Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

We played the third of our series of 14 planned Amateur Night games this weekend. Last session, in the first round of the 4 on 4 Killer Kart events, we’d disliked the way that the teams drove in formation for the first several seconds. In the second game we’d disliked the way that ramming became the key tactic.  By taking note of several easily missed rules and moving to the Amex Proving Grounds arena, we hoped to get a more interesting and cinematic event. It turned out that the rules changes would overcompensate somewhat, resulting in surprisingly large impacts on the tempo and tactics of the game. But even with power plants getting set on fire almost every turn, the game would still take almost 3 full hours to play out.

The Amex Proving Grounds is a single map sheet sized arena with four corner sections and a central cross shaped area with a TV bunker in the middle. We agreed to enter in pairs in the four gates with each vehicle heading into a corner. I thought this would result in four separate dog fights in each corner, but what happened was that all four pairs kept driving right past each other to meet up with a second head on pass against a second vehicle. (I actually made a silly error on the first turn– I ended the round with two of my cars unable to target their opponents. This essentially gave the enemy drivers a free shot; this didn’t turn out to me significant, though.) Because of this style of opening, we essentially had a dry “die rolling competition” during the first few turns.

One of my opponent’s cars took a tremendous amount of damage in these first few seconds and caught fire due to power plant damage. Lucky shot! On the other side of the arena, two cars met at 30 mph. (Under these rules, the sweet spot for any weapons fire is the sides of the cars. With only three points of armor there on the Killer Karts, you have a chance of taking out the car with a single hit!) The two cars traded shots to the sides at point blank range. I turned to the right sharply to head towards the TV bunker and the other cars. My opponent immediately turned the same direction and pulled right next to me. I think the very next turn he went ten miles per hour or so and ended up half an inch ahead of me. I went 5 mph and pivoted toward him, getting a chintzy free shot in with some slightly heated discussion about how exactly this should have played out. The next second, I stopped while he pivoted. The second after that, I went in reverse and got in another free shot in.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the arena, two high speed passes were going down. All four vehicles took power plant damage and we all had to check for vehicular fire. Each of us lost a car because of fire! I angled two of my surviving cars against one of the survivors and did minimal damage while taking a lot stray hits. Our SMG armed pedestrians left their flaming wrecks after taking a point or two of fire damage to their body armor. They braced themselves against the arena walls and fired at enemy vehicles. These were essentially free shots doing a point or two of damage– the peds weren’t worth targeting if an actual car was in arc. (My opponent said several times that he actually felt safer out of his car!)

My pink Killer Kart (the one that scored the first lucky kill) hurtled across the arena and took a point blank shot at the enemy vehicle that had been pinned early on in the game. A point blank hit through the side resulted in another vehicular fire. The single point of fire damage at the end of the turn was enough to knock the driver unconscious. We agreed that the driver had somehow managed to throw himself out of the car even though it didn’t make much sense. Other than him, the event was fairly safe. (Playing some of those overlooked rules makes for amateur night events with much higher survival rates.)

This left three vehicles on my team to take down the remaining car. A lucky shot by even the pedestrians could kill one my cars, though, so we still had to carefully play out each phase for a few more seconds. I regrouped and repositioned for the final shots. The yellow Killer Kart that had gotten tangled up in the low speed dog fight got the lucky shot that knocked the last driver unconscious. This would be the only kill that was not caused by vehicular fire.

The rules changes had a tremendous effect on the game. We’d agreed not to reset handling tracks each turn. This eliminated the annoying D6-right-angle-maneuver-every-single-second approach that we’d seen in our second Amateur Night event last session. We also drove slower– and as a result, no one died due to a wipe out on the crash table. Any time we did an extreme maneuver, we had to go straight for a full second afterwards in order to get back in full control. This leads to combats that are less like a WWI dog fight and more like a series of high stakes “jousting” engagements.

The other big rules change was to play the 1 in 3 chance of vehicular fire each time the power plants took machine gun or submachine gun damage. This ruling would obscure all other tactics in the game. At the same time, it actually increased the chances of the duelists to survive the event. If your car caught fire, you simply got out of your car. This led to many a pedestrian picking up a prestige bonus even after effectively being taken out of the game.

There were a few minor rules that we still managed to mess up this time. We were probably adding back the reflex bonus to handling status each turn when we should only have been adding back the HC of the cars. Also, it’s -2 to hit the side of a vehicle when you’re not in that side’s arc. (We’d been playing just a minus one penalty.) Finally, to prevent the argumentative simultaneous action type arguments like the one we had this game, we should move vehicles going the same speed in the order of their reflex roll results– with ties being broken before the beginning of the event. (Oh yeah, and we need to fix that infamous missing column five on our speed/range chart.)

The only tweaks I’d suggest for the next game would be to possibly a) Move the useless top and under Killer Kart armor to the vulnerable sides, b) Give the drivers the use of a portable fire extinguisher (along with their BA and SMG) for the duration of the event, c) Use a larger and asymmetrical two map-sheet sized custom arena, and/or d) Possibly switch the ammo to just ten shots of high density rounds. We should also comb back through the Compendium 2e for any other obscure rules that we should try to remember. We should test out the entire set of rules one more time… and then we should lock it all down for the next four duels. These radical changes from one game to the next have to stop!

We are steadily moving our game to a more-or-less “by the book” Compendium 2e approach. The only real difference is that we’re using a GURPS style combined speed/range modifier. (We feel that the official 2e rules for this give way too much of a bonus for high speeds. Our rules give more of a flavor like the original pocket box rules: -1 per full four inches (more or less) but with an extra -1 or -2 due to higher speeds. The biggest difference in the new rules is that you don’t always get a sure hit anymore on those point blank shots– unless your target is a “turtle”….) The only house-rule that came up for discussion during this game was to change the d6 roll to check for fires to a 2d6 roll with different targets for each weapon in the game: MG’s should be less effective than 33% and should certainly be less effective in starting power plant fires than, say, an RR. Also, Lasers should be less effective than flame throwers.

Here’s the results for my four winning characters which all have base level skills in Driver, Gunner, and Handgunner:

“Green”– Elroy McKnightridge
Prestige: 3
Gunner Skill Points: 1
Handgunner Skill Points: 1
Notes: 3/7/08 Amex Proving Grounds (KK)– Vehicle caught fire after two high speed passes against enemy Killer Karts.

“Yellow”– Arnold Schlamer
Prestige: 5
Kills: 1
Driver Skill Points: 1
Gunner Skill Points: 2
Handgunner Skill Points: 1
Vehicle: Killer Kart with 1 hit to power plant, 1 hit to front armor, 1 hit to right armor, and 2 hits to left armor.
Salvage: Killer Kart with 2 DP left on MG, 1 DP left on power plant, and no front, left, or right armor left.
Notes: 3/7/08 Amex Proving Grounds (KK)– Through devious rules lawyering and general sliminess, Arnold managed to “pin” an enemy Killer Kart. He effectively got two free shots at his opponent, even though it was a teammate the put in the killing blow. Arnold did however get the final lucky shot in that ended the event.

“Blue”– Buck Lescynski
Prestige: 5
Kills: 1
Driver Skill Points: 1
Gunner Skill Points: 2
Vehicle: Killer Kart with 3 hits to power plant, 14 shots left in MG, 2 hits to right armor, and 3 hits to left armor.
Notes: 3/7/08 Amex Proving Grounds (KK)– Buck set an opponent on fire during his second pass in the event. He failed to get any decisive hits in for the rest of the event.

“Pink”– Marla Zuckerton
Prestige: 7
Kills: 2
Gunner Skill Points: 3
Vehicle: Killer Kart with 12 shots left in MG, 3 hits to front armor, 1 hit to right armor, and 2 hits to left armor.
Notes: 3/7/08 Amex Proving Grounds (KK)– Scored first blood in the event by setting an opposing car on fire with a lucky shot. Crossed the arena at high speeds to nab a kill out from under her teammate, Arnold Schlamer.

We played Dimension Demons again recently. The last time we played, we took a while to get the hang of the rules and I played a series of painstaking hit and run attacks with the “demons.” A typical situation would be maybe a one-in-six chance of taking a city with similar chances of getting a demon shot to pieces. The humans fire first, though so they get a pretty fair chance to disrupt the attack even if they can’t completely eliminate any attackers. And any demon that lands on another unit (or on a volcanoe when he pops back) is gone– a much more likely event than the others depending on where you pop in. In a steady game of attrition, I ended up losing so many demons that I could no longer attack.

My opponent played much less cautious game. He placed his transports close together and concentrated four demons on a single city. If he targeted his demons on the edge of the map, he had a much better chance of landing in his target square. This resulted in a pretty fair chance of his taking one out, but my sliders reacted fast enough to make such assaults less likely in future rounds. He failed to take the city– and when he popped back his demons landed on each other resulting in an insane amount a casualties. After adjusting his strategy, he tried again. I decided to purchase several “thumper” units instead of the usual mix of defense forces. In three additional games, my thumpers easily chewed up any attacking demons. The demons went from having a low chance of success to almost no chance at all. Thus goes our second session with this reviled game that’s been labeled as being one of the three worst of the old Metagaming line.

The balance of power in the game is extremely fragile. The demons are relatively weak, but have extreme mobility and a chance to produce new units. Humans are powerful, but if they concentrate their forces, they demons will simply attack in the weaker areas. The thumpers are so powerful that they have to be completely eliminated before an assault begins. If the humans can concentrate more than one thumper attack against the demons each turn, then demon casualties will be pretty heavy. Once the thumpers are eliminated, the demons can begin trying for a city. Once the humans lost enough units, they will not be able to cover all of the cities. The humans will have to react quickly to any attempt to establish a breeding program… but if they do, the demons can simply take a city on the opposite side of the board and start another one simultaneously. (Alternately the demons can commit everything to defending the first one.)

Luck plays a large role in this game… and with the exception of thumper units, it’s difficult for either side to concentrate their firepower enough to work around the need for luck. One rule that could simplify the planning of attacks would be to declare that units that teleport on the same turn cannot materialize on top of each other. Losses hurt the demons tremendously as it is… but losing two or three demons to an unlucky phase in may be what’s breaking the game. The demons need to be able to concentrate four demons in an attack without fears of such debilitating losses or else the game just stalls as each side waits for a lucky break. As you resolve each transport of a unit, check to see if it is landing on one of its fellow teleporters. If it is, roll a die to determine which surrounding hex it actually ends up in. If it lands on a unit that did not engage in a transport move, then both units die as they normally do. You might declare that this “bonus” only works with units using the same transport– and if units from different transports phase in to the same place, they’re in trouble. Pop backs might work as if all of the units were coming from the same transport, making them a little safer: then you only have to worry about falling into volcanoes or landing on units that didn’t take part in the attack!

Just based on these few games, the standard Dimension Demons scenario appears to be unbalanced and difficult to “fix.” It appears to be highly suited to solitaire play, however. As long as the rules favor the humans, there’s very little for the human player to do except sit back and repulse demon attacks. It’s only until things disolve into a free-for-all that you really need to players to take the role of either side.

We played a couple of “Team Amateur Night” events this past weekend. We used 4 stock Killer Karts on each team at Southtown Arena in Indiana. These were pretty complicated games running about three hours long each (but only hitting at about 15 seconds of game time.) We played mostly by Compendium 2e rules, though we agreed to simply reset handling tracks at the end of each turn and also to use a modified speed/range chart. The chart was basically pulled from GURPS 4e, but I converted mph to yards per second and CAR WARS “inches” to yards. Taking the GURPS modifier and adding 6 to it results in something pretty close to the classic CAR WARS modifiers but with (at medium-short range) maybe a -1 or -2 penalty for high speeds added onto it.  The cool thing about it is that speed mods have no effect at long range… and a lot of effect at close range.

On our first event, we entered the arena on opposite sides. My opponent entered the central area immediately, but I pulled my vehicles toward each other so that they could enter the central area from a middle opening instead of one of the diagonals. As we entered the central area in two groups of two, my opponents 4 vehicles were converging on them. My opponent had much better targeting mods due to the set-up. I was suddenly very afraid– I was sure that he could get his group to tailgate mine and pick us apart one by one with little chance of return fire. I accelerated and split up, hoping that one group could somehow cover the other.

Things got ugly for my first group. All four opposing vehicles converged on them and they took heavy fire as they continued to accelerate attempting to leave the central section of the arena. My other vehicles circled back to come to their defense. One of the opposing vehicles made an extreme maneuver in order to get a shot in. He failed his control roll and he turned sideways and began to roll. The mob of vehicles continued to converge and one slipped around the rolling vehicle and then made a sharp turn to get another shot off. He failed his control roll as well and began a spin out. My cars turned to exit the central area and one of them failed a control roll, skidded, and then rammed a barrier.

My other two cars slowed down and concentrated fire on the spun out vehicle while the other vehicles attempted to pull around back into the action. The now stationary target could do nothing to prevent us from shooting up the driver. This left us with 3 cars on my team versus two on the other. In the final face off, I used one of my damaged cars to ram one of my opponent’s fresh cars. I had a pair of other vehicles slow down and combine fire against the other, taking out its driver from the rear.

On our second game, we agreed that the 4-on-4 “in formation” game was maybe not optimal. Off the cuff, we agreed to have vehicles from each side enter in pairs in each of the four gates. We rolled 1d6 to determine how fast each group was going and agreed to abide by the “tag team” rule of no fire unless we had no more than 2 vehicles in each section. The idea was the break things up a bit and make things a little less predictable. We also worked up some rules to make the speed modifiers come out a little more sensibly. (See the rules for “Head-on”, “Crossing the T”, and “Tailgating” below.)

The faster pairs entered the central region directly. In one pair, my opponent slowed down faster than me by just 5 or 10 mph or so. He was able to shoot up my car and sideswipe me multiple times and killed my vehicle in two seconds. In a similar situation on the opposite side, I had a similar advantage, but was not able to capitalize on it due to missed to-hit rolls, low damage rolls, and also to my not realizing that the sideswipe was a viable tactic.

In another corner, I slowed down to 5 mph while my opponent accelerated away. As soon as I could fire, I began shooting at his rear and quickly killed his driver. On the other side, our two vehicles fanned out, heading toward opposite corners. My opponent turned on a dime and got a lucky shot through my side before I could react. I turned back to face him down, taking more fire to that side. I turned into the central area, but miscalculated my turn. Another speeding opponent on the inside was able to take me out with a shot that just barely could hit that weakened side…. That was a mistake that easily cost me the game– especially when combined with the bad luck in another of the pairings.

One of my surviving vehicles ended up chasing one of the opposing team. I’d occasionally get a shot off, but the penalties were generally pretty bad and the walls in the arena were effective in eliminating the continuous fire bonus. In the chaos, I was reduced to a single vehicle. I ran it out of the central section just as two opposing vehicles were rounding the corner. As I’d lost my MG to an opponent the aggressively targeted fronts in spite of the extra penalty, I was hoping for a T-bone at 35 mph in order to save face. Things didn’t work out– the t-bone turned out to be a head-on, and the extra damage was enough to kill my driver permanently.

So we ended up each with a single victory and some continuing characters. We drove a lot more conservatively in the second game after all of the wipe outs in the first round. With to-hit targets running in the 9 to 11 range, we quickly discovered the importance of rams in the second game. I’m considering shifting the to-hit bonus for translating the GURPS targeting mods from +6 to +7– that would encourage a little more shooting and a little less ramming, hopefully– but I wouldn’t want that change to negatively impact other events beyond the amateur night scene.  Here’s my current proposed chart:

We had discussed using these house rules to eliminate handling status tracking, but I was concerned about its effects on a series of small D1 maneuvers and hazards that got more dangerous. After seeing these two games run with almost excessive use of d6 maneuvers being used in the dog fights, I’d almost consider using both systems. Any Bootlegger, T-stop, d4, d5, or d6 maneuver should require a driver skill roll as described in those house rules– on top of any control rolls required by the handling status. Of course, that adds complexity to an already complex system… which kinda defeats the purpose of the house rules…. It’s just a thought, though.

One thing was sure, we didn’t want to do all of our amateur night duels in the same arena. The next time we duel, it will be at the Amex Proving Grounds. We’ll have pairs of vehicles enter each of the four gates and then swerve off into their respective corner pockets– forcing hopefully a fairer initial duel than what we got with our last game. I’d almost recommend not giving the contestants complementary body armor like we did just to make sure things end quicker. Making to-hit rolls slightly easier and punishing hard core maneuvers a bit should create some more interesting games, I think….

I got in 3 games of G.E.V. this weekend.  I played against the guy that had crushed me in several games of Carcassonne a while back, so I knew that he could handle a game like this.  It seems like people either really don’t care about games too much–in which case they won’t even bother to master a relatively simple game like Ogre– or they are highly aggressive and tactically minded– in which case the terrain, spillover, and overrun rules of G.E.V. won’t pose them the slightest problem to them.

We played the Breakthrough scenario three times.  The first game, I played the defense and my opponent split his force into two groups.  I purchased heavy tanks and light tanks.  6 points of infantry and a heavy tank were stranded on the small eastern island and the G.E.V. attackers were able to mop them up without taking any fire.  Oops!  On the other side of the board, my light tanks sallied forth and the attackers were able to hit and run enough to destroy them for free.  I was able to send a couple of light tanks out from the central city to a woods hex and get a couple of shots off, disabling a couple of G.E.V.’s, but it didn’t help me in the end: the Combine forced scored a tremendous 80 point victory!  I hung my head in shame.

My opponent then took up the defense.  I sent my G.E.V.’s up the west side of the map and came up against two heavy tanks and a swarm of infantry.  One mobile howitzer brought up the rear while another one was isolated on the eastern island.  He played much more aggressively than I did and sent his forces as far down the map as he could without any cover at all in many cases.  In the bloody melee, I eliminated the infantry and disabled the tanks.  I lost a couple of units to the howitzer before I could slip in a good pot shot.  The surviving heavy tank proved difficult to kill and followed my G.E.V.’s down off the map, getting in a good overrun and a couple of kills.  I also scored a decisive victory, but with just 60 points.

At this point we realized that, just like Ogre, the key to this scenario is mastering the coordination of the defensive units.  My opponent suggested that the game was unbalanced, but I felt that we were missing something in our unit selection and tactics.

In the final game, my opponent took the defense again.  I ran my G.E.V.’s down the river this time.  We took out a mobile howitzer and six points of infantry at the cost of a couple of G.E.V.’s.  We then used our “road bonus” to move down the map at high speed across the water.  The reacting forces continued to move east to intercept us, but even the surviving mobile howitzer was out of range.  I ran my 10 G.E.V.’s into the swamp hexes on the far side of the map.  Three or four G.E.V.’s were disabled.  The howitzer then arrived to pick up a couple of kills while the rest of my force left the map.  I again scored a decisive victory, but with 64 points this time.

We got into an argument about whether or not G.E.V.’s have to pause (like they do when crossing streams) when crossing from water to clear hexes and vice versa.  I supposedly said they did in the first game, but said they didn’t in the last.  Then there’s the question of how the “road bonus” works in this situation as well….  The one key rule that we completely forgot was the obscuring of the defense’s set up in the Breakthrough scenario.  I would not have been able to choose the absolute best point of entry like I did in the third game had we played by this rule!

I like this game a lot.  It is very violent and full of many difficult decisions.  The spillover fire and overrun rules really aren’t that complicated– they’re just hard to explain to a first time player.  The terrain is also pretty easy to get the hang of once you play a few times: we really didn’t have to refer to the cheat sheet that much for that.  It amazes me how far these rules go in differentiating the various units.  Each armor unit has its own personality: in G.E.V., they are so much more than a move, fire, range, and defense rating.

The recent podcast on The Vintage Gamer includes a very healthy interview with Greg Costikyan, the Maverick Award winning designer of such notable games as Paranoia and Toon.  While the discussion ranges from topics on the 70’s wargame market to modern indie computer games, the podcast still contains a healthy dose of material of interest to folks that are obsessed with classic eighties era games.

Aspiring game designers will want to hear this– Costikyan says that most professional game designers burn out within five years.  If you’re going to college, don’t major in some goofy program geared totally towards games, but go ahead and do Computer Science or Graphic Arts instead so that you can use your industry experience to get your foot in the door for what will likely become your real career.

CAR WARS fans will note the cameo appearance of podcaster Jimmy Anderson, but don’t forget to check out the links section: Van Verth includes a reference to this Costikyan article that describes how TSR almost single handedly put an end to the wargaming hobby.  The article includes a concise history of War Games and of Strategy & Tactics magazine in particular.  And according to SPI’s feedback, 90+% of all wargamers played alone.  Just based on the number of CAR WARS and Traveller players that appear not to have a gaming group, this shouldn’t have shocked me like it did… but I’m surprised.  I’ve long despised “game designs” that target, not people that play games, but people that play with games… but evidently that has pretty much been where the market was all along.

Costikyan also comments in the article on the fact that computer games do not “match paper games for sophistication, depth, and accuracy.”  Hopefully his new Manifesto Games company can do something to address that.

One thing I could quite parse from the podcast was Costikyan’s opinion of the atrocious looking Paranoia XP.  I think Jim Van Verth was expecting him to slam it, but it might be that he actually was pleased with it: the author was from a preapproved list of people he had complete confidence in.  But there was one edition that he completely hated… I think it might have been the one before XP, though.  Not being a Paranoia expert, I may have completely botched this exchange, so if anyone can clear this up, please let me know.

At any rate, it sounds like the definitive version of Paranoia to pick up is the second edition.  According to the podcast, the first was probably overly complex and still “finding its voice.”

The Vintage Gamer continues to be a good resource for solid material on game design history and analysis.  It can really open your eyes to classics you might have missed.

In Ogre, you put your Heavy Tanks out front and your Missile Tanks and Infantry form the second line of defense.  But if you’re playing the 1983 Challenger: Ultra Modern miniatures rules double blind, this is not a good idea.  In this game you should have a line of infanty on the first line in order to alert you to the enemy’s approach.  You should concentrate your mobile units in a second line– preferably somewhere that your opponent is unlikely to shoot with artillery fire.  Finally, you should have a reserve just in case your opponent if feinting.

Here’s my infantry and APC’s whooping it up after taking out some Ruskie scout cars:

My boys quit laughing right about the time the rest of the party showed up.  The APC’s were quickly destroyed and the infantry remained dug into their fox holes.  I annoyed the Ruskies with artillery fire and accidently hit some of my men once, too:

I had to do something about my men!  I sent my tanks to respond and split them up a bit in order to avoid having them disabled all together by enemy artillery.  I moved at full speed to get there ASAP, but couldn’t fire as a result of that.  (I was still learning the rules!)  Then… because of the lack of a full first-line infantry screen… we unexpectedly ran into the main Russian element!  The smoking hulks in the picture below are all that remained of my platoon of tanks:

Now the Ruskies were free to roll on through and cover Bergkohn with as much fire as they liked.  The rest of my forced were ill-placed to respond… and heavily outnumbered. 

A fog of war can have a huge impact on tactics….  Panic is bad news– and playing a game with another game’s tactics is, obviously, not a winning strategy.

A secret cache of files over on the BITS site has granted me much enlightenment in regards to T4 ship design and combat.  (Thanks to Hans Rancke-Madsen for pointing these out to me.)  Not all of my questions are answered, but there is a glimmer of hope that I can succeed in making this thing work!

It looks like the sandcaster you buy in T4 is a single sandcaster in a small turret with a “rating” of one.  It appears that each one requires its own gunner.  (It’s still not clear whether or not a single gunner can fire several of these at a single laser or missile swarm without penalties.)  The power plants in the core T4 rulebook did not seem to vary much, but the QSDS 1.5 PDF from BITS addressess this problem.  On the other hand, the new hull definition for the 400 dton needle style airframe has a Maximum G of 3– which forces me to cut the maneuver drive back on my patrol cruiser design.  I also don’t have an official design for the small craft, so I just use the Classic Traveller designs for now.

The MayDay 4.1 PDF from BITS contains valuable rules for converting the abstract system to a hex based approach.  It also includes a new version of the sensor rules, but appears to require the T4 edition of Fuel Fire Fusion & Steel.  Oh well… we’ll take what we can get at this point.  It looks like we’re more or less at the everything but sensor rules and missile munitions now.

For my Patrol Cruiser design, I added in an additional small laser battery for point defense.  I also added several extra MFD’s to allow the gunners to control two full waves of missiles.  I couldn’t stand to just shoot 8 missiles… wait for a hit… then shoot another 8 4 turns later.  This way, the cruiser can get 20 missiles on the map at once.  Viva la barbette!  There’s not a lot of cargo space after that, so things are pretty tight on this ship, but it should be a pretty fun ship to play in a fight.

War Patrol Cruiser (QSDS 1.5)
Tons: 400
Volume: 376.2 m^3 ?
Cost: 364.48 MCr
Crew: 32
Cargo: 8
Std Controls: Std Mil (Bridge) 
TL: 12
3 Jump Drive (6 Std/Pc Fuel)
3 Maneuver (Thrust Plate, 22 Mw)
8 Size
680 Power Plant (3x 200Mw, 4x 20Mw)
A10 P4 J10 Sensors

2x Laser Battery(2) 4/3-2-0-0           
1x Laser Battery (1) 4/2-0-0-0 
2 Battery Missile Barb 5 (4)
3 Sandcasters (30×3 Cans)
Ext. Grapple (30 dton Ship’s Boat)     
10 Armor, 12 Structure

Crew Detail: 2 Engineers, 1 Electronics, 2 Maneuver, 11 Gunners, 3 Screens,
2 AuxCraft Crew, 8 Troops/Marines, 4 Command, 1 Steward, 1 Medical

Software: Predict 2 (x3), Gunner (x11), Evade-4, Anti-Hijack, Library (+33.4 MCr)

(Cost includes an additional MCr 16 for Ship’s Boat.)

***

Some remaining minor questions:

“Missile launchers do not have to be crewed when operating as part of a missile battery under the control of a Master Fire Director, but if assigned, a crewmember may launch missiles under local control from the weapon mount.”

Question: If a crewmember is launching missiles from the battery, how many can he control?

Guess: None.  Only unguided missiles can be launched without the benefits of a Master Fire Director.

***

“USD Bonus - The USD bonus for missile batteries using this equipment.”

Question: The QSDS 1.5 rules on bits introduce a “USD Bonus” in regards to Master Fire Directors.  Is this the same thing as the number of missiles that it can control or is it some new bonus for to-hit rolls?

Guess: Uh… just use it as the number of missiles it can control.

***

Question: Does carrying a small craft on an external grapple increase the amount of fuel it takes to make a jump?

Guess: Uh… no?

***

Question: Does Predict software improve to-hit rolls using Missiles or Sand?

Guess: Uh… no.  (According to robject.)

***

[Note: I'm not sure at this point why I continue to fiddle with such an outdated system riddled with errors and ommissions that Traveller players have long since abandoned, but here we go anyway.  I guess I partly want to be able to judge the rumored T5 edition from the standpoint of what Marc was trying to accomplish with the T4 ruleset.  Also, there are some neat features in it for those of us that haven't gotten around to buying every single edition of the game.]

Update:  Here’s the spreadsheet detailing my Patrol Cruiser design.

The T4 ship design system is not bad, at a first glance.  Unlike previous versions of Traveller that limited you  to a set number of “hardpoints” based on ship size, T4 assigns a Surface Area requirement for each component.  You can load up as many weapons as you want as long as you can fit them in both the internal space and external surface area.  (Obviously, the shape of your starship will have an impact on the volume and surface area.)  Note that, instead of the usual “generic” critical hit table, you can probably use these figures to come up with a more suitable custom table for each ship.

Each component is rated with power and crew requirement.  Once you’ve got the bulk of your ship designed, you then choose a power plant.  The excess power of 14.3 in the design below is calling out to be relevant in a combat scenario, but alas, it doesn’t appear to matter much in the T4 combat rules.  Determining your crew requirments is a bit more tricky: it’s not just a simple matter of checking your running tally.  Engineering crew is determined with one part of the numbers, command crew based on your total crew size….  Then you have to figure out who gets the nice diggs.  Due to the weird rounding rules in this step, you can’t breeze through this part.  With both these steps, it’s a little strange having to design most of your ship before picking these: you might not have enough space to do what you need, so you may be forced to go back and revise things.

One unusual decision on the part of the designers was to specify armor values within the standard hull tables.  You don’t have the option to vary them.  If you want to increase the defensive capability of a ship you need to add in sandcasters.  A high sandcaster rating can be useful in deflecting laser and missile hits.  (Note that the ranges for the sandcaster table in the combat section are incorrect– they should be VS, S, M, and L.)  But when you buy a sandcaster the rules do not specify what you are getting.  Is it a turret that requires a gunner with a sandcaster rating of 1?  That’s pretty useless.  Is it a turret that requires a gunner with a sandcaster rating of 3?  That’s not so bad.  Can a gunner fire more than one sandcaster per turn?  I see nothing in the rules to help with this question, and once again I’m forced to pick over previous rules editions to try to ascertain what the designer was thinking.  In the ship below I purchased three of the sandcaster items, but I have no idea what I bought or if I can use them!  They take up nearly as much space as the laser, so I will guess that they are good enough to block one and merit a total rating of three and also require a single gunner to operate.  I have no idea if this is right, though.

The computer software section has been cut down quite a bit since the old days, but there still appears to be a remant there that ought to have been excised.  The “Return Fire” has no obvious use in the T4 rules.  Also, the table used to determine the required size of the Jump was ommited from the rulebook.  Looking through the errata, I see that the small ship designs are completely bogus… and that the patrol cruiser was completely mangled.  And missiles seem to be given short shrift: I see no information concerning the cost and space requirments of the standard and nuclear types, nor any information on guided or unguided.  What a mess!

I’ve spent several hours messing with T4 ship combat at this point, and to get any use out of it I still need to continue a comparative analysis between it and the other editions, design a slew of ships, and come up with a good half dozen house rules.  I have doubts that many people ever used these rules….

If you’re interested in the gory details, here’s a complete breakdown of the Patrol Cruiser design I slogged through.

One of the things that surprised me about post-ADQ Car Wars fandom was the attachment to the whole armed vehicle genre.  CWIN, for instance, covered news of post-apocalyptic armed autos in all of their manifestations: board games, computer games, card games, and probably even books and movies.  I guess the genre of the game was never that important to me– oh, Boy Scout Commandoes and dangerous pizza delivery runs fired my imagination as much as anyone.  It was highly accessible fantasy to be sure, but the endeavor of playing Car Wars was something much more than all of that. 

Other critics have labeled Car Wars as merely being a “design-a-thing” game, but I don’t think that’s the best category to describe what its all about either.  Car Wars has its feet firmly planted in two contradictory worlds: it’s is part of a family mini-games– inexpensive and relatively easy to learn games that utilize the trappings of older wargames– and at the same time Car Wars is part of a family of monster games… mini-games that raged out of control in a series of contradictory expansions and errata culminating into comprehensive “Compendiums” and “Doomsday” editions.  In other words, the true family of games that Car Wars belongs to includes Battletech and Star Fleet Battles– and genre and even the fact that it uses a design system is secondary to its categorization.

Comfirmation of my approach to “gaming cladistics” can be found in the excellent article, An Introduction to Elegance.  He classifies them as “quasi-RPG wargames” and uses them to epitomize the lack of elegant design in American games.  He then sets up the German games invasion as being infinitely superior in the gaming elegance department… and he uses an example from computer programming to support his argument.

But I don’t think it’s entirely fair to compare an abstract game to a simulation.  While “Quasi-RPG wargames” can of course benefit from techniques developed by the German designers, they are not inherently inelegant.  It’s more fitting to view Settlers of Catan as a more elegant version of the Monopoly and M.U.L.E. tradition of game.  In this discussion, it is important to understand the design differences forced upon a game by its choice of scope and granularity. 

The Car Wars design system is extremely elegant when judged from the correct vantage point.  The equipment list if finite and colorful… and the exact combination of speed, maneuverability, defense, and offense capability can be chosen at the whim and style the designer.  Complex equations are necessary only when calculating speed and range… simple addition tallies and percentage increases are sufficient everywhere else.  Most importantly, cost is an accurate balancing factor: Battletech and Star Fleet Battles both had to develop kludgy “Battle Value” and “Base Point Value” systems to accomplish the same thing.  Finally, the statistical values developed in the design process impact all of the various rules subsystems in clearly defined and significantly game-impacting ways.

Returning to the programming example… a nifty “elegant” abstraction is only relevant to a project if it can accomplish the same requirements as the “ugly” solution.  Sometimes it is the right decision to simplify things… but at some point the maxim “as simple as possible but no simpler” comes into play.  German games are fun… they are interesting toys… but they don’t even attempt to solve the same problems that we were trying to solve back in the eighties.  And I’m not sure that a “germanified” Car Wars game could come close to capturing the flavor of an effective dueling machine tossed into mortal combat at a funky arena.

Anyways, just a minor quibble with an otherwise solid post.  Check out the My Play blog for more interesting discussion and gaming analyis!

I tried a practice run through of the T4 space combat rules: just a standard duel between two TL 12 10 ton “Light Fighters.”  This really isn’t a fair test of the system– it’d be like judging Car Wars based on a duel between two body armor wearing pedestrians having a long range shoot out using only heavy pistols.  My first impressions were positive.  While not particularly exciting, the rules were fairly easy to follow and relatively uncluttered.  Of course, the fighters are restricted to shooting it out in the point-blank range band, so there are not a lot of options for maneuver.

In my test run, both fighters had to roll a 5 or less on two dice to score a hit.  The fighters lack a lot of fancy equipment, so critical hits tend to not do much.  To completely finish off a fighter it takes 5 hits with the point defense laser.  And with that you have a nice little probability problem for the aspiring actuary: what is the expected number of rounds it takes to finish a fighter duel?  In my case, one fighter scored a lucky hit on the other and took out its laser battery.  While the other attempted to flee, the fighter continually tried to close and keep firing.  It took a total of 37 turns to finish it.  That’s 370 minutes of game time, or six hours and ten minutes!

When opponents have equal maneuver ratings, the initiative is determined by flipping a coin.  To escape a battle, the fighter would have to win initiative three times in a row to get to long range.  Of course, even if he succeeds in breaking off, I think the attacking fighter can elect to pursue.

Anyways, I saw several places where the rules could be improved:

1) Critical Success and Critical Failure effects are not defined for skill rolls in space combat.  Addressing that could go a long way toward adding at least a possibility of a satisfying coup-de-gras moment in the above scenario.

2) The initiative step is more or less geared towards a face off between opposing fleets: the side with the most ships and highest leadership skill can close or pull away as it pleases.  The fifty-fifty approach used above is very unsatisfactory– surely there are other factors that can impact this all-important step.

3) T4 has been criticized for giving too much weight to attributes in its task system.  In space combat, however, attributes have no impact at all!  (This mismatch leads me to believe that these rules were mostly lifted from previous versions of Traveller without much thought to integrating them into a new vision of how things should work.  It looks like an opportunity to provide a “last word” on space combat was carelessly passed by.)

4) The no-effect critical hit results are very depressing.  They ought to at least force the characters of the target vessel to have to make some sort of saving throw to avoid problems.  Think R2-D2 locking down the stabilizer on the x-wing or putting out the fire on the Falcon.

5) The jamming and sensor rules are pretty confusing.  The terms are defined, the step is there, and there’s a table of modifiers… but what really happens here is not spelled out.  Evidently a successful jamming attempt can break an opponent’s sensor lock, or make it harder for them to get a lock to begin with.  But the difference between active and passive sensors are not addressed even though the choice is explicitly referenced.

6) There are not a lot of choices in this vision of space combat.  Perhaps a paper-rock-scissors choice could be made at the beginning of each turn… with a matrix of the results creating bonuses for later steps or creating new contests of skill.  On the other hand, perhaps Traveller space combat is intended to be dry and without a lot of surprises.  I’m not sure about this.

7) There are no effects for morale or endurance.

 Looks like a lot of room for improvement.