[Mechaton] Giant robot combat, up close and dirty

[Adam Biltcliffe]

The new initiative rule, where you put all the dice by the mech and can pick whether to keep or discard them as they come up in turn? Totally rocks. Initiative feels useful, now. Though I think it means you're even more likely to get pounded on if you roll a low defence.

Thoughts after yesterday's excellent game:

Making the cover sparser is a good thing. We had mostly single hexes of cover with about five empty hexes between them, which means if your mech is slow, it's a toss-up whether you can make it to the next piece of cover in one move or whether you have to choose between leaving yourself exposed and not making progress. Also makes the difference in weapon ranges more important, because you can't get far away enough to make a direct fire attack on that guy you're sharing your cover with.

Putting objectives where they can't be defended from in cover is much more fun, but there's no real reason to do it, sa far as I can tell. In yesterday's game, I was the only one who placed a flag far away from cover, and I did win, but I think I'd have ended up doing so much more easily if I'd just put it in cover and left a fat mech on it from the start. Have you guys been putting objectives mostly in cover, or in the open?

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

I've been putting objectives in cover in such a way that it's hard to get to them cleanly from outside: with walls around them and cover between them sparse. That way, a single mecha can't take both in two turns (or, if they're really close, in one turn, though I doubt anyone's doing that).

Having both sparse and dense areas of cover on a board is also fun. We had a huge, open killing floor that made everyone stick to cover until the chips were really down and had to take the dangerous short cut.

I'll just come out and say this: pounding on the weakest guy on the table at a time is strategically meaningless. Pound on the side that's winning. Otherwise, you're fighting for second place with the current winner getting a greater and greater lead.

[Adam Biltcliffe]

I'll just come out and say this: pounding on the weakest guy on the table at a time is strategically meaningless. Pound on the side that's winning. Otherwise, you're fighting for second place with the current winner getting a greater and greater lead.

I wish this was the case, but it doesn't seem to be working out that way for us. Say the mech you really, strategically speaking, want to atack has a five for his defend this turn. If you and the third player or whatever attack him with, say, a total of a dozen mechs, and half of them manage to roll a six for attack (which sounds statistically about right to me), your expectation is that you'll do a total of one damage to that guy. With every non-allied mech on the board attacking him. This seems totally inefficient to me, when you can attack a weaker mech two or three times as efficiently and then blast that other mech later, especially when the game is typically only about six turns long. This is starting to make me suspect that we're still not using the same rules.

[Joshua A.C. Newman]

This is starting to make me suspect that we're still not using the same rules.

Yeah, something's amiss:

Say the mech you really, strategically speaking, want to atack has a five for his defend this turn. If you and the third player or whatever attack him with, say, a total of a dozen mechs, and half of them manage to roll a six for attack (which sounds statistically about right to me), your expectation is that you'll do a total of one damage to that guy.

... but you're saying that all off the winning team's mecha are rolling 5s, presenting you with no options. And doing so while also making attacks that are good enough to prevent you from moving around and taking objectives. Somehow, the dice are all coming up too high on his side and not high enough on yours.

Now, if each of those dozen mecha attack (that number sounds high, but it's easy) and get one attack die each, you should be doing two or three damage to that guy. Let's say the target in question here is built to defend: two Blues, a 2 Red sniper rifle, and a 2 Red missile rack for Direct fire. That mecha had six dice. Now it's got three or four. And you think it's gonna get a 5 defend every time? Rolling two Blues and putting both Whites into Defense, that's only a 52% chance. So if the defender there rolls a 5 instead, making the defend a 4, they're now rolling 24 attack dice, of which four should come up 6s, putting the guy down. And that assumes that you're trying to completely run the player out of dice, that you need hir to lose that mecha. Just bashing it down to Whites is probably enough. And don't forget that it'll lose Blues along the way, making damage even more likely.

Remember this when shooting at the guy in second place while you're in last: that guy's helping you. If you're fighting that guy, you're fighting on two fronts when the defender should be doing that. If you've all got roughly equivalent forces (which it sounds like you're doing), that means the defender is having to take hits at twice the rate as the other two, while the two attackers are receiving the whupping at half the rate.