The photos from Lincon are up. Total time at the con was about 30 hours, but Thursday evening was real slow.  A lot of people came by, but no play. But both Friday and Saturday had a at least one game going almost all the time, some times two, plus a little lego building on Saturday. I forgot to keep statistics, but I guess about 15-20 games were played in total, most of those 20 point games with about 2-3 mechas with the Doomsday clock set to 5. I played 6 games I think, and I won all the one on one games, even though it is almost a deadly sin to beat new players in their fist game since the best way to make people like a new game is to let them win.

The worst thing about the con was the my room, which I shared with the Star Wars mini crowd and Heroclix, was kind of hard to find. There were very few people just walking by just looking for games.
The best thing was that more than half of those that played one game played another and everyone thought it was both a very fun game and incredibly easy. The second best thing at the con was the pancakes. I ate nothing but pancakes there. The third best thing at the con was people telling me that my lego mechas were awesome. That little ego boost will hopefully last until next year.

Things to do next year: Get a a better spot. Mechaton is virtually unknown to the general crowd, so it needs passersby to attract new players. I also need a lot more terrain. I don't have many parts suitable for this, but just adding a few trees made the battlefield twice as good.

I discussed a lot of rules with people, and even though everything worked great in play, using the latest Hijacked version with new sheets, there are still some few things that came up that could be tweaked . More about that later.



All in all it was pretty fun, even though Thursday night had me despairing that no one would come and play. I'll probably do it again next year, although it would be nice to do a follow up on Legion, my Memento inspired role playing experiment I had four years ago.

Vincent inadvertently gave me a idea for a new mechanic when he was talking about overloading on attachments. I've wanted to add more advanced options to Mechaton for a while now and one way of doing that would be to allow mechas with lots of dice in on area, ”specialists” as Joshua likes to call them, to do funky shit by not rolling their extra dice. Instead you can discard a die you should have rolled and get an extra effect instead. For some things you can discard all you colored dice; blue, green, HtH red and yellow and hope for good luck with just the white dice. Others you must keep at least one colored of, like direct red, artillery red and some games yellow. So basically you're giving up the chance for a high result to get something else. Every time you pick up your dice that angst will hit you like a ton of bricks whilst you figure out if you're going to roll 2 red dice or 1 with a special effect.

Here's what I've come up with so far, most of these are straight from the previous Enhancement rules. It's just examples so far, I'm not making any claim that they are balanced or even playable yet.
 

Discard any red die to recieve +1 on die roll when rolling damage dice.

Discard any red die to reduce your target's defense by 1 if your attack does damage.

Discard a red artillery die to increase AoE range by 1.

Discard a red HtH die to push your target 1 step if your attack hits instead of dealing damage OR put a Lock on you target (your target cannot move unless assigning an extra die to movement, the value doesn't matter).

Discard a yellow die to increase sensor range by 50% OR you can spot with two dice (white/yellow) * OR you can split a spot die (white/yellow) between two targets.

Discard a yellow die to ignore any cover between you and your target for this round.

Discard a green die to upgrade a green D6 to a D8.

Discard a blue die to subtract your defense value from the value of a spot die placed on you.

Yeah, the Lock idea for HtH is tailored for those assholes that dance around their stations. You roll one less die and force your opponent to assign an extra die to be able to move. I think that is elegant myself, but as anyone who has read this blog can tell most of my ideas don't always work as well as I first think they would. A good thing about this add-on is that no player is forced to use it if they think it to bothersome. That's the bad thing about my Enhancement add-on, you commit yourself very much to a strategy during army building.

I don't know if I've got the time to test this anytime soon. I think this is quite neat idea, but I might not see the flaw yet. So give me some feedback people and tell me the flaws.

* EDIT: This no longer seems like a good idea.

Now there's only a month left until LinCon and since I've decided to really offer a better experience than last year I've resolved to do a lot of play testing until then. This last month I've played six games and one of those was especielly rewarding since I played with some very experienced people, not at Mechaton but at games in general, and since I said I was play testing there was a lot of discussion about various rules. I didn't play with the enhancement rules since I had a printer problem that only left me with the new and improved sheets. So the rules I played with was Hijacked's, with Pilots and the pilot skills. Lets go through all the ideas I got from that game and the others.

First of all the pilot skill idea I proposed earlier here sucked. In fact it sucked ass. I suspected that it would, but not that much. Mostly it sucked because of bad probability dispersion; i.e. It worked for D6:es, but not for D8's and D10's. Shame on me. An easier idea for pilot skills would just to add the pilot skill level, 1-3, to the dice roll, up to the dice maximum. So if you had Artillery 2 you would add +2 to the roll, but you still wouldn't get a higher result than the max of the die you're using. Say you rolled a 5 on a white die, add 2, you would get 6. You roll 5 on a red d8, add 2 for a 7.

I think this would work, the question is: is it balanced? One skill level would ideally balanced at a cost of 1 point per level. Further playtesting is needed, I'll have to remember to ask every player who takes this if they felt it was worth the cost.

We had a long discussion about range and I was the only one who thought that HtH weapons didn't suck. But they had one really good idea that I was told was quite common in other wargames; if you attack someone in HtH combat that mech cannot attack anyone else unless he moves away from you. Supposedly getting your groin kicked in disturbs your ability to aim somewhat. I think this would work fine in Mechaton as well. So I'll try this and see how it works out.

There was also a moment when a mech shoot a target with 3 other mechs standing in front of the target. My autumn -06 rules says that ”every damage die that comes up a 5 is a hit to your target's cover.” The player rolled FOUR 5's. So the question was: is that four hits to each mech or four hits distributed amongst them? I haven't come across this before, despite playing Meachton for nearly four years (statistically I should've, I've probably just forgottten about it), but as I understand the rule all three mechas got four damage each. The rules doesn't mention comparing their defense value to the attack, but I feel that is a given, otherwise there's a loophole to damage high defense mechs byt shooting at low defense mechas. I've definetely overlooked the possibilities of this and next time I really need to point out this rule so that everyone is on the train, especially since the next few setup variants I'm going to try out will probably will result in a mroe dense battlefield. The result of this particular incident was that one attack destroyed two mechas, seriously crippled one and failed to injure the intended target at all.

One thing I really really despise is ”the station dance”. It goes like this: I attack the lone guardian of a station with my HtH weapons. Said guardian doesn't have a HtH weapon but a direct range weapon, preferring his target to be atleast 1 move away. But at the same time the guardian cannot walk away from the station. So the mech will just move around it, putting the station between us and then shooting me. When it's my turn again I move 1 step into HtH range again. And so the dance goes around the base until one of us dies or goes dizzy. Every time this happens I wish I'd gotten direct weapons instead of HtH weapons instead. Sure, it would take take longer getting to the base but I'd probably get one more attack getting there and we'd save a lot of play time by just standing 2 moves away from each other and shoot each other in the face like real men. And not being in HtH range would also mean my own support mechs wouldn't hit me with friendly artillery fire.

Which smoothly brings me to Vincents new artillery Area of Effect rules. All 6's you get on the damage roll apply to all mechs within 1 move which have a defense value lower than the attack value. This is brilliant and works very good at the table. Sure, you hit your own mechs some times, but that's something you can live with. There been talk over at anyway wether artillery AoE needs an additional downside or not, but I think this is enough. If AoE is always ”on”, sometimes you'll deal extra damage to additional targets and sometimes you'll hit the wrong mech. It just means you've gotta think a little more about movement and be ready to sacrifice your own troops.

My solution for handling multiple activations, which Vincent also discussed, is that AoE damage to collateral targets doesn't activate them. If they don't have a defense value yet I place a number of small pennies equal to the damage deal with a die with the attack value on top and when that mech get to act it's handled like a regular attack. That way you avoid the risk of mixing up dice that you have rolled and are justing waiting

We also tried Nukes, missiles that cost 2 points, give a 1T10 attack with an AoE of 1, rolls of 9-10 gives area damage. As with missiles they're a gamble, they might totally obliterate your target or be a total waste of points.

Another thing I've been trying out is that you can increase Sensor range by reducing the value of the spot dice. -x on the roll gives +x to range. This makes sensors a little more versatile without making them more powerful.

An idea I had was to allow something similar for direct damage and artillery weapons to increase or decrease their max/min limit. Most weapons in real life don't go a set length and just stop, you can often make them go furter or shorter, but they're a bitch to aim. I remember that our Haubits FH77 had a tilt-down panic mode to fire at a target right in front of you, like a seriously stationary barn. So intuitively it feels like a -2 for each length modification would be right, which would limit you to adjusting the effective range of a weapon with 1 or 2 steps up or down. I'll try this next game, whcih should be next monday, unless I can get another game this weekend also. LinCon is only a month away and I still got a shitload of stuff I want to test until then.

I've recently promised to arrange Mechaton at LinCon this year, it'll be the third year this time. I intend to finish playtesting the enhancement rules until then, so every other monday until then I'll go the local board game night.

Anyway here's some more ideas for enhancements I've been stashing in a file for some time.

Gunner (2 points)
Allows an extra attack. Requires two ranged weapon modules, but not necessarily of the same range. For each attack only roll 1D6 instead of the usual number (2D6 for classic or 1D8 for Hijacked), each attack requires an assigned red or white die. You cannot fire missiles as well in the same round. You can however make an ordinary full powered attack against one target whilst your gunner fires a missile at another target.

Yes, Gunner can seem awfully unbalanced, but here is my reasoning. For 3 points (in M: Hijacked that is) you can get a mecha with 1 white and 1 weapon. The same cost as for gunner and an extra weapon. With gunner you get a weaker attack, but you can take the same points and tack them onto a sturdier mecha.

Armor (1 point, can be taken once for each module)
This enhancement does nothing besides absorbing 1 damage.

Guided Missiles (1 point) That is such a crappy name!
+1 on the attack die roll and the damage roll when shooting missiles.

Racer (2 points)
Requires 2 green modules. Allows you to use two dice for your movement and also allows you to move, attack and then move again. Mantiskings idea.

Explosive (2 points)
+1 on the die roll for all your damage rolls. Does not apply to Missile damage rolls. This was also Mantiskings idea. I

Suicide Module (1 point)
This module does nothing; until the mecha self-destructs. Then, instead of rolling 1 damage die for this module, you roll 3. For each two Suicide modules the self-destruct area effect increases by one. If this module is damaged it might cause a chain reaction; roll 1D6, on 4-6 it explodes and causes another damage to the mech.

Pilot skills (1 point per level)
I know that a long time ago when pilots first first got talked about at anyway several people thought that pilot skills should be specific. When I got around to using them they weren't; pilot rank just reflected general skill. But lets try specific skills that isn't simple rerolls. There is one skill for each type of die except white: Shields, Sensors, Movement, Hand to Hand, Direct, Artillery and Missiles.

Skill level 1: If you roll a 1 or 2 the result automatically becomes a 3.
Skill level 2: If you roll a 1, 2 or 3 the result automatically becomes a 4.
Skill level 3: If you roll a 1, 2, 3 or 4 the result automatically becomes a 5.

Skill level 3 requires 1 rank in general Piloting; you don't get this retardedly good at something without some general skill.

Thanks for your feedback, especially Mantisking who has supplied some great ideas and forced me to justify my own.

Gun Fleet is ready now, I just have to assemble the pieces. I think it works, but it is at least 3 times as complex as Mechaton but that's mainly because I'm the kind of guy that yells ”GODDAMN, SPACE DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!” at almost any sci-fi I watch. I blame my education and Atomics Rockets.

I'm all out of Vincents printed Mechaton books so I had to rewrite my handouts for an upcoming Con so that I have both Hijacked and the classic version of the rules ready for play in both in english and swedish. Amazingly enough it is entirely possible to fit all of the rules on just 3 A4 pages; I make heavy use of bold and coloured text for making it easy to find specific rules. Anyway that forced me to pick out all changes I made in my Hijacked version so I thought I might as well post the lot of them here.

Attachments are called modules, simply it translates much better to swedish. So if I talk about modules instead of attachments on the blog I'm probably discussing something related to Hijacked rather than classic Mechaton.

There are no minus on the Shield or Sensor die roll.

Weapon modules gives 1D8. A weapon with 2 ranges rolls 1D6 for each.

No Green D8; instead a mech get +2 move if not shooting or just making a melee attack.

You need a Sensor module to spot.

Missiles are 1D10.

Pilot gives 1 reroll per rank per round. Pilots can be ejected at any time; they land 1D6 from their mecha. They've got 2D10 initiative, 2 move, 1 attack (against infantery only, range 3), 1 defense and can take 1 damage. A pilot can enter any unmanned mecha within 1 move. Name your pilot ranks, 0-3, with cool names that fit your army.

Mechas are bought for building points.

Chassi (white dice): 2 points (max 3)

Module (coloured dice): 1 point (max 2/4/6 depending on Chassi size)

Missile: 1 point (max 1/2/3 depending on Chassi size)

Pilot: 2 point per rank (max 3)

A Mecha can have twice as many modules as its Chassi and as many modules and missiles of each type (each weapon range counts as a different type) as its Chassi.

Recommended starting building points:

For a short game: 20 points. Doomsday clock at 7.

For a full game: 60 points – 10 for each extra player above 2. Doomsday Clock at 14 - #players.

Same number of stations per player as usual.

At the end of a game add the worth of your chassis, modules, missiles and pilots for the mechas left on the battlefield. Each station you control is worth 5 victory points. Most wins (duh!).

Cover and damage roll:

Clear LoS: Hit on a 4 on the damage roll.

No LoS: Hit on a 5 on the damage roll.

Behind cover; within 1 move from wall, terrain etc.: Hit on a 6 on the damage roll.

Attacking, moving, spotting and taking bases can be performed in any order.

Self Destruct: Declare before rolling your dice; you cannot both act and self-destroy. Roll all that mechas dice straight as damage dice; hit on 4-6 to all mechas within 2 move. Mechas within range but behind cover take half damage. If you get shoot at and have to react you can roll defense while stating that you are going to self-destruct later, but all dice rolled for defense cannot be rolled again for self destruct damage. A pilot can eject before self destruction.

Shooting terrain: Remove 6 bricks per hit, but this depends on how your terrain is build so discuss this with the other players before the game begins.

So these are the rules I  play with most often, at Cons I demo both these and classic Mechaton. As you can see Hijackeds rules are far more deadly, in most games you can count on losing at least half your mechas from enemy fire, making it even more important to grab bases to make up for the points lost.

The Flickr group for Mechaton is flourishing. Darrin Bowers has added a whole lot of awesome mechas that are the most anime like I've seen so far. I immediately tried to build some mechas like his, but I lack the part so it's either time to start scrapping old mechas or buy new parts.

Eric Provost wrote about his groups Mechaton hack and they've made some changes that are very similar to mine, which in a way is kind of encouraging since it means I'm not a lone deviant.  Go read now, then return. The best idea was remove the minus for sensors and shield, like Hijacked does, but with the addition that at tie in defense and attack means a zero point hit, thus allowing the use of a spotting die to roll for damage anyway. Very elegant solution. I might use that.

I'm not sure I think their idea to keep spot dice on the table from round to round is ideal though. Sure, sensor dice removal doesn't make sense, but neither does a new defense every round. Forcing you to use a spot die whenever an attack is made even though you don't use it isn't a god fix for accumulating sensor dice either since it removes choice. Let say I spot a primary target early in the round. I really want that spot die for my mega-damage artillery dude that acts late in the round. But before him I've got a weak shooter whose only available target is the primary one. If I shoot with him he's less like to inflict damage, but if he's forced to use that sensor die anyway. So to save that sensor die I have to not attack with him. That just screws my tactical choices.

Eric made an argument that the last mech to act doesn't get to spot, but I've never found that to be unfair. Going last is pretty sweet since you never have to assign a die to defense, which your best white usually goes to, and all mechas has assigned their defense so you can just pick on the weakest without having to second guess what defense they might get. I've seen a ton of games where new players start with choosing to act early in the beginning of the game, but at the end of the game they go "Yeah!" when they get to go last.

Keeping the sensor dice from round to round has some appeal though. I served as an artillerist during my time in the army, I relayed target data from the forward reconnaissance teams to the artillery batteries, verifying that the target data wouldn't place friendly forces and how much and what kind of munitions to use. That was some time ago and my know-how of ballistics isn't what it once was, but a very basic principle is that target data is only as accurate as it is fresh, since forces in the modern battlefield tend to refuse to stay in one place for very long. So if I would play a game where sensor dice stays on the table from round to round I would either let the "old" spot dice stay the same until the target acts again, in which case they are at least halved (round down) or until the target moves, in which case you just remove the value of your move (or maybe even twice the value) from the spotting dice. Both those cases requires that you separate old spot dice from a previous round from new spotting dice from this round. Simply take a small coin and place those under all spotting dice left on the table at the end of the turn.

This post got a little longer than I expected. It'll be very interesting to see how their next game goes with their changes.

Someone anonymous posted this as a comment and I think it's brilliant.

"Reading your posts again this morning, an idea has popped into my head. Instead of costing Creation Points, how about having enhancements cost Victory Points? You make an army, total up the points cost, then make a decision to enhance them. I know it would add an extra step between total victory points and starting the game, but it might make things even more interesting. The decision to increase or decrease the margin of victory can be a hard one."

This is a really good idea of how to incorporate enhancements into the original Mechaton rules without adding another step at the point per calculation. But I think I would put the enhancement step in the actual army building step. This adds some extra uncertainty since you have to decide how much you dare to enhance before you know what your point per unit cost will be. Sure a -6 to your victory point at the start to adds some extra omph to your attacks or shields might be totally worth it, but it´s also a gamble, especially since most games with three or more players in my experience tends to end with quite narrow victories. Or you could go all in and put enhancements on all your attachments. Combine that with the max number of mechas could give you a starting victory point score of at the worst -1. Sure, you would probably crush your opponents unenhanced mechas, but you would only win if you destroyed pretty much every other mecha and made sure you had more stations than them. 

Anyway, brilliant idea by anonymous, who either forgot to credit him/herself, or a is a mysterious A.I. from the future.

Since we´re already talking about enhancement I´ll throw in some thoughts and things that came up in play test.

First the E.C.M. enhancement shouldn't give +1 to defense, because that is way too good. Instead it lets you re-roll blue 1's and 2's. I know Vincent had some objections to defense boost, and I can see his point. Let's see if this works better.

And two new enhancements:

Shortcircuit (HtH): When hitting a target you can, instead of rolling for damage, decrease your targets defense with the amount that your attack overcame his defense. Instead of gutting him you put a high voltage cable to his groin.

Repair (Shields): You can repair an attachment, but not an enhancement, by withholding 3 dice from that mechas roll. At the end of the turn roll 1D6 against a target number of 2, equal or higher is a succesful repair. Add 1 to the target number for each attack against the mecha the same turn and 1 for each damage taken the same turn (i.e. if I got attacked 2 times and took 2 damage the TN would be 6). A 6 is always a succesful reapir, no matter the TN. Yes, you want to go last if you want to repair, but chances are your opponents will throw a couple of shoots your way just to screw you.

Thanks for the good idea, and let me know what you think of mine.

I've been working on a space battle conversion of Mechaton for quite some time now without getting anywhere. The first version was playable but very unsatisfying because it was to simple and it's weapon mechanics didn't work. A second version used a way too complex mechanic inspired by WarCosm (great game by the way, but I haven't gotten around to playing it yet). Then Atomic Rockets thought me that everything I knew about spaceships and space war was wrong and then there was no going back. And since there are a bazillion of way better space war games than any I'll ever make, plus the fact that Vincent Baker probably could make a really amazing Mechaton space game on his lunch break, I decided to make a game using these ground rules:

Fighters make no military sense

Vector movement; which is really hard to do both playable and reasonably realistic, but I think I found a system that works adequately.

Your biggest problem in a fight might not be your enemy but instead your excess heat.

There ain't no stealth in space. But then again being able to see someone and getting useful target data is not that same thing.

There are two things that are will be unrealistic in the game that I'll just ignore anyway for practical reasons. First that space is three dimensional, not two, reason being that just the thought of doing a 3-D tabletop game gives me brain cancer. Second is fuel and mass factors. A realistic game would be one where every round you would have to adjust your space ships mass and thus its potential deltaV due to fuel and ammunition expenditure. There are games that does that, but since I want a reasonably simple game  I'll just assume that ships don't loss mass.

I think I've got a game here that might work: I've got the basic play mechanics and ship building, a really cool system that replaces the Doomsday Clock with a heat management systems that makes the battles last about 4 to 10 rounds and a vector movement system that can use poker chips as both stand for lego ships and as direction aids. If you use poker chips as marker and each round write down your current course, facing and velocity it doesn't matter if someone knocks over all your ships. In at least half my Mechaton games someone has rocked the table so that all mechas flew all over the place. All that really serious measurement all for nothing.

What I haven't decided yet is if I'm going to keep Mechatons turn sequence or if I'm going to use a sequence where everybody moves their ships according to the orders from last turn, then a initiative pass where you roll dice, shoot and then secretly assign movement dice to a new course.

It would be quite typical of me to say I'm nearly there and then not post about this for over a year. Please kick me if I don't deliver in a reasonably short time frame.

Malcom and Simon has created Mechatonic, a blog about their Mechaton campaign. Awesome in many ways. I've got it in my bookmark toolbar and plan on checking it out regularly.

Also check out their propaganda war at Story Games. Next con I really should whip up some motivational posters like that. Go Combine!

Vincent and some other guys have started a "Dunesque Mechaton Campaign" that I could pay serious money to be a part off.

Play test on the Enhancement rules continues, two games played so far, serious analyzing of the results in progress, but in the meanwhile I thought I'd dump another idea that isn't quite ready yet. I've been wanting to add more reinforcement play and special events that happen outside of what the mechas can do by themselves. I also wanted the feeling the battle is part of something bigger, that there are forces outside of the immediate battlefield that can intervene. I've had rules for reinforcements before, but those only amounted to saving the building points you had from the beginning and insert them later. No one ever used them because there was no point not using all your assets from the start.

But if you introduce a resource system to the game a lot of options become available. But then the game turns into something completely different beast altogether. I imagine it would not be every ones cup of tea.

Anyway here are the bare bones of the rules so far.

In addition to being worth the all-important Victory Points (VPs) each base also generate one Reinforcement Point (RP) at the end of each round. This is your currency for winning the game.

Introducing a Reinforcement phase (happens before initiative is rolled) during which you can:
-convert RPs into VPs, 2 for 1 (if all your mechas are lost this cannot be done, also: you are a coward).
-Reinforce: buy new mechas that enters combat from a point on the edge of the battlefield nearest to one of your original stations. If you pay for airlift (see below) at the same time the mecha can be inserted somewhere else. New mechas cost the same in RP as

During action so to speak RPs can be used for:

Field Promotions
A mecha pilot (see earlier post for the rules for pilot rules) can be promoted in play using RP, 2 per rank, when seizing a base or destroying a mecha. Any pilot of atleast rank 1 can be promoted into Commander (see below and earlier post) at any time for 1 RP.

Battle Orders
Airlifts, Long Range Attacks (crappy name) and Self Destruct.

Your army needs a pilot with the Commander enhancement to use these.
Battle orders are often delayed which works like this: If an order has a delay of 5 and you order it at initiative tick 10 (I count from 10 down, others count from 1 up) the order executes on 5. Use a initiative D10 to keep track of this. If the order has a delay would take it into negative initiative tick it will execute next round (yeah, now you regret ticking that Doomsday Clock!).

Does delayed actions work given that a lot of mechas will act out of order? Pro or con? It would certainly make people think more about who to attack an when.

Airlift (build a model that rocks and fits your mechas)
Airlifts can move units any distance and are delayed action:
x initiative ticks before they arrive, x ticks in transit.
The carried mechas has it defense reduced by x (halved?) during transport (flies lie a cow and drops like a brick). An alternative would be that the airlifter had its own crappy defense; if destroyed the mecha falls to the ground and has to roll one damage die for each white and colored dice on the mecha (damage on 4 ), minus 1 for each green dice (your mecha fortunatly has jumpjets or great suspension, or something).
Cost: x (1 or 2?, or maybe 1 for each white die)

With an airlift you can:
-airlift a mecha from one place to another
-airlift in a new mecha during the reinforce phase
-airlift a mecha out of combat (risky)

Drop pod is a special kind of airlift: a new mecha hurls down from space fast and hard anywhere on the battlefield. Expensive (3 or 4, or 2 for each white?) but not delayed.

Long Range Attacks
-Nuke: Needs an action from a mecha to place a homing beacon. Extremely expensive, slow and powerful. Cover: Yeah, right.
Cruise Missile: Medium powerful attack: 3D8 for each RP? Delayed by x initiative ticks. When declared you place a marker at the edge of the battlefield; the attacks comes in straight line from this point so the targeted mechas might be able to dive behind cover if lucky.
Death Ray: Instantaneous. Cheap, maybe 1 RP for 1D10. THERE IS NO COVER FROM THE DEATH RAY!

Edit: Another, much simpler, idea would be to model these attacks from the Big Missile rule and scale it up from there. Big Missiles cost 1 point and give 1D10 which to me has always seemed like a fair trade. So for each RP spent you get 1D10. So for that you can buy a huge one-time attack at one point, or mech. But say that we allow area attacks as well. How about 1 RP for each 1 move in radius away from that point? And that the attack is delayed by 1 initiative tick for each 2 RPs spent.
So you declare an attack, place a marker where it will hit soon and calculate cover from that point. So a 6D10 with a 4 move radius would cost you 10 RPs, and have a delay of 5 initiative ticks. Now you have to ask yourself: is it worth it? You could get a pretty neat mecha for that, or 5 VP in the bank if you're a coward. Still, it would be awesome.
Now you can call your attack whatever depending on how big it is.

One other thought, each player can only make one Long Range Attack per turn. A row of consecutive 1D10 attacks against the same target over and over again seems unbalanced.
Same should perhaps go for air lifts, 1 per turn.

Destroy Base
At any time you may order your bases to self-destruct: 1 RP to destroy a base that you owns ability to generate Rps, 2 RPs to destroy it completely, now it's only rubble and not worth anything to anyone. Self-destruct has a delay of x and can be aborted if another player seize your base and either pays the same amount of RP or some makes some kind of test. Yes, you mutilate yourself and hope it was not in vain.

So far these are only my brain farting out new rules, I have no idea if these will work or even be fun.

I've got a playtest version of what I previously called pods, now called Enhancements, which is kind of self explanatory. The idea with these are that each Mechaton army should be infinitely customizable and unique.

Yes, I'm aware that introducing these to the game starts an arms race of sorts by increasing the dice values. With +1 to the dice roll as well as Mechaton: Hijackeds D8 values of 9 or even 10 won't be unheard of. By this goes both way since all kinds of modules are boosted. Do I think my opponent will enhance her Shields? Then I enhance my attacks. If we both enhance our attacks; well, it'll be a shorter Last Mech Standing game. I think that the +1 enhancements are balanced since they don't add a hit point as well. Modules gives you a D6/8 and a "hit point", for the same price. Intuitively it seems that 2 D6 that gives 2 "hit points" are as good as 1D6+1 with one "hit point". But that will take some testing to find out.

The Enhancement rules, version 1.2

Each enhancement cost 1 point. Attaches to a module and is lost when that module is lost (I added three lines for enhancements on my sheet and draw a line to the module it is on). One enhancement per module, no multiples of the same enhancement.

Movement

Racer: +1 on the dice roll.
Turbo: a D6 is converted to a D8.
Jacked: +1D10 Initiative, +-2 on the roll, always wins roll-offs.

Shields

E.C.M.: +1 on the dice roll.
Cloak: Cover counts as being one step higher.
Jammer: Halves one sensor dice, round down.

Sensor

Network: +1 on the dice roll.
Booster: +50% range.
Sat link: Negates all terrain cover, including other mechas.
Note: Sat Link vs cloak: First Sat Link removes all natural cover, then Cloak adds one step.

HtH attack

Berserk: +1 on the dice roll.
Pusher: Instead of damage moves target 1 step backwards for each hit.

Direct attack

Aimed: +1 on the dice roll.
Penetrating: Attack several targets in the line of fire, -1 on the dice roll for each (think flame thrower).
Coordinated: +1 on the dice roll for each time time the target has been hit by one of your mechas with Coordination this turn.
Armor Piercing: If the target is hit and takes damage reduce the targets Shield dice with 1.

Artillery attack

Heavy: +1 on the dice roll.
Cluster: -1 on the dice roll, hits all mechas within 1 move from target (i.e. In HtH combat range). Edit: Cluster is always "on", so watch out for friendly fire.
Coordinated: +1 on the dice roll for each time time the target has been hit by one of your mechas with Coordination this turn.
Edit: Forgot to add this to artillery as well:
Armor Piercing: If the target is hit and takes damage reduce the targets Shield dice with 1.

Commander
Attaches to a white dice, requires Pilot. Any of your mechas may use the Commanders Pilot rerolls. Only one mecha may be commander, does not count towards the enhancement limit.

So are any of these grossly over/underpowered? Let me know. I'll post some playtests of these rules as soon as I can.

Because people have asked: If you want a full copy of the current Mechaton: Hijacked rules you can have them provided that you own a copy of Vincents Mechaton rules (I'll give you a page/line/word question). Mechaton is Vincent Bakers intellectual property and Hijacked is just a mod of those rules, not a separate game in it self. If you don't own the rules go buy them now, they are only 6$ for the PDF and they also contain some awesome mecha blueprints. Right now the complete version of my mod only exist in swedish so if you want them in english you'll have to give me a couple of days to translate them.

Update on pods: Scratch what I said before. There will be three kinds of pods for each kind of module. Each pod can be taken once, costs 1 point and is lost when the module it is placed on is lost. An example for Shields, which is the only one so far that has all its pods named:
E.C.M.: gives +1 to the dice roll.
Cloak: Covers count as being one step higher.
Jammer: Halves one sensor die within 10 move, round down.

I think it will take a long long time to test these in play. And if they work they'll always be super-optional, I wouldn't even dream of using these in a demo game. If you think this concept stinks, please say so.s

I played Mechaton at NärCon with a couple of new rules. Since NärCon isn't a pure gaming convention there weren't that many people that were interested in playing, but there was still a steady stream of people giving me compliment for my mechas, the best one being "It´s art!". It was at times quite boring, people would come and play a demo game for an hour, then I would sit and wait or watch another game at a neighbouring table for an hour. But several of those that played a short demo also wanted to try a larger battle so I might have "sold" the game to a few people, even though that wasn't why I was there. Bright side is I seem to get better at the strategy side, I won 3 out of the 4 games I participated in, thus ending my usual habit of always coming second. Yes, I've heard that you should let the wookie win, but still... It is fun to win.

Anyway, out of perhaps a dozen games I've decided to include these changes to Mechaton: Hijacked, my version of Vincent Bakers rules. Look further down in this journal for the introduction to Mechaton: Hijacked.

Attachment are also called modules, because attachment doesn't translate very well into swedish whereas module does, so that's the jargon me and my friends use. So if I say module I mean attachment, just so you don't get confused.

Pilots: Cost 2 points per level, max 3, and each level lets you reroll one dice, including damage dice, each round. It a super-white dice that doesn't let you sustain more damage or allows you to take more modules, so cost wise it works out I think. The fun thing with having pilots is that you can do a lot of other things with them. You can eject them right before an opponent rolls her damage dice to save them, and they land 1D6 move away. Now the game turns into STOMP THE MEATBAG! They can enter an unmanned mecha 1 move away (ow, the scenario possibilities!). You can name them and for each level you could have a corresponding rank, like 0: private, 1: Sergeant, 2: Captain, 3: General. I haven't decided what kind of move/defense a stranded pilot should have, but it should be pretty appalling. I'm really looking forward for Vincent campaign rules to see if pilots can be included.

The green D8 is out. It made no sense that a mecha that loses it guns should suddenly move way faster, and since HtH mechas always got an super movement dice for free they never bought movement modules/attachments. So the new rule is: a mecha that isn't shooting gets +2 Move, but they still need to pick a green or white dice to move. So HtH mechas are faster, mechas that choose to run instead of shooting are faster, and mechas with only white dice left can run for cover a little faster but not super fast.

Sensor dice does not negate cover completely, it downgrades the cover one notch. So if you're behind cover (damage on 6) and spotted you count as being partly covered instead (damage on 5-6), but the sensor dice must be discarded for this benefit. But this way you can benefit from quite low sensor dies as well.

I'll test the changes to see if they hold up and then I'll try another addition that I've been itching to try: Pods. Pods cost 1 points each and modify modules/attachments. Most of them will give either +1 or -1 on a dice roll plus a small change to how that module works, like giving it +50% range, or giving extra cover. I've got a dozen or so ideas that will need a whole lot of testing. The thought is that with more options mechas can be more specialized towards a battlefield niche.

I also wrote up a Electronic warfare module, or E.W. for shorts, that lock up opponents dice, but I'm not sure yet if it will add that much to the game. It's very cool but also maybe too complicated.

Comments are more than welcome, playtesting even more so. Sorry for any bad grammar that still lingers.

I´ve really decided to pick my self up and finish Gun Fleet soon. Mainly this is because right now various people at flickr, like Soren, nnenn, onosendai, J5N, Adrian Florea and many others, are churning out so many awesome microspace builds that I'm seriously thinking about scrapping my mechas for parts to build spaceships instead of the other way around. I've been building a yellow/grey/black space fleet from the scrap parts left from the new Exo-Force kits and they are far from finished, but look quite decent.

On flickr I also stumbled over Spook's Lego Microspacewars which seemed like a quite thorough conversion of Homeworld. Awesome, but it seems a little too complicated at glance,
I'll read it through as soon as I can and see if it has any good ideas about how to do vectors.

I should have posted a more complete play report ages ago, but it was postponed again and again, so I might as well summarize Mechaton at LinCon as Awesome. Bigger, better rules, more mechas, and with the help of Daniel Thunborg way more accessible. Daniel took some sweet sweet pictures of both our Mechaton corner and of the Con in general. Check them out!

I have plans to bring Mechaton to NärCon the 8-10 of august. I´ll try to playtest Gun Fleet there as well.

Previously on this seldom read journal I've talked a lot about various things in Mechaton I've thought could be streamlined or just altered. Mostly that has been just talk, the vast majority of my games have used the rules as written. As you can read in the post below there are a number of things I think could make this awesome game even more awesome, and most importantly simpler. There should be as few exceptions as possible and all players should know the rules after one round of play. So without further ado here are the Mechaton: Hijacked rules:

Your army is built with points. White dice cost 2 points. Attachments and Big Missiles cost 1 point.
A mech can have 1-3 white dice (light, medium and heavy mech). For each white dice you can have 2 attachments. For each white dice you can have one of each type of attachment, the various weapon ranges counting as different types of attachments.

Bases are worth 5 points. The number of bases and points for your army depends on the number of players and for how long you are going to play. I need to crunch some numbers on this and get some suggestions for army points for various numbers of players, but I know that a 2 player game with 1 base each, army worth 20 points and the Doomsday clock set at 6 takes roughly an hour.

A weapon attachment is always a 1d8. A Big Missile is a 1d10. So one attachment equals 1 die. Easy, avoids confusion.

There are no minuses on any dice rolls. What you roll is what you get.

You need to have a Sensor attachment to spot.

On your roll damage roll you score hits on:
Line of sight or Spotted with Sensor: 4-6
Not Line of sight: 5-6
Cover (mechas are not cover): 6
Shooting at a cover: always destroyed

Special maneuvers:
Self-destruct: Declare before rolling your dice. Roll all dice as damage dice, hit on 5-6, all mechas not within cover 2 move from you take that damage. If you get shoot at and have to react you can roll defense while stating that you are going to self-destruct, but those dice you roll for defense cannot be rolled again for damage.

Ping: You need Sensors for this and you need to declare it before you roll. You may but your Sensor dice on all mechas within 10 move from you but those mechas can also place a Sensor dice at you -1. i.e. if you place two 4:s you get two 3:s.

I think these rules work quite well, at least for me. I´ve tested a lot of versions with these and some of them grew from others. The new rule that say you need to have Sensors for example came for three reasons: we discovered that 3-white mechas can spot like crazy otherwise, people forget that they can spot even if they don't have sensors and with the new LOS rule for damage Sensors are somewhat more powerful.

The biggest impact with these rules are that Mechas take a lot more damage. A game is now not only a a game of taking bases, it's about survival. If two players decide to hammer at your mechas for more than one turn expect some serous pain.

A rule that didn't make it was that if you took damage you shield went down with 1. It was to hard to remember and didn't add that much.

A maneuver I'd like to try is All power To... Before you roll you can convert to dice into another color (not into white). You need to have to attachment that you are diverting power to. This is for all those situation where it is more important to move fast or just survive. Maybe next time.

I recently attended GothCon in Gothenburg, where I played some indie rpgs (Roach, Staden amongst others) and a lot of Mechaton. I applied what I learned from playing Mechaton at A Con of You last year. The reason for part three of what I learned at ACoY never appearing here is that my conclusions from those games needed testing. I had made a compilation of the rules I wanted to test (see next post) and throughout the con I applied them differently in each game to see which modifications worked and which didn't. I played more games at GothCon than I had anticipated and it was a good learning experience which bodes well for LinCon.

Jonas Ferry and I played an awesome game on friday night, this time with a level playing field. I had 11 mechas and I think Jonas had 7. The game took about two and a half hour and I think Jonas ended up with roughly twice as many victory points than me. I think this cements the fact that I am not a very good tactical game player. So I think we are even now. It was certainly way more exciting than the last game we had.

I played 4 one-on-one demo games with various people late Saturday night. Of those I won 3, mostly because those I played against choose to have 2 big mechas whilst I had 3 medium. Since we both had 1 base each I could both defend my own base reasonably well and mount a serious attack against his.

The same army in a later 4 player game on Sunday did not work so well. Here the amount of crazy damage being dealt out in every direction meant that my slightly weaker army crumpled. Also I got sidetracked into fighting two people at once. One of those was only opposed by me and took the victory almost unscathed. A later game with 3 players where I only explained the rules was not finished since the players had to catch a train, but the players understood the game and thought it was awesome. Over all a lot of people came by, asking about the game, taking pictures and marveling at my mechas. Those moments when people walked by the table, which was conveniently placed in a central corridor, and exclaimed: "Wow, these are awesome! Did you build them yourself?", did wonders for my ego. Everyone who played and a lot of passersby asked where to get the game and I pointed them either to Anyway or just told them to google for Mechaton. Hopefully some of them will buy the game from Vincent.

The next post, which I´ll hopefully post today, will be about my Mechaton house rules which I might use at LinCon.

Three games were played at A Con of You, with 3, 4 and 2 people playing. They all had one thing in common; at each game one player got so far behind in victory points right from the start that besides luck there were no chance of them winning. They had to play a near perfect game to get even near. At the first game I was one of those; I started with 21 vs 42, 30 and 35 I think. At the second game I think it was Jocke who started 15 vs 20, 25 and 35. And the last game I started with 56 with 5 mechas against Jonas Ferrys 27 with 6 mechas.

If you play a game were, from the beginning, there is only a small chance you might win you might have fun, but you won't get very excited. Your choice won't matter as much as the others, because you failed earlier. I've said many times that Mechaton can be viewed as two games: the army building where you decide you point per unit and the game at the table. If you fail to second guess the other players in the beginning you're pretty screwed later. During you first game this is especially true and chances are that if you get screwed over and get to watch the others have a fun and exciting game that fails to engage you because you cannot win you might not want to play again.

During mine and Jonas game this was especially true. He had 1 more mecha than me, but I had more than double points. As long as I protected my bases and I could lose 4 mechas and still whip his ass. Even if I hadn't ticked the Doomsday clock at all I don't think it would've mattered, we destroyed each others mechas at about the same pace.
Now there are several scenarios where we would have been more equal. If there was more player they would've cooperated against me, but still someone would've gotten the short straw.

So my idea, that needs to be playtested soon, is to return to a building point system. Everyone agrees beforehand on a number of points to build their army on so that on paper at least they are equal. It's what you do during play that makes you a winner.

The points you begin with are called resource points. When I say that something has a cost it is in resource points. When I say that something has worth that is in victory points.

Buying a mecha with 2 white dice costs 4 points and is worth 4. Each attachment for it cost 1 point and is worth 1 point. It is worth what you invest in it; you lose what it is worth when it is destroyed. So a 1 white dice mecha is still be worth 8 points if it started with 4 attachments.

Bases cost 5 points but are worth 10. You've got to have at least 1 base, but you can buy as many as you dare.

Big Missiles cost 1, but are worth nothing. You can have up to two per mecha.

Resource points you don't use goes into your resource bank where they are worth the same amount of victory points. You can, at the beginning of a turn, before initiative is rolled, buy new mechas with BIg Missiles for it (but not bases). I haven't decided yet where these mechas should be deployable.

So say that we decide on a 50 point game. I buy 4 mechas with 3 attachments each. That costs me 28 points. I get 2 bases for 10 points and 2 Big Missiles for 2. The remaining 10 points I put in the bank for now. My army is worth (4*4 + 4*3 + +10 + 20) 58 points.

If I had bought another 2 bases with my remaining resource points my army would've been worth 68 points.

The obvious question here is should you get a lot of bases and go defensive or get a lot of mechs and go base hunting? Or just put you points in the bank and slip under the radar as an uninteresting target?

I don't know If the setup rules with a defender and a primary attacker should be kept or if everyone just should take their turn placing bases and mechas. Ideas?

Gun Fleet.

Coming soon...