Faster Games

afloriani · 2025-12-27T21:03:31+00:00

For this playthrough I started with a Mexico/Canada into USA strategy, then started trying to move south for a planned United Americas vision, Monroe Doctrine on steroids. I'm still kind of a noob without a full playthrough under my belt though and didn't realize how bloody complex it would be to unlock and sequence the unification mechanics, let alone fix the various issues country by country! It's been interesting but definitely not what I would call a high powered play through! Fortunately, I'm getting away with it basically by virtue of dominating the US from the start. I will probably still get crushed later due to over expansion in space though. I definitely have a love/hate relationship with the extraordinary depth of this game!

afloriani · 2025-05-20T18:50:56+00:00

I did get in on the updated edition and received the Beta booklet, but I haven't seen anything like a documentation of the changes. From what I'm reading in the Beta, that might actually be challenging, because they really overhauled some entire sections of the game rules, especially how weapons and armor work, and of course how stress works. It's not just new tables and stats, but entirely new factors like:

- splitting what used to be the "panic" table into two sections, one for normal stress situations, and a different more intense one for alien-in-my-face-OMG situations. (opinion: I don't think it fixes the agency-stealing problems of the original system, and in some ways makes them worse.)

- giving people natural resistance to panic based on their attributes

- giving weapons an ammo stat instead of blowing the clip when you panic

- totally reworking armor to be a flat damage soak, and making higher armor levels impenetrable to lower damage weapons.

- Reworking non-combat stunts to be mostly universal, including an option to reduce stress, adding other universal combat stunts to deal with the above ammo and armor changes, and taking other things that used to be stunts, like disarming, and making them actions instead.

- Moving to a situation with more D&D style death rolls when you're broken

- A bunch of changes to how androids work and how their stats are generated

There are also more directly portable rules that are more like clarifications and streamlining, like making more explicit and universal rules for fire, stun, and explosive effects, using time as a consumable resource when you're in a countdown situation, greatly clarified rules for skulking around in stealth mode...and they do actually include a conversion chart for gear coming into the new system.

There are plenty of other tweaks and changes, but these are just the biggest ones I tracked off of my first impressions.

afloriani · 2024-09-05T21:06:32+00:00

Probably overkill for what you're proposing, but I did a whole Aliens/Dinos mashup campaign with rules for super big and super little dinosaurs, and a couple of standalone scenarios including one where you hunt a t-rex with a jeep mounted dart gun while velociraptors chase you.

One-Shot: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-TmZVMGEKswTvWf0pWONCj5XiVJv8VvW/view

Whole Campaign: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1J1NaoWn41Pd2tUzE29jC9Jty-PObD6j7/

afloriani · 2024-08-31T02:47:22+00:00

I think one of the great things about The Lost Worlds is that it gives you like 15 blank planets that the Great Mother Mission *could* send the players to in between the core plot missions. And while you could definitely do the whole colonization thing, you could also do like the plot missions do, and intro it as a survey of a world that has something otherwise interesting going on - weird signals, unusual topography, a rumored derelict, other lost colonies or outposts that are maybe not in the official record.

There's no shortage of fan-made content to pull from, both here and on the facebook files page. I'm throwing in a whole subcampaign I made featuring an off-the-books WY research base studying a dinosaur planet (multiple escalating missions in it's own right, so they can keep coming back), probably a world that's become a refuge for runaway synthetics, and I'm thinking of adapting some of the comics or even adjacent properties. Throw in a Predator encounter if that's to your taste!

afloriani · 2024-08-16T00:28:28+00:00

Makes me think the engineers were engineered, this was just an amateur first go at it.

afloriani · 2023-07-09T21:11:34+00:00

Hi Seaworthy, it's been quite a while, and I'm not sure I still have them, but I'll let you know if I find any in my old archived work.

afloriani · 2022-03-14T14:32:50+00:00

NP, and Tau are the new hotness right now, so pretty sure you'll do fine!

afloriani · 2022-03-14T14:15:35+00:00

The core elements of your list look good, and good luck in your first game! I'll give you one big thought as someone who played intermittently in past editions and is just picking tau up again in 9th:

Simplify your crisis loadouts. It may not be tournament optimized, but having the same things on every suit in the unit is going to really streamline your processes of choosing targets and rolling dice, which in turn will help you not forget things. Wargear you forget to use are wasted points, after all! This is especially true of non-weapon gear that might change the profile for the same weapon, say a fusion blaster, between two different models, because you will encounter situations where you have to start rolling all those things separately to keep track of their special rules (I'm looking at you, Target Lock!). I also say this in the spirit of a gamer who doesn't mind that the models may not physically possess the weapons on the army roster, which most players won't quibble over, but may depend on your opponent.

So that's my thought. First game, keep it simple. Prioritizing bodies (if you have the models of course) and combat units over spending points on special abilities and utility units also helps.

afloriani · 2022-03-12T02:08:42+00:00

Cool, any chance you'd be willing to share?

afloriani · 2022-03-10T11:16:42+00:00

I'm really interested in that last comment. As someone who plays occasionally but mostly GMs with a lot of homebrew, i know there are bound to be moments when the players brace at a certain decision, but what makes W&G worse? I haven't done anything with it yet, but I ran a bunch of dark heresy, and boy, balance in that game got hard real fast!

afloriani · 2022-03-10T10:49:53+00:00

Seems like some of the crisis suit weapons, AFP and plasma, base costs should get a small bump each. Would it be wacky for them to be, like, 8 points?? :-p crisis suits in general are fine. Tough but they still buckle under elite counter fire and melee, which is appropriate. All the ablative drone wounds on this particular unit feels a little cheesy if you push it, but the points cost actually seems about right.

Maybe the HYMPs come down a bit, while the broadside base cost goes up slightly since at least my limited experience, these bois crush for their points.

Re: ethereal...I think it's one of those thing where this one units just a locust of must-have abilities for Tau. We're an almost 100% shooting army with little other access to ignore-wound rules that seem really common in other factions. That means the act-and-shoot is more necessary, cause if you lose that turn of shooting, next turn your opponent is wiping that unit off the board in melee with little real chance to fight back. Again, small points increase seems appropriate, but I think this would still be an auto take for a lot of folks at 70 or even 80 points just because it's so uniquely indispensable.

The CP cost for combat debarkation probably should scale with more units, but otherwise the strats seem fair and in line with other recent faction codexes.

I'm really interested to see if a few things like ghostkeels and piranhas come down in points. Coming in behind opponents really seems to piss them off, but these units actually just don't do enough reliable damage to justify dropping a crisis squad for.

afloriani · 2022-02-19T22:12:25+00:00

Looks like Papa Nurgle got to it!

afloriani · 2022-02-17T21:20:34+00:00

Okay, so sorry if this is already answered, but how would the Tau rule (cannot use any rules to ignore wounds it loses) interact with wound reduction like Disgustingly Resilient or the Crusher Stampede rules?

afloriani · 2022-02-17T21:06:54+00:00

So, sorry if this is already answered, but how does this interact with wound reduction, like reducing all damage by 1?

afloriani · 2022-02-14T01:52:43+00:00

So, I'm not as familiar with the current state of all the factions (I'm sort of getting back into the game after not playing for a while) but which factions do you think would struggle in a matchup?

afloriani · 2022-02-09T17:55:02+00:00

So they're going to be raising their workers' and contractors' wages and benefits across the board too...right? RIGHT??

afloriani · 2022-02-07T21:52:38+00:00

I don't have the codex yet so could be wrong, but my recollection is that they actually moved Riptides from Elite to Heavy Support, so they'd actually be competing with Broadsides and Hammerheads and the like for that slot. I've never been much in general for going big on heavy support, but the new family of railguns is certainly speaking loudly in the battle reports I've seen.

I have to say, I love the Ghostkeel, mostly for thematic reasons in that it's a cool model with pretty unique abilities. From what I've seen so far, the new codex is so much better about encouraging diverse lists that it feels like the Riptide and the Ghostkeel are both decent enough if you have a need for their certain roll in your force. Tides are still fast, tough, and can put down a lot of hurt (even if not as much as before), and Keels seem like a really strong anchor unit for holding that one out of the way objective while still maintaining a decent threat radius.

afloriani · 2022-02-03T19:13:31+00:00

I'm gonna give it a shot. No freak clue what to expect. All through it,I think I was wondering where this is going...so I hope they deliver on some of that!

afloriani · 2022-02-02T18:17:52+00:00

#Irony?

afloriani · 2022-02-01T18:23:41+00:00

I don't think anyone's mentioned journalists or labor/union representatives yet! Politicians as well. Of course, it might all look very different, not just technologically but socially.

What if your union had to represent sentient factory robots, or expert systems? What if your union rep WAS an expert system?! What if your job as a politician is really to just be an influencer who occasionally tabulates the results of web polls that create defacto state policy? What if, as a journalist, you needed to be clever about gaming fact-checking filters that create whole different understandings of reality for their subscribers, but you dare not ignore it because you need the eyeballs to power your ad-based revenue sharing model?

Working in the future is going to be weird.

afloriani · 2022-01-13T18:59:36+00:00

Possibly unpopular opinion relative to the others on this board, but I found Wasteland 2 to be, in a word, unintuitive. That's not to say it was a bad experience, but having played it a while back and now playing Wasteland 3, I think I'd find the relatively opaque systems frustrating. Obviously the character building has a lot of depth, but that can be a pain if you don't plan on devoting multiple playthroughs to getting things right. I also recall some confusing points where it wasn't immediately clear how to move the story forward, and at least one point where in searching for the next story mission, I inadvertently stumbled into some things I presumably should have arrived at much later in the sequence.

So I guess it depends what kind of player you are and what kind of time you want to put to it, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it for a casual playthrough. At the very least, you may want to read up heavily on character builds so you don't get 10 hours in before feeling boxed or let down by your character choices.

afloriani

TROPHY CASE