Pre-Game:
We both had an axiom maniple (?) with a Warlord, a Reaver, and two Warhounds. I had Legio Vulturum, weapon-wise I set up the Warhounds with weapons that Karas said were good for stripping void shields, the Warlord with high Strength weapons, and the Reaver with a mix of the two; my idea was that the fast Warhounds would engage first and take off the shields, then the bigger, slower mechs would catch up and start hammering the exposed hulls. Or whatever. Karas and Neo had Legio Ignatum, I have no idea what weapons they were running.
Deployment:
I won the intiative and spread my models out (the photo was taken after one move so one Warhound is too far forwards, and I couldn't see the screen properly so I didn't realise my Reaver was out of frame on the left).
Round 1:
I decided not to use any orders this turn as none of them jumped out to me as being useful yet. Karas and Neo use the March (I think was called) order on the Warlord and Reaver. I walked stuff forwards. I pushed the engine on a Warhound twice in order to swing wide to my right; I rolled three heat, rolled a 10 on the D10 engine overheating roll, and the Warhound blew up and did a bit of damage to the Warlord next to it. So I lost a model before a single attack had even been made. The other Warhound took some void shields off the Warlord. My Reiver took some damage to the head, giving me a penalty to my command checks.
Round 2:
I decided to charge my Reiver into the Warhounds, but failed the command roll. I think I also failed a command roll on the Warlord, though I don't remember what it was for. I might have failed a "Shoot First" command on my remaining Warhound, but if so I forgot that I failed and did the Shoot First action anyway. Karas and Neo's Reiver got the Charge order. I shuffled my Warlord further around the terrain to try to isolate the Reiver so I could finish it before the Warlord could get a line on me. Since Neo's Warhound was moving towards mine, I repositioned my Reiver to begin to intercept. Karas kept pushing his Warhound, then tried to run it up to my Reiver to blow up next to it, but it didn't blow up. The Reiver charged my Warlord, only just making it into 2" range, and did a bit of damage.
I attacked the Reiver with my Warlord. Karas told me to use the gun first (I couldn't use the hull weapon because the Reiver was too small). This was "concussive", causing the Reaver to to rotate 45 degrees to it's right, which took it out of 2" melee range - before I could use my melee weapon. I measured it and said it was out of range, but Karas ignored me and just pushed the Reiver in closer. So I used the melee attack, which I think was also concussive, but I don't think we rolled any concussive rolls for it? Anyway in total I didn't do much damage. The reiver now retaliated. Because Karas had ignored the fact that was out of melee range, it was able to use its melee weapon as well. Whatever. Neo's Warhound attacked my Reiver, but I thought it was attacking my Warhound and resolved the damage against the Warhound, blowing it up. I rolled "moves and shuts down" on the death table, and when I went to resolve that we realised the mistake and I just gave up.
Post-Mortem:
OK, I understand now that this is supposed to be a very technical, dare I say "realistic" naval-style combat game. Repeated hits on the same location weaken it and make it more vulnerable to taking damage. As you take damage your systems break down, etc. I get it. I get it, but I don't like it.
It was all so old-fashioned. Look up tables all over the place, different numbers scattered all over the data cards that you had to check for different rolls, and that kept changing. Sometimes rolling high is good, sometimes rolling low? It's a stark contrast to modern game design, that is consistent, streamlined, and intuitive, but that still has plenty of depth.
Honestly, I had a miserable experience. I honestly never felt like... like I could do anything? I mean, part of that was that, for all the complexity the game has in damage allocation and whatnot, I didn't feel like I had many actual meneaningful decisions to make in terms of gameplay. Which direction to walk and which model to shoot; it's just my impression, but it seems to me there's games these days with so much more interesting decision making happening every single turn.
But it wasn't just about decisions; I felt like I couldn't do anything. I don't know how to explain it, but with alternating activations between players combined with the different phases, it felt like half an hour between when I move a model and when it gets to attack. And the movement was incredibly pondorous and unsatisfying; I can barely shuffle a model forwards a few inches at the cost of risking reactor damage. Then when my chance to attack finally comes, well, it felt like I was lucky to plink off a single point of armour or a void shield or two. It was not satisfying. And you could "push" to do better when moving and defending, but not when attacking (yeah, some special weapons which I didn't have had push effects, but it wasn't a general rule the way it was with movement and void shields). So I didn't even have the choice to increase attack power to try to guarantee at least a bit of damage, even if it came at a cost. I felt powerless playing the game.
Now of course part of that was just my dice. But then that's part of my issue: it's a VERY dicey game, in that a single attack (or bad reactor roll) can cost you a model, or you can unload volley of powerful weaponry and feel like nothing happened. Sure, technically that can happen in any game with dice, but most games these days have ways of mitigating the "feels-bad" moments. Warmachine uses 2D6, so you get a probability bell-curve and some degree of predictability, plus the core rules of the core models include the ability to boost attacks, so you almost never feel like there's nothing you can do, you can always connect or do damage, though it comes at a cost. Other games such as 40K have you throw so many dice that it evens out. Monpoc has you build resources then decide how to spend them; you can ALWAYS get damage through, as long as you commit the resources to it. Warcaster has resource allocation, and also the constant redeployment of troops means losing to bad (or opposing good) rolls doesn't feel as bad as you can bring models back.
I don't have a problem with inherently dicey games, but it depends on what is dicey. If the dice can have interesting effects, like say randomly swapping models' positions or something, then it can be quite interesting and fun. In this case the dicey effects were mostly just more or less damage. I know that there were some Machine Spirit effects that could have been interesting, so that's nice, but they didn't come into play, and even so it doesn't change the fact that the basic damage rules were just so... swingy. Which can feel bad, especially in low model count games. I've experienced this in several games now: low model count games where a model could die to a single shot or survive a whole bunch of attacks are not satisfying, the swingy nature of a few bad dice rolls is just too much when you can lose a huge chunk of your army to a single dice, or you can use your entire army to try to take down one average-strenght model and fail completely. It just doesn't feel good, to me at least.
To be fair it turns out that my Warhound should not have blown up because the reactor was only orange; so I should have rolled a D6, not a D10. But that's part of the problem! So much complexity in small details, so many little modifiers that you have to keep remembering or checking on, so many lookup tables you have to keep referencing; even Karas, who loves the game so much he wanted to get other into it, could not remember all the rules and missed this small but important details of there being different dice for the same roll.
Working with software, I've learned that the best solutions usually have an elegent simplicity to them. Simple formulas that determine results (e.g. Warmachine's "add dice roll to weapon damage and subtract armour") are so much nicer and better than having to deal with lots of specific cases and responses; damage in AT is like "if X then void shields so check for save number under current number of voidshields, else armour so roll dice for location then check location for damage bands so if dice plus strength is 11 or 12 it does regular damage so one point of damage, but if 13 or 14 it does extra damage so two points of damage, but that number is modified by the modifier under the current amount of hull damage etc".
What I'm saying is, AT is very inelegent. OK, some people enjoy that kind of "classic" wargame. That's fine. But I appreciate rules that are elegant, and games that manage to be deep without being too complex, I much prefer the modern streamlined type of game that PP tends to do better than GW. They are easier to get into, rules are easier to remember, games are faster to play, etc. Obviously you need some level of complexity as without it there will be no meaningful decisions to be made. But, like everything else, it's about balance, and different people will enjoy a different balance at different times.
For me? I'm old, tired, can't concentrate anymore on account of being constantly sleep deprived (or possibly I'm going senile), and I think I've lost a lot of my passion for wargaming. And this game of Adeptus Titanicus might have been the most miserable gaming experience I've ever had.
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