Listening: Runaway - Artist vs. Poet.
Deimos is a space-based miniature wargame designed on the principle of personalisation in your fleet and as such there are very few template units to choose from (think 2 per ship class). Comprehensive design rules allow the creation of very personal fleets tailored exactly to your play style. This customisation factor allows every battle to be different, No tactic will ever stand because there is always an opponent who has the set-up to beat it. This means that the game has a very high replay value.
There are 2 types of single ship, fighters and bombers. 5 Medium ships, Escorts, Corvettes, Gunships, Hunters and Frigates, battle each other but only harass the bigger ships. Destroyers, Carriers, Cruisers, Battleships and Sunships are between 20 and 40cm long on the board, with batteries of hard-hitting, powerful weapons that flare across the void.
The weapons also allow for a degree of tactics that is not usually present in wargames. Space would not give weapons a maximum range, so any weapon can be fired across the board, including dumb-fire weapons (or straight-line). The enemy can either move out of the way or take the blow across his line. 2 missile types, Orion and Tempest, speed away from the ships, accelerating quickly and causing untold destruction across the enemy line unless intercepted by fighters, drone defences or escorts. Beam and Lance weapons are the more powerful, capital ship only weapons, with lances being a single, very powerful shot and beams being multiple but less powerful shots not quite adding up to the same damage. The final weapon is an EMP generator which can disable 3 targets in any line it can fire on.
Except for the Hunter cannon. One of the most devastating weapons that any army can deploy, the Hunter cannon takes 10 turns to charge, making the hunter a nice target for the bigger ships to blow out of the (metaphorical) water. If you allow it to charge, however, it can take out a battleship. Single shot.
Deimos is shaping up very nicely. Any design ideas are welcomed. Please comment, stuff gets pushed off the bottom of the talk box and we'll miss it.
DJ Trigon, going back to my rules-writing.
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Last call for regret and defeat
To finish the bottle full of empty dreams
Punch strong head that was straight out of line
Another excuse with no alibi
Hitching on the road of decline
With no name streets and no vital signs
I pissed away the best of me and
No one can help me!
To finish the bottle full of empty dreams
Punch strong head that was straight out of line
Another excuse with no alibi
Hitching on the road of decline
With no name streets and no vital signs
I pissed away the best of me and
No one can help me!
im gonna hazard a guess that
ReplyDeletethe smaller the ship the faster it can move?
because it could work like that
bar 1-2 big ships moving fast
and how does health work
movement?
defence drones?
upgrades?
I could post all 7 pages of the rules, and I haven't got Needles' movement in there, almost nothing on combat either. Only the weapon descriptions and the design rules for everything up to escorts and half of corvettes. I do not have the time nor the inclination to post a half-done and constantly changing work.
ReplyDeleteSorry to rant. But you'll forgive me if I left out some detail.
No, the bigger a ship is the better engine it has and the faster it can move. There's no air or water resistance here.
Health is a number based on the ship's class. The base shield has the same health unless you upgrade it or focus it. Focusing takes shield power away from the other arcs of the ship (forward, left, right, rear) and puts it into one arc to power the shield up.
Upgrades are put into slots depending on the hull you choose when designing. On a corvette hull you might have 5 weapon slots, 1 shield slot, 2 engine slots and 2 misc slots. Misc slots can be used for anything - so you could technically have 5 weapons. though it would be more sensible to put 1 towards engine so you can upgrade that to Mk3 and 1 to shields.
Defence drones are counted as a weapon. They are mounted on the bigger ships and can be launched at 5, 10 or 15 drones a turn depending on the size of the launcher. There is obviously a maximum.
Movement is determined by the power of your engine. This (thanks Needles) is a 3-point value: Turn/Power/Max. The first is how many degrees (approx) out of 90 you can change heading in a turn. the second is your ability to change your speed. So you could go from stop, to 20, to 40, but you could not stop without going for 20 another turn then. All measurements are in cm.
Btw: That speed of 20 is only for the biggest and second-biggest ship in the game. The smaller ships have much more practical speeds.
Trigon
Holy crap. That was almost as long as my original post.
ReplyDeleteyeah it was
ReplyDeletewhen you say practical speeds
do you mean faster or slower
because smallish but fast ships would be cool
justifiable by larger engine on smaller ship
=less weight to pull by the engine
Practical is slower in this case.
ReplyDeleteSmallish but fast ships are cool and used in popular fiction, however in reality the larger mass of the ship is offset completely by the amount of engine space available on a larger ship. Besides, the larger ships have antimatter drives, the smaller ones are still on fusion. So the big ones would go faster anyway.