After ten battle reports, I think it is time to finish the Battle for Zorpel campaign. A few thoughts about the campaign and the tools presented in Five Core 2:
The campaign system is good, with its random events and character advancement. The campaign progress system may result in quite long campaigns if you play until one side reaches 10 progress points. During these 10 battles, it fluctuated between -2 and 2.
The mission generator is great. The board setups that I ended up playing were quite different from each other and different from what I would have made on my own. I barely used the force generator but I can see them both used together to create very different one-shot games.
The character classes and skills add detail and variety to the forces and worked really well in this campaign, in which each side had 3-4 figures.
Despite all of these tools, I should have worked more on the background of the campaign. The general setting (directly inspired by Legions of Steel) gave some meaning to the battles but they still felt disconnected. A region map with settlement locations etc. might have helped.
Likewise, an outline of the colonial forces and maybe a detailed description of a few recurring characters (instead of an unlimited supply of new grunts replacing the losses) might have made the battles more meaningful.
The two battles fought using MapTool worked well (even if they did not look pretty). Now that I have learned how to rotate tokens in small increments (using Control+Shift+Mouse wheel) I have to try playing games with element bases in it.
5 comments:
It's been a long ride huh :-)
Glad you generally liked the campaign. If you could add or change 3 things?
Yeah, it was fun! The changes/additions (although only 2 of them):
- Add a bit more of a snowball effect on progress points. The progress thresholds have this function but I'm not sure it is enough. I was thinking about the "milestone reached" random event... maybe after a milestone, missions are worth more progress?
- Alternatively, have another way to determine if a mission has priority (and thus is worth more points). Maybe something based on number of missions played or number of missions since the last priority mission.
Both good calls. I like your thinking. Let me ponder.
It's been fun and interesting to read your reports!
(and your afterthoughts about the rules)
Thanks for the comment, Fitz-Badger!
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