[Mechaton] Objective rules?

[Adam Biltcliffe]

So, what exactly are the rules for capturing objectives? I'm asking because my play group seems to be getting kind of dissatisfied with the way the game is working, and I'm still curious as to how come we seem to have been getting such a different play experience.

This is what we're doing: At the start, all your objectives are owned by you, and you carry on owning them until someone else takes control of them. To take control of an objective, you have to be the only player with any mechs in melee combat range of it, and as soon as that happens, you own it until someone else is able to take control.

So this means you can put a mech on your objective, and then anyone who wants to take that objective away from you has to destroy your mech, no question. So what I see this leading to, pretty understandably, is everyone puts all their objectives real close together and then sticks all their artillery mechs on top of them, so there's no way you can take points off them without destroying a pretty significant proportion of their army.

That doesn't seem to happen in your games? Why not?

[lumpley]

If everybody does that, then the person who starts the game winning, wins.

The defender should do that. The attacker(s) should think really hard about what they want to do and how they intend to take away the defender's objectives.

Right?

-Vincent

[lumpley]

Hey Adam, check out the new yellow dice, in your honor.

-Vincent

[Adam Biltcliffe]

The new yellow dice look sweet, and I'm looking forward to trying them out.

When you say this:

The attacker(s) should think really hard about what they want to do and how they intend to take away the defender's objectives.

... I think there must be some subtlety I'm missing, because isn't the answer to that question a no-brainer? viz, you pound on the defender's mechs that are sitting on top of their objectives with all your stuff, and whether you win comes down to whether they blow up in time; it's not too hard to get a couple of your own mechs over there to take them if they do, because the poor beleagured defender is fighting off everyone else as well as you, and unless you get a lucky shot, actually killing a mech takes most of the game.

Of course, this doesn't guarantee you first place, but from experience, the solution to that one seems to be to make sure all your mechs are heavily-armoured so they don't die, and if anyone is foolhardy enough to leave any of their mechs unarmoured or assign them a low defence die, blow them up; the loss of an expected third of a point of damage to the defender or whatever is totally more than compensated for by being the guy who wins when the defender goes down. (Maybe it shouldn't be, but our games are typically lasting about six turns, so they're ending right around the time the defender's objectives go down, before anyone has a chance to do anything about the new winner.)

I think I must still be misunderstanding something. What other answers to the question "how do you intend to take away the defender's objectives?" are there?

(Also, is the actual rule I mentioned above for how to take away objectives the same one as you're using?)

[lumpley]

Those are the same objective-taking rules, yeah.

Okay, so in your games the balance of points isn't shifting until the very end of the game, at which point second place becomes the winner, and second place up until then has been a crapshoot. That's how it's working out?

Actually, y'know, troubleshooting your game is really, really hard when there's not a rules document. Like, I'm pretty sure that you aren't inflicting damage on a 5 or 6 in hand to hand, for instance, and I have no idea what setup rules you're using. Give me a couple weeks to make a real game text and let's revisit, okay?

-Vincent

[Larry L.]

Vincent,

Objective rules are great and all, but I'd prefer to see subjective rules. Such as:

Starting the Game

The player with the coolest Lego mech dude goes first.

...

Winning

The player who tried the hardest wins the game.