Ring of Red and Gear Kreig

[Roebeast45]

Has anyone had a go at using Gear Kreig for a Ring of Red style game? The way that infantry supports the walkers was always really cool and I wondered if GK could be simplified enough to mimic it.

For those of you who don't know Ring of Red was a Playstation 2 game that took place after WW2 where Japan becomes split into North and South Japan. It used a variety of Armored Fighting Walkers and infantry units. It had some groovy mecha and infantry design and a slower paced fighting system than most games.

[Weird WWII]

Ring of Red was such a horrible game!  The slowest and redundant POS I have ever blew good cash on even if it is WWWII-ish.

Brian

[Dr.Falkenhayn]

Ring of Red was such a horrible game!  The slowest and redundant POS I have ever blew good cash on even if it is WWWII-ish.

Brian

AMEN!
I expected a Game like Front Mission,i was so disappointed 

[Roebeast45]

It's really odd how I much I enjoyed such an awful game. Maybe I'm just totally wrong.

It certainly had flaws but I found the actual game play to be enjoyable and tense. Sorry it didn't work for you gentlemen.

[Jakar Nilson]

I've only read articles and collected screen shots of Ring of Red (mostly in Japanese), so I don't know how many statistics there are or how complex they might be. From what I saw, it does bear some resemblance to the early Front Mission games, play-wise (but that's only from the screen shots). It also appears from the same screen shots and articles that you command about five walkers.

If you still want to go with the Silhouette system (which is the basis behind Gear Krieg), it has been streamlined for faster play with Heavy Gear Blitz. If you can find a copy of the original HG:B! (not Lock & Loaded* ), there's a page showing you how to convert vehicle stats from HG 2nd Ed. to Blitz. GK and HG 2nd Ed. are both Silhouette, so it's pretty much the same process. The other thing, apart from simple vehicle stats, are simpler infantry stats, where each unit is simply a combined unit with one hit per base.

*Lock & Loaded is an updated version of HG:B!, but forgoes the conversion page.

There are also the Gear Krieg supplements for World at War, but I haven't played the system, so I don't know how much faster it is.

[TheMightyFlip]

Ive still got my copy of Ring and Red. Basically you moved around the combat map like Front Mission, but when you moved to attack, its became a duel between two mechs and the ground troops you took with you. Each mech could have 3 or 4 squads, 1 on the mech the others on the ground, each ground unit had special attacks that would trigger at random. The duel was fought with a range, you moved your mech into range and opened fire when you had reloaded.

You had the heavy mech which was a massive cannon, slow moving and need a lot of range to fire, the medium mech which could fire at long and mid range, the close combat mech which was mid to close range with a C&C attack I think, and the light mech which was for anti infantry and had to run in real close to do any real damage.

And that was it really, you moved around the map, and had duels and hoped to hell you could get off more damaging shots before the computer.

[Agis]

There are also the Gear Krieg supplements for World at War, but I haven't played the system, so I don't know how much faster it is.

World at War is WAY simpler. You can play roughly 2x as big battles in the same time.

[Roebeast45]

And that was it really, you moved around the map, and had duels and hoped to hell you could get off more damaging shots before the computer.

I think the part that I liked was choosing the right squads to maximize the mech's fighting ability. And the countermeasures were great. When a squad fires wire around your legs your mechanics cut it loose and such.

I'm thinking about no more than five AFWs per side with three squads per as support. This would give a nice game time and should be manageable with 15mm. Coming up with the abilities for each squad and pilot should be interesting.