Domains at War

I won't be able to get back to the game until tomorrow. Not sure when exactly, but I'll find some time.

So, now that we know Jagtai can't use arrows at point blank range against heroes, this has raised some more questions. Do heroes have facing? Can they benefit from flanking each other? Do they become disordered? (It seems odd for one woman to be able to become disorganized) If a hero was serving as a lieutennant, and their unit is destroyed, do they immediately roll initiative, or continue to act on their commander's?

1) Yes, heroes have facing. They follow all the rules for movement and attacks except where otherwise noted.

2) Yes, they can become disordered from charging. (The origin of the Disordered condition is the ACKS rule that states that combatants suffer a -2 AC penalty when they charge. This is the primary way that heroes would get disordered.) Heroes do not become disordered from damage, however, since they never take unit hit points of damage. "A unit becomes disordered as soon as damage is dealt to it." 

3. During the round when the hero's unit is destroyed, the hero would still be activated during his commander's phase. Starting next round he would become independent, as if he'd detached. (Note that a typical lieutenant would not qualify as an independent hero in a brigade-scale game.)

 

Oh shoot, I hadn't checked whether the lieutenants actually qualified! Well, that solves that. Thanks Autarch!

Hey bobloblah any idea when you'll be able to get back to this?

​ I'd like to get back to it, but it's been crazy between the holidays, a bout of the flu that I'm still suffering from, and trying to finish the edit for Guns of War and Lairs & Encounters. I'll try and get on this afternoon, but if not it'll be a couple days yet.

Far be it from me to pester someone dying of the plague! Take all the time you need, just let me know when you're ready again.Also, whoo, guns of war! I'm very excited for that.

Whoo, we're back in business! I took the liberty of rolling init for both sides, and two fun things happened:

 

First, Baal won init against Valanna, so Red gets to hit Blue again. I considered having my archers shoot the crap out of that disordered Light Infantry #2 in hopes of deleting it entirely, since it can't withdraw while disordered, but instead opted to surround Valanna. She's got a relatively low morale, so if I can destroy her unit, she may well flee the field. Unfortunately, my archers do extremely poorly, and the first one whiffs entirely. The second one scores two hits on the flank, which is respectable, but in moving up that far exposes him.

Baal moves up, his massive armored phalanx rolling SIX dice against a disordered enemy! He scores exactly one hit, enough to force shock! Valanna's terrible leadership, combined with the natural cowardice of light infantry, means they'll rout on anything lower than an 8.

She gets an 11. Which becomes a 6 with the modifiers, so she just scootches back a step. Baal follows. Baal's other phalanx scores exactly one hit too, but I'm waiting on Bloblah to find out if they withdraw. Ultimately, Baal's great init roll has yielded little. It probably would've been wiser to delay until after her, and then counterattack. The good news is that the Jutlanders are getting really close now! They're going to participate real soon, I can feel it!

Meanwhile, on the other side of the map, Jagtai has outrolled Tarkaun and Mennic by the grace of nuffle. That means he'll get to go first, which is a VERY interesting prospect. I might get to see those elephants charge! I can't see anything Danir or Valanna can do about that.

Let's do the math real quick: An elephant gets four tusks at 8+, and 3 tramples at 3+. On a charge, everything is +2. We'll also be charging into a flank, so that's another +2. They've got 6 AC. That means in real terms, I'm looking at four 10+ and three 5+. That means I can reasonably expect two lance hits and at least two trample hits, and like all lance charges, buying one gets you one free, so that's a total of five hits, or 20 damage. As a medium value! That's three hits away from total destruction. The second charge could well finish his unit off, if I can just find someone else to charge it. 

Those elephants are getting deleted though. Mennic is going to explode elephants, because he's the Thomas Edison of his generation. They will suffer his fury knowing they did their duty though, so #worth.

Overall, I think I'm very well poised to take the match, so it looks like this will be a big success for my ego. It's also been a big success in terms of learning the rules, because we've had a number of great conversations about "wait, HOW does that work?" most of which made it onto the thread. Seven to eight more of these, and I'll feel comfortable running against my players.

Agreed on the learning the rules. This match has made me realise how badly we mangled them the first time I tried this scenario right after getting Domains at War.

I've started work on constructing a battle scenario. For this one, I'm interested in playing with weird unit types, so I'm having it be a crossbreeding wizard versus a necromancer wizard.

It turns out creating custom units is a damn nuisance! That's okay though, because I'm making cavalry out of ghouls riding giant black widows. It'll be worth it.

It always seems like too much work until you imagine them coming over a hill through smoke and fire to the dulcet tones of Wagner.

I'd like to see the build process and end result if it's not too much trouble to post.

 

I just posted the end result over in the homebrew forum! I thought about recording the build process, but my screen kept filling up. The most surprising thing to me is that per-unit, the ghouls have a significantly higher BR than black widow spiders, so making them into cavalry actually waters them down into a lower BR unit.

The other surprising thing is that because there are so many mulitipliers, if you miscalculate even one variable, you can easily end up doubling the final result.

There's an error in the published BR for Ghouls, I believe; you might want to recalculate it from scratch.

I did! That does explain a lot about the published stat though.
 

So, as Blobloblah and me finish up our game of the basic scenario, does anyone have a custom scenario they'd like to contribute? I'm tinkering with a siege right now, but I have no idea how to balance it so it's slow going. (That's one of my favorite things about ACKS is that nothing is really supposed to be "appropriate." Bad things just show up in all sizes and the PCs pick fights with the ones they think they can do and flee in terror from the ones they're not sure about.)

Susan, if you'd like I could share my nascent rules on point-buy values and you could start playtesting them.

 

That sounds excellent! I'd love to. I'd been using BR as point-buy in constructing my current scenario, but I wasn't sure how to account for things like wizards, lieutenants, and trebuchets.

I'm working on one with Zombies! that I wouldn't mind playtesting with other folks together or independently.

 

So, having thoroughly read the rules for zombies, they're actually not too complicated. They just *need* a necromancer to exist, and if they have one, they don't have morale.

 

That said, wow, they're sturdy! Zombies offer a big chunk of hitpoints that will never, ever let you down. Sure, they have no AC, but that's a small price to pay for being able to survive fifteen attacks no matter what. If you're already an evil wizard, you could do worse than having an undead honor guard.

Hey Bloblah, were you still interested in finishing this game?