Lead Adventure Forum
Miniatures Adventure => Future Wars => Topic started by: Frostie on 18 November 2020, 08:35:16 AM
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Has anyone here played BattleTech Alpha Strike?
I have always loved he idea of the game and Alpha Strike appears to make it more open and something I could introduce my 9 year old son too
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I wrote a comparative review to be found here:
https://pijlieblog.blogspot.com/2019/03/battletech-classic-modern-classic-or.html (https://pijlieblog.blogspot.com/2019/03/battletech-classic-modern-classic-or.html)
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I wrote a comparative review to be found here:
https://pijlieblog.blogspot.com/2019/03/battletech-classic-modern-classic-or.html (https://pijlieblog.blogspot.com/2019/03/battletech-classic-modern-classic-or.html)
Thanks I will take a look
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I have played a bit of both. I was actually taught how to play classic BattleTech by my friends 9 year old son who was running the "beginners" table that day. He had been playing for some time with his dad though. After playing both I think any 9 year old, with an interest, could pick up Alpha Strike or Classic.
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cheers,
I like the review as well Pijlie
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Has anyone here played BattleTech Alpha Strike?
Me! Love it. Great way to play company level games.
A lance each might work for younger kids
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Yes, and love it! This is the fast-play version that BattleTech needed 25 years ago. It got me to dust of my mechs and finish building up my inner-sphere battalions for each house.
Lance v. lance games are nice short 45-60min affairs and you can play a couple in a gaming session. Company v. company is fine for a longer battle, and battalions are great for multi-player convention games.
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Is Alpha still available to purchase? I've got the Kickstarter box inbound some time next year and kind of fancy having some quick rules too.
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Is Alpha still available to purchase? I've got the Kickstarter box inbound some time next year and kind of fancy having some quick rules too.
There was a reprint of Commander's Edition last year, which appears to be sold out again now directly at Catalyst. You might still be able to add it to the KS while the pledge manager is still open, I think that was on the mighty menu of add-ons.
Miniature Market has some in stock at the moment:
https://www.miniaturemarket.com/cat35680.html
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There was a reprint of Commander's Edition last year, which appears to be sold out again now directly at Catalyst. You might still be able to add it to the KS while the pledge manager is still open, I think that was on the mighty menu of add-ons.
The Pledge Manager closed yesterday.
The PDF is still available from Catalyst
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The Pledge Manager closed yesterday.
The PDF is still available from Catalyst
Awesome. PDF is all I'm after. Cheers, I'll have a look.
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Death From Above Wargaming made a very well-produced series of How To Play videos for Alpha Strike. Here are the links:
- Intro (https://youtu.be/cu34W0ryYQA)
- Basic Rules (https://youtu.be/05ZGXFAwLKg)
- Intermediate Rules (https://youtu.be/zJi1OWI_Jos)
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Death From Above Wargaming made a very well-produced series of How To Play videos for Alpha Strike.
The gameplay videos they have produced use their own houserules though and are not as good
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Yeah, DFA clearly labels vids that use houserules as such so there should be no confusion.
But let’s unpack what “houserules” means in this case: Alpha Strike Commander Edition comes with a healthy amount of optional rules to give the base line game more depth. So “houserules” should not be interpreted here as somehow “against” the intent of the game. The design philosophy of Alpha Strike is about flexibility to begin with, allowing players to dial in or out the amount of crunchiness they want (especially in relation to how much one wants Alpha Strike to resemble CBT).
What the DFA guys want is something a bit closer to CBT than basic Alpha Strike so they use some optional rules from Commander Edition, having further modified some of those along the way. One example would be rolling attacks separately. Another would be changing the movement/range scales.
Having played the most basic version of Alpha Strike back when first edition came out, I have to say it was very boring to me. It was like Baby’s First Miniatures Game. Maybe that is okay if you want to put dozens of mechs on the table at once. I much prefer the way DFA have developed Commander Edition for their purposes.
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Maybe that is okay if you want to put dozens of mechs on the table at once. I much prefer the way DFA have developed Commander Edition for their purposes.
AS does have a lot of optional rules. They even use a few of them. What they have done is changed the movement rates and ground scale. They also use a dice rolling mechanic that tends to skew the results of their rolls. So they slow down the rate of movement but then they spend the first few turns of every game I have seen sprinting to get into contact. They play the game to get around the primary change they made. Its quite illogical.
I suspect, but have no evidence, is that they dislike playing on maps and so have CBT scale games in terrain using the AS rules. They haven't, AFAIK, used the lance building rules in AS at all.
It just seems really weird to play a game aimed at company level engagements and then just use a lance a side.
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I don’t think it makes sense to conclude that they are playing in a way that invalidates the changes they made.
Did they change the ranges and ground scale to slow movement down, as you suggest? I don’t think so, or rather, that was not the goal in itself. The initial turns of most, perhaps all, miniatures games are about moving into position. And obviously this is especially important to Alpha Strike because of TMM. They clearly don’t want to avoid those things, as you noted.
So why the changes? I think they explain it themselves and, as I recall, it has to do with using a 4x4 play area without invalidating mechs that want to work at long and extreme range.
As to the damage rolls, let’s explain it for the folks at home:
In Alpha Strike, each mech makes a single attack — a single roll for all or nothing damage. A lot of people, myself included, find this extremely boring.
One alternative is to roll 2d6 for each point of damage a mech can potentially inflict with an attack, which means rolling 2d6 a number of times, separately, in a row. Statistically, this method does not produce significantly different results than the basic rule (https://zacgaming.wordpress.com/2020/11/16/alpha-strike-multiple-damage/) over a large number of rolls. It’s just more fun (YMMV) than the all-or-nothing baseline mechanic.
But even so some people, myself included, find rolling 2d6 for each point of damage tedious. So the further modification is to roll a single d6 of one color and as many d6s of another color as the damage value of the attack such that each point of damage rolled shares one of the d6s making up the 2d6 roll. This is generally referred to as the “pilot die” method (as the shared d6 is said to represent the pilot’s contribution).
I’m not sure what you mean by “skew” but the pilot die method wouldn’t produce statistically different results from the baseline or multi-2d6 methods. Conceptually, it’s a compromise between the two. While not all-or-nothing, if the “pilot die” rolls low, you’re more likely to do less damage but there’s still the chance of doing some.
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Did they change the ranges and ground scale to slow movement down, as you suggest?
They specifically mentioned this in one of the videos I watched. The same one where they spend two turns sprinting. Its what stopped me watching their AS videos.
So why the changes? I think they explain it themselves and, as I recall, it has to do with using a 4x4 play area without invalidating mechs that want to work at long and extreme range.
And yet they really never seem to do this in the videos I have watched. Mind you I haven't watched a lot of them since I have no interest in watching people play a game that is so heavily modified from the original.
I’m not sure what you mean by “skew” but the pilot die method wouldn’t produce statistically different results from the baseline or multi-2d6 methods.
And I ran the numbers and it doesn't. I'll update my article with the new stats.
The DFA guys are certainly free to play their game the way they want it to but, aside from their three learning AS videos, I tend to not recommend them because of the house rules they add. I would do the same for any game system. When you watch one of their videos you are watching them play their variant of AS and not AS as it is presented in the book. What you learn in those videos isn't necessarily a transportable game experience. It is the DFA AS rules and not necessarily the AS rules
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I’m having trouble following your point. You think they changed the ground scale and ranges to avoid sprinting?
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I’m having trouble following your point.
Thats the internet for you
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Amazing ...
EDIT: Thanks for updating the article!