Balancing the Grimdark Future (and the Age of Fantasy) - Pt. 3 (Patreon)

Hi everyone,

Continuing with our updates about the new balance changes, here are the last few points I'd like to discuss. I'm sure that I'll come up with more stuff to tell you about later, so this will be a short one for now. :)

Automatic Hits & Automatic Wounds

Since the beginning of our games we had a lot of special rules that would deal automatic hits or automatic wounds, usually something like "unit takes 2D6 automatic hits" or "unit takes D3+1 automatic wounds".

Whilst those are nice because they allow for a very straight-forward effect for your special rules, they are hard to balance when everything else in the game needs to be rolled for.

Even though we had a point cost associated with automatic hits and wounds, they still didn't feel very fair to us when everything else always fails on a roll of 1 for example.

In order to mitigate this we're going to be removing (almost) all instances of automatic hits and automatic wounds, and instead replace them for a die roll of some sort.

So for example if a rule used to be "deal 3 automatic hits" it might now say "on a 2+ deal 3 automatic hits". Note that for spells this isn't going to change, because you are already rolling for spells.

When it comes to automatic wounds those are being streamlined into hits with AP(4), so now you still have a chance to save against them. For example a spell that said "deal 1 automatic wound" would now say "deal 1 automatic hit with AP(4)".

This is also going to apply to other rules like rending, instead of saying "on a roll of 6 the hit can only be blocked on a 6" it will instead say "on a roll of 6 the hit gets AP(4)". This is just to keep things a little more consistent.

Lowering Randomness

Another thing that we noticed when going through the armies again is that there are too many situations where there are random rolls that can cause the same rule to be either completely useless or extremely powerful.

In order to mitigate this we're going to be lowering randomness as much as we can, so most special rules will now just give you an effect instead of having to roll for it, and stuff that used to deal DX hits will now just deal X hits.

For example a rule that said "on a 4+ the unit gets furious" might now just simply be "the unit gets furious", or a spell that said "deal D6 hits" will now say "deal 4 hits".

We hope that by lowering the amount of randomness there is in the game your units will now behave more like you expected them to behave, and we will lower the amount of luck there is in the game.

So yeah, no more rolling a 2 on a powerful firestorm spell, but also no more rolling a 12 either. ;)

Streamlining Melee Combat

For those of you that have been paying attention to the forum this is something we've been talking about for a while now, but there are a couple of small changes coming to melee in order to streamline things further.

In order to lower the amount of steps that are part of melee we're going to be changing the following rules:

Fear - This will now give you +D3 wounds to melee resolution and we're going to be lowering the amount of units that have access to it. This way things are more balanced and you don't have to roll to see if the unit fails its morale test.

Furious - This will now give you +1 attack when charging, using the special rules of a weapon of your choice. This way you can just roll your furious attacks as part of your regular attacks.

Impact - This will remain unchanged, however we're going to be lowering the amount of units that have access to it. This way we don't have as many situations where you have to roll an extra set of impact hits.

So that's it, three small changes that will hopefully speed up things!

Grimdark Future - Wave 1 Completed

Since the last update we've gone ahead and completed all wave 1 armies for GF, which you can find here: http://onepagerules.proboards.com/thread/1379/wave-grimdark-future-layout-previews 

Honestly this was more work than I expected it to be since I wanted to re-think a lot of the stuff that's in the game. Also the fact that just the Battle Brothers + Detachments have 8 armies worth of units doesn't help. :D

Anyway, now that I'm done with GF I'll move onto AoF, and then I'll quickly copy them for the Firefight/Skirmish version. I don't think I'll be able to release this all by Thursday's update, but next week wave 1 could be completed.

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That's it for today, make sure to check out the new army updates!

Cheers,

Gaetano