Re: [Epic] SM Chaos

From: Andy Skinner <askinner_at_...>
Date: Fri, 13 Feb 1998 08:14:04 -0500

Chris Miller wrote:

[whack]

> SM/TL was a good
> game that was fairly popular in the U.S. - maybe not as much as Fantasy or
> 40K, but sold a lot better than many other companies flagship products. E40K
> is a good game also, but it was presented as an evolution of SM/TL which it
> is not -

I didn't have that impression at all. "It's war on a whole new scale!"
New? I thought they made a big point of ignoring that there had been a
previous game.


>if they'd revised the existing system, people would have groused
> but not quit. Froma gamer's point of view, many people would say they mad a
> mistake.

I wonder what they could have done. I like suppression being added to
the
game, and I like the parts that seem to play faster. Would adding those
in
to the old game work? (In other words, make them feel like a real part
of
the game, not a hack added in.) I like the chance to shoot midway
through
a charge. I'd have been happy for them to make detachments on Charge
orders
move one regular move in the movement phase and again in the close
combat
phase, allowing First Fire units to whack 'em in between. (Or even to
move
the close combat phase after Advanced fire, but that's because I'm not
that partial to close combat.) I'm sure they could have added new army
creation rules, but it isn't clear that they could have done that well
and still have the old army cards come out with the right points. I
think they needed to fix the problem with initiative, maybe alternating
detachments during the movement phase.

But the biggest question for me is could it have been made faster?
Maybe
abstracting out a bit the rules for declaring targets. To say "this
detachment
shoots at that detachment" only really works if the guns have similar
effects
(like FP), but I think something maybe could have worked out. With the
variation
in to-hit numbers and damage mods, it complicates it. Just one or the
other,
and maybe you could use different color dice for each kind of shot, and
still
rolled them all as one.

andy

-- 
Andy Skinner
askinner_at_...
Received on Fri Feb 13 1998 - 13:14:04 UTC

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