to do, and it ultimately is quite a bit easier/quicker once you use it a few times.
You are correct that, being a limited resource, it does have an 'issue' with squad size, but even the v1 rules used a limited 'special defense' resource mechanic (cover, field and dodges), so adding a limited dice flips mechanic for both the skill of the firing unit and the defending unit's armor in a way codifies it all together nicely. And were the game to feature
40k sized units of 30 Orks, yeah, the mechanic would totally breakdown, but given that
MEdge will never have squad sizes more than 6 models, it can, and does seem to work nicely.
5) I always want to avoid markers in a miniatures game - what is the point of lovely figures and terrain if it is covered with stuff. In a game with facing defined by the squadleader, you can reverse one model to show the unit has activated.
I totally agree with you in principle and the v1 rules went to great pains to try to limit the amount of tokens in the game down to just suppression markers (that were 'cinematic' old epic-style blast markers). But the truth is, watering down all the effects in the game to just suppression made everything feel a bit too same-y. In hindsight, I do think sacrificing a bit of the 'cool' looking clean table to have some fun game mechanics can be/is a worthwhile trade-off.
Your suggestion for 'marking' activated units is a great one, and we could certainly suggest it as an option for players to consider, though ultimately how players want to mark their activated units (assuming they even feel like they need to) is really up to them.
6) I loathe having rules that give models other rules. If a vehicle is also large, please just put "Vehicle, Large" on the model's card, so I know it has both rules, rather than having to remember that being a vehicle makes you "large". It would also allow you to have vehicles that were not large, if you wanted to for some reason.
This is an interesting suggestion. We have two types of 'Large' models: Behemoths & Vehicles (even though there aren't any vehicle models in the range yet). Going by your suggestion we'd have to rename 'Behemoths' to either 'Large Behemoths' or just go with 'Large Infantry'. Though I think going with 'Large Infantry' then creates a bunch of potential confusion when you're talking about what types of units can enter buildings and such, you now always have to mention 'standard infantry' (instead of just 'infantry'). We could certainly also get rid of the whole term 'large model' completely and instead always say: "vehicles & behemoths", but that would be super wordy/difficult to write cleanly throughout the rules.
I know you're just railing against the concept of 'hidden' (or 'stacked') rules, and we did take great pains to try to eliminate as much of that as possible in v2, but I'm not sure this is an instance that is really too big an issue, do you? We don't ever have plans to make any non-large vehicles, so there isn't any value for splitting 'large' off from 'vehicle'. Ultimately there are just those 2 unit types (behemoth & vehicle) which are large models, and the main rules for large models (including behemoths & vehicles) are all together in the rulebook. Having a single term ("large models") is super convenient for referring to abilities/rules that affect both of them, so I don't think we can lose that.
7) The three action layout seems inelegant. Double Move + Dash is basically just three move actions, and it hard to see many circumstances where you don't just Move - Status - shoot. You don't seem to lose or gain actions (or maybe you do in the unit rules). It just seemed like a lot of rules for not much flexibility. In a squad game I'd love to be able to shoot then move.
You can only make a single move (and shooting) action per activation, so you can't take 3 movement actions in a single activation.
The point of the system is that 90% of the time you will be doing a movement action, a status action and then a shooting action. I know in other games, with even simpler actions, the ability to fire twice or move twice or shoot and then move is what a lot of the tactical options of the game revolves around. Because the status actions in
MEdge often represent what the 'unit is doing' once it finishes its activation (e.g. a unit that is 'on the move' represents a unit that is currently moving, and a unit 'taking cover' represents a unit hunkering down to take cover).
If we allowed units to make actions in absolutely any order, then you end up with some really bizarre interactions that don't really work. For example, if a unit was allowed to 'fire' then 'move' and then go 'on the move', then that unit would get the protection of being 'on the move' from enemy firing, but wouldn't suffer any of the penalties from being 'on the move' because that effect shuts off the next time that unit activates. We could try to change when the 'on the move' effect shuts off to get around this, but then you end up having to remember all these little provisos instead of the much more simple: when a unit activates it removes all of its 'on the move' or 'take cover' tokens.
With that said, both the Broken and Artarian Remnant do have special rules that allow them to 'Aim', 'Fire' and then 'Move' (in precisely that order) in some cases. But that has been left as a special ability for certain factions/units and it is necessarily rigid (doesn't allow 'on the move' as part of it, for example) to make it all work.
8) I'd put all the Suppression rules in one section to give the reader a better feel for its role in the game.
Can you give me some specific examples of precisely what you're suggesting (where would you want this section to be, what exactly would it include)? I could see maybe adding a 'recap' box-out of most of the common suppression mechanics somewhere, but totally removing the rules for raising/lowering suppression out of, for example, the rules for shooting seems like it would cause more confusion than anything!
10) The reward for getting behind your enemy seems pretty small. I really loved the way the original game's concept was described - that enemies in cover were basically safe from shooting until you outflanked them.
While that was the original design goal of v1, the reality was that we even had to back off that a bit in v1, because in a 5 turn game it becomes really hard to implement a system where the only real damage is caused by outflanking enemy units and still have the game be any fun. Even with the level of this we did end up with in v1, units were nigh indestructible in cover which we got TONS of feedback saying that it just wasn't fun to constantly shoot at enemy units and only cause suppression.
With that said, I do think that if you try out the v2 rules, you'll see a -1 cover & -1
AV penalty for being behind a unit is really quite significant and worth going for when you have the opportunity.