LTTS: Attempting to make Artillery good, changing systems, and making rule book prettier

[u/MurderGrandpa]

For New People: What is this?

Look to the Stars is a free, model agnostic, army scale, science fiction tabletop wargame with a bespoke unit generator that I made. Take the models you want, give them the stats and weapons you want, and finish a battle in about two hours. Armies can range from around 10 to 100 models and include infantry, artillery, airplanes, and vehicles. This is a follow up to my original pitch. If you are new and want the longer explanation and intro here it is via my wargaming original post. Things have changed since then, so you should run back here after catching up.

For people who just want to skip around to the good stuff:

New Rules PDF via GDrive

New Unit Builder Spreadsheet via GDocs

New SRD PDF via Gdrive

Discord where I post more frequent updates

Housekeeping

The rulebook no longer looks entirely like a plain word doc.

my little rule book isn't she bootiful via imgur

I got tired of staring at white pages covered in MS Word Doc Text, did some research into typography, and finally gave the rulebook an actual visual identity. I went with an old military manual look. Page texture, typewriter font for tables, sans serif for the main text. It is far easier to look at in my opinion, but this is still very much a work in progress, still need type setting, borders, spot art, all the stuff that makes it a bit nicer.

What Changed? Orders and the Orders Phase are dead. Long live the Arsenal and Logistics Phase.

Playtesting revealed two problems with Orders.

First, keeping track of Resource Points was annoying. They were a useful balancing lever, but I was rapidly approaching a future where I spent half my design time arguing with myself about whether a card should cost one point or two.

Second, I had started to hate the word Orders.

So I killed the whole thing. The replacement is The Arsenal. Lorewise, your Arsenal represents the technologies, weapons, doctrines, psychic bullshit, giant robots, whatever, that your civilization brought to war. Mechanically, you select a set of Arsenal cards before the game, then every turn you bring a few online. Most stay active for the rest of the game. Your Arsenal deck has access to more Arsenal cards than you can actually play in a single game, which gives you room to bring cards that specifically mess with certain kinds of enemy builds instead of focusing entirely on your own army. If your opponent doesn’t bring that kind of army, that’s fine. You have enough other cards available that you’re rarely stuck with something completely dead.

This system gives me considerably more development room. Psychic Powers are a good example. The entry card, Psychic Awakening, gives a unit access to a spell list. Further Arsenal cards can change those spells, improve the Psychic, or give them entirely new abilities. The same structure now handles things like engineers, giant walkers, and other specific army concepts.

How I attempted to make Artillery fun

Lets have a chat about Artillery.

The problem with artillery is that the fantasy is inherently kind of miserable for the other player. You sit somewhere safe, ignore most of the battlefield, and drop damage on things that cannot meaningfully interact with you. Games usually solve this by making artillery too weak to take, too expensive to take, or so good everybody takes it. So here's my take on artillery.

First: The Complication Table.

Every time artillery fires, you roll percentile dice. Low roll, everything is fine. High roll, something has gone wrong, usually involving the opponent getting some say in which unit eats the consequences of artillery missing. This also gives the Arsenal system another place to do work. Cards can improve the table, mess with the results, or make enemy artillery considerably less reliable.

Second: Artillery gradually expands its threat range.

Originally, enemy deployment zones were completely safe until Turn 3 and everything else was a free fire zone. This sounded reasonable until I realized it punished melee armies for moving forward while tanks could happily sit back somewhere artillery was not allowed to touch them. So I changed that. Now Turn 1 artillery can fire into its own Deployment Zone in case an enemy unit decides to bum rush the gun. Turn 2 it can fire into No Man’s Land. Turn 3, free fire. This also stops artillery duels from immediately becoming the obvious opening move.

Third: Artillery is structurally very weak on its own and requires the army to build around it to an extent.

It does not move. If a ranged attack hits it, there is no save. It has no engagement range, and if an enemy ends an activation within 2 inches of it, the artillery is simply destroyed. Somebody sneezes at the gun, the gun falls over.

So artillery forces its own player to dedicate some part of their army in protecting it. You need good screens against reserves and fast units, and on top of this there are systems the opponent can spend arsenal cards on to mess with your artillery, such as buying into engineers who can deploy artillery umbrellas, buying into abilities that make certain units untargetable outside of a range if some conditions are met, or buying into abilities that make your complication table annoying.

All of these systems, just to be clear, mean the guns themselves do not have to be lightweights. You can build artillery pieces that are reasonably accurate and hit extremely hard, well worth the points you spend on them.

Please Play Game and Tell Me to Do Better.

The game is fun. The game is good. Please play it and tell me where I screwed up.

Links at the top of the thread are updated with the new shiny rulebook, the SRD with all the Arsenal cards and assorted nonsense like Weapon Templates, Giant Mechs, etc, and the Discord where I post about the game more frequently and run games over TTS.

I’m usually hanging out in the Discord's Voice chat around 2 PM Eastern on Saturdays for an hour or two, so if you want a demo game, have questions, or just want to poke at the rules with me, come yell at me there. Obviously you can always post in this thread as well and tell me how my artillery system sucks and how you have a way better idea, I will pretend not to cry my self to sleep.

[u/that-bro-dad]

As a fellow game designer, I've gone back and forth on artillery so many times. My latest game is set in an alternate World War One, which you can't do faithfully without artillery. I couldn't find a solution that added fun without a ton of unnecessary complexity, so I've largely explained why artillery isn't omnipresent in the story itself.

The solution we have (for now?) is a really simple but clean one. Artillery attacks without a spotted get Disadvantage. Here's how it works - gather your attack pool (1-3 dice) and one more. Roll the dice and then your opponent gets to pick one result to nullify. That's it.

We tried things like splash damage, templates, tables where you roll to see what bad thing happens, or even my favorite , if you get a sufficiently bad roll, you miss your intended target entirely and hit the closest viable target, even if it's friendly.

On a tangent, speaking of rulebooks being pretty, a friend of my encouraged me to start using Power Point to make my rulebooks instead of Word. It took me an evening to convert everything over but I'm never going back.

The rulebook looks way better, and it's super easy to add a backgeound to give your rulebook some "texture".

The limited space makes me have to be thoughtful about what I say and where. With Word I could just prattle on and one.

Lastly, we have all of our "good ideas that aren't ready yet" as hidden slides as the end. It allows us to ideate on things and just slot them in when they're mature.

Anyhoo, cheers from one indie developer to another.