Playtest Check Station

Night Brood feedback:

• The Frenzy Rules- didn't bother using them last game (once I finally remembered at the start of turn 2 that we'd forgotten to implement it) because the rule is just one more plate in the air to remember & it either slows down play unless you place a reminder marker make a note on the sheet or makes movement predictable. It hasn't been needed to nerf the Brood thus far in my hands at least...
  
• Ammo for beams -needs to go- it threatens to hinder the flow of the game: "Excuse me, I'll be taking this turn to run away so I can try to regenerate more ammo", even though it hasn't come up in practice (the ships rip apart or lose their weapons altogether before they get 4 turns worth of shots in), the concept isn't growing on me well. If the ranges had been kept long, sure, it makes sense. With ranges cut back, you have to get into a knife fight with ships and that usually results in jump pods falling off the frame like a tipped Mellon cart. Regenerate every turn? Why slow the game down with the extra rolling and forgo the ammo in the first place because if you fail to regenerate you are back to running anyway. Leeches and Spore Moles need ammo -Beams don't.
  
• Gammas are a mixed bag. Fast, small ships with DV's on their best days that's easier to hit than most gunboats and warhounds. Their X-Beams miss often locked down to a D4 ADB die but do solid damage sometimes when they do connect. I'd be funny if they were cheap & disposable, but attrition fighters they are not. They'll probably need some kind of push before it's all said and done, even if it's a slow titration of their points value.
  
• The -2 penalty to shoot when jump pods are used is another one of those easy to forget rules that don't seem to be needed at the moment because the brood ship is either using the pods to A) escape, so isn't concerned with firing anyway, B) get in an advantageous position to shoot in which spending the limited resource only to have the advantage dulled somewhat defeats the purpose of chasing the advantage. (at least in my games thus far- it can be tricky enough to get a shot to hit with 3d8 without the penalty), or C) Shaking off torpedos from a tracking pack. Coupled with the aforementioned D4 ADB Gamma issue, it becomes Sophie's Choice of- "Do you want to eat 4xMk.10's this turn... or not hit anything, but waste 1 of your 2 remaining shots trying when Regeneration 2 is your fallback to resupply?"
  
• Beam Ranges being clipped have had the effect of making pinning down ships with mid to plus-sized drones nigh moot. No more is there a long-range zone to safe-ish-ly shoot at ships stuck in the drone-quagmire for a couple of turns. If an Alpha or Beta is in range to shoot now, then so are the ships they are shooting at in most cases --they can just min. move, shoot back, drones be damned. Drones nuisance trick falls flat without a shooting pressure advantage, but with beam ranges as they are drones no longer trap ships for time-at-range raking. There's no advantage to press with stuck ships that are equally effective at range.
  

It's safe to say I've not yet hit a stride with the new brood. I believe they have the tools already to do well, with enough board space and time. The trouble I'm having is making them work in a 4-6 turn game with a closed-border play area. In that arena, I'm finding them a tough proposition to hit parity as I'm having them crumple rapidly. If the old Brood were a 9 to the Imperial Houses 7, this iteration feels like a 5.5 on the grid. That's not saying much- my luck and dodgy play with only 3 games in could make for enough margin of error to account for the slack. That's my thoughts so far anyway.

Night Brood feedback:

• The Frenzy Rules- didn't bother using them last game (once I finally remembered at the start of turn 2 that we'd forgotten to implement it) because the rule is just one more plate in the air to remember & it either slows down play unless you place a reminder marker make a note on the sheet or makes movement predictable. It hasn't been needed to nerf the Brood thus far in my hands at least...
  
• Ammo for beams -needs to go- it threatens to hinder the flow of the game: "Excuse me, I'll be taking this turn to run away so I can try to regenerate more ammo", even though it hasn't come up in practice (the ships rip apart or lose their weapons altogether before they get 4 turns worth of shots in), the concept isn't growing on me well. If the ranges had been kept long, sure, it makes sense. With ranges cut back, you have to get into a knife fight with ships and that usually results in jump pods falling off the frame like a tipped Mellon cart. Regenerate every turn? Why slow the game down with the extra rolling and forgo the ammo in the first place because if you fail to regenerate you are back to running anyway. Leeches and Spore Moles need ammo -Beams don't.
  
• Gammas are a mixed bag. Fast, small ships with DV's on their best days that's easier to hit than most gunboats and warhounds. Their X-Beams miss often locked down to a D4 ADB die but do solid damage sometimes when they do connect. I'd be funny if they were cheap & disposable, but attrition fighters they are not. They'll probably need some kind of push before it's all said and done, even if it's a slow titration of their points value.
  
• The -2 penalty to shoot when jump pods are used is another one of those easy to forget rules that don't seem to be needed at the moment because the brood ship is either using the pods to A) escape, so isn't concerned with firing anyway, B) get in an advantageous position to shoot in which spending the limited resource only to have the advantage dulled somewhat defeats the purpose of chasing the advantage. (at least in my games thus far- it can be tricky enough to get a shot to hit with 3d8 without the penalty), or C) Shaking off torpedos from a tracking pack. Coupled with the aforementioned D4 ADB Gamma issue, it becomes Sophie's Choice of- "Do you want to eat 4xMk.10's this turn... or not hit anything, but waste 1 of your 2 remaining shots trying when Regeneration 2 is your fallback to resupply?"
  
• Beam Ranges being clipped have had the effect of making pinning down ships with mid to plus-sized drones nigh moot. No more is there a long-range zone to safe-ish-ly shoot at ships stuck in the drone-quagmire for a couple of turns. If an Alpha or Beta is in range to shoot now, then so are the ships they are shooting at in most cases --they can just min. move, shoot back, drones be damned. Drones nuisance trick falls flat without a shooting pressure advantage, but with beam ranges as they are drones no longer trap ships for time-at-range raking. There's no advantage to press with stuck ships that are equally effective at range.
  

It's safe to say I've not yet hit a stride with the new brood. I believe they have the tools already to do well, with enough board space and time. The trouble I'm having is making them work in a 4-6 turn game with a closed-border play area. In that arena, I'm finding them a tough proposition to hit parity as I'm having them crumple rapidly. If the old Brood were a 9 to the Imperial Houses 7, this iteration feels like a 5.5 on the grid. That's not saying much- my luck and dodgy play with only 3 games in could make for enough margin of error to account for the slack. That's my thoughts so far anyway.

Making the Gammas work as a swarm we allowed all ships with a regen rating of 4 buff each other for a +1 to hit if they are within the regen rating of hexes (4 = 4 hexes).  

Again this allowed bigger ships to buff many other ships and the max buff was the regen rating.  Therefore, small ships could get a max of +4 where as the Alphas could get a buff of +8!

Making the Gammas work as a swarm we allowed all ships with a regen rating of 4 buff each other for a +1 to hit if they are within the regen rating of hexes (4 = 4 hexes).  

Again this allowed bigger ships to buff many other ships and the max buff was the regen rating.  Therefore, small ships could get a max of +4 where as the Alphas could get a buff of +8!

I read that post where you talked about that originally and have been hoping it will be in the next test packet. The only reason I didn't comment on it was that I feel like I necro enough threads as it is!

But yeah, I'm in full support of knocking down the gammas points a tad & giving them a mechanical incentive to use swarm behavior. As a concept it has merit, I especially like the fact that there is no dice rolling involved, just a quick looksie when you check arcs to see what kind of swarm support you have intact (my recent afterburner rules need to be tossed out mainly because with extra dice fiddling in a phase it runs counter to the metal express combat dice philosophy: the fewer rolls the better).

So if I understand this correctly, there is only one current Gamma that has this group buff ability (Thistle), and any other Gamma within 4 hexes of a Thistle (or 4+ regen Beta) gets a +1 to hit...  so:

• 3 muckworms in a swarm with a thistle would all get a +1 to hit on their X-Beam shots
  
• 4 Thistles in a swarm (within 4 hexes of each other) all get +4 +3 to hit
  
• If one of the above Thistles is 4 away from one of the remaining.... this is getting too convoluted to express with words- some charts are in order...
  

How I am understanding it in pictures:

Figure 1

Not enough regen i.e. social interconnectivity = no buff. Easy.

Figure 2

The thistle is able to support the mucks as long as they are within its buff radius. A single Thistle could support a maximum of four Gammas in this manner, but the one on the right is just beyond its influence. Check. So-far-so-good.

The tricky one I'm not sure about-
Figure 3 (Thistle social connection network simplified for ease of reading)

A swarm of Thistles buffing each other and the Beta Skree, the one on the far right can only benefit from (and lend a buff to) the Thistle it is in range of, but also from the Beta because its social interconnectivity range is 8. You check each ship swarm-buff when it fires.

1. Is the Skree able to get a +1 from the far right Thistle it is supporting due to its swarm influence (regen) rating being 8 hexes (is the buff both incoming & outgoing range-wise)?
   
2. Are the Gammas allowed to support each other or only higher-ups in the hierarchy? Gamma-->Beta-->Alpha  ...let me rephrase: Gamma-->Beta/Alpha, Beta-->Alpha
   

I think a bidirectional support structure- bottom-up for offensive (to-hit) and top-down for defensive (DV) would be interesting.

We'll just have to wait & see what makes the cut & what works.

Yup in a nutshell. Remember 4 ships can only get +3 because each ship cannot buff itself, if regen is 4.

Yup in a nutshell.  Remember 4 ships can only get +3 because each ship cannot buff itself, if regen is 4.

Ahh true. Corrected the example above in red.

I'd lop the range on gamma's down to 1, maybe 2 to keep them packed together. Range of 4 can create some pretty loose formations and the idea is to replicate the swarm-like behavior of a shoal of fish. I packed them in close in the charts to keep the image sizes down, but if I were to spread them out to the allowed max. you could make the argument that they'd be getting it all the time.

A second suggestion is to grant the buff to gunner skill ratings rather than a flat to-hit boost so that by collectively forming up into dense swarms they can break the bonds of their puny D4 ADB die. And applying the buff to Gnr skill just increases the odds of a better to-hit result rather than outright guaranteeing it. So I'm suggesting possibly a higher buff overall, but with more noise in the system: a jump from a D4 to a D6: a +2 potential buff, from a D4 to a D8: a +4 potential buff if it's realized in the attack roll. This of course also will interact with damage too though -if that's a concern.

In this way gunnery skill could be able to be ditched altogether if it was really a design goal: Gammas use a D4 ADB if unsupported, a D6 if supported by at least 2 other ships, and a D8 if supported by 3 or more. This also decouples it from Regen so it doesn't affect that subsystem's point value calculation.

Lastly, I'd abstract the gammas from their miniatures in the rules stating that they are not to scale with the betas & alphas and note one miniature represents 3-5 and depict them as such in the artwork to push the swarm angle to the limit. In a perfect world, they would have redesigned tiny miniatures and assemble on a tree or clear acrylic platform and truly take on a swarm form to the eye, but that's a topic for another day.