Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

The Powerball…. What a weird design! Without a gunner, it can’t fire but one weapon per turn– but it has three weapons! It has flame weapons, but can’t really start fires…. Hmmm…. Nobody in our group has the nerve to drive this one into the arena, so here’s a variant that has a bit more teeth:

Remove the RL, 2 rounds of MG ammo, and 1 round of FT ammo. Add two linked HRs back and a Targeting Computer.

Weight becomes 4,234 lbs.

Keep your distance and take pot shots with your MG. Thanks to your targeting computer and large ammo supply, you have a real advantage with this approach. Your low HC is a real shortcomming, though. Use a duelist with a decent driver skill if you’ve got one.

If you do happen to score a flame marker, consider closing and switching to the FT– this is especially effective if your target is going under 60 mph. Time your pass just right so that you can close to point blank range to launch your HRs at the start of the next turn. If you’ve softened him up before the pass, you’ll hopefully leave him with a breached side and two fire markers.

Remove the MML and the HR. Add 27 points of armor and a pair of linked incendiary MR’s to the back. Weight becomes 6590 lbs.

The MML is useless and a single HR will scare nobody, so get rid of them!

The goal of these changes is (like in the previous Hotshot variant) to make it possible to score two fire markers in a single turn. If you do set him on fire, you will have to wait for it to do the job. While the combined damage of the MR’s will shorten that time, the extra armor will help insure that you survive it so that you get to see the exposion.

Does the Hotshot always seem to die in her duels against the Piranha?

Try this instead!

Remove 20 rounds of MG ammo, 4 rounds of FT ammo, the 2 FT’s from the sides, and the “Panic” button. Add 71 points of armor, two incendiary MR’s linked right, and two incendiary MR’s linked left. (An MR is like an HR except it does only 2 dice damage.)

Cost becomes an even $15,000. Weight becomes 6540 lbs.

You might miss the ammo, but without the extra armor in this variant the stock Hotshot can’t survive long enough to shoot it anyway. Any pass in which both MR’s and FT’s hit has very good odds of scoring 2 fire markers. Hopefully the MR’s will weaken his armor enough so that when your he catches fire he’ll have a decent chance of getting breached.

Design Note: The Hotshot is one of the oldest and most produced designs in the game. Because this variant doesn’t move anything around, this is a believable upgrade that real life “street” HotShot’s could easily have been converted to.

Gunners in vehicles without computers get to add in their +1 to-hit bonuses… but if their driver has a computer they don’t.

!?

Yep. It’s true. This is because the vehicle sheets have already absorped their bonus into the to-hit roll! (Compare the stats for the Hot-Shot’s MGs to the Piranha’s to illustrate this.)

Evidently the designs in the 5th edition consistently put the targeting computer in the driver’s position. This is supposedly ’simpler’ because the to-hit rolls for both the driver and the gunner are the same now. One less bonus to calculate during play….

Before a duel you may want to move the targeting computer over to the gunner’s position. Then during play, the gunner now gets a total of +2 on his to-hit target. (Or, if you’re going by the calculated to-hit targets on your vehicle sheet… the gunner gets +1 and the driver gets -1.)

Tricky….

The Dragon (Division 15 Set 3) mounts two linked Heavy-Duty Flamethrowers. At first, you might think that the fire rules work against this car.

“Check seperately for each incendiary attack, even if they occured in the same phase– but linked weapons of the same type are combined into one attack.” (page 10)

If you hit with the linked weapons, you’re only going to score a single flame marker. That’s no better than a pair of standard flamethrowers can muster….

The trick with the Dragon is, let your gunner fire one HDFT and let the driver fire the other. Each HDFT gets its own fire roll then. If you hit with both and score at least 6 points of damage in each attack, then you have a pretty good chance of nicking 2 flame markers!

And two flame markers are of course much better than one. Even if your opponent rolls “Remove one fire marker” at the end of the turn, he’ll still take fire damage.

Keep on Duelin’!

This blog is dedicated to the Car Wars table-top game. It was initially released in 1982 in a nifty black “pocket box”. It was a rare hobby shop back then that didn’t have a rack of Car Wars expansion sets in zip-loc bags…. (sigh!)

Steve Jackson Games has released a 5th edition recently that is especially well designed. Few shops seem to carry it today and support for it seems to have stalled temporarily, yet it’s still a really fun game to play. It may be that the Car Wars concept will appeal only to the generation that still thinks that Tron is a great movie, but I hope it will catch on again as the economy picks up.

Here are some links to get you up to speed:

FAQ–

http://www.sjgames.com/car-wars/faq.html

PDF’s of counters–

http://www.sjgames.com/car-wars/pdf.html