thread: 2006-11-30 : Mechaton FAQ
On 2006-12-01, Rich Stokes wrote:
We played a brief game last night. It was fun, but it seemed very slow. There was a lot of "I hit you, I roll 4 dice, no damage, next!" going on.
Initiative seemed to be reasonably important, except it also wasn't. In that, most of the time mechs went in Combat order, rather than Initiative order. So my force of 4 mechs with 3 attachments each would have been better off with a couple of extra attachments since it didn't really feel like the extra initiative dice helped much.
There seems to be a great temptation to have armoured artillery units hanging about at the edges of the board and not really getting into the action. That is, create a mech with one or two artillery weapons and one or two defence attachments and then leave it in the corner of the battlefield.
Moving early in the turn and rolling badly for defence seems pretty bad. That is, one of Dave's mechs was sat in the corner and ended it's turn with a 2 in defence about halfway through the second turn. Everybody who had an artillery piece on the field wailed on him, because they knew they would hit! After that, I don't think anyone left a mech with less than 4 defence for he rest of the game.
With 3 players and a total of 12 mechs, it felt very much like there were a lot of clashed for initiative. I wonder if maybe using d20s for initiative might help, or just a deck of playing cards (Savage Worlds style). Cards would take up more space next to the mechs on the field though...
Cover, hmmm. The was cover works is very... interesting. As far as I can tell, what you do is draw an imaginary semicircle around the target mech with a radius of 1 and the middle line pointing towards the attacker.
(dotted line points to attacker, target mech at the bottom where the dotted line crosses the baseline, r = 1)
If there's anything in that semicircle, you have cover.
Is that right?
One of the best ways to hit highly defended mechs seemed to be to shoot at mechs behind them. That is, if I take a similar example to Mr Miller:
___A__________xy___
I am at A. I want to hurt mech x, but mech x has armour and an ECM and rolled well this turn, so it has a 5 defence. Mech y, on the other hand, is a bit rubbish, and has only got a 2 defence this turn. A rolled a 5 for it's attack.
I can't damage x directly, because I have 5 attack vs 5 defence. But if I fire at y I get 3 damage and any that come up 5 hit and damage y's cover, which happens to be x.
Am I interpreting that correctly?
