I know what you're thinking. You're asking yourself "Why is this Ironstrider Ballistarii from the year 40,000 CE fighting Roman soldiers in 44 CE?"
Is it a simple matter of a misplaced decimal point? Time travel? A cloned Earth stuck in the past, like System 892 in Star Trek original series? Or is it just a tabletop gamer throwing unlikely opponents onto the same battlefield?
It's the last one.
Playtesting
For months, I was playtesting the rules for a universal (in terms of army types and miniature brands) wargaming system. In the system, weapons are ranked before the game starts, and each player assembles squads limited by the most powerful weapon of each miniature in the squad. Assemble one squad, and you have a skirmish game. Assemble a bunch of squads, and you have an army for a full battle.
The power scale in my game starts at the weakest weapon. In a game of ancient civilizations, that's probably a gladius or kopesh or whatever sword is in popular at the time. Weapons increase in power from there to include spears and pikes and battle axes. In modern or sci fi games, the weakest weapon might be a pistol, with a step up being a rifle, and maybe another step up for a rocket launcher. Even though the game is based on the humble d6, there's no ceiling to how powerful weapons can be because of the game's unique hit and kill system, which are based on double and triple dice results, not on hitting a specific number on the d6.
The game works well enough for me that it's actually the pirmary wargame I play (to be fair, I'm playtesting so it kind of has to be). However, I wanted to strain the limits of what I thought I'd designed.
The first step, a little unintentionally, was to start playing historic armies. The subtle difference between miniatures on a single base and miniatures on individual bases became clear pretty quickly, and not because I was using single squad-sized bases. Even though my miniatures were on individual bases, I was playing the armies as historically accurate as I knew how, and that meant not breaking up a Roman maniple no matter what happened.
With such an unexpected discovery from playing a historical game, I decided to get creative in my playtests. I'm used to trying to break a system during late stage playtests, but what would happen to the game if I tried to break things before the game even started? There's only one way to find out.
Well, I'd been busily painting an 1000 points of Adeptus Mechanicus for Warhammer 40,000. The army concept was a "mostly mech adMech", meaning I have a bunch of Kastellan Robots, Ironstrider Ballistarii, Armigers, and Kataphron Breachers. So I grabbed the models that were battle-ready, assigned them weapon ratings for my game, and let them loose on a Roman Imperial legion (if you count all 20-ish Roman miniatures as a legion, which I do because I'm not dedicated to wargaming enough not to).
The results were not what I'd expected. But I learned three important lessons.
The setup
My battlefield was about 4 feet by 3 feet, with some crumbling walls and gravestones as scatter terrain. I also included an objective on the battlefield, and decided that the goal of the game wouldn't just be to kill the other army but to secure the objective.
In-world, the Romans wanted to prevent the grave of their former princeps from being looted. The knowledge-hungry Adeptus Mechanicus wanted to unearth the battle general for some ancient (alien?) artifact that got buried with him. The Mechanicum exist in 44 CE due to a time travel computer virus that infected a detachment. They intended, begrudgingly, to visit Holy Terra for some useless ceremony and ended up in ancient Rome instead.
1. Know your knobs
First of all, I was reminded of a dial I had available to me when rating weapons. In the game, armour is largely taken for granted, because why would you be on a battlefield without armour? However, granting attack penalties against heavy armour can help weapon ratings from skyrocketing, because penalties are applied to the attack roll, not to the weapon rating. In a game with a squad power limit of 10, the mech player can pretty much have just one mech in each squad, so a Roman maniple with a power rating of 10 theoretically has an equal chance to hit and kill that mech. In practice, of course, there are still advantages the mech has over a maniple of squishy humans, but I found that those advantages reflected "reality" (by which I mean in-game reality). Its movement speed is greater, and it requires more kills to be brought down. The mech is made of ceramite and is four times as tall as a soldier and has a base that's 5 times as large and is radiated and uses autocannons. Then again, it's a single target for a whole maniple of people trying to dismantle it. Get in melee with it, and you just might be able to knock it over or literally disassemble it piece by piece.
The mech should win a fight against even the most ardent hastati, but like a guerilla troop of Ewoks, the Romans ought to have some chance to do the impossible.
2. Army size is important
How's this for a shock: the game was won by Adeptus Mechanicus, but the battle was won by the Romans.
I don't want to go into a full battle report, but by round 3 the Romans had half a cavalry squad and one infantry squad on the battlefield compared to three Adeptus Mechanicus. The cavalry managed to topple the Ironstrider Ballistarii right before getting vaporized by a Kataphron Breacher, but the Roman infantry were close enough to secure the objective by the end of round 4.
From there, the infantry managed to roll well against the two remaining Kataphron Breachers and dispatched both of them (going into melee grants a bonus, and because the base size of a Kataphron Breacher is so large, the bonus of each footsoldier stacked).
The game ended with Romans as the last army standing. In-game, the Romans won, but the goal of the game session was to get the most Victory Points by the end. Because the Mechanicum managed to secure the objective for so many rounds and scored so many kills, they ended the game with 6 Victory Points compared to 5 Victory Points for Rome. In-world, this reflects the fact that the Roman army was unsuccessful at protecting the tomb of their former princeps. During the rounds that the Tech Priests owned the objective, they were able to exhume the princeps.
The lesson here is that when you send three mechs to fight 10 infantry and 8 cavalry, the turn economy and bonuses really start to matter. They may have ]had the bigger guns, but the Adeptus Mechanicus had to make choices about their priorities. In retrospect, the Mechanicum should have played for kills up front, and advanced to the objective in the final round or two. But they underestimated the influence of numbers.
For the record, terrain also played its intended role. I threw in some walls and obstructions that served as cover for the Romans during the advance, and it saved several of their lives and only served to get in the way of the mechs.
3. Little wins
To my surprise, the Romans got a Victory Point in the first round, thanks to the cavalry. They were able to move in and secure the objective quickly, and got cover thanks to the ruins of a nearby wall. Their hold on it didn't last long because the squad got literally stomped on the next round, but once again it showed me how power isn't just the dice you roll.
4. Balance of power
As game designers, we spend a lot of time trying to "balance" a game. I suspect that game balance is one of those things you can't identify until you see it unbalanced. You usually get to see the imbalance by accident as you change things during the design process, but I think there's a lot of value to tipping that scale intentionally once you believe you've gotten it right. OK great, you got it balanced. Now how does it play when somebody ignores all that careful balancing you did?
5. Fun
I'm analysing my own playtest like it was done purely for science. If I'm honest, the actual reason I played Romans against Adeptus Mechanicus is because I thought it would be cool. I like Romans, I like mechs. Why not play both?
And frankly, after months of genuinely tense wargames, it was a lot of fun to play a game I thought was basically predetermined. It didn't turn out the way I thought it would, but it was so much fun to play out the Roman army and its tenacity and fearless dedication and tirelessly regimented strategy. In fact, it was just as fun as playing (from the Roman perspective, anyway) the god of war himself, the hand of the Omnissiah, the Tech Priests of Mars.
Which means, I guess, in a way, everybody was a winner in the end.
More importantly, though, it demonstrates the value of illogical, irrational, outside-the-box playtesting. And also, that playtesting is playing, and that's fun.
Photos Creative Commons cc0.