Refining the system

Over the holiday season I've had some time to organize a couple of playtests of the game to see if the core mechanics work well. 

Playtesting is always very interesting because it immediately highlights any glaring issue that in your mind isn't even an issue. Even just explaining the rules to someone can often trigger an immediate realization that something just does not work. It is important though to decide what is a core part of the design that you are not willing to change (even if the playtesters do not like it) because that is what makes it interesting to you. In my case I cannot compromise on the random activation done by drawing cards as that is one of the main differentiators and interesting points (for me) of the system. I also cannot compromise on the size of the units and the amount of units in an overall fleet as I have to work with the Fleet File collection models.

For the playtest I needed to choose a scenario. I wanted a small battle which wasn't too long in the anime so that I can use just a handful of models and test first in a limited scale and a short time. Easier to test it multiple times. Because of this I chose Lugen, which is one of the battles just before Amristar. The battle is between the black lancer fleet and the 10th fleet.

Because of the limited size of the battle I chose to use 5 ship models for the empire and 7 for the FPA. Again, some of the limitations are there because there just aren't that many black lancer models in the Fleet File collection boxes.

The HP and various other stats for each battle group are recorded on the fleet status sheets which look something like this:

Overall I was pretty satisfied with the playtesting but some of the main things that stood out to me and needed changing were:

• Victory conditions: initially i had a mechanic where every time you lost a full row of HP you added a dead card to your deck and when drawing too many of those it forces a retreat. This ended up not working as it just slowed the game down too much with many activation being just drawing dead cards when the game was already functionally decided. I've decided to change it to simple moral checks once 50% of the fleet HP is lost.
• Fighters: fighters are represented by tokens that can be deployed from each battlegroup onto the map. They have limited range and after some turns have to retreat back to the ships to be deployed again. The mechanics of how this worked were just not good enough and a bit cumbersome to manage so I slightly redesigned their role as a soft area control.
• Dice: initially I was using d6 but I found that it didn't allow the granularity that I wanted. If a ship was too far I cannot increase the target number to be rolled above a d6 and I cannot decrease it below a 2. So, for example, if the target number at close range is 2 how can i make it even  more impactful when a ship is firing into the rear of another ship? You can double damage or explode dice, etc.. but it doesn't scale in the same way as just decreasing the target number by 1. So I changed the dice rolled to d10. The shooting templates then changed something like the image below. Now there is space above the max range and below the minimum so that modifiers have an effect.

In addition to all of this I introduced a new mechanic called formations. Each battle group can be in a certain formation which confers some benefits. Ideally each formation is better in different circumstances and choosing which formation to use is a crucial choice. It also gives something else to do with an activation card apart from just moving.

The formations are:

• Offensive: Better at close range and causing moral check fails.
• Defensive: rewards static defense.
• Command: buffs fighters in their area.
• Maneuver: more mobility.

To change a battle group to a formation it requires a skill check with modifiers depending on which formation is the stating point and which the target.

The diagram above shows how the different formations are related. This sort of system should also allow for more customization and personality to commanders. A defensive commanders will have bonuses moving into defensive formation and negatives moving out of it. Or a commander which is very good at controlling their fleet might just have flat skill check modifiers to every roll.

And this last point is one of the more important ones as what makes LOGH what it is is the personality of the characters and the game needs to showcase this. The playstyle of each fleet should feel very distinct depending on your commander and the scenario.

I have  yet to playtest these changes and if you're interested in helping out, please head to the discord:

discord.gg/YkfpxwSWYC

You can also find here a link to the playtest draft rules:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lVFoyPWOxfr_r59apUBhqKbIOcnLhBwL/view?usp=sharing