deacon wrote:
Hey guys! Nice to see you all again
Now - for the space forggies:
I want these guys to "feel" ancient, and powerful - these guys have unlocked the mysteries of how the universe works and when threatened, their military might is awesome to behold. Even advanced factions like the Lyceum or OTC are baffled by the seemingly "magical" nature of their warmachines and armament.
Even their average troopers are equipped with highly sophisticated equipment, such as space warping protective fields, "guns" if you can call them that - which, while short ranged, apparently open spherical rifts in space/time, leaving nothing behind after they dissipate.
So these guys are way WAY beyond crude ballistics. And I don't want their weapons and vehicles to look conventional at all - you wont be able to look at one of their models and say "That's a gun" or "That's a Tank". I want the shapes presented by this army to be wholly "outside the box".
On the battlefield, I want these guys to be very powerful, hard to predict, and small in number. You will have to work hard to beat them, but it will also be hard to manage them as your own force. I like the idea of "waves" warping into the game from far far away. So maybe you take a quarter of the points being played, say 500 for a 2k game, and that is the number of points you get to warp in each turn. These points can be "banked" to warp in larger models. Also - these guys are masters of foresight, so only the first wave of troops is selected before the battle - the rest can be decided on as the game progresses...
Note - this will leave you overwhelmed at first, but if your opponent is not quick about grabbing the win, your force will eventually out-value his as more and more waves join the battle...
Just a few ideas! Thoughts?
I think before we begin, we should also dump our conventional thinking about vehicle and infantry types. Familiarity with non-western doctrines is always a good thing when crafting a new army (for example, just plucking an idea from the news, Spetsnaz is often called the Russian special forces or the Russian SAS. Their real role and organization and training is so completely off-the-wall by US standards that people have trouble thinking about them without continually stuffing them back into the western model again and again). For the Froggies, we have to step even further back and revisit the foundations of their doctrine and capabilities or else we'll create "super-frog-tanks", backed up by "super-frog-VTOLs" and fire support from "super-frog-SP-artillery" until the "super-frog-infantry" shows up.
You might also want to consider re-visiting your modeling as well. New capabilities might give you the ability to do things that simply <i>look</i> eye-catchingly different on the playing field.
Have you considered partnering with Litko or Corsec? You could have them do a bazillion transparent acrylic disks with laser-etched symbols on them, and have those represent vehicular shields.
One easy thing you could do is haul out the standard science fantasy supertech and pull from that. Force fields and teleportation are obvious choices. Here's another: Let's look at the fundamental mechanics of a ground game and ask ourselves what kind of crazy things we could do that break those rules in the name of mind-twistingly dangerous super-science?
Here's some brainstorming:
- Teleporting out of assault: instead of normal withdrawal, a unit simply nominates a position some number of centimeters away and moves their figures to there. Assault's over, sorry guys.
- Energy tokens: Perhaps have some kind of energy mechanic where you can spend tokens to get something (shields? firepower?)
- Shields: Not your garden-variety ablative ones. These are "you shall not pass" invulnerable types. Attacks must come from the flank or rear to have any effect at all. Maybe in exchange the froggies can't fire through the shield either.
- Terrain-changing: Either to represent seismic changes, or perhaps an energy field between two froggie units. So anything crossing a line between two froggie units treats the ground as dangerous. Or anything coming within X centimeters. Or, hell, weird games with dimensions let you MOVE a terrain piece.
- Time travel: Sure, let's screw with causality! Nominate a unit. Put a copy of that unit on the board, anywhere you choose, at any time (even during the opponent's turn). Place a "time rift" marker next to the unit. Any kills scored by the copy are put to the side. If the nominated unit is destroyed before the time rift closes, then the copy is removed and all its kills are returned to the board next to the rift as the paradox resolves. The froggie player can close the rift voluntarily by moving the nominated unit into contact with the rift. (Obviously, we'd need some mechanic to allow the unit coherence rules to work, but you see what I mean.)
- Spacial rifts. Number up some pairs of "spacial rift" tokens. A unit can move freely between rifts, and a unit can even remain adjacent to both tokens-- as long as each half is in coherence with itself and one of the two tokens, then the whole unit is fine. Now we have a way for our frogs to hop!
- Artillery: Normally, with some exceptions, indirect fire follows the barrage rules and direct fire uses the shooting rules. Why not reverse it? Nasty, carefully aimed shots arc around obstacles, while direct fire unleashes a firestorm of sheer, unmitigated heck.
- Soul sucking: ok this is a stretch, but I wanted to think of something totally off the wall. How about having your weapons do no damage but attack their opponents' sentience directly? That is, the intellect, so it affects robots and bioconstructs too. Every attack is essentially anti-personnel, and numbers rather than armor or shields is the only defense. That makes infantry very strong but vehicles very vulnerable. Obviously, this creates a long list of balance and feasibiliity problems, but it came to mind and this is brainstorming.
ANyway, these are just a barrage of suggestions. The key is to make them both headscratchingly weird and also very powerful. So they kind of play an entirely different game from the other armies, and force the other armies to develop entirely different tactics to face them. Once we have that in mind, we can figure out what kind of hardware they use to implement their weirdness.
