Re: FnordCon Update
The armor (thus far) is equal on all sides, which makes forward mounted weapons a considerably less great of a tactic.
A driver and gunner are pretty much standard, so two weapon shots per firing (unless someone has offed one of them).
Weapon placement tactics are... different because of this. Mind you, I've only had 5 prototype games thus far and all 4 player (guess who spent nearly all weekend at the Car Wars tables).
Lining up a shot is a bit different than it used to be. It definitely exists and can be one of the biggest factors between success and failure. Those who are used to the mechanics around that sort of play will have an edge.
Given the armor, crew, and weapon situation, the best way to line up shots is often along the diagonals, allowing two sides of weapons to bear on a target and easy shifting of sides to soak up hits.
And speed is the single biggest defense in the game. At least in the prototype sets. You got a yellow defense die * your speed setting (0-5) to start with. A steel plate on the same side gave you an extra yellow die. The yellow dice have 2 shield markers on them. There was also one of the driver cards that added two green dice (single shield each) to the defense rolls.
You could reroll one die for range (every turn stick past the first one was a reroll). You could also reroll a die by spending an 'ace' token.
There was also some free shields if there was an object (like another car) blocking part of the shot.
One place that sucked on defense was that if you lost control you also didn't get to roll any of your dice for speed.
But that was it on the defense rolls. Anything not shrugged off like that gets applied to armor first and if you ran out of armor you got to draw from the internal hits deck, which was a card indicating how to allocate any remaining damage.
One thing that was apparent though was on the small battlefields, staying at speed 5 all the time was tantamount to suicide. I *did* try the tricked out high speed car in one of the design our own games. Alternating between a speed of 3 and 5 courtesy of a couple of items (that I personally think were underpointed) and being tactical in my use of ace tokens that game proved very effective against the other players - two of the cars were nearly trashed and the third had a breach on one side. My own car was only down a couple of points of armor on any side - and while I didn't have the heaviest weapons, they were heavy enough.
One other observation from the games (which I brought to Randy's attention to watch out for) - your best target is usually the player seated to your right. Why? Because you can change speed immediately before your move, and then make your moves. This can have a massive impact on the positioning and who can fire at whom (all moves are done before anyone fires). In the case of the player on your right, you will move after that player three turns out of four, giving you a big edge in determining the final position of your cars relative to one another... and which weapons both of you can use on each other.
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Dynamax Designs, Designing quality since 2035.
Watch your handling and remember to Drive Offensively!
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