Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

Some state governments have been encouraging the establishment of M-corps (”militia-corporations”) in an attempt to use the AADA system to subsidize the creation of a new class of combat ready citizenry. City police and the highway patrol admit an inability to deal with large well-organized gangs. Military assistance from the Federal government is too infrequent to preserve the viability of in-state businesses. Proponents of the M-corp system believe that encouraging the formation of small autodueling corporations within the state will minimize the threat of gangs and stimulate economic growth.

First, an M-corp gathers 20 volunteers that must commit for at least two years. These duellists begin with base skills: Driver 0, Gunner 0. The M-corp then requests a grant from the state government. If approved, they receive an initial grant of $30,000. (Grant amounts may vary state to state.) The M-corp is obligated to assist the city police department in defending the town against gang attacks, but is free to invest the grant money in equipment and vehicles for arena events.

M-corps that remain profitable for three years (and that get good recommendations from their city) become eligible for Full Militia Status and a $70,000 militia grant. This money can be used to buy bigger and better vehicles and also to clone the more promising personnel. The state government, however, retains the option of calling these militias to assist in a coordinated attack on the gangs.

Because the M-corp system is so new, a state with 6 to 8 M-corps will probably have only one or two organizations that have acquired Full Militia Status. In addition to their grants, an M-corp also receives a variety of tax breaks and incentives. Some states require the cities attached to the M-corps to make a matching grants of 25%.

Each year, the state government awards a special $50,000 grant to the M-corp that has been the most profitable. The state uses this formula to determine profits:

Profits = (Total Cash Prizes from Arena Duels for the Year) – (Repairs Expenses Incurred by the Corporation in those Duels) – (Total Purchase Price of Corporate Vehicles Destroyed in those Duels)

Note that investments in vehicles and clones do not count against profits for the purposes of this grant. The state does not want to discourage such spending! Additionally, some states do not count expenses related to certain in-state industries such as certain specified ammo and weapons purchases.

M-corps often engage one another in team events with two or three cars to a side. These duels are staged at in-state arenas and are relatively friendly; they are, after all, training together in order to help combat the gang presence. Nevertheless, ratings for these events are high due to the number of spectacular deaths that occur because of the lack of experience among the team members.

Ramplates have been scaled back quite a bit in the new game. They get +1 or +2 damage per die instead of the old killer doubling, and the confetti rules put a limit on how much damage small cars can risk dealing out. (There should be no more 200 mph rams from heavily armored Compacts….)

Flame weapons have been scaled back a lot more, too– even more than ram weapons.

There was an old Van design in the original AADA guide called the Firestarter. All it had was a Heavy Laser in a 3-space turret. Under the variant fire rules first released in DCW (and subsequently made official in the Compendium), the HL was useless when it came to starting fires. It could only make a bad situation just a tad worse with it’s Mod of 1 and it’s Duration of 0.

The 5.0 fire rules brings the Firestarter back to the game allowing it to consistently score a fire marker with each hit. I think this is a good thing. On the other hand, I don’t like that the new Piranha with it’s three Incendiary MG’s is almost as good at starting fires as the Firestarter– and probably even better than the Hotshot!

The fire situation is further restricted by the fact that you now have to burn through the armor before you get a chance for explosion. Also, fires can go out fairly easily even on vehicles that don’t have extinguishers. This makes things unnecessarily hard on the Hotshot.

To balance all of this, I propose we give an additional bonus to flamethrowers. The Hotshot ought to have an edge here! When rolling at the end of the turn to see if the fire went out, add one to the roll for each hit that was scored by a flamethrower.

With this rule, the Hotshot has a much better chance of destroying his enemy with the “oven effect”– even if he doesn’t score fire markers every turn. A hit by a single FT will help insure that the fire keeps going. A hit by a pair of linked FT’s will most likely score one fire marker and then have a pretty good chance of earning a second one at the end of the turn.

This isn’t a big change and still doesn’t make flame weapons the terrors that they were back in Compendium 2.0. The main idea here is to keep the game colorful and lively by making the weapon types more equal and distinctive.

“There are plenty of options on the table for the future of Car Wars, and the Vehicle Design System specifically. However, I will not discuss what they are (except that Pyramid doesn’t figure in to any of them). Right now, it’s in a holding pattern, and probably won’t move in *any* direction until late 2004 at the earliest, more likely 2005.”

– Andrew Hackard

I ordered the Division 5 Car Guide and the Arena Book. Probably silly purchases, but I wanted to provide a bit more choice to the players withouth having to buy 6 more sets.

– brian

By the way, the Arena Book comes with two mean division 15 cars. The Terminator-X has killed my cars more than once!

Also the Division 5 book comes with a $7,500 variant version of each car in the book. I’ve never played that division what with it being so new and all, but it may be more fun than the usual $5,000 games.

If you’ve got 4 players and a referee, it may be more fun to have two teams go against each other with a 15k car and a 7.5k car on each side. You ought not to end up with a stalemate in that game– one side should come out with at least one survivor.

We had our second session of Car Wars last night. The game went a lot faster but we still got confused when figuring out collisions and collision damage. I need to make a flowchart for that stuff.

Anyways, it was Division 5 but we used HotWheels cars anyways to make it a bit more exciting. My brother took a bunch of pictures:
http://www.boomstick.org/archives/2004_03.php#000248

- brian

Nice pictures!

Did Dave survive his ram against you?? Did anyone survive the event? Are you tracking any information as a continuing campaign, or was this a one-shot type event?

You may be wondering if anyone in Car Wars dies due to weapons fire…. They definitely do in Division 15. But one thing about that ram– there’s no to-hit roll and no way to dodge once they get in close….

One way to diminish the ram’s effectiveness is to play in larger arenas that are set up to force people to make lots of turns. Your board looks a little small compared to what I tend to play on. Also, the Bumblebee could have turned the spikedropper on automatic to cut back on the other players’ maneuverability.

I normally try to avoid tire shots because they’re so chintzy– but if I’m up against a dedicated ram car or a person that’s known to always ram, then I feel free to take off his tires in self defense. Of course if the ram car has an ultra-low profile, this might not work so good….

But if everybody’s ramming… well…. The first person to ram will loose speed and front armor. That makes him a likely target for everyone else.

The only real defense against the ram is to go faster than everyone else. You go first then and get a chance to get out of the way.

Oh, and about those collisions. As referee I apply those rules with a heavy dose of common sense. I generally announce… “this is what happened; anybody think that’s crazy?” and generally nobody complains.

This was listed under “failures” section of the stakeholder’s report:

Car Wars was another disappointment. Our 2002 relaunch of the line started well but then stumbled over about three problems in a row . . . then I got a credible offer for the digital game rights, which didn’t work out . . . then I got another credible offer, but that didn’t work out either. At the moment, the game is very much in a holding pattern.

http://www.sjgames.com/general/report.html

This past weekend I stayed up until 3 playing games– can’t remember really doing this since I was in highschool…!

I opened up the afternoon with a couple of games of Ogre. My opponent charged straight in with the Ogre and took out my CP– then he died a couple of turns later. As the defense, he bought 2 howitzers and then broke his units into 3 seperate waves. My Ogre rolled over them as if they were speed bumps. (Yep… defense is a lot harder for new players….) No enemy units survived.

The rest of the crowd showed up after supper… and we got the women-folk to join in. We played two games of Chez-Geek. I didn’t really care for this game– it’s just a little bit too off-color and dumbed down for my tastes. The game really does capture the atmosphere of college life though…. The most irritating thing about the game is that it’s a pain to keep track of who’s in the lead.

After that, we broke out a game called Citadels. This is a Rummy-like card-game with layers of jedi mind-tricks and betrayal added in. It’s cute little game that manages to have depth without getting into complex rules and game mechanics.

The final game we played was the original Illuminati. Several times I had to announce that this was the coolest game I’d ever played. Its just soooo neat! I was one of the first groups to get attacked…. I had almost no cards in my power structure! When my turn came around again, I announced a Neutralize attack against the most powerful player. I wouldn’t get anything out of it and the other players would get first dibs on the wreckage– all they needed to do was make a small donation…. Heh heh heh. Revenge is sweet. (This is only about 300 times more fun than trading properties in Monopoly. What a devious game!!)

I just picked up some HotWheels cars and noticed they’re bit bigger than the pieces that came with the Division 5 sets. I haven’t picked up Division 10 or 15. Are those cars bigger?

– a reader

The Luxury cars are 3 inches by 1.5 inches and include the Piranha, Hotshot, and Dragon from the Division 15 sets. The Vindicator and the Banshee are Mid-Sized counters and are 2.5 inches by 1.25 inches.

With the gigantic turning keys included in the 5th edition sets, Car Wars can easily be played on the carpet with matchbox cars and the like. No paper maps are needed!

Finally drug some new guys into a match! (This was the first time I played Car Wars with anyone outside of my teenaged gaming group.)

I refereed and ended up doing the moves for both players. “I’ll take two d0’s to the right this phase.” That seemed to work well. I tracked all the handling, speed, and damage details on a clipboard. These measures insure a fair game.

It was Bumblebee vs. Killer Kart Racer. The Bumblebee scored lots of hits in spite of the ultra-low profile and ended up tailgating his opponent for several seconds. The Killer Kart finally did a bootlegger’s reverse and came to a stop in the corner of the arena. That may have fixed the tailgating problem, but it didn’t help when Bumblebee slammed into him at 70 miles an hour. (The player had wanted to do a J-turn ever since he read about it….) There wasn’t much left of the Kart, but the Bee could still drive!

It took an hour and ten minutes to play out the eight second match. These guys are hard-core Halo players…. It’ll be interesting to see if they play again sometime….

I’ve recently purchased several items on Ebay. It is neat to see all of the old games there that I wanted so badly when I was younger… but there are some pitfalls here that can ensnare the simple and the unwary.

1) Many sellers will pad their pockets by charging too much for shipping. I don’t purchase from anybody that has $5 marked for their shipping costs– these guys are cheating the “system.”

2) Watch out for sellers that do not specify shipping costs. (I like media mail. They like priority mail. Yuck.) These guys are worse than they guys in #1 because the guys in #1 are at least honest about their dishonesty!

3) You will be tempted greatly to buy things you don’t really want in order to “combine shipping.” (This is the coolest way to “save money” through ebay– but you won’t save money if you spend more than your budget allows for games you won’t really play!!)

4) Many sellers are complete amatuers. They’ll pack things sloppily and your precious collector’s item will arrive mangled. Let the buyer beware… and remember to ask your buyer to put the stuff IN A BOX!!!

5) Pay attention to the seller’s location. That good deal you just landed can be blown away when you add in the shipping charges from Australia!

6) When buying an old Steve Jackson pocket box game, make sure you get the newer style of box that doesn’t have the clicky latches on the sides. The old boxes are smaller, more brittle, and are usually broken.

7) Many sellers do not come clean on the state of the game components. They will gladly sell you rulebooks and counters that are marked up– and maps that are mangled. If the seller does not specifically say the item is brand new or uncut, then assume the worst. A lot of sellers call their items “mint” when they really aren’t. Watch out. If you’re buying something like GURPS Autoduel 1st edition, then assume the counters, map and inserts are gone unless the seller specifically says they’re there.

9) Use “My Ebay” to track lots of items at once. Try to get a feel for the value of things before you jump in and start buying. This is a really cool feature.

10) Wait as long as possible to put in your bid.

Jeffro’s conclusion: Use Ebay mainly to buy shinkwrapped out of print games that you can’t find anywhere else. Use Ebay to sell all of those old games you never really played… and use the money you get to buy cool stuff from Warehouse 23!!