BattleTech - The Board Game of Armored Combat
BattleTech Game Systems => Strategic Combat => Topic started by: Greatclub on 25 August 2018, 18:42:26
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Are there any Chaos Campaign products with alternate victory conditions?
One of the guys in the group says he doesn't want to do "Solaris Duels," By which he means 'Kill enemy' as a victory condition. Unfortunately, he can be vocal about it.
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most all of them. bloodying the enemy is often at least one of the objectives, but there are other things to do. often trying to complete a "destroy 75% of the enemy force" objective is imprudent because even if you succeed, repairs will cost more than the reward - so there's often a weighing of options that has to take place and forces players to decide if certain gambits are worth attempting.
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I'm trying to have us play 'OTP: death to mercenaries'. Just breaking even is hard enough that you either go for all the objectives or doom yourself to death by WP exhaustion. Either that or you have to go directly to the touchpoints, as they look like the only places you can reliably gain WP in excess of the track cost.
The other CC product I have is ER: 3052; while it's much less brutal a track cost/reward basis, it's harder to run for multiple players on different sides.
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I want to say they have some free Chaos track information, any of the recent sourcebooks have tracks, and you also have a few players (DreadMoores comes to mind) that provided Chaos track scenarios. With some alterations you can adapt almost any track to your campaign or lift victory conditions to insert.
But yeah . . . 'Death to Mercenaries' . . . its sort of hard to do anything outside of existential fights.
Course, if you want to mess with him . . . hand him a recon sweep mission and have everyone else pile on as the site defenders, turn it into a rabbit chase.
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yeah, the stress to just break even is one of my biggest irritations with stock products. i ran a number of chaos campaigns over the years (built from scratch) and found that easing the WP scarcity helps. i'm more concerned with having fun than simulating the struggle against insolvency.
Primary objectives (WP reward equal to track cost)
Secondary objective(s) (~25% of track cost)
Options
to keep things under control, i offered players a used mech market after every mission with a set of units i selected with 40%/50%/10% light/medium/heavy (assaults were super rare in the market, and were mostly dangled as salvage opportunities). Also since we had to keep games under three hours, the bv limits kept forces on the smaller end.
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Any recommendations for products that are
1)less of a race to the bottom than DTM,
2)easier to run with two opposing forces than ER:3052
3)pre-jihad?
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Are you running the generic Missions between tracks? They're small scale enough that you don't need to spend your entire stock of Warchest Points every time, and they don't need every objective completed to stay in business. Doing a Mission: Recon breaks even without firing a single shot, and you can earn a profit by adding weather and playing smart. Mission: Supply is similarly workable, with the added benefit of being able to scrape up a few Support Points.
Also important is that Missions tend to have Forced Withdrawal or Salvage in place, so a strategic element takes place on what to destroy and what to let run.
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We've only run two tracks so far, scout and defend.
Recon isn't in DTM; it is in 3052, but appears to be a product-specific version. Is there a book with the complete generic missions listed in generic format? Total Chaos?
Also, it appears we were using the optional bonuses not just wrong, but backwards, and adding them to the cost of the track - oops.
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Total Chaos does indeed have a large variety of generic tracks, and it has so many other tracks that I'm certain you'd find a large number with the kinds of objectives you're looking for.
I do not know if the generic missions in that book are identical to those in other books, it's possible they're subtly different in each book to better reflect the feel of combat in that era.
With 13 generic tracks and 143 named tracks, it seems to me that Total Chaos might be exactly what you're looking for. :)
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Also, it appears we were using the optional bonuses not just wrong, but backwards, and adding them to the cost of the track - oops.
Lol, that would make it harder to work through . . .
Last one I played with my group, we increased the numbers of defenders and with our plan accomplished the primary goal- secondary goal was out of reach with the time b/c it was wiping out a set amount of the enemy. We were not sure we would be able to do that even without the additional enemy forces, so we took the WP for bringing in more targets which offset it.
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If you cannot find an official Chaos Campaign track you like or fits your mission, take a look at the Campaign Operations book. There is a whole section dedicated to Warchest options and objectives that is pretty handy for scratch building a track.
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I'm slowly, (emphasize slowly) working on a 3020ish Periphery Chaos Campaign in a similar design as Total Chaos. Starting with a choice of three missions based on the various contracts you can get in the "Running a Force" section.
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Could somebody who has a copy of total chaos look at the generic scenarios and see if they're
1)Defender is xx% of attacker force
2) Roll on this table, and that's how many and what type of mech the non-player has?
I just grabbed a copy of Sword & Dragon from a game store a couple towns over, and it's the latter; I'm trying to figure out if TC is as well before I order it.
The sarna listing of Chaos Campaign products is pretty incomplete - at the least, it's missing CampOps, Wars of Reaving, Sword and Dragon, Wolf and Blake, dawn of the jihad, several ______ turning point titles, and probably stuff I haven't noticed.
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Could somebody who has a copy of total chaos look at the generic scenarios and see if they're
1)Defender is xx% of attacker force
2) Roll on this table, and that's how many and what type of mech the non-player has?
Mission: Assault
The Attacker may use up to 75% of the players force.
The Defender rolls 1d6 for each column on the chart, +2 if the player didn't complete one of 3 Missions immediately prior to this one.
The chart has columns for Tech level, % of Attackers force, weight mixture, which table to select units on, and what skill level to give them.
The exact numbers vary between missions, but the general theme is consistent for all the missions.
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So an option of both? Ordered!!!