So I've had T&T about a month now and have been playing it on a weekly basis. It's proven quite popular with my local sci-fi and fantasy -oriented gaming group, who were already casual fans of WoG. A number of them have now bought into T&T and/or expanded their collection of WoG planes with an eye towards playing more. That's great!
I was interested in discussing a couple things:
- How are you balancing your games? Meaning, how many tripods to how many airplanes, and how do you account for the different capabilities of the tripods and planes?
- Which scenarios are you playing? This is tightly related to the first question, as we've found that, depending on the scenario played, the balance can swing pretty wildly one way or another.
Our experiences:
We pretty quickly found that the objective based scenarios - like "First Spark" and similar, where the Tripods are tasked with destroying objectives and then walking off the Earthling side of the board - were extremely difficult for planes to win, even against a single Locust or similar. We found the Tripods could basically just ignore the planes, focus on destroying the objectives, and usually manage without too much difficulty to get off the board without much issue.
We were using the objective placement as described in the scenario description, on a playing surface consisting of two official WoG mats placed long-edge to long-edge (so roughly 90cm x 90cm, the size proposed in the scenario rules).
The resulting games were sort of non-interactive, in the sense that the planes were desperately trying to attack the Tripods, but despite causing some damage, mostly just flailed away as the Tripods easily walked between objectives and destroyed them without trouble before sauntering (scuttling?) off the board.
Our solution (so far): we then tried a simple dogfight scenario, where there was 1 objective per Tripod, with the objective not counting for victory conditions but serving instead as a recharge point for the Tripods. The goal for each side (Earthlings and Martians) was to destroy the other side completely.
We balanced the Tripods' sum of hitpoints + energy against a corresponding quantity of airplane hitpoints.
Example: if the Tripods used a Squid (12 HP / 6 Energy) and a Cuttlefish (20 HP / 10 Energy), we'd balance against roughly the same HP total for airplanes, so roughly 45-50 HP (i.e. in a recent game, a Sopwith Snipe 16 HP, a Fokker E.V 15 HP, and an Albatros D.III 14 HP)
Obviously, this is abstracting a lot, and is just our attempt at getting to rough parity in a scenario where mutual annihilation is the goal. In a scenario where the Tripods were attempting to destroy objectives and walk off the board, I'd expect you'd need even more airplanes to balance out the game (i.e. to be able to inflict enough damage fast enough to reasonably have a chance for the planes to win).
How are the rest of you getting on? Are you using scenarios in the book, are you creating your own, and above all, how are you figuring out balance?
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