============ OGRE/GEV list, Dec 2nd (Last: Nov 28th) ============= ===== Ogre material on personal pages From: "Andrew Walters" ------------------------------ From: "Andrew Walters" Subject: Ogre material on personal pages >I emailed someone at SJ Games... Consider yourself mocked :-) I meant that by way of apologizing for pestering Henry with a question that wasn't necessarily his bailiwick, I didn't mean for the problem to be diagnosed. I sent my first inquiry from my web browser, which doesn't keep a copy. >naughty Fish for not answering He did answer a day later. I wasn't going to submit it to the main page because I'm a bit shy about it because its a bit off-beat. I'll post to the list when I get the stuff up, and if the real Ogre Web Page wants it I'd be honored to contribute it. Then I'd be honored and mocked! Experience/Elite Units A trim, tight game system like Ogre/GEV is tough to add to without watering it down, and allowing for infantry unit quality and morale may be like adding track/gun hits, etc. I'd enjoy a game where you kept track of crew, gun and track hits per vehicle, had some specialized ammo as in the original Starship Troopers game, etc. But you'd have fewer units and the game would move slower. You'd have to care about each unit and manage a bunch of partially-capable units, so you'd have a very different feel. Marines add a lot very simply, and they provide an example of a specialized form of infantry that interesting and balanced without watering down the game. I don't like them because they cost a lot for no additional fire power, but they have a role, and in that role they're worth the price. I use them without liking them, if you can relate. A die roll modifier is essentiall a column shift on the CRT, so its the same as modifying their attack strength. I'd prefer the assumption that six MI are a 1/1, twelve are a 2/1, and with green troops its twice as many men, therefore half as many squads can ride on various armor units, etc. If we need different abilities for green troops, etc, lets give them different non-combat abilities: inexperienced troops might have the GEV in the woods effect on entering enemy weapons range, for example - when enemy sensors lock on they might go to ground until the seargent comes along and rousts them. Or maybe they have to stop on entering towns or woods and re-orient themselves. Morale check rules are easy to write, but you end up with Squad Leader, which is a fine game, but its about morale, not fast moving armor combat. Commandos aren't normally used in front-line combat - there was a whole scenario dedicated to demonstrating why in the SPI game Commando! But perhaps elite troops could get disabled and recover like armor units - they've learned to get out of the way, but then they have to regroup and reestablish communications before they're effective again. Obviously these are off the top of my head and are not playtested, and I won't even try to assign point values to these, but I think this adds more color to the game, and gives the flavor of different kinds of troops instead of seeming like the same old troops with different attack strengths. Mixed Ratios Part of the play balance and "magic" of the Ogre/GEV system is the inefficiencies. If you create a 3:2 column Gevs are going to suffer more at the hands of secondaries, for example, and that would hurt! I enjoy those ugly ratios and the ineffieciencies, its like the sour in pineapple or the burning sensation of peppers... If you had two GEVs four hexes from an Ogre, would you rather have two 2:3 attacks on a secondary battery or one 4:3? The whole playing-the-odds process would be watered down. I believe a key element of game design is putting the player in a position where they have to make hard choices, so anything that contributes to that without adding frustration is *good*! ----- [I've been trying out Splitfire and a SplitFire Mark III-B doesn't seem to be sufficent to overcome an Advanced OGRE defense, but a Splitfire Fencer seems to be about balanced. The feel is that the OGRE is a much slipperier opponent. The Fencer will launch a few missiles and then scoot out of harm's way. APs are much enhanced. The OGRE can walk down a line of single-squads, targeting 1-1s along the way instead of simply dropping down at the end of movement and being forced into 3-1s because only a few squads are adjacent. I'm thinking of bringing in the GEV stacking and overrun rules, but this would simply favor all GEV defenses. (Even a few hexes to retaliate from could be stacked five deep in GEVs.) This would also stop the classic OGRE dirty trick of disabling adjacent armor units to prevent infantry attack. (On the next turn you crush the armor unit and roll over the infantry stuck on the other side.) Even with these adjustments AND forward observers, Splifiring OGREs are much favored, but not by 50%. -HJC] Henry J. Cobb hcobb@io.com http://www.io.com/~hcobb All OGRE-related items Copyright (c) 1997, by Steve Jackson Games.