It's been a couple or three years and I've made my way back to Leviathan again. Boy, just seems to be one of those games that always needs a few years to pass before the desire to play it overcomes the mental inertia that resists the pre-game set-up. I like the idea of the game, I like the marking off boxes of armour in the shapes created by different weapons and watching systems go down once the armour is penetrated. I just feel like I don't know where to start to make a scenario. Consider the last time I played, I used a scenario I found online.
This time I did things a little differently and I think I'm mostly inspired by the host of the YouTube channel "Joy of Wargaming" and how he sets up a mini game of moving armies around on a map to figure out how they meet and what the force strengths are...very interesting stuff (Link to series here). What his series following a Napoleonic style campaign has helped me realize is that it's ok to play a non-balanced game. Just the fact that one side is stronger can contribute to a more engaging story and can point you toward a more easily contrived scenario: side blue is stronger on paper, so perhaps side red is staging a fighting retreat, hoping to lose as few units as possible.
Well, I didn't really care to run a whole campaign map, but I had the thought of what about a scenario generator that uses a deck of cards. I got to work.
One suit had types and quantities of ships assigned to each card for the TOG forces and another suit with an identical set-up for the Renegade Legion forces. To the third suit I assigned certain scenario types: planetary defence, escort mission, or an all out fight among others. The fourth suit was assigned special conditions of the battle: asteroid belt bisects the play area, solar flares from a nearby star send damaging beams across the map at intervals and other things that could cause interesting changes in the course of a battle.
My scenarios have the potential to be massively unbalanced! I could decide that each side draws two cards. Maybe one side gets a battleship and a frigate and the other gets a frigate and a cruiser. So, depending on the scenario card I pick, the smaller side is trying to get away, but maybe theirs is a suicide mission to try and bring down that battleship! Or maybe the special condition does something that disables the battleship. I don't know.
It was actually pretty easy to come up with and I hope it will reduce the amount of resistance I feel about setting up a game. I feel like there's a nice amount of potential and maybe I can tweak things a little as I find parts I don't like.
Now, my Leviathan box has 11 ship counters per side for the capital ships - from destroyer on up - but dividing them up, they only took up 9 or 10 of the cards (some have multiples of the smaller ships on them). So I started adding corvettes, since there are a large number of smaller ship counters that are too big to be fighters. The rule book kind of presents them as corvettes, but it's unclear how to stat them out for a game. Some online searching led me to a couple of old discussions on how to insert the smaller ships. Following some of these suggestions, I made up status displays for these small vessels.
I also added orbital missile platforms as one of the card options. Of course, there seems to be no info about something like that. There seem to be orbital platforms mentioned in some rulebook or something, but they are more on the mostly harmless side of things. So, I'm making up my own stats for missile platforms as well.
Good thing I spent that time to make up some stuff because both corvettes and missile platforms made it into the first scenario I drew. But that's a story for another post.
No comments:
Post a Comment