Full Spectrum Dominance

[Sangennaru]

Since we're officially in Beta - here we are with the project me and Feo have been working on in the last six months:

Full Spectrum Dominance
Combined-Arms wargame for small scales

A brief overview of the game:
- Sci-Fi setting. We're already thinking to make lists for WWII and Modern settings. It would work quite perfectly.
- Small scale (6 to 15mm), company level with a good mix of infantry, vehicles mechs and supports not on the table.
- Easy army building, with cards representing all of the above for rapid set-up and access to the information
- No tables and very little bookkeping: all you need to know is on the cards, the manuals are only for rule-lawyering.
- Alternating activation with limited options per round: A bunch of activation dice are rolled each Round and then are used in alternating turns by players to do stuff. You can do anything, but you can't do everything.
- Almost no math. Even a simple two-digit sum done frequently can slow down the game considerably. very few modifiers and low numbers are used.
- A full-sized game is played on a small surface (2x3 feet for 6mm figures!) and runs for about 90 minutes.

For now the game is in Beta, and we're sharing it free in the facebook group: www.facebook.com/groups/fullspectrumdominance

Sample of the gaming cards:


A small force:


And the turn sequence phase:


I'll post here updates about the rules. Anyone interested who's not on Facebook could PM me here (I'm not checking every day the mailbox of LAF anymore, but i will read it!)

[Sangennaru]

Very pleased to show the first WIP attempt for the third faction - the wastelanders!

[Sangennaru]

(I'll keep updating this thread even though most comments are on my "6mm" thread anyways)

some good uptades regarding the manual - some lore is starting to pour in!










Cheers
Jack

[fred]

The look of the cards and rules is great - really professional look to them

One little suggestion on the unit cards, on the Unit Characteristics line a bit more white space would make reading them a bit easier. Or use colour on one or two of the values

I’ll get my mate to log onto FB to get the beta rules!

[aliensurfer]

Looks really interesting, just grabbed the rules to read through. Thank you.

[Sangennaru]

Glad to see that some extra polishing is attracting interest!

Here are four pages of fluff-introduction written by Iain Ross:

   

   

[Sangennaru]

More profiles getting ready for V 0.14!

[Pictors Studio]

Lovely work on that.  I hope you'll be posting some battle reports on here soon.

[Burgundavia]

Lovely looking rules and cards. Looking forward to seeing some play tests and battle reports.

[Sangennaru]

Lovely looking rules and cards. Looking forward to seeing some play tests and battle reports.

Lovely work on that.  I hope you'll be posting some battle reports on here soon.

Many thanks!
I'm notoriously terrible at battle reports, BUT I've just recruited a fellow player to join LAF. He wrote some excellent BRs, and he is perfect LAF material in general!

[Spheroid]

Hello folks: I’ve just joined: lots of great stuff to explore on here: can't believe I haven’t found it before! I was told that one or two people might like a Full Spectrum Dominance battle report: here’s one I wrote about a game that I played with my gaming buddy Billy a few weeks ago.  I’ve taken a bit of a liberty with the fluff for this scenario, but I like a bit of context with my wargame   Game description, and thoughts after the intro! (Sorry for the wall of text…)

Brigadier Galileo Leone sighed, as he lowered his ocular scope from his eyes. His worst fears had been confirmed.The sudden cessation of communications from the remote mining outpost was due to what he had identified as a group of Spider Droids. These skittering, humming machines were always a vanguard: a harbinger of the arrival of a larger invasion force.

It was perhaps inevitable that the Tech, a self-replicating machine race governed by a sentient AI born of The Singularity event over a hundred years ago, would attack Saguro. This planet was very rich in ores which the Hive Intelligence could use to manufacture more of its war machines and extend its computational network. Leoneknew from bitter experience that this would give the HI even more power to drive forward its inexorable quest to unlock the meaning of existence. In other conflicts and invasions, where the humans that once created it could not usefully be used by the HI, it mercilessly exterminated them, lest they stand in its way.

It was likely that somewhere in the system there would be a Hive Intelligence Nexus. This sub-entity would be controlling the invasion force as a remote avatar of the main HI. The key to stopping, or at least slowing this invasion would be to find the location of the Nexus and destroy it. But finding it was the tricky part.

A plan formed in Leone’s mind. Those comms towers in the Medina below had most likely been hijacked by the HI to run local communications with its forces in this area of the planet. He needed to take the main tower, use it to trace the location of the Nexus and then destroy it to disrupt the drone activity in this area. It wouldn’t be easy though. Where there were spider drones there would be bigger, deadlier machines. Leone turned to his Lieutenants and began to issue the instructions to prepare for the engagement…

The Hive Intelligence Node designated ‘Calliphon’ reviewed the topology of the system that it had arrived in three solar days earlier. It reached the same conclusion as it had every time it had run the scan data; this planet was so rich in Ytterbium ore that it could advance the Hive Intelligence’s power significantly. Though the place was the site of an unfortunate human infestation, the expenditure projected to secure the planet and remove the organic life forms would be a net gain for the HI.

It had already sent drones to commandeer the humans’ local communications infrastructure, targeting a remote cluster close to the humans’ paltry, surface-scratching mining efforts. There weren’t enough of the vermin here to warrant subjugating them into a labour force, so Calliphon had instead opted for extermination.

Following its initial vanguard action, Calliphon had use of the humans’ local commsnet and was using it to marshall forces that were orbitally inserting under its direction. Now there was a degree of security at this part of the planetary surface, it had its own cortical network transferred to a larger facility to the north of the initial invasion point. This hadn’t been absolutely necessary, but Calliphon has streaks of arrogance and pride in its manufactured personality, and liked to experience the fruits of its planning first hand.

Things were going according to plan. Until, that is, it detected the engine flare of a human warship manoeuvring in-system. Clearly, backup for the ground colonies had arrived, and Calliphon began to adjust its planning and calculations accordingly…

Game summary:
We played the first scenario in the book, ‘The last Bit’. I played Enlisted and Billy played as the Tech.

The army lists were:
Enlisted:
Tank Commander x2, Scouts, Armoured Infantry x2, Troop Carrier x2, Heavy Battle Tank), Mobile Artillery, Main Battle Tank x 3, Tank Hunter, Guided Missile.



The Tech:
Battle Droids x2, Heavy Droids, Gun Platform, Socrates, 3x Zeno, 2x Syro, 2 light Spiders, Orbital Deployment, Sentient AI, Pilot AI.



The game lasted 5 turns (it ended when The Tech blew up the central comms antenna), and it was a solid victory for The Tech. Billy had 24 VPs but lost 3 due to troop losses, and I had 21, but lost 5 because most of my tanks got blown up! Final score was 21 to The Tech and 16 to The Enlisted.

I loved the game, and I’m sure Billy will add his own comments, but I think he really liked it too! I love 6mm anyway, but the way the models, the terrain and the rules come together make it a really excellent gaming experience!

I think I lost because (tactics obviously   ) but I also didn’t think about my wave decks carefully enough: I struggled to get off the ground really in the first two rounds: I have brought on the big tank, some infantry and some artillery, whereas I think I would have been better served taking more of the tanks to give me a heavy presence to build on later. Lesson learned! I also lost my most expensive piece (Heavy Battle Tank with a Tank commander) to a single shot from the Tech Gun Platform in turn 2. It’s a bullet magnet that thing, and I should have had more units on the table to make Billy have to split his fire more than I did.

Billy played the scenario really well, and though did manage to regain some ground on turns 3 and 4, it wasn’t enough to close the gap. Billy could have destroyed the central tower at the end of turn 4 which I suspect would have given him a more decisive victory rather than waiting till turn 5, but maybe he was just being sporting…



Overall First Impressions
Billy summed the feel of the whole game up quite well I think, ‘I thought it was going to be a beer and pretzels game, but it really isn’t’. There is a lot to think about here.

The wave mechanic is great. I think as we play a few more games it will be easier for us to form some tactics around this, (it was all a bit random the first time), but I can already see how I could have adjusted things to give me a better start. It’s an extra facet to the game that seems integral and seamless to the gameplay and not at all like an add-on.

The AD mechanic for the first round or two seemed slightly unnecessary, but when you start getting more units on the table (round 2 and beyond), it rather cleverly makes you think really hard about what you want to achieve that turn. It’s actually a very clever part of the game. Again, by the end of this first game I was starting to get a better understanding of it: it was forcing me to think twice about my usual gung-ho tactics and actually prioritise actions that were going to be important to the outcome instead of just killing stuff. I think this is a really clever bit of game design and is one of the more unique things about this ruleset.

Command and multiple activations is nice, and adds yet another layer to the gameplay. Again, I only really started to see the potential of chaining the Enlisted’s activations together with their special rule. There is a depth in this mechanic which I can see once we are more experienced leading to a whole variety of different plays.

The combat and damage system is really easy to pick up and execute. Now that we’ve had one game, I’m pretty sure we can get through the mechanics of this without looking at the book at all, which is exactly how it should be. It too is deeper than it first appears: the damage for vehicles and mechs and the debilitating effects it can have are really nice.

The Victory cards are clever too I think: being able to sacrifice cards (and therefore VPs) for in game effects is an excellent idea: I really like this aspect.

Overall, I think it’s a brilliant system. I was really looking forward to playing (I love the models the LF produce, even though you could theoretically use any), and I was definitely not disappointed! There is an awful lot of tactical depth and there are several new and unique ideas which make this a lot more than the ‘alternating activations and two actions’ game that it might at first be mistaken for. I’m really looking forward to the next two scenarios, and think that we’ll print some different lists and try some of the other units out. I really hope there will be more scenarios floating about soon!!
It's pretty, it’s deep, it’s exciting and it’s clever. All the things you need to make a game excellent!!

[fred]

Thanks for the write-up - and a great looking game!

We are planning to give FSD a run out this week - and are trying to decide doing the two starter scenarios, or trying one of the standard scenarios. The two starter ones seem pretty small as games - and from what you have written above quite a lot of the more interesting parts of the system seem to come into play with a full game. But I also get there is a need to get a handle on the core mechanics. Any steer on this would be great.

[Sangennaru]

Thanks for the write-up - and a great looking game!

We are planning to give FSD a run out this week - and are trying to decide doing the two starter scenarios, or trying one of the standard scenarios. The two starter ones seem pretty small as games - and from what you have written above quite a lot of the more interesting parts of the system seem to come into play with a full game. But I also get there is a need to get a handle on the core mechanics. Any steer on this would be great.

If you're playing with people, i'd suggest the full game. The intro scenarios are for the (many) ones who play solo to test the rules, or for less experienced wargamers!

[fred]

Thanks for the steer - there should be two of us, and we can pass as people most of the time

[fred]

We played our first game last night - battle rep to follow - a very interesting game, requires a lot of thinking!

Below is a lot (sorry) of feedback on the rules - mainly around clarity. Probably the main point is the QRS doesn’t align with the rules in several places


Page 6
Basic Concepts
Would be better to start with Full Spectrum Dominance (FSD) - rather than jumping straight in with FSD

Game Size
12 x 8  - suggest swap this to 8 x 12 then the size matches with the 2’ x 3’ example given

This paragraph is a little odd

As long as the value of 1 DU is agreed upon, it is absolutely fine to change it at will (and possi-bly use the metric system as well).

It suggests that the value of a DU could be changed mid-game. I’d suggest this

Pre-game you are free to choose what measurement 1DU equals - and use that for the game - you could possibly use the metric system!

Page 7, end of first column
Coloured dice - suggest change this to specifically coloured dice
May also be worth adding that dice of 10-12mm size fit well on the cards

Page 11
I think there is too much text in the red box - I think it would be better if this just contained the text from the QRS - to give a summary. At the minute there is a lot of repetition with the text to the right.

Moving Activation Dice - is the text for ‘On a Card’ still correct with the change in activation?

Initiative Roll - what does out of combat mean?

Page 12
Remove the full stop after Pass at the top of the page

Placing AD on cards - given the changes to activation and reaction. Is there a reason to place AD on the activation part of a card? Or should AD only be pre-placed on Special Abilities?

Page 14
Commanding Units
Is there an order to the units activating with command?
Specifically does the Command unit need to complete its activation first, before any of the sub-ordinate units activate?

Page 16
Line of Sight - multi-base units (eg infantry) does only 1 base need LoS for all bases to shoot, or does each base need LoS. I feel this paragraph could be read either way

Armour Piercing the second example should be AP2, not just AP

When Close Combat is mentioned here I would add that it is AP1, as well as referencing the Close Combat rules

P18
Reactions
How do characters work with reactions?
If a unit with a character reacts, can the characters special ability be used?

Close Combat - bold text, change Armour Piercing 1 - to AP1 to be consistent with other text, Ignore Cover probably should be capitalised

P22
Controlling objectives
The extra rules for Mechs and Vehicles to control an objective are easy to overlook. I think they should be referenced in the first paragraph

To control objectives in subsequent rounds - do mechs and vehicles need to do another control action - or do they just need to be in contact?

P23
Agile - I can’t see any rules about terrain slowing or blocking movement. So what does this special rule do?

Charger - does this mean a unit can do a free combat action after a movement, with a Contact ranged weapon?

Fire Base - standard shooting is referred too - does this mean the free shooting action, or something else?

Large Target - would also suggest adding that infantry can’t block LoS to a Large Target

Thick Armour - is this still correct with the change to AP?

P27 Synthetic Pilots
Is the Software Upgrade support card now redundant with this changed rule?

34 QRS
Turn sequence is different - reinforcements are before Initiative on the QRS but the other way round on p11

Alternating Activation - this still mentions placing dice for activations
Strange bullets in this section

Close Combat - change to attacks count as AP1 and Ignore Cover - AP stacks with weapon stats

Objectives - I think the rules for Mechs are different here to p22


The Tech Unit Cards
Gun Platform - significant down grades in this version - probably needed.
The 5 and 6 boxes are green, but cause systems damage, should they be yellow? If they are meant to be green, then not sure what the S values mean

Battle Droids save is 1d8 should it be d8
Heavy Droids save is 1d10 should it be d10
Light Spider Droids save is 1d10 should it be d10

Orbital support says deploy spider drones - but units are spider droids

Generic Cards
Mortar Fire - calling the weapon Bombing is confusing - suggest Mortars or Mortar Fire

Satellite Uplink - do the rolled dice move to the Ready pile?

The Enlisted
Setup action needs defining in the rules
How long does it last, when is it lost etc
Does this replace the Heavy rule?