1 Topic by Dauntless

(2 replies, posted in Defiance)

Okay, I'm wondering what kind of minis people are using to play Defiance.  Me personally, I prefer a near-future military look compared to science fantasy figs (WH40k, Void, i-Kore, etc)...so here are some of the figs I found interesting.

Right now, I have a platoon worth of New Anglican Commonwealth (NAC) regular infantry and a Power Armor platoon of Eurasian Solar Union (ESU) troops from Ground Zero Games Stargunt line of 25mm figures.  This will soon be supplemented by a platoon of ESU Naval Infantry, and in the near future, a platoon of Oceanic Union Defence Force (OUDF) infantry and at least a squad of NAC Power Armor troops.

Unfortunately, there's not a lot of good pics of these minis, but I'm happy with them for the price (about $2 per figure including shipping and handling).  If you haven't heard of Ground Zero Games, check them out.  Good minis for Starmada too.

But these figs from Pig Iron Productions look sweet.  Too bad there's only a handful of them.

For vehicles, DLD Productions looks nice.  And the price looks pretty good.

Some of the figures, especially the Troopers section, look nice from em4 miniatures.

Lastly, the figs from 1stcorps look pretty decent.

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2 Reply by Dauntless

(8 replies, posted in Defiance)

I agree that figuring out the modifiers for a bell curve system is less intuitive than for constant systems.  But I've often wondered if it's even worth it to have a point-based system.

Now, this may be heresy for me to say for a wargame, but I've never completely understood the concept of "points armies".  Jon Tuffley in his Stargrunt II game didn't provide any points system for an "effectiveness" calculus.  His reasoning (which I find difficult to argue with) for this omission follows three main points: 

1) Firstly, while even though it may be possible to gauge the effectiveness of a single unit, when you look at the group as a whole, the groups effectiveness is more than the sum of its parts.  In other words, you have to look at the group holistically. 

2) Secondly, the effectiveness of units is extremely context sensitive.  For example, if you design a bunch of units that have really powerful long range weapons, that's not going to do them a load of good in heavily forrested areas. 

3) Finally, and this is where I think the "heresy" part comes in, having a point total destroys the mission based atmosphere of the game.  Instead of creating imaginative campaigns in which the odds are never even, a point system encourages a competitive mindset in which you simply throw armies at each other. 

Unfortunately, most people are loathe to play unbalanced games.  And yet many battles are unbalanced, precisely because you don't want to fight your enemy when he's as strong as you are.  You maneuver and force him to split off his forces and fight when and where you choose to fight.  Point totals encourage a type of gaming where these imbalances do not exist, and hence there is less creativity and imagination involved in setting up the scenarios.

But getting back to the statistical problem, I suppose you're right that considering the meta-play, there does turn out to be conditional probabilities which will in effect make the odds more bell curve like.  Still though, I think the interplay of having a more diverse variance and deviation in the probability distribution would make not only for more interesting gameplay, it'll change the way you have to think about your tactics and strategy.  Granted, it will be less intuitive, but I think having modifers which are also skewed to the probability distribution and density functions which follow bell curves would be interesting.

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3 Reply by Dauntless

(8 replies, posted in Defiance)

I thought about doing something similar.  I was thinking of rolling 2d10, and simply multiplying every modifier and Target Number by 2 (that way you don't have to worry about round-off problems if you divide).  I don't think this is particularly accurate though.

With a bell curve, the more extreme the target number (for example a 2 or a 20), the harder it is to get that number.  The same applies to the modifers.  The more extreme the modifier, more impacting it is to the chance of success.  In other words, all modifiers would have to be "squeezed" to the center (this is the same principle that a teacher would use for "grading the curve" if they knew what they were doing).  Linear, well actually I should say constant ( since all MJ12 games use a flat line )probability functions don't have this problem, because all modifers have the same modification to the probability.  I could do something complicated like use a squashing function on the modifiers (for example, maybe take the tanh of the probability distribution), but I'm pretty lazy right now when it comes to my hobby projects.

But if no one else has done this, maybe I'll write a program that'll do all the number crunching for me and put the results up for people to see.  If I ever have time of course.

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4 Topic by Dauntless

(8 replies, posted in Defiance)

Has anyone tried modifying the rules to use multiple dice rather than a single d10?  I like the breadth and depth of the rules for the most part, just not the stochastic modeling that goes into it (i.e. the die mechanics).  Life generally follows a bell shaped distribution, not a flat one.  Problem is, changing the die mechanics is akin to basically rewriting all the modifiers from the ground up.

I'm curious if anyone has tinkered around with something like this.

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