07-11-2022, 02:39 AM | #1 |
Join Date: May 2012
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CW 6e Equipment Tech Level and Avaiiability Ratings
I 've build an UNOFFICIAL spreadsheet that divides all of the CW6e equipment into technology levels that tell you where the equipment can be obtained or repaired. This is designed to facilitate campaign games where the players may find themselves in e.g. a small town in the middle of nowhere, and asking themselves very important questions like "Is there a shop here who can repair my shot-up Betatron? Or at least sell me some steel plate to weld over the holes from our last fight?"
The spreadsheet can be found at this link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing The weapons are divided into Technology Levels, a la GURPS, with a tab on the spreadsheet for each tech level. I've used the GURPS Tech Levels as a base, but the descriptions are modified to more clearly sort the equipment by the types of materials and precision of the engineering involved, to more clearly tell you whether you can reasonably expect to be able to purchase or repair the item in a settlement of that size.
Additionally, I've given each Tech Level some additional capability attributes to provide more granularity in the availability of equipment manufacturing and repair capabilities. Eg, what if the garage you're holed up in the rough part of a big city doesn't have hoists for moving large pieces of equipment around? What if the refugee camp's only welder is on the fritz? Each piece of equipment has been given a Y if its manufacturing or repair requires a certain capability. If a piece of equipment has a Y under that attribute, a facility will need that capability to build or repair it:
Last edited by HeatDeath; 07-11-2022 at 09:51 AM. |
07-11-2022, 04:04 AM | #2 |
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Bellevue, WA, USA
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Re: CW 6e Equipment Tech Level and Avaiiability Ratings
HeatDeath,
Thank you for posting your apocawesome Tech Level Rules for Car Wars 6E. They should also be useful when designing arena combat tournaments. You may be interested in Tech Level Rules for Car Wars 4E by Tony Kontes, rules that might be able to be exported to Car Wars 6E. Boneheadz Command Center http://boneheadzcommand.blogspot.com Tech Levels in Car Wars https://boneheadzcommand.blogspot.co...r-wars_20.html Boneheadz Command Center October 20, 2013
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Michael P. Owen Seattle Washington Autoduel Team https://www.seanet.com/~owenmp/swathome.html Twitter: Car Combat Central https://twitter.com/carcombat |
07-11-2022, 05:12 AM | #3 |
I do stuff and things.
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: CW 6e Equipment Tech Level and Avaiiability Ratings
ADMIN NOTE: This is unofficial, and the game does not deal in "tech levels" or any of the suggestions made here. That said, definitely have fun with things! We just don't want to confuse new players who open the rules and wonder where the tech level rules are hiding.
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07-11-2022, 08:15 AM | #4 |
Join Date: May 2012
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Re: CW 6e Equipment Tech Level and Avaiiability Ratings
Post edited to make it's unofficial nature clearer. Thank you Phil.
Yeah, in addition to serving as a framework for RPG repair and replacement rules, a cool thing you can do with this with immediate application to your game is to use the TL lists to build thematic cars from various TL factions by restricting your equipment to a given TL or below. The fun thing is they'll still be balanced against each other via build points! E.g. a melee-heavy TL5 Wasteland Raider against a TL9 drone vehicle from the former-Tesla-Gigafactory AI Hive! The possibilities are endless! Last edited by HeatDeath; 07-11-2022 at 09:03 AM. |
07-11-2022, 02:06 PM | #5 |
Join Date: Dec 2007
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Re: CW 6e Equipment Tech Level and Avaiiability Ratings
Did that in NOVA back-when -- one of our more-genocidally-minded types designed a "drone" car for wiping out dreg-gangs without having to worry about "morality" of the crews. (I was playing the dregs; let's just say: It went *very* badly for him. >:) )
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07-11-2022, 03:28 PM | #6 |
Join Date: May 2012
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Re: CW 6e Equipment Tech Level and Avaiiability Ratings
There's a chilling piece of short fanfic somewhere in the Ogre forum about an escaped spy having blended into a stream of refugees, an underling worried that the soldiers might not want to fire on the refugees to get the spy, and an evil general remarking casually that having an Ogre under his command makes that a solvable problem.
[EDIT: Ha! Found it! Post 24 on this page: http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread...efugees&page=3 ] There's a temptation to think that differing tech levels between combatants should make for a one-sided curbstomp. An Ogre vs. a tank battalion defending a refugee column, or a TL9 drone car vs. a wasteland Raider. The higher tech level should just win, we think - it shouldn't even be a contest. But all that means is that the scenario wasn't balanced correctly. One of the beautiful things about 6e is the rigorous mathematical foundation of the build system makes for units that are so finely balanced, that you can quite easily partition the equipment into tech levels but still have balanced duels. And that's interesting to me. The tech levels I have delineated above are purely thematic and fluff - they don't affect the game at all. A 10BP TL9 drone car will remain balanced against a 10BP TL5 raider. And that's a good thing. Last edited by HeatDeath; 07-11-2022 at 03:38 PM. |
07-12-2022, 01:52 PM | #7 | |
Join Date: Dec 2007
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Re: CW 6e Equipment Tech Level and Avaiiability Ratings
Quote:
For ex.: The battle was played out on the original Midville maps -- which included a department store. My side rigged the old store mannequins to look like a cluster of dregs hiding in the building. The drone came thundering up, rammed through the wall -- and plunged straight through the strategically-weakened floor into the basement filled with "dragon's teeth" obstacles. Also: Have you ever noticed how much a typical streetside storm drain looks like a slit-bunker? I have. I had my troops shooting from those; the TH penalty to shoot at them was *huge*. And the less said of the AV Crossbows shooting "Bangalore Torpedo" bolts (the 2' bolt described in _Chassis & Crossbow_, loaded with homemade Plastique).... End Result: I was able to annihilate his $500,000 force using maybe $50,000 in gear, through superior strategy and tactics. "Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've created...." >;)
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"Dale *who*?" 79er The Jeremy Clarkson Debate Course: 1) I'm Right. 2) You're Wrong. 3) The End. |
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07-12-2022, 05:00 PM | #8 |
Join Date: May 2012
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Re: CW 6e Equipment Tech Level and Avaiiability Ratings
[Replying in Older Editions forum.]
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07-16-2022, 01:08 PM | #9 |
Join Date: May 2012
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Re: CW 6e Equipment Tech Level and Avaiiability Ratings
So last night I finally bindered my last set of cards. My 4th binder - green - is arranged by tech levels with dividers, and sorted by weapon, type, upgrades, accessories, sidearms and gear within each tech level, except for TL5, which is more broadly sorted offensive, defensive, maneuverability, and TL8, which is sorted as everything else, then lasers.
I really like the way just that little bit of fluff about each component - the tech level and special requirements for manufacture an repair - really feel like they bind the build system back into the game world - gives everything just a little more context, ya know? To hear tell, apparently the early design of 6e went a little bit down the rabbit hole with worldbuilding and factions and tech levels and equipment availability and all that sort of thing early in the development, and then [and rightly so] retreated from that mostly to deliver what ended up being a really well-balanced set of equipment available without restrictions to all players in all basic games. But it's still nice to be able, now that they've got a very solid game system into everyone's hands, to go back and add some of that fluff as an optional layer. Last edited by HeatDeath; 07-16-2022 at 01:34 PM. |
07-16-2023, 01:27 PM | #10 |
Join Date: Oct 2021
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Re: CW 6e Equipment Tech Level and Avaiiability Ratings
I love this tech level and availability ratings idea.
By the way, I needed to simplify the attributes down to single letter for abbreviated display in some places, so I came up with these: ┌───┬───────────────────── │ L │ Large ├───┼───────────────────── │ W │ Welding ├───┼───────────────────── │ P │ Precision Machining ├───┼───────────────────── │ M │ Advanced Materials ├───┼───────────────────── │ E │ Electronics ├───┼───────────────────── │ H │ High Power Density ├───┼───────────────────── │ C │ Exotic Chemistry ├───┼───────────────────── │ N │ Nanotech ├───┼───────────────────── │ S │ Advanced Software └───┴───────────────────── A single card can have multiple, of course. Hope they make sense. |
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