"Super Unstoppable Death Machine Units" Topic

According to a recent poll, most gamers avoid rulesets that are prone to "super unstoppable death machine units."

Which rulesets have "super unstoppable death machine units" problems?

40k.

Napoleonics

Napoleonics is not a ruleset, Otto.

OK Otto, SOME Napoleonic rules make Imperial Guard Grenadiers unstoppable. Others do it for British Rifles. Most do neither. And every genre with more than one or two ruelsets have some that do the same.

Swedes in Benith the lilly banners are pretty super human. But then the rules also recommend the enemies of the swedes have 50-150% more troops.

'Clix

Spearhead kinda gets there when American and Brit troops need a 5+ to change orders and can only do so when not in combat, while Germans do it on a 2+ and can roll at any time.

The old "Empires in Arms" board game made the French pretty unbearable.

Easy answer would be 40K and W$Fantasy.

There was also a 7YW set which made the Prussians godlike. Not sure, but it might be "The Final Argument of Kings."

30K Primarchs

Tricolor.

Column, Line, and Square.

Maybe the original Chainmail Armored Cavalry versus peasants and levy troops. Look at the dice odds in hat match up!

Chainmail Swiss and Landsknechte could probably take on a few trolls on their own :-)

Matildas in EW Flames of War.

Royal Horse Artillery in Empire V.

I remember Empire had a special "S" morale for the French Old Guard. S – Like the letter on their chests.

The Swedes in anything by Warlord Games- I've seen 'em tear Astartes legions to peices with their bare hands. I'm pretty sure they're the next faction for Gates of Antares too, with their rapid-firing plasma muskets, and muzzle-loading Autocannons.

Isn't this the whole premise behind OGRE?

In a lot of rules this years unstoppable death machine is next year's "rebalanced" lower-mid.

Saga Byzantines get my vote.

This was something I intentionally designed out of the QILS mechanic. You can't build an unkillable unit.

You can intentionally build units that can't kill (or degrade the capabilities of a unit on the board to the point where they can't kill, if that fits your objectives and strategy to achieve them).

And you can make the odds that any given unit will kill the one you're designing are arbitrarily small. But they're never zero, as SWMBO has often demonstrated to me. (Once, her half-die mouse devastated my four-die Master Bacon pigs with cleavers on piggy-back despite estimated 32:1 odds.)

Etotheipi brings up a good point in that "build" systems are often suspectible to this, unless you take great care in designing them.

A lot of build systems tend to either not correlate the value of an item or ability to the general strength of a unit (making a unit move through terrain at no penalty isn't worth much for a unit of peasants but for a giant monster it's rather handy) or assign "stat" costs on a 1-for-1 scale (i.e. each point of Armour costs 3 points, instead of increasing the cost as you buy more).

Of course "fixing' this increases complexity in the formula or process and may not be a big deal for a group of like-minded gamers in any event.

Saga Byzantines get my vote.

I thought for Saga it was the Irish?

The "rule of thumb" (not a build system, and we acknowledge that such things are fundamentally flawed, yet frequently useful regardless) in QILS is not terribly complex.

Start with the number of dice the figure gets. Add one for a "tricked out ability", which is the ability to have one of the rules (like, say, a figure can't attack the same target twice in a turn) not apply. Square that number t get the value. Add up the values of the figures on your side.

It's pretty simple, yet holds up very well for creating forces where reasonably equally skilled players have fairly even track records of winning symmetric objective games in environments that don't favour one side. It also holds up for the system in the long run for things like the good ol' 3:1 rule and some other, more complex combined arms force ratio projections.

Part of the success is in the system encoding combat effectiveness for close combat, ranged combat, and defense into coloring the pips on a d6 (though the rules don't explicitly say you must use a d6 and we've done some experimentation along those lines; all the scenarios we publish do use a d6).

This gives you billions of options, with tens of millions of tactically significantly different designs (combinations vs permutations).

Basically, you have a finite performance space and you have to make trade-off decisions when allocating it. If this pip is defense, then it can't be anything else (well, mostly, but that requires the use of optional rules, and there still are limits).

So, you can always roll a one. Which means you have a 1:6 chance of having a max of one defense point (or maybe you have a zero, since you made that an attack pip). Or 1:36 with two dice (again, best case). And so on. The odds can be intentionally made arbitrarily small, but there is no no-hit build for a figure. You can always hit it with a 2 attack strength.