Cooperative Zone Raiding In The 41st Millenium

We've been talking about taking Zone Raiders out for another spin. I wanted to try the co-op mode as I've been thinking of running a co-op campaign someday. Without any real preparation we threw together a couple of 750 RU lists on the spot. I built a Zone Stalkers list around my Space Marine Scouts, trying to pick appropriate equipment:
Jaeger (Sniper Scout w/out a cloak)
- Light Exoskeleton
- Vesper Rifle
- Chaincutter
- Rangefinder Scope
Scout Stalker x3 (Sniper Scouts w/ cloaks)
- Light Exoskeleton
- Vesper Rifle
- Chaincutter
Scout Stalker (Scout w/missile launcher)
- Light Exoskeleton
- Heavy Isotope Cannon
- Chaincutter
- Ballistic Optic

Speedy built an Exanthropes list using his Infinity JSA models. Due to a misunderstanding he selected some artifact weapons, which are only supposed to be aquired during a campaign, but we didn't want to spend more time on the list building so we just allowed it.
Aspirant
- Duelist Panoply
- High-Frequency Blades
- Mico-Laser Array
- Combat Stims
Aspirant x2
- Duelist Panoply
- Allow Pilum
- Monofilament Fibres
Aspirant
- Arsenal Panoply
- Graviton Hammer
- Micro-Laser Array
Combat Automata x2
- Micro-Laser Array


Pre-Game:
We picked the first cooperative mission: Scrapheap. We scattered some terrain around, I used some Monpoc tokens as the Scrap tokens and numbered Warcaster objective tokens as the enemy groups. We used miscellaneous small Warcaster tokens as activation tokens. The deployment area was extremely small, so I just took one edge and Speedy took the other.


Early Game:
We immediately revealed the first group: two Marauder Sharpshooters (Space Marines) and three Marauder Assassins (Skitarii).

They almost immediately killed my Stalker with the Heavy Isotope Cannon and one of Speedy's Combat Automata. In contrast our models whiffed almost every attack. Seriously, it was amazing how terrible our collective dice were; despite having relatively similar stats, our 11 models took something like half the game to take out that first squad, continually missing almost every attack. By the end we were down to two enemies, each surrounded by five of our guys, and we were still struggling, missing every attack.

Mid Game:
We finally finished off the first enemy squad and started to advance on the obectives, with a Combat Automata leading the way. At this point I finally figured out where the enemy behaviour patterns were written, so we started rolling for enemy group movement. At which point one group immedately advanced and spotted the Combat Automata. They were revealed to be three Marauder Troopers (Space Marines) and two Marauder Skirmishers (Skitarii).

While the enemy didn't take long to kill the Combat Automata, they were unable to do any damage to Speedy's other units who were behind cover. Meanwhile my models were taking high ground and casually one-shotting the enemy models. I think we actually wiped out that second squad in just one turn, or maybe two at the most. It was a ridiculous reversal, largely due to the fact that the enemy squad had appeared in the open while we were in a more advantageous position. There was no cover in front of them and as far as I understood the AI rules they would not retreat to cover, but would just advance and shoot.

Late Game:
The rest of the game, the other two enemy squads just kept moving further away. We spent the next three or four turns with Speedy casually walking around picking up Scrap tokens while my guys took Overwatch from the high ground, and then we evac'ed.

Post-Mortem:
I hadn't had the chance to fully revise the rules before the game. Seeing as we've only played once before and that was over a year ago, I was very fuzzy on the rules. To make matters much worse, I hadn't actually read the co-op rules at all before we started, and could only give them a quick once-over as we prepared the table. As a result the game was quite exhausting, with constant flicking back and forth through the rulebook.

There's a lot that I like about this game, but the rules are not really laid out in a way that is easy to look things up in a hurry; the book has no glossary and there's a lot of interacting rules that are quite spread out in the rule book. For example, the mission briefing for the Scrapheap mission describes the possible enemy group compositions, in the main text on one page, but only describes the group behaviour type on the map layout on the next page. So the first couple of times I went looking I couldn't find it and we just left the group markers stationary.

The movement system was a bit cumbersome too. There's basically 6 different movement actions available, and they are all quite different, and to figure out which ones are available to a model you need to check it's armour and equipment. After a point we kind of just didn't bother worry about it and just moved. Actually after a point I didn't bother with a lot of rules; those terribly early dice did not leave me in a mood to figure out exactly how many shots each enemy had or how many to-hit bonuses it got by the time were were on the second squad. I can't tell how you glad I was there wasn't a third squad. BTW I was a little bit surprised by how long it took to grab the Scrap tokens and evac; I'm not sure how that would have played out if we were under fire at the time.

One thing I noticed this game was that the hit bonuses are VERY swingy. Cover is RIDICULOUSLY important; stepping out from behind cover can easily make a 10 point swing in the chance of getting hit; that's 50% of the roll! Speedy might have been right when he said we were using the wrong terrain for the game; I think we need much more terrain that's much smaller. Or something, I don't know; point is terrain has a huge effect on the the game.

It felt like one model couldn't do very much in a turn. That was fine in our previous games because one turn didn't take too long. But I'm starting to think that too many models might slow the game down a bit too much. It makes sense now that each mission has model limits; the rules are just too crunchy for large model count games. But maybe it won't be an issue if you understand the rules much better so you move through turns much faster? Although missions have turn limits, so... I dunno.

I completely ignored the AP rule, and will probably continue to do so; I really don't like that rule at all, and it's on far too many weapons. I might just ignore the whole "wounds can reduce how many actions you get" rule as well; it just feels too crippling. Honestly I'm tempted to try to do some homebrew just to simplify the rules a bit; I like that you have a lot of options but right now I think there's a bit too much complexity. For example, a lot of actions end your activation. Reloading does not, but you can't attack in the same activation. That's just a bit messy, you know? Too many special cases sort of thing. If I can just simplify the basic movement, action, and hit modifier options a little, that I think would go a long way to making it smoother and more streamlined to play. My goal is to run a cooperative campaign, so I'm not too worried about breaking the game's balance. But I definitely need to go over the AI rules a couple of times.

By the way even though our dice were unbelievably bad for the first half of the game (seriously it's hard to describe how silly it was), we nevertheless won every single intiative roll against the AI. Dice are weird.

This Is A Test Of The Emergency Zone Raiding System

As mentioned in my last post I was looking forwards to trying Zone Raiders. I put together some profiles based on some models from the Infinity Operation: Cold Front box:

The bruiser

The sniper

And three cheap (identical) grunts.

The idea was to have a few rules to play around with (reloading, mobility, armour piercing), but not too many so we wouldn't be overwhelmed. I duplicated the profiles for both Pan-O and Nomads to make sure there would be no balance issues in these introductory games:

The first game I played with Speedy. He took the blue Pan-O and I ran the red Nomads. We basically didn't bother with any of the mission or environment rules, to keep things simple. I forgot to take pictures until the end, so you'll see the final board state at the top of this post. We used the Cold Front tokens: regular order tokens represent wounds while irregular order tokens tracked command points, face-down tokens stood in for out-of-ammo tokens, and the frowny face indicated downed models. During the game my armour saves were hot; the Mobile Brigada pretty much refused to die until late-game when the Sniper finally managed to take out his armour. I believe my own sniper was taken out a little early though, and eventually my grunts were overwhelmed.

I then played my friend Watcher (who's not into wargames but has been dragged into a couple before). This time my armour saves were not so hot, and perhaps more importantly my survival rolls were cold too, with models often dropping the moment their armour was breached; my Mobile Brigada went down quite quickly due to my overly-aggressive attempts to get him into combat early. Meanwhile his Orc was on a long flank behind the building on my left, so he arrived untouched late in the match and starting punching my last few models to death.

Obviously this simple demo games don't paint the full picture, but I'm liking the game system so far. I quite enjoyed the pacing created by the alternating model activations; it meant each player got constant quick breaks, but never had to sit idle for very long. I did find that constantly passing control back and forth meant that (in addition to really wishing we had a second measuring tape) I sometimes lost track of which of my models had activated in a round; I think we might start using tokens to track activations.

Which is a bit worrying because there's already a lot of tokens on the table, following each model around. I might discuss placing some tokens on the model cards instead of the on the table, but obviously that would make some things easy to forget, so I think it should be for the less important tokens (like the aforementioned activation tokens, and maybe for wounds) if at all. Also, we all agreed that replacing downed models with a token rather than leaving them on the table would be better, making it much easier to take in the table state at a glance. Obviously each model would need a token that's unique to it, but that's easy enough.

One thing that worried me a bit, and still does, is that the large number of possible actions available each activation could make the game harder for new players to pick up. Watcher seemed to be doing OK though, and personally I found it very enjoyable to have those options; I found it far more interesting than the typical "move-attack" pattern of some wargames. The fact that some actions have added restrictions like ending your activation is an added complication, but I think it's an important balancing factor and I don't think it will take too long to get used to.

Command tokens were a surprisingly fun resource management element: having that extra chance to land an important shot or save a model is a comforting ace to have up your sleeve.

The movement system was a bit more restrictive than I had expected, which is not a bad thing because it means choosing armour with better mobility options has genuine value. I'm a fan of games with a lot of movement, so I'm happy that it feels like the movement and elevation rules will lead to some cool three-dimensional gameplay, though obviously you will need the right terrain to support it.

I was initially afraid that having to keep stopping to reload would feel cumbersome, but in practice I found that I didn't actually mind it too much. Activations were quick enough and rounds short enough that having models duck down to reload didn't feel so bad, plus it's kind of cinematic when you think about it. It also creates meaningful decisions in target prioritization and how much to commit to an attack, and I think it can lead to more movement as turns when you can't shoot encourage you to move around, rather than just stand still and keep shooting, which I like.

The rulebook is pretty good, but there is some room for improvement. The lack of a proper index means that some rules can be a bit hard to find, at least mid-game. Obviously the reference pages help a lot, but there were still some rules I couldn't find in the middle of the game and just gave up on searching for.

Also some rules could use some more explicit language, and/or some actual examples. The cover rules, for example, seemed simple at first but we quickly ran into situations that we weren't sure how to resolve. I think we're going to have to discuss some house-rules for a few things, at least until they get clarified by an errata or something (there don't seem to be any forums and I'm not on Facebook so I don't know what kind of official or unofficial rulings might be occurring).


Overall I'm looking forwards to using the rule set to run some narrative campaigns. It's going to take a lot of prep work though, as I'm going to need to put together some terrain and other stuff. Fingers crossed it will all work out, because I have really high hopes for this game system.

Zone Raiders Card Creator V1.09

I absolutely love the setting of Zone Raiders. Though I have not had a chance to play a game yet, the rules look pretty good to me from my first read-through.

While the book has a sheet for building your characters, I'm rather fond of Warmachine-style character cards, so I decided to throw together my own little Zone Raiders card creator. It's relatively simple and has a lot of re-used code, so it actually didn't take me too long to get this far. It's still a work in progress of course.

I wanted the card creator to pull double-duty, allowing the user to either print it out empty and fill in the data with a pen/cil, or to fill it in the browser, but then overwrite it later as characters changed (these overwrites might just be temporary until the user has time to update the original card if they are willing to keep printing out cards), so I made sure all the fields were as large as I could fit them and set pretty much all the text to be white.

Right now there's a few elements I'm not completely sure about; for example the font size is a bit large, which means some names and things need to be abbreviated. I'm considering shrinking the font size, but I feel that would look a bit funny, so what I would really like to do it add a menu option to allow the user to set some parameters such as font size. Perhaps in later iterations.

I wish I could set the whole thing to save profiles so they can be loaded later, but I don't know how to do that working out of Blogger. There are some other "advanced" functions that I am interested in adding, if I have the time and end up getting into Zone Raiders. Fingers crossed.

Anyway, please post any questions or suggestions for changes as comments on this blog post.