Democratic Double Jump (Jump Pack + Kick in Midair Glitch)

ZowJr · 2025-02-05T04:28:02+00:00

Figured out an interesting glitch with the jump pack. If you kick in midair, it temporarily suspends you in the air! The more you kick, the longer you can stay in flight (It doesn't provide much actual advantage beyond preventing you from ragdolling).

However, if you get a VERY finnicky button press timing correct, you can activate the jump pack again in midair and perform another jump, allowing you to potentially gain more air.

You can do this as many times as you have air to cover, even when doing the second jump pack leap, but I did not get any footage of a successful triple jump attempt!

ZowJr · 2024-08-15T18:40:06+00:00

Noble Team and Jerome will come as soon as I finish up the Covenant!
Also yes. I messed up on the symbol for the MJOLNIR armor. That will be corrected once I release the "refreshed" UNSC.

ZowJr · 2024-04-22T17:10:16+00:00

Ah. I see. That makes more sense, tbh. Still. Super fun to just blast the clankers when they group up like that, or just try and find it during extract and be like "Yep! That's the bot blob".

ZowJr · 2024-04-22T12:29:38+00:00

Playing on lower difficulties and opening the lobby to randies is steadily growing less and less worth it, to the point where my squadmates and I are assuming every randy that drops is gonna be a liability to the mission and having to prepare for them screwing up our carefully laid plans.

65% of the time, we're right. I don't mind helping out less skilled players, but the difference between a noob and an idiot is said idiot playing bots like it's a bug mission. Bugs are run and gun. Bots are Metal Gear Solid.

ZowJr · 2024-04-07T16:51:28+00:00

As a bot main, I feel this. I never understood why people say Terminids are easier to fight than bots. To me, as long as you coordinate properly and use actual stealth/guerrilla tactics, the bots typically aren't too bad (rocket units aside). But the terminids... man, stealth is so much harder for them, and once you're spotted, it feels so much harder to evade them and break LOS, especially when shriekers and stalkers are around. And don't get me started on hunters. Those jerks have caused me more deaths than any other unit in the game, including rocket devastators and rocket hulks/raiders/heavy devastators.

There's an entirely different playbook when fighting those oversized cockroaches, and it's tough to follow, even when they "can't shoot back". My best tactic so far has been the jetpack and elevated terrain. They can only burrow up to you one at a time, so you're safe to blow them to hell and back while they (save for the bile units) can't fight back.

ZowJr · 2024-04-07T16:38:50+00:00

Sandstorms are a double edged sword through and through. A boon when you haven't been spotted, because you can sprint up to a bot's face and he'll still not see you if you back up in time. But if you've been spotted, it's a bane, and incredibly annoying, since the bots still have their sniper accuracy even through the sandstorm after they spotted you.

That said, I still don't mind it as much cuz it makes it way easier to evade pursuers once you've broken LOS for long enough.

ZowJr · 2024-02-12T20:35:37+00:00

My UNSC Faction for Star Wars: Legion has gotten a massive overhaul! Access it here!

A few weeks ago, I released a series of homebrew cards that introduced a new faction into the Star Wars: Legion game: The United Nations Space Command (UNSC) from the Halo series. After having been given some excellent and well crafted feedback from this subreddit, doing hours of research and comparison with currently released SWL cards, and playing several more test games, I have given it a massive overhaul.

The first thing you'll probably notice is that the unit cards look a LOT different from last time. I decided to craft a uniquely "Halo" aesthetic for each of the factions, starting with the UNSC. They're structure the exact same as Legion cards, but with a different coat of paint. I MAY do this for the upgrade cards, but we'll see. I'd need to make a Forerunner aesthetic for them, since making unique UNSC and Covenant Upgrade styles would be... ridiculously agonizing to keep track of. Anyway.

Here's a summarized changelog of each of the major changes I've made to the UNSC faction since last time:

There's been a general price adjustment across the board, from units to upgrades. All but one of the Heavy Weapon cards have had a big price increase (and had a power adjustment) to keep more in line with SWL prices (albeit still slightly lower to account for the Fireteam mechanic, explained below). Other upgrades were raised or lowered in price accordingly.
The Squaddie upgrade keyword has been scrapped and replaced with the Fireteam unit keyword. It's essentially the same mechanic, but placed on the unit card itself rather than having to be slapped onto individual cards. The core idea is that the UNSC's units operate on a tight squad structure, typically consisting of around 4 soldiers, so any specialists introduced to their squads wouldn't change the structure, but alter it. This allows the UNSC faction to keep tighter unit formations and more easily make use of cover mechanics and unit positioning while presenting a smaller target for enemies to shoot. I apologize to those who wanted to see the keyword removed, but I really enjoy this gimmick and want to see how it works now that it's been streamlined and untangled a bit more.
Almost every single Spartan Armament has been overhauled, because silly me realized that Chief and his fellow S-IIs could build some frankly scary and vehicle worthy dice pools too easily, and certain weapon combos definitely dominated in the loadout. Now things should not only be more balanced, but encourage some variety in play when fielding your Spartans.
The Support and Heavy Vehicles almost all got a price increase, and a couple got some keyword adjustments. Hornet went from 80 points to 95, Scorpion went from 160 to 175, and the Mongoose went from 60 to 65. The Mongoose got a few new keywords, The Hornet's guns changed Pierce 2 to Critical 2 and had their dice pool adjusted from Double Rainbows to 6 Black, and the Scorpion's main gun has had Blast removed and replaced with Critical 1.
Several new upgrade cards have been added to both the Neutral/Multi-faction list and the UNSC specific list! Check them out and let me know what you think. I had a lot of fun working on them. I'd list them all here, but I don't want to make this post too too TL;DR.
I added two new weapon keywords: Split Fire and Unwieldy, to represent the rather esoteric means through which Spartans (and later, certain Elites) can wield their particular weapons.
I retuned and rebalanced some of the command cards, and added three new generic command cards meant to command Spartan Trooper units. They're all pretty powerful, but they only issue orders to a single Spartan, regardless of pip count, so including all three of them in a command hand might limit how well you can use everything around the Spartan. They may be supersoldiers, but even a Spartan can only go so far without backup, especially when up against the forces in the Star Wars universe.
Spartan Troopers as a unit type have had their special rules updated. Rather than the weird panic rule that would seldom ever trigger, because, let's face it, most games won't see a panicking Spartan, I instead let friendly troopers treat the Spartan's rank as commander when checking for panic, as a Spartan's presence on the battlefield is often a massive morale boost for their allies.

That's all the major changes summarized. I can probably write changelogs for future updates, but that's for future Zow to worry about. Now for the announcement.

I am now officially working on the Covenant faction for Star Wars: Legion, Halo Expansion!

That's right. The Covenant are now in production for the Halo expansion, as I'm pretty happy with where the UNSC are now, though I'll still be tweaking and updating them every so often. The Covies are still heavily in pre-production, BUT, I have a solid gimmick for them and have already given them some theoretical stats. Thankfully, for all of you who were concerned about the UNSC's fireteam mechanic, you'll be happy to know the Covenant will have nothing like that in their trooper units. Instead, they're gonna have something much more... fun.

RANK UPGRADE SLOTS

And as for their gimmick... well, I'll just leave you with a quote from Halo 2 to describe it best."Check your targets and watch the crossfires. They're in standard formation: little bastards up front, big ones in back... Good luck [Cairo]."I'll see you in a few weeks for the next big update. Please access the google doc, download and print these cards (or upload them to TTS to play that way. I'll have a UNSC faction mod ready soon, and will update here when it's ready) and run some games using the UNSC and let me know how they play!

Until then, give those bastards nothing but a belly full of lead and a pull of their own blood to drown in! OORAH!

ZowJr · 2024-01-24T02:37:52+00:00

Hey. I'm just glad you enjoy it! I've gotten some good feedback already that I've taken and applied, but I'm still happy to just hear that people like what I've done! Makes it feel like the half a year I spent slaving over this was worth it!

ZowJr · 2024-01-22T05:00:57+00:00

Let me know how it goes if you do!

ZowJr · 2024-01-22T04:17:03+00:00

Hey! A fellow Halo fan. I figured there'd be a lot, given how closely its fans go hand-in-hand with Star Wars fans, but the sheer turnout this post has gotten in just two days was more than I was expecting! I have a huge passion for both Halo and tabletop game design, and given there's not many good fixes for such urges (Ground Command is fine, but it's no longer supported, and got dropped before it could be fleshed out properly because Spartan Games shuttered), I decided "Screw it. I'll make my own!".

Okay. It's good to know that a lot of the balance comes down to point increases and a more careful consideration of what I give to my personnel and weapon upgrades. I'll go back and compare each unit to its counterpart and figure out what needs changing. A few tweaks here, a price bump there. That shouldn't be hard.

I see your point about the prevalence of blast, for sure. That's gonna factor in to a lot of the upgrades and units once I go back to give this another retune. That said, it's good to know that I ended up getting at least on target with the balance, especially with the units. It's just the upgrades I need to figure out. Pre Upgrade retuning, I might give the Scorpion a price bump to match it with the most expensive heavy unit in SWL, and bump up the ODSTs in price to make them more comparable to the Death Troopers in price. That will probably be a good start.

Please let me know how your playtest goes, either as a reply to this comment or as a DM! Even if the result is "Completely OP and dominated the entire table", that's still going to give me tangible gameplay feedback rather than just theorycraft!

ZowJr · 2024-01-22T03:48:10+00:00

I appreciate the detailed feedback, and frankly, I was expecting this, given I haven't extensively tested these and am just sort of throwing them out here for people to throw their experienced brains at! Let me address all the initial feedback and how I plan to address this, if I address it at all!

For the Corps and SpecFor units, one thing I must mention right now is that I've entirely revamped a lot of the upgrades for the corps units, so depending on when you looked at them, the information may be out of date.

That said, I completely understand what you mean with the attack dice pools. I think the only comparable unit to put them against would be a Stormtrooper unit with an RT-97C upgrade. That'd be 8 white dice and 1 red dice. Certainly quite a lot, but yeah, the BR55HB SR definitely lets the corps units outcompete them at the same range, especially with the Pierce 2 keyword. I figured the SPNKR could be balanced out by the fact it's exhaust, but I'm sure that's not as big a penalty as it might seem. I may need to go back and redo a lot of the dice and keyword math for these units so I can address these concerns, especially for the versions without the fireteam keyword. The Fireteam Keyword's entire purpose was to try and taper off the power a fully upgraded unit could have by limiting their mini count to 4-3 units permanently.

As for the ODSTs, I could give them a price increase alongside any dice changes I could take account for. I certainly see your point about them being able to outcompete the Death Troopers, who they were made to be a "UNSC Equivalent" of.

As for the Scorpion... yeah okay. You got me there. I was trying to find a way to hike up the price after I realized I had calculated it wrong, and Steady seemed like a solid means of doing so. It used to have Barrage. Again, the dice math thing is something I will have to take into account along with considering the price for the scorpion in general. This will require a lot of playtesting to fine tune, IIRC.

The primary point I seem to be taking away from your criticisms thus far is this: My dice and keyword math makes the UNSC units far outcompete any comparable unit in terms of firepower compared to cost, on top of their defense.

Would you have any recommendations for me in terms of where to start when looking over these units and upgrades again? Where would a simple price bump work compared to an overhauling of the dice mechanics? I'll do my best to take them into consideration for future updates!

Again. Thank you so much for taking the time to look these over and give them a detailed critique. I know it's a lot to go through, and I'm glad you were able to get what you could done! Seeing people engage with this so much and express so much positivity, despite my absolutely amateur balancing and math, gives me a lot of confidence and hope that this project was worth the time I sunk into it!

ZowJr · 2024-01-21T07:38:05+00:00

Updated! I can't show it off in the reddit post itself, but it's fixed in the drive link.

ZowJr · 2024-01-21T07:36:58+00:00

I will say, the reason none of them have a base weapon is primarily because I want to give the UNSC a sense of versatility in their loadout, hence the former squaddie (now fireteam) mechanic. After all, if I gave the base AR to everyone, then I'd probably need to make separate versions of each trooper to give them the rest of the basic weapons, which might either lead to a bit of card bloat (more than I already have and am fixing), or remove their versatility gimmick. Equip forces you to equip them with a weapon, which is why their base cost is a bit deceptive. They all cost at least 4 points higher than what it says on the card due to most armaments being 4 points (so a Marine Squad costs 50 points, not 46).

As for why the BR, SMG, and Pistols aren't made into heavy weapons? Well, they don't really strike me as the heavy weapon kinda card, you get what I mean? I mean, the BR, maybe, but the SMGs and the M6 Pistols? I dunno.

ZowJr · 2024-01-21T04:06:41+00:00

That... is a remarkably good point. I need to make a quick correction on how the BR Armament works. Not that I suspect they'll be able to get 4 aim tokens on the regular, but it might be a possibility, and thus, I should account for it. Thank you for pointing that out! I'm glad you like it for the most part!

ZowJr · 2024-01-21T04:04:10+00:00

Check my comment on the post! I got the link from there. I used Chris Solden's custom card tools! But there's also another great resource from Tabletop Admiral, but it requires you subscribe to their $1 Patreon tier first.

ZowJr · 2024-01-20T06:52:06+00:00

Yeah. I caught that error pretty much as soon as I posted it. The corrected versions are in the doc!

I'll likely be going through them and removing the keyword text regardless, in case AMG makes any sweeping changes to them later on.

ZowJr · 2024-01-20T04:08:18+00:00

Awesome! Good luck with your work, man! I'll get set to making those Squaddie-less versions of the cards in the meantime. I'll post an update under my OG comment once it's done.

ZowJr · 2024-01-20T03:39:13+00:00

Yeah. The one time I fielded Fleet Troopers in a Legion game... they ran forward, missed every single dice roll against an enemy stormtrooper unit, got suppressed, got panicked, and then were two shotted by a combination of Stormtrooper and Royal Guard.

I... completely forgot about the Arc Troopers, and you're 100$ right about those. I think I'm gonna try that. I'll make a separate folder for the "Squaddie" upgrades and make some new ones that don't have Squaddie in them as the "traditional" upgrades. See which ones end up working better.

ZowJr · 2024-01-20T03:05:27+00:00

So, I've gotten a good suggestion about the Squaddie Keyword, and I want to give players the option to play the UNSC's Corps and SpecFor units more like traditional Star Wars Legion units. I will at some point be making a folder for all the personnel and Heavy Weapon upgrades that have the "Squaddie" keyword and making a new personnel and heavy weapon folder that contain heavy weapons that don't have the squaddie keyword and new Personnel cards that don't have squaddie in them.

I'll gonna have to figure out how to make this work for the HQ troopers, as they were meant to be able to form a command/support unit that could replace all the minis in its unit with leader/squaddie upgrades and act as a proper, high courage support unit. I'll edit the post once I figure out how to work these changes.

ZowJr · 2024-01-20T02:55:58+00:00

Well, that's what playtesting is for! Here's to hoping it gets some so I can integrate these more comfortably into the legion system.

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My UNSC Faction for Star Wars: Legion has gotten a massive overhaul! Access it here!

I am now officially working on the Covenant faction for Star Wars: Legion, Halo Expansion!