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Damn Yankee...or Cold War Gone Hot


06/24

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13 hours ago, Silver Fox said:

That's the most concise review of the FOW world I've ever seen. Well done, I'm not bitter that no German player in my club will take on my French, honest. Still have a lot of fun with late war and mid war though and enjoying Barbarossa immensely. 

 

 

It's a great game. One of the absolute best games to sit around with mates and just waste a day away.  But from 07 to about late 09 it was a tough game to support.  What should have been a hissy  fit from some cheesed off players turned into a nightmare. Battlefront shut down their forums,  deleted people's accounts,  banned some players, imposed strict posting limits on others,  nuked quite a few fan sites and just made general horses rear ends out of themselves.  There was no real rhyme or reason to it.  I had no dog in the fight,  so I was pretty much left out of it. I had just watched Mongoose epicly mishandle their Babylon 5 game and it shut down, so I feared for Battlefront. It almost seemed like Battlefront was self destructing. I'm glad it didn't.   

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1 hour ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

Could be worse.....Could be Leading Edge Games (anyone remember the Aliens RPG fiasco, or ever actually attempt to play Phoenix Command)?  :mental:

 

I actually owned, at one point, all of Phoenix Command, but sadly never got to play it and sold it on.

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2 hours ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

Could be worse.....Could be Leading Edge Games (anyone remember the Aliens RPG fiasco, or ever actually attempt to play Phoenix Command)?  :mental:

 

Good Lord!  That's insane! I thought that Battletech, the old FASA Star Trek and Babylon 5 wars were way too slow. The amount of time needed for one game must have been MASSIVE! 

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I'm not sure that anybody really knows how long it would take.....I've known loads of people own it, but none that actually played it.

 

I did once play a Phoenix Command based wild-west skirmish at a games convention, but the guy running it had simplified things massively.

 

This is a damned good game:  http://adept-press.com/games-fantasy-horror/sorcerer/  But I really couldn't recommended it for players with low SAN ratings.  :mental:

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On 11/8/2016 at 8:09 PM, Sgt.Squarehead said:

Some rather more civilised games here:  http://toofatlardies.co.uk

 

Highly recommended!  :thumbsup:

 

I've played Bag the Hun before.  Despite my best efforts to hate it, it was really fun. As a matter of fact, if it wasn't for Check Yer 6!, it would probably be my go to table top flight game.

 

There are also some local guys who play Pickett's Charge.  I have to avoid those guys like the black plague.  They are super fun to game with, so you end up spending a few hundred dollars on games you know you'll never play again unless they are around. Those guys are how I ended up with a Star Trek Attack Wing fleet, and a irritated wife. 

Edited by Thud4444
Named the wrong game
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37 minutes ago, Thud4444 said:

 

Good Lord!  That's insane! I thought that Battletech, the old FASA Star Trek and Babylon 5 wars were way too slow. The amount of time needed for one game must have been MASSIVE! 

 

Fun fact: I used to demo Battletech for FanPro and Catalyst, the successors to FASA. I ran battalion-on-battalion (IE 40 units to a side) games every two months. 

 

2085596872_96863e28d9_b.jpgClassic Battletech December 1 2007 105 by Edward IX, on Flickr

 

2874669758_81e8df9a79_b.jpgSeptember 20th CBT Game 066 by Edward IX, on Flickr

 

I had to stop because even with my discount, it was ruinously expensive. I did get to design some published 'mechs for the game, that was kinda neat for me.

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Which mechs did you help design?

Any good ones?

 

If I could brag, the WoB Goshawk in the main rule book is supposedly named after me. That's my only claim to fame. And it's a lame one.  That must have been a all day event with all those units.

 

Based on the pic, Jihad? Battle of New Avalon, mabe?  Those are definitely Fed Suns, but the Lyran Guards are throwing me.

 

 

Wait, some body brought a Helios? !  That's my kind of crazy!

 

What are the cards for?

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23 minutes ago, Thud4444 said:

Which mechs did you help design?

Any good ones?

 

Ehhh...not reeeeally. 

 

C-1FC Cossack

SGT-9D Saggitaire

Tyr (Kurita)

 

I also got one short story published on Battlecorps, but it was pretty bad.

 

23 minutes ago, Thud4444 said:

Based on the pic, Jihad? Battle of New Avalon, mabe?  Those are definitely Fed Suns, but the Lyran Guards are throwing me.

 

Two different games, as you guessed. 3rd Crucis Lancers versus Proserpina Hussars c. 3075, and Lyran Guard/Com Guards versus the Word of Blake on Tharkad in like 3070 or so. It's been a while. I supplied all the minis for the games, so I got to force people to use lotsa crappy ones. (Heh heh,) I badly misjudged the firepower of Lyran formations in the latter game, BTW, not helped by BV not handling Manei Domini well. There was one Steiner lance with a Devastator, a Thunder Hawk, a Fafnir, and a Nightstar, and it pretty much destroyed an entire flank of the WoB attack over a very short period of time. Whoops!

 

23 minutes ago, Thud4444 said:

What are the cards for?

 

I used card-based initiative, with each lance getting a card, to speed play. That, threats, and feeding everyone with pizza generally got us wrapped up by six if we started right at 10:30.

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The Sag isn't bad, kinda like a Fed Suns Legacy.  The Cossack is a tough to love mech anyway.  I don't think there was much you could do there that didn't turn it into any other light mech Panther clone. There are worse mechs out there, WoB Grim Reaper I'm looking at you! Or some of those straight up ignorant Society mechs...

 

Yea that Lyran fight is way one sided. Even the poor Comguard is way undedgunned.  You not only gave them amazing assaults, but those are some of the best heavies from the era. Meh, it just the WoB, kill'em all! We mostly used tonnage over BV. But that opens a entirely different can of worms, doesn't it.

 

Did you ever try Alpha Strike? It's an attempt to speed up game play and fix some issues.  Ironically it's a lot like FoW. Really fast and really fun. We played a 144 mech battle one day in about 4 hours. Where your Cossacks is meh in Battletech, it's really good in AS. I always use it in my St Ives Lancers light companies. Well armed lights are AWESOME in AS.

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3 hours ago, Thud4444 said:

We mostly used tonnage over BV. But that opens a entirely different can of worms, doesn't it.

 

I balanced by BV, tonnage (and later, combined armor factors and internal structure values), and number of weapons per side that could headcap with one hit. That ultimately proved pretty workable.

 

3 hours ago, Thud4444 said:

Did you ever try Alpha Strike? It's an attempt to speed up game play and fix some issues. 

 

I haven't! I like the idea, but it was hard for me to adapt to a new set of rules.

 

3 hours ago, Thud4444 said:

Well armed lights are AWESOME in AS.

 

My favourite has always been the mighty Dart. Two small pulse lasers, no waiting.

 

18 minutes ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

I've still got all the FASA Battletech stuff up to the Clans (which I thought were cheesy and avoided), but no miniatures whatsoever.....TBH I didn't think the figures were up to Ral Partha's normal standards.  :unsure:

 

Eh, I don't even think regular Ral Parth stuff is good, by modern standards. 

 

I dislike the Clans (and am creeped out by the small subset of players who seem to think they have an admirable society -- "I was in the National Guard, so I'd be in the Warrior Caste," sure okay, pal), but I will say that the never technologies make the game go a LOT faster. In 40-unit-to-a-side-games, a lance of 'mechs being dropped in a turn was not uncommon. 

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We never played much beyond two or three lances a side.....TBH it was a fairly clumsy game.  :mellow:

 

Did you ever play ICE's Silent Death board game at all.....I was really impressed with that one, beautifully intuitive rules and a lot of fun to play.  :thumbsup:

 

Some of Ral Partha's early figures were outstanding, finely detailed and perfectly cast.....That's why I found their Mechs so unimpressive.  :unsure:

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5 hours ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

Did you ever play ICE's Silent Death board game at all.....I was really impressed with that one, beautifully intuitive rules and a lot of fun to play.  :thumbsup:

 

 

Nawp, it was on the way out when I was starting to really waste my time get into wargames.

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Yea, I played it. Unless I'm remembering wrong,  it was super fast. And really deadly. The old B5 Wars early fighter combat was a less refined version of Silent Death.  I played it and the minis where ok, but I never really latched on. It didn't have the name recognition of all the other systems.  I was super shallow back then. 

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5 minutes ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

All this talk of RPGs is tempting me to climb up into the attic.....I have as many games & figures up there as I do kits down here!  :blush:

 

 

Ironically that's how I got into wargaming.  I wanted models of the warships from B5. I found the minis at a game shop and bought a Vorchan and an Hyperion for display.   Every few weeks I'd stop by and buy a mini and they'd invite me to play. I discovered that they had figures from the Mechwarrior 2 video game and they explained about Battletech.  Sat in on a 3025 vs clan game and I was hooked. Painted a Star of clan mechs in SEA camo and I was off to the races.

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9 minutes ago, Thud4444 said:

 

 

Ironically that's how I got into wargaming.  I wanted models of the warships from B5. I found the minis at a game shop and bought a Vorchan and an Hyperion for display.   Every few weeks I'd stop by and buy a mini and they'd invite me to play. I discovered that they had figures from the Mechwarrior 2 video game and they explained about Battletech.  Sat in on a 3025 vs clan game and I was hooked. Painted a Star of clan mechs in SEA camo and I was off to the races.

 

I still have most of my B5Wars stuff (and Fleet Action), but haven't played in what must be getting alarmingly close to twenty years now. Jeepers. Always loved the look of the Omega-class destroyers.

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12 hours ago, Thud4444 said:

Ironically that's how I got into wargaming.  I wanted models of the warships from B5. I found the minis at a game shop and bought a Vorchan and an Hyperion for display.   Every few weeks I'd stop by and buy a mini and they'd invite me to play. I discovered that they had figures from the Mechwarrior 2 video game and they explained about Battletech.  Sat in on a 3025 vs clan game and I was hooked. Painted a Star of clan mechs in SEA camo and I was off to the races.

 

My own experience is not dissimilar.....I started with Citadel miniatures (the FtF range had just come out), moved via D&D into Runequest & Traveller and that pretty much was that.....  ;)

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I saw a game of Phoenix Command being played in my Fresher's Week back in '93. It was a 1v1 double blind game for two freshers, with a GM who knew the rules. It took all afternoon and simulated about 30 seconds, I think. The loser opened a door, looked left, looked right and got shot in the back of the head as the winner turned a corner and spotted them just as they looked away. 

 

I also own Silent Death and quite a lot of Battletech stuff, not to mention all the figures from my early teens misspent playing Games Workshop games... 

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