Sci Fi skirmish play-test 2

So, after the first playtest of my sci fi skirmish rules, which are called Raiders Of The Outer Rim (ROTOR), I made several amendments, particularly to the shooting, close combat and initial game turn rules.

Yesterday at the club, I had an opportunity to play-test again, with Matt from last time plus two new players, Wayne and John. John is John Curry, who runs the History Of Wargaming Project, so I was happy to get him involved as I hoped that he might offer up some real insights.

I didn't take any photos this week, because I wanted to concentrate on the game, so this will be a text-only (BORING!) post.

I wrote up a simple scenario, that would concentrate on working through the combat mechanisms;

The teams have been hired by a large Agribusiness Corporation to carry out a seek-and-destroy mission inside a damaged and abandoned orbital agricultural habitat, which the corporation wishes to bring back into production. Unfortunately, a gang of Feral Alien intruders, led by an Alien Psyker have occupied one sector of the habitat and are trying to penetrate the AI core. These feral aliens only have H2H weapons, but move quickly. The habitat is still active and is patrolled by small combat drones, which are controlled by the habitat’s damaged AI systems. Before the repair teams can move in, the alien intruders must be eliminated. Unfortunately, because the AI is damaged, it cannot distinguish between lifeforms and the drones will attack anything that moves.

The teams were all fairly similar, with combat droids, who are powerful entities in ROTOR, plus a variety of basic grunts and specialists (in this case heavy weapons, psykers, scouts and techno ninjas) led by Leaders and Sidekicks.

The role of the aliens was given to the Snakemen warriors from my Saga: Age of Magic Otherworld warband, with the Hamata taking the role of the Leader Psyker and with a Feral Alien Paladin as the Sidekick. The Defence Drones were from one of my HOTT armies.

Anyway, the game played out a lot more smoothly than last week, but it did throw up some new talking points and questions. The most important issue was how the Turn Sequence should work, and I have made some changes to this for ROTOR V1.3, which will form the basis for the next play-test. I have also changed the way that Droids and Scouts are activated, to speed up the Turn Sequence and give each player a bit more thought about what they can and cannot do.

I have also made a few tweaks to how Psykers operate, because there was a real risk that they might be too powerful as things were in V1.2. There are now risks attached to using psychic powers, and repeated use becomes harder.

Finally, my Techno Ninja was shown up to be too weak, something that my initial solo testing had highlighted, so I have made the stats a bit stronger for this specialist type.

I think that the game we played out was OK as a test, but lacked the variety of the first game in terms of the kind of actions the payers had available. Still, the is a work in progress, even though I think that I am getting closer to a finished article.