stevenmathers
-
Content Count
13 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Posts posted by stevenmathers
-
-
This is the last expansion:
https://boardgamegeek.com/article/22792095#22792095
Commander, preparations for have started for incorporating the inhabitants of this cluster into the fold. So far, predictably, the Eldar and Human planets have resisted our peaceful overtures, and the application of force will be required to show them the error of their ways -- for the Greater Good, of course. There are also several planets that are, unfortunately, overrun by the greenskins or servants of the Warp Gods. These lost causes will need to be eliminated to ensure the safety of all, in time. For now, you have your preliminary objectives. The ethereals have determined that once they have been achieved, consolidating our hold on this cluster will naturally follow. Good luck, commander!
fire warriors…..2/1/2 fragile-ish but very shooty.
battlesuit.........3/3/2 shooty and solid
hammerhead...4/4/2 big gun tank.
supremacy.......4/5/3 big gun titan.
protector cruiser...3/1/2 very shooty fragile cruiser.
custodian carrier...5/4/3 same again but much bigger
STARTING TROOPS: (using Chaos figures)
3 fire warriors
2 battlesuits
1 factory
6 materials
HOME SYSTEM:
side 12A having 1 reinforcement and 1 cache
side 12B having 1 forge and 1 cache.
The Tau have not mastered deep warp travel. Their ships ply only the edges of the warp and travel significantly slower than their opponents. Thus the Tau have only 4 ships available, reflecting the reduced speed at which they can spread through the cluster. Poor strategic mobility and excellent tactical mobility is situation for the Tau.
With only 4 ships, and no starter ship, you should be trying to make as many land bridges as possible during setup, both to aid your difficulties with strategic movement and also to capitalize on several tactical tricks the Tau can pull that rely on, or are greatly enhanced by, adjacent planet placement. You should probably also try to set up long term strongholds in two locations rather than just one -- your starting ground forces are strong with two cadres of battlesuits, and your ability to defend with tactical tricks is excellent, so you shouldnt fear being overrun. Rather your opponents should fear you as you cant afford to sit in your own backyard and build up. There simply wont be enough time. Advance quickly over land bridges and build ships to support further advances, ASAP.
You get a cache token either way, so your asset choice at setup is forge/reinforcement. While both are useful, the Tau dont have a burning need for either - cache tokes are where its at for the Tau, with their ‘technologists’ strategy upgrade. So probably just take the one that looks like it will be hardest to find elsewhere. One thing that might slightly favour the forge token is that you could pull the code of fire tactic early - a forge token allows you to decrease the CL of an upgrade card which could be very handy indeed.
Faction ability / unit composition:
DOMINATE ABILITY: Adaptable Tactics: After this order, you may swap out one card pair in your combat deck for a different pair of the same command level, for free.
“Know thy enemy” is good advice for any faction, but it is particularly apt for the Tau as they have many combat cards that are situationally very effective at confounding enemy abilities, or taking advantage of certain tactical situations, but are otherwise pretty average in terms of icons and temporary tokens. Luckily, a Tau trait is adaptability - changing your tactics to suit your enemy - and their dominate ability allows them to do just that. So you should be continuously anticipating likely situations and opponents as you plan your orders, and trying to get that dominate order in beforehand so that you are likely to pull cards that will work well.
Tau units are pretty tough, but their defining characteristics are mobility and powerful ranged attacks. To simulate long ranged combat and mobility, they get a lot of dice, and the combat card icons lean towards defence, and the temporary tokens offered by those cards lean towards offence. The theory being their mobility is a continuous defensive advantage for the duration of the combat, but their attacks are fast, transitory and targeted - then they melt away again. Hit and move, hit and move.
So even though your warriors and cruisers have only 1HP, the number of dice they throw and the shield icons they play enhances their survivability quite a bit. The Tau philosophy is simply - ‘dont get hit’!
Morale-wise the Tau are more than happy to run away from a losing fight, so that they can counter-attack hard. Battles of attrition and grinding out morale wins are not their idea of warfare, so there are hardly any morale icons or uses for morale dice in their deck. For some other factions, morale dice are used as indicators of random tactical opportunities. Not so for the Tau - tactical opportunities should be explicitly planned, not something to be left to chance.
So while you dont have any advantages in manufacturing great numbers of troops, nor getting them from system to system in a hurry, the Tau are formidable because they upgrade quickly and are able to preserve their troops better than any other faction - as long as you have organized paths to retreat. A good Tau commander always makes sure there is a back door, so use your small fleet wisely to closely support the advance (and retreat!) of your ground troops and dont get sucked into chasing down enemy fleets or using your precious few ships as static void defences.
While the best form of defence is attack, the best form of Tau defence may be counter-attack.
-
Full writeup and cards at BGG link below:
https://boardgamegeek.com/article/22631873#22631873
DOMINATE ABILITY: After resolving your dominate order, you may perform a free restricted deployment. You may purchase a minimum of two units all of the same type for a cost of 1 less than normal, per unit. Deploy these units onto a single planet with a factory in the active system.
“We have more soldiers than you have bullets” sums it up for the guard. The guard has an enormous capacity to pump out units with its dominate ability, particularly guardsmen for half price, and most of their combat cards depend on having combined arms in their battles. The Guard’s strategic issue is getting those different units to where they need to be, because their dominate ability only allows units to be spammed en-masse to a single planet. To feed their war machine, particularly when spamming guardsmen, they need to hold a fair amount of material producing territory, because cache tokens are wasted on spamming 1pt guardsmen.
Unit Mix
12 Guardsmen
3 Cruisers
6 Ogryn
6 Leman Russ
3 Battleships
3 Titans
The effectiveness of the Guard’s combat cards is maximized by fielding combined arms - using multiple types of units in the same army, leading to the whole performing better than the sum of the parts. An effect that is required because Guardsmen have the worst stats in the game. Not only that, but the effect of the combined arms is only realised with unrouted units - its no use having a card that benefits from combining unrouted tanks and unrouted guardsmen if your only tank gets routed in the first round. So rather than routing your last heavy unit to tank damage, you will find it more useful to use some guardsmen as ablative meat shields rather than routing that heavy, and thereby ruining the effectiveness of its armies. Guardsmen are both vital and completely expendable.
The Guards combat deck has a number of cards that are more effective the more guardsmen you field, and the opposite is also true - if you dont have many guardsmen, those cards become underwhelming. Try to have a couple of cards in your deck that are not so dependent on massing guardsmen, to give you more options when defending or in later rounds of combat when your guardsmen have been killed. -
Full writeup and cards at BGG link below:
https://boardgamegeek.com/article/22488941#22488941
DOMINATE ABILITY: Teleport: Move any units from any one planet to a friendly planet in the target sector that has a structure on it.
Necrons can teleport multiple units to a system containing a tomb world by dominating, allowing them to retrieve units that have been spread on various missions or find themselves in untenable positions. Unlike other factions teleport abilities, this requires the order be carried out in the destination sector rather than the source, meaning the further towards the front lines the destination is, the less likely you are to get full value in resources from the dominate order. However, once your Monoliths arrive, teleporting units to the front line from the rear becomes far easier, at least for infantry.
Speaking of which, the Necrons only have 10 land units and 5 ships…Unit Mix
4 Warriors
2 Harvester cruisers
3 Immortals
2 Monoliths
2 Tomb ships
1 C’tan
But what units they are! Top class toughness on every line and respectable firepower. The necron units exhibit extreme resilience and ability to rally, simulating their self-repairing machinery which can turn them from a broken pile of scrap back to full operation in the midst of battle.
What is morale to an emotionally challenged, immortal machine? The concept doesn't make sense. To a Necron, ‘morale’ represents their certainty that the situation is proceeding according to plan. Necron commanders are more than willing to concede a bad position and teleport out of trouble so they can come back better prepared next time. So their troops get the worst morale as units stats - being routed or not hardly worries them - but the longer the battle goes, the more certain they are of victory, throwing down more morale icons and dice with every round. The only way to outlast a Necron army is to destroy them utterly or keep your own troops unrouted.
Tactically, the Necron combat deck is fairly straight laced with little in the way of options and tricks, reflecting their rigorous military doctrine and their trouble adapting their tactics to new situations. But why would they bother? The tactics they do have are very effective. Keep advancing and shooting the enemy until they are all dead, and if you get blown up, self-repair, rinse and repeat.
As such you will tend to just keep throwing down icons on every card, rallying your troops, teleporting into and out of battle, and relentlessly incrementing your morale with almost every card.
The other attribute of necron cards is that their strength split between general and units abilities leans a little more towards general than other factions, reinforcing the theme that being routed is more of a temporary inconvenience for Necrons rather than a disaster.
So you will find the flavour of necron battle is a little dour and single-minded, leaning towards a combination of offence and morale, as opposed to the marines, say, who lean towards defence and morale. But thats OK. For the Necron player, most of the interesting decision making is being done at the strategic level. -
what is the "screw the guy to the right" problem?
I think this is one game that would benefit from the 'bid for the place you want' rule. bid with what I dont know. Perhaps everybody gets a suit of cards (ace high) and do it like El Grande
i.e. before each round, and including setup, you pick cards and the order of the cards determines the order of play. Once a card leaves your deck you cant use it again, its burned.
to stop draws, it proceeds like this - very 1st turn a random player picks and displays a card. the next player in table order does the same, but cant pick the same card as a card that has already been displayed. After everybody has displayed a card, that is the turn order for setup/that turn.
the next turn, the person who went last in the previous turn is the person who selects and displays the 1st card...
-
I made a strategy guide along the lines of the other strategy guides at board game geek.
It has all the bits for print and play
-
PLAYTEST 2:
Major difference was change in the unit makeup from 6 carnifexes to 6 devourer cruisers.
This was an epic 6 turn game between orcs and nids. nids won.
WHAT WE KNEW
Orcs would be too strong on the ground, particularly early, so the Nids had to keep them at arms length long enough to get two cities and a hive ship on the board.
EARLY GAME
Setup was not botched by the nids this time, and with the aid of the two starter ships, they managed to set up such that the orcs would have a very hard time orc-rockin for some early kills. The nids built another devourer in the first turn to aid in this stonewalling job. It felt a lot like an eldar defensive play but the quality of the ships was waaaaay less.
The two-world eldar home system was in a corner and proved adequate, although finding that second planet to build a safe 2nd city again proved difficult, and in the end the 2nd city ended up being taken from the orcs by the hive ship (built with multiple forge tokens and 1 city).
Strategically it felt like playing eldar with the difference being rather than teleporting units to the front lines, the front line was the hive ship which by the end of the game had gone from one corner to the opposite far corner, and by which time the orcs had completely taken over the Nids starting system.
The hive ship factory was really, really useful and it was well worth thinking about how best to use it because there were a few left field options that pop up. I believe it probably needs to be nerfed such that you cant build units and structures with the same deploy (technically you can because units are deployed first, then structures, so its not really the ship thats building the structures, but an explicit rule will be introduced to override this)
COMBAT
The nids, trying to play aggressively got thrashed in two early skirmishes against Nobs, although going in with greater numbers (in one case two warriors and 2 reinforcement token VS 1 Nob 1 reinforcement token)... Reason was the the Orcs had Party Wagon by this stage (couldnt move due to the ships so they built up instead). And that extra reinforcement coming in helped a lot through the sheer amount of HP they had, plus if the nids dont throw at least a few shields when they only have tier 0 cards, it makes it really hard.
The lesson is if the nids are behind in upgrade cards, they need to bring *overwhelming* numbers to the fight. If they cant do this, then dont fight, because its really expensive. Losing nids very rarely get a chance to retreat.
Later I found Swarm Lord to be a really good counter to party wagon, and as luck would have it, party wagon failed to make an appearance for 3 combats in a row which really cramped the orc options.
The final huge battle for the winning flag was a carnifex + warrior vs a nob and 2 orc boyz, with 2 reinforcements on both sides. 7 dice on each side and the orcs threw 5G, 2S while the orcs threw 4G, 2S, 1M
unfortunately for the orcs they didnt draw party wagon, so they went for sea of green, adding a reinforcement and routing a gaunt. The nids game plan was simple. throw as many guns at the orcs as they could muster in the first round with an all out shock of impact, and luckily they drew screamer killer and detonated the carnifex straight up for 6(g) and used the morale dice to throw up 3(s) as well.
The orcs were decimated with all orc boys and reinforcements being destroyed and the nob routed. The warrior was safe, and all that was left to do was sacrifice guns and gaunts playing warrior and termaguant to fend off the orcs and win on morale.
Somewhat unlucky for the orcs with the dice rolled on both sides and cards drawn on both sides favouring the nids, and it could have gone the other way fairly easily had the orcs drawn party wagon(s) and/or a bit more defence in the dice.
OVERALL I think it worked really well. the game was tense and swung back and forth. battles were tense with wins and loses on both sides. The Nids felt fairly eldar like in the first two rounds, but the strategy diverged once the hive ship came on board.
In retrospect, the orcs may have benefitted from building a ship or two earlier than they did to engage the nid devourers which are even crappier than onslaughts D = 1/2/3 vs O = 1/3/2
The easiest way to delay that nid hive ship is to attack their resource base ASAP, and dont let them chose the fights.
I feel that the presence of a Nid faction in a game will force all the other players to consider naval options pretty early, even Orcs, so will make for a different feeling game for everyone.
Its possible that an Eldar vs Nids game would be a whitewash for the Eldar due to their huge starting naval superiority and the Nids only marginally better land forces, mostly due to numbers. In this case the Nids would be best served during setup by build orc-like land bridges as much as possible, and investing in bastions to prevent being bombed to pieces. -
I agree tyranids don't work with the 'default' objectives given how they probably should play - certainly they shouldn't use cities and manufactorums, for example, and shouldn't capture them.
Tau are fine, as are necrons (lots of cards to generate shields and 'unrout' units would make sense). Astra Militarum would work, too.
I don't particularly want >4 player games, but a choice of races would be nice.
I'll be honest; what I really want to see is something focusing in on the fleet combat. But FFG aren't going to do that whilst Armada is a thing.
If Eldar can use Orc factories to make Eldar units, then I think you can cut the Tyranids some slack there as well ;-)
I think the important thing with a new faction is to offer new strategies and tactics to employ, loosely inspired by the flavour of the race.
-
Hi. Ive been working on a Nid expansion for a few weeks, but it needs playtests.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uN6glmBC9xQv3RcqyHdxVpKQMnpbHJW-Cp8zm16exlI/edit?usp=sharing
Best played with the Eldar figures due to 6 ships, but easily adapted to another faction such as chaos or marines for testing against Eldar.
Please post your playtest feedback to the expansion thread here or on BGG https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1545173/tyranid-faction
-
Just a note: Ive modified the faction to use the eldar rather than marines figures, based on a move from 6 carnifexes to 6 devourer cruisers to better reflect their space-going nature.
-
Get a job at FFG and make this happen please.
Play it yourself man, using the Eldar figures! and report back here with the results!
(FFG, I will do this this for free to get my name on the box
)here is my first playtest report
-
Due to the number of ships, this is most easily played with the eldar figures and cards, although I have added card substitutes for Chaos and marines as well.
-
Ive had a crack at a Tyranid faction.
I made a strategy guide along the lines of the other strategy guides at board game geek.
It has all the bits for print and play
https://boardgamegee...372766#22372766 << nid rules and guide, including card images
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uN6glmBC9xQv3RcqyHdxVpKQMnpbHJW-Cp8zm16exlI/edit?usp=sharing << MOST UP TO DATE RULE DOCO
TYRANID FACTION
STRATEGY: Capillary towers let them recycle ground units and structures into fleets, move somewhere else and then vomit units back down with orbital bombardments, mycetic spores and hive ship factories. The ability to raise an extra resource token through domination also eases the tyranids need to hold large land areas.
Because their ground forces are so vulnerable in small numbers and to orbital bombardment, they might work best when clumped together in just one or two sectors and slowly move en-masse gathering objectives and perhaps not bothering to have any factories on the ground at all. It would be awesome if it worked that way in practice. Play to their strengths and build a hive ship ASAP. Defend by attacking with it. Their home is in space - planets are just food.
TACTICS: Their primary characteristic is a preference for attack and very little defence and a fanatical tenacity/morale, which means you cannot afford to wait them out - they will keep coming until they are destroyed or you run away/die. But they are susceptible to being shot to pieces because they dont generate much defence from cards except by sacrificing units. They have almost no morale generating ability - their main moral source being embodied in unrouted troops. Rally ability is OK (synapse creatures), but not of much value to their fragile infantry.
Overall, they are the most fragile race on the ground, so need their ability to pump up numbers and throw heaps of troops into every battle, and their attack/defence profile means all battles will tend to the bloody on both sides. Bastions (vast tunnel networks) will greatly help to defend crucial planets and objective tokens.
CL0 - (6) gaunts .................[1] <1> \3/ fragile but incredibly tenacious.
CL0 - (6) devourer cruisers .[1] <2> \3/ exist to protect hive ships
CL1 - (6) tyranid warriors ...[3] <2> \3/ more effective version of the light units
CL2 - (3) carnifex ...............[4] <3> \3/ the damage soaks of the land forces
CL2 - (3) hive ship ..............[3] <6> \4/ huuge! can be upgraded to mobile factory!
CL3 - (3) bio titan ...............[5] <4> \3/ toughest ‘nid land unit available
DOMINATE ABILITY: Gain 1 extra resource token of any type in addition to whatever other resource tokens are acquired.
STARTING TROOPS: (best to use Eldar figures)
2 devourer cruisers
3 gaunts
1 warrior
1 factory
6 materials
Magnus Grendel reacted to this
)
Thoughts on Expansion sets
in Forbidden Stars
Posted
Just finished the Tau tonight, so that is the first 4 on your wishlist at board game geek variants forum. No Dark Eldar, sorry