Rusty Ballinger
United States
Arcata
California
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This is a negative review of a game my friends & I were really excited about. There's a lot to like about this game, but after three plays (each with the same three players), we think it's broken in ways which can't be fixed without significant changes, and we would rather play another game than test changes to this one.
There are a couple other reviews for this game; although they rave about the game's innovative systems, they don't really describe what those systems are. If you're considering getting this game, hopefully you'll find the information below helpful; perhaps the things which bothered us won't bother you, or they won't be problems with more or fewer than three players, or you're more willing to experiment with house rules than we are. Also, a new version is supposed to come out this year; I don't know anything about it, but maybe it will address the problems we had.
How excited were we?
Two of us bought the rules. I spent more than I will admit to at my FLGS for dedicated dice. One of us built 20 frames for everyone's use. I wrote a doomsday clock Android app. After our first two games, one of us made laminated sheets for tracking attachments & allocated dice, and bought markers for writing on them. So, we were highly motivated to enjoy this game.
Why were we excited?
In no particular order, here are some of the things we liked.
The price is right. $6 for a PDF of rules? Great! (Of course this presumes that you've already got $40 of dice and $500 of Legos sitting around, ha ha.) I've seen complaints here about the rules being black & white, or having only hand-drawings of Lego units, but I don't care about any of that. (Besides, when you're printing it out yourself, black & white line drawings of Legos are better than color photos.) And the half-height layout is perfect for tabletop play; that's the way miniatures rules should be laid out. So I was happy with the rulebook itself, and its price.
The rules are simple, concise, and clear, so no complaints there. I really like the writing style, too. For example, the description of the stationary flags which players will be fighting over: "A station might be a supply, command, or observation station, it might be a crashed satellite, it might be an ammo dump, it might be a jeep with a flat tire and a load of fresh peaches. Whatever: it's something worth fighting over." That's cool; that's my kind of game!
Army construction and the core of the game: you begin by building your mechs; each mech can have 1-4 attachments, where an attachment is a weapon, or some defensive attachment like a shield or ECM pod, or some movement attachment like jump jets or spider legs. (Weapons fall into three categories, but all defensive attachments have the same game effect; all movement attachments have the same game effect; etc.)
These attachments add dice to the pile of dice you roll at the start of your mech's turn. Each mech rolls two dice which can be used for anything; a defensive attachment lets you roll a die which can only be used for defense; a weapon lets you roll two dice which can only be used for an attack; and so on. These dice are color-coded--defensive dice are blue, movement dice are green, etc.--so if you use the same color of Legos on your attachments, you can look at any mech on the table and see what kinds of attachments it has, and therefore how many dice it will roll on its turn.
Cleverly, these attachments are also the way damage is handled: when a mech takes a hit, you choose an attachment and break it off the mech! (When you're out of attachments, two more hits kill you; you can represent the half-dead state by tearing off your mech's head or whatever.) This is a simple, fast way to track the decrease in quality of your mechs as they take damage, and having to choose which attachment to lose is painful fun: do you want to lose your shields and get killed next turn, or lose your gun and have to gum the enemy to death? Another interesting twist is that, when your mech's guns are gone, you may actually move faster, because you get to add a special green d8 (usable only for movement) to the dice rolled for that mech.
Another interesting thing is the way initiative & unit activation is handled. At the start of the turn, everyone rolls a d10 for each of their mechs to determine each mech's initiative, and then each mech takes its turn one at a time in ascending initiative order. Two wrinkles are that A) a mech which started with fewer than 4 attachments gets to roll extra dice, increasing its odds of activating sooner or later than other mechs, and B) when a mech is attacked, it becomes the next mech to take its turn if it hasn't already gone yet. (The way this is handled is perhaps the most confusing part of the rules: the attacking mech pauses its turn; then the target mech starts its turn, up to the part where it rolls its dice; then the attacking mech finishes its turn; then the target mech continues its turn. The rules include an extended example which makes it reasonably clear, though.) Anyway, this system reduces down time, because you never have to sit through the other players moving all of their mechs--as soon as one player's mech attacks, someone else gets to take a turn.
Another neat thing is the way you can see the state of the game just by looking at the table; you don't have to refer back to mech record sheets during play, or keep asking your opponents, "what's this guy's defense again?" If a mech hasn't gone yet, it's still got its initiative d10 sitting next to it. If it has gone, it's got a blue defense die sitting next to it. If it's been painted by a targeting laser or whatever, it's got a yellow spotting die sitting next to it. If it's only got a shield and a melee weapon left, you can see them. That speed & simplicity is great.
Another neat thing is the way cover can be destroyed. There's only one kind of cover, and either you're in it, or you're not. If you're in cover, shots which are blocked by that cover blow pieces off the cover itself, potentially making it not cover, which means you can't hide forever!
One last little thing is spotting. Normally, the attacker's attack value minus the target's defense value tells you how many damage dice the attacker will roll, with each 5 or 6 being a hit; but if the target has been spotted earlier in the turn, it will have a number displayed on a yellow spotting die next to it, and you can choose to roll that many damage dice instead (and discard the spotting die). Spotting is done the same as everything else--by assigning a die to it from your pool--and mechs can have spotting attachments which let them roll dice which can only be used for spotting. That gives some additional choices during army-building and the battle, at a cost of almost no additional complexity.
So, as you can see, there are quite a few really neat ideas at the core of the game, and the level of complexity is right where I like it: simple enough to be fast-playing, but with enough neat twists to keep it interesting.
So, what the heck went wrong?!
During play, we ran into four problems, each of which is described below in more detail than you probably wanted.
1. Balancing & victory conditions make one player cry.
One of the neat ideas is the way the game handles unit costs, and integrates that right into motivating players to attack. (We've had problems in the past with other multi-player miniatures games where, if the victory condition is "last guy standing," your best bet is to lay low and wait for the other guys to tear each other up. I don't like games where the good move is the opposite of the fun move.) So, it was refreshing to see an unusual, counter-intuitive solution built right into the rules. Here's how it works.
The first half is the Doomsday Clock: the number of turns remaining until the end of the game. Every turn, it ticks down by one, and each player can tick it down too. When it gets to zero, the game is over, and the player with the high score wins. You can see that if you're winning, or will be winning, you want the clock to run faster, and if you're losing, you want it to run slower.
The second half is how your score is calculated. In general, within some pretty simple constraints, you build as bad-ass an army as you want (e.g. for a 3-player game, you're going to build 3-6 mechs and 2 stationary objectives)... and then the players who built more begin the game with fewer points than the players who built less, which means that the stronger players are losing, and the burden is on them to make up the difference before the time runs out. (And if they're not aggressive enough, you can bet the current winner will be pushing the clock as fast as they can.) On paper, it sounds great!
In practice, though, this system is one of the main things causing us to throw around phrases like "fundamentally broken."
The first problem is that the guy who's the biggest target--the one who's ahead on points, the one who has the most to lose from each mech or station taken from him--is also the weakest guy on the table. Think about that: in a three-way fight, the two big guys team up against the little guy!
The second problem is that, because your score is based mostly on the number of mechs you have, regardless of the health of those mechs, by the time the points leader gets knocked out of first place, he's not just down on points; his surviving mechs are trashed. Meanwhile, the guys who weren't in the lead--who were stronger to begin with--are still pretty healthy, because the other strong players were shooting at the weak guy. So once your stronger opponents have teamed up to knock you off the throne, you have no hope of climbing back on.
The third problem is that, because winning is based not on destroying things, but on the other guys being destroyed, you still have situations where one player does want to sit back and let the other two fight. ("I need you to kill him so that I can win.") That's the opposite of what I want in this sort of game, which is raw aggression at all times.
Our last game illustrated all three of these points. The strongest guy, Ray, had 6 full-strength mechs and a starting score of 24 points. I had 6 almost full-strength mechs (one of them was a lighter-weight recon mech) and a starting score of 32 points. The weakest guy, Dan, had 5 medium-strength mechs and a starting score of 49 points. Ray and I slapped at each other a bit, but most of our fire was concentrated on Dan, who lost one mech per turn for the first three turns. (We had to keep shooting him; until he lost that third mech, he was still winning!) His two remaining mechs were in terrible shape; meanwhile, Ray and I still had six mechs each with only light damage.
The worst consequence of these problems is that being the weakest player isn't fun. Out of three games, we were each the weakest once, and none of us enjoyed it: from the start of the game, you know your two stronger opponents are just going to beat on you until you're out of the game. None of us want to be the weakest player again, so if we were to play again, we would each build the strongest army allowed, and begin the game tied on points; this means interesting choices about building a large army of fast, light mechs, or a small tough army, have been eliminated.
I think most of these problems could have been solved with a less innovative approach: you get points for how much damage you inflict, and your score is adjusted by your army size (so if your army is 1.2 times more expensive than mine, you have to cause 1.2 times as much damage to tie with me). But, does removing points-for-controlling-stations skew armies toward less mobile mechs which are just going park in one spot and fire artillery all game? I don't know. Related to that...
2. Movement rates are too low.
Remember how I said you begin each mech's activation by rolling a pile of dice? You assign one of those to its defense, and one to its attack... and one to its movement. This means each mech's movement is based on a single d6 (or d8 in some cases), and your best dice are usually going into your defense first, and your attack second... and your spotting third... leaving "whatever's left" for your movement. So we'll say most mechs move an average of 3.5" per turn (4.5" per turn for melee-only mechs), but that's generous.
Our games were each about 4 turns. So, a mech with guns gets to move about 14" over the course of the game. A mech designed for speed, with no guns, is looking at about 18" over the course of the game.
Our games were played on a 4' table, using a 12" ruler. (That means the range of direct fire weapons was 12", and also that the attackers start about that far, or farther, from the weakest player's stations--those stationary flags I mentioned earlier, the "jeep with a flat tire and a load of fresh peaches.") This means that, in most cases, the weakest player's flags are just plain unobtainable: you can't reach them. With an average mech, you have to plod straight toward the flag every turn; if you have to zig-zag around cover, or spend a turn cowering, forget it; you won't make it before the end of the game.
The situation seems like it ought to be a little better out among the stronger players, since the weakest player is allowed to place his last few mechs after the strongest players have placed their stations. In practice, though, what we saw was ruthless gang-stompings of any lone weakest-player mech foolish enough to be placed near a strong player's stations, which were invariably clumped with that strong player's mechs.
One effect of the low movement rates is that the stations mostly failed to be a focal point for the fighting, or to have any effect on the game at all. We did see some contention for the weakest player's stations when we had mechs which were designed for speed and deployed specifically to take them, because the weakest player was the only one who was going to be too badly beaten to hold his stations. But most of the time, the stronger players' stations were placed so far away from the action, back in some artillery fire base, that they might as well have been on a different table. Which is too bad, because I really appreciated the idea of stationary-things-to-fight-over being built right into the rules.
We kicked around some ideas for increasing movement, but if you increase it significantly, you should increase the range of direct fire weapons too, which makes artillery pointless. But maybe that's not a bad thing, because...
3. Artillery is overpowered.
(I'm not totally sure I agree with this one, but at least one of the other two guys was adamant about this... and, actually, I would probably "almost always" take either an all-artillery army, or all artillery except for one or two fast guys. In fact, out of three games, I don't think I ever built any mechs which used guns other than artillery, so maybe he's right.)
As I mentioned, weapons are divided into three categories. Those categories are melee, which is up to 1" away; direct fire, which is up to 9" or 10" or 12" away (depending on what ruler you decide to use at the start of the game--we used 12" in all our games); and artillery, which is "everything else." So, with artillery, you can hit anyone on the table who's more than 12" away. (The game doesn't have rules for line of sight.) You might build two pairs of direct fire mechs... or, for the same cost, you could build two pairs of artillery mechs, which could cover each other as effectively as two pairs of direct fire mechs could cover themselves, plus be able to hit anyone else on the table.
The reason I'm not totally convinced that this is a real problem is that it seems like there may be ways to counter it: if you take five artillery mechs, and I take five direct fire mechs, I can try to place my mechs all in a clump and stay inside direct fire range of one of your artillery mechs... err, but then you just set up your artillery mechs spread around the board, and four of your guys can hit my guys all game long while my guys take out one of yours, and then (because of the slow movement rates) my guys have no hope of reaching your guys before the end of the game; they just hunker down and try to survive your concentrated fire until the clock runs out. Or, maybe I set up each of my mechs next to one of yours, but that's even worse: each of my mechs shoots at one of yours, maybe getting a hit here or there, while four of your five concentrate their fire on one of mine at a time.
OK, well, just because I can't think of a way to counteract an artillery-heavy strategy... or any reason you wouldn't want to always use such a strategy... that doesn't mean there isn't one. (One problem with artillery-heavy armies is that they're boring: great, we'll all just park here and roll dice to see who wins.) But if artillery is overpowered, perhaps it could be balanced by reducing its odds of doing damage, or--more fun--making direct fire weapons cause hits on 4-6 instead of 5-6? Melee weapons would need to be enhanced too, because as it is...
4. Melee weapons are pointless.
It wasn't until our third game that someone pointed this out: there is (almost) no reason to take a melee weapon instead of a direct fire weapon.
If I take a direct fire weapon, and you take a melee weapon, I can always hit you when you can hit me, but you can't always hit me when I can hit you. When we realized this early in our third game, we came up with some house rule for disengaging--you can't fire a ranged weapon if you're in melee range of an enemy, and you can't move if they've made a successful melee attack on you this turn--just so that the mechs with melee weapons weren't totally hosed by mechs with direct fire weapons.
In the rules as written, there is one reason to take a melee weapon instead of a direct fire weapon: if you have no guns at all, you get the green d8, which should increase your movement. But, as mentioned, that increase in movement amounts to an average of 4 or 5 inches over the entire game; the main benefit is that the extra green die hopefully frees up one of your two "wild" dice for other uses. (Oh yeah, the other benefit is "swords look cool.") But, if you've already got an artillery weapon, and you're looking to add a weapon for close quarters, you would always take a direct fire weapon instead of a melee weapon.
(Regarding the significance of that green d8: if you have a melee weapon, and I have a direct fire weapon, yeah, that extra green d8 means you probably don't have to use one of your "wild" d6s for movement... but neither do I, because I don't need to move. If I'm losing, then yes, I may need to come to you... but if you can't hit me at range, then I don't need a defense die until you're close enough for me to shoot, at which point I don't need to move anymore!)
Anyway, house rules for disengagement or other changes to increase the value of melee weapons (a major boost, like having them do damage on 3-6 instead of 5-6?) might address this.
I DO TO YOU NOW THE OVERDUE CONCLUSION
As I said at the start, this game has a lot to like, and I hope I've demonstrated that. (And, because I would like for this game to do well, hopefully I've done a lousy & unconvincing job of explaining the problems we had, ha ha, or have explained them in such a way that people with more enthusiasm for house rules will still consider buying it.)
However, in discussing various ways to fix the various problems we had, we finally concluded that we'd rather just play one of the many games we don't have to fix. I hate to say this about such a cool game, but this game is dead to us: we won't play it again.
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Morten Lund
Denmark
Århus
Denmark
Yes, Beware the Geek bringing gifts!
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Thanks for the review; I was sold when I saw the 'mech designs; I think I'll hang around for the 2nd edition of the rules
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Wade Nelson
United States
Saint Louis Park
Minnesota
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Thanks for the review. I bought these rules a while ago, and when you read them they sound pretty damn cool. I'm suffering from a real bad case of brick envy, as I am in fact LEGO-less. I used the LEGO Digital Designer to prototype out a bunch of mechs. I priced out a bunch of stuff on bricklink.com with the intention of building the most badass LEGO machinery ever to walk a felt mat. Then I got distracted and never brought myself to spend some $80 on LEGO parts.
I did all that crap with the idea of having a pretty cool slugfest. Visions of Mechwarrior 2 in LEGO form. Sounds like it'll never actually happen without some tweaks to the artillery and movement sections. Maybe I'll have to take another look at Battletech.
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M C
Canada
Lethbridge
Alberta
More money than brains... :-(
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Maybe you can house rule some sort of Ogre scenario, where one player is deliberately overpowered or has some fixed ground defenses or something so the other players are supposed to gang up on the other guy.
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Darrell Hanning
United States
Jacksonville
Florida
Love women in action movies and shows. It all started with Diana Rigg, in the Avengers.
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I tend to stay away from anything having the word "fighty" in it, where Joss Whedon is not involved.
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Eric Jome
United States
Milwaukee
Wisconsin
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Hmm...
I wonder if you did all this right? For example, you say that if you take a direct fire weapon, you can always hit my melee weapon only mech but sometimes I can't hit you. That's not true as I read the rules.
First, you cannot hit me at all if I am not within direct fire distance. That means, if I am within hand to hand or at artillery, you may not hit me at all - weapons cannot be used at all outside of their range type. What is the range of direct fire? Let's assume 12 as the rulebook gives options, but 12 should be the most useful to you and least to me. Remember, you cannot fire at all if I am more than 12 or closer than 1.
I'll build my mech with 2 green dice, so I will get the best move of 2d6 and 1d8 to try to close that gap. Seems like you'll get one shot before I'm on you? Maybe two. And you get 2 red dice and I get 2 blue dice. So, half the time it works out for you? Roll poorly and I'm in your face hacking off your limbs. It's the same odds when I close... only you can't fight back just like I couldn't.
Complicate this by the fact you may have to come to me to take my stations... meaning I may even easier get the drop on you. It doesn't seem so clear that your direct fire attack always wins.
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Fabio Calzolari
Italy
S.Lazzaro di Savena
Bologna
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It's a long time from my last play, but i remember that i noticed only the Artillery "overpower".
Anyway the game "requires" a lot (a LOT) of destructible terrain to gain cover, to mitigate long range and artillery fire; more, it's a "friends" game (which mean that the player should try to make a battle with a "sense", not to break the system .... i'm not able to explain me better, sorry).
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Eric Jome
United States
Milwaukee
Wisconsin
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Remember, in any miniatures game, if you find shooting is dominating games, you aren't playing with enough terrain.
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Jon
United States
Vancouver
WA
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cosine wrote: Remember, in any miniatures game, if you find shooting is dominating games, you aren't playing with enough terrain.
Or the rules suck. One or the other.
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Eric Jome
United States
Milwaukee
Wisconsin
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quozl wrote: cosine wrote: Remember, in any miniatures game, if you find shooting is dominating games, you aren't playing with enough terrain. Or the rules suck. One or the other.
No rules survive contact with poorly conceived scenarios.
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Ben Vincent
United States
Vancouver
Washington
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Quote: 1. Balancing & victory conditions make one player cry.
How much of this would be solved by only having two-sided fights (with tema s for multiplayer)?
It sounds like artillery and direct fire weapons should have minimum ranges. It might also make sense for melee to be more accurate/damaging than direct fire, which is more accurate/damaging than artillery.
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iStitch
United States
Kalamazoo
Michigan
If at first you don't succeed, forget it and start drinking.
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I still want to love this game!!! I just need another few hundred dollars of LEGO before I can actually play this and BrikWars.
*sigh*
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Paul DeStefano
United States
Long Island
New York
It's a Zendrum. www.zendrum.com
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cosine wrote: Remember, in any miniatures game, if you find shooting is dominating games, you aren't playing with enough terrain.
Nope. In Arcane Legions, archers are still absurdly overpowered.
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kuhrusty wrote: if you take five artillery mechs, and I take five direct fire mechs, I can try to place my mechs all in a clump and stay inside direct fire range of one of your artillery mechs... err, but then you just set up your artillery mechs spread around the board, and four of your guys can hit my guys all game long while my guys take out one of yours,
Maybe the easy house rule or the real rule misread (?) is that you can only fire artillery if the target is outside of all friendly melee and direct-fire ranges.
It makes sense thematically, since artillery will be some sort of large blast radius, low accuracy shot that would be dangerous to fire with friendlies in the area.
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Eric Jome
United States
Milwaukee
Wisconsin
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SabreRedleg wrote: It sounds like artillery and direct fire weapons should have minimum ranges.
They do have min ranges.
Melee is max 1, min 0.
Direct is max 12, min 1.
Artillery is max infinite, min 12.
A weapon valid at one range cannot be used at another. Right in the rules.
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Raymond Bull
United States
Massachusetts
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SabreRedleg wrote: It sounds like artillery and direct fire weapons should have minimum ranges. cosine wrote: They do have min ranges.
Melee is max 1, min 0.
Direct is max 12, min 1.
Artillery is max infinite, min 12.
A weapon valid at one range cannot be used at another. Right in the rules.
That's my reading of the rules as well.
We also play with a few tweaks. Cover comes in three grades: Full (Damage on a 6 only), Partial (Damage on a 5 or 6), and No Cover (Damage on a 4, 5, or 6). So when you attack at Melee Range your opponent automatically falls under No Cover.
Also, we use a tape measure instead of the ruler. This allows us to shift ranges and base them on the size of the playing surface.
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Rusty Ballinger
United States
Arcata
California
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cosine wrote: I wonder if you did all this right? For example, you say that if you take a direct fire weapon, you can always hit my melee weapon only mech but sometimes I can't hit you. That's not true as I read the rules.
Well, I said "I can always hit you when you can hit me." If you're farther away than direct fire range, then yeah, neither of us can hit each other, but once you close to melee range, every turn goes like this:
- you roll enough movement to close to melee range, and attack.
- any die gives me enough movement to back away 1" and attack with direct fire.
(And on turns where my mech wins initiative, the order is reversed.)
On the turns where you're first running up on me, and on later turns if my d6s happen to beat your d8, I stay outside your reach, and I get to attack while you don't. My ability to keep backing off is limited by terrain and the edge of the table, but if I took a movement attachment too, then terrain isn't an issue...
cosine wrote: I'll build my mech with 2 green dice, so I will get the best move of 2d6 and 1d8 to try to close that gap. Seems like you'll get one shot before I'm on you? Maybe two. And you get 2 red dice and I get 2 blue dice.
Well, wait a minute, if you took two green dice and two blue dice, you don't have a melee weapon--
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Raymond Bull
United States
Massachusetts
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cosine wrote: I'll build my mech with 2 green dice, so I will get the best move of 2d6 and 1d8 to try to close that gap. Seems like you'll get one shot before I'm on you? Maybe two. And you get 2 red dice and I get 2 blue dice. kuhrusty wrote: Well, wait a minute, if you took two green dice and two blue dice, you don't have a melee weapon--
Yes he does. He can use his two white dice for Melee.
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Dave J McWeasely
United States
Louisville
Kentucky
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Good review
This is a well-thought out negative review of a game I'm very fond of.
I love the "how excited were we?" section. I feel like it defuses the old dismissal of "you didn't really give it a chance".
Thanks, Rusty.
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Raymond Bull
United States
Massachusetts
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I've been thinking about this review and trying to formulate a response that doesn't come down to "IS NOT!" But I think it'll take a day or two to come up with a decent rebuttal.
One thing that is bothering me though is the number of "thumbs up" this has gotten in the nine hours or so since the review was posted. We barely get any traffic out here on the Mechaton page yet this review has gotten over four times the accolades of any other topic on the Mechaton forum. Do people really feel this way, are outside people jumping on the bandwagon, or do people just think this is a really good review?
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Jon
United States
Vancouver
WA
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Mantisking wrote: Do people really feel this way, are outside people jumping on the bandwagon, or do people just think this is a really good review?
From what I've seen, this is the only review that actually discusses the mechanics of the game. And it does that really, really well.
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iStitch
United States
Kalamazoo
Michigan
If at first you don't succeed, forget it and start drinking.
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quozl wrote: Mantisking wrote: Do people really feel this way, are outside people jumping on the bandwagon, or do people just think this is a really good review? From what I've seen, this is the only review that actually discusses the mechanics of the game. And it does that really, really well.
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Matt Crawford
United States
San Francisco
California
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This is one of the best "negative" reviews I have read on the Geek, because it actually discusses in real terms why he didn't like the game. It wasn't, for example, like this other recent negative review of Kingdom Builder that was funny, but basically boiled down to the old argument of "you only do this over and over." Which could be leveled at literally any game and isn't helpful.
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Shaun Austin
Australia
Townsville
Queensland
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Thanks Rusty for an excellent review!
I don't believe anything you have said is incorrect. However I know there is a good game in there, if you care to find it.
I have to admit I have never played with many of the extremes the rules allow (and you have obviously tried those extremes). Having played a few "Generic" game systems over the years, I know that there is usually some way to use the rules to your advantage and coming upon them accidently can ruin a game just as easily as doing it deliberately.
Because there are usually new players in my games, I impose some extra limits, to prevent ganging up and poor "newbie" choices.
1. All teams must take the same number of mechs (but not attachments)
2. No more than one Artillery mech per team
3. No More than one Melee mech per team
As you can see that does limit the games to very specific scenarios, but they have always been fun. In fact your review has made me wonder if I would ever play without those limits now!!!
We always play on a 3' x 3' table with most terrain in the middle so that mechs are rarely more than 24" away from each other at the start of the game. Even on that small area, we have encountered the movement problem you mention, especially for Melee Mechs.
I have only played a few games with three to five players, so I am not totally experienced.
Thanks again for an informative review! 
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Rusty Ballinger
United States
Arcata
California
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Mantisking wrote: kuhrusty wrote: Well, wait a minute, if you took two green dice and two blue dice, you don't have a melee weapon-- Yes he does. He can use his two white dice for Melee.
He can make a melee attack, but he doesn't have a melee weapon. If someone says that's a good build for a hand-to-hand brawler, then I'll take that as agreement with the "melee weapons are pointless" claim being discussed, ha ha.
(Look, if you're rolling two white, two blue, two green, and the green d8, and I'm rolling two white, two blue, a green, and two reds for my ranged weapon, you're gonna get disassembled. Our defense is the same, but your attacks are two whites, while mine are two reds + two whites.)
(Looking more closely at the numbers, the beating may not be as bad as I thought, but it's still bad. Assuming we always put our best necessary die into defense, then when I roll first, I hit 57% of the time while you hit 29% of the time, and when you roll first, I hit 62% of the time to your 26%. Or, put another way: when I roll first, I will get to roll an average of 0.96 damage dice to your 0.48, and when you roll first, I get 1.07 to your 0.41.* And that's not accounting for the turns in which I get to fire and you don't!)
* unless there's an error in my code. Keep your receipt.
(To see what I mean by "best necessary die," consider the case where we each roll only two white dice, and you roll a 2 and a 4, and I roll a 3 and a 5. If I roll first, then I put my 5 into defense and my 3 into my attack; you put your 4 into defense and your 2 into attack, and neither of us gets any hits. But if you roll first, then I see your attack is a 2, so the 3 can be my defense, freeing up the 5 for my attack, so I'm rolling two damage dice!)
Mantisking wrote: I've been thinking about this review and trying to formulate a response that doesn't come down to "IS NOT!" But I think it'll take a day or two to come up with a decent rebuttal.
Well, good; with as much neat stuff as this game has, I think it deserves a good rebuttal.
cold_fuzion wrote: And we like Rusty.
Aw, great. They're sympathy thumbs!?
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