/awg/ Alternative Wargames General

Vaguely relevant to OP, a friend and I are looking for a relatively good, generic 6mm game. Any particular recommendations?

>Epic Armageddon is good but not generic
>Dirtside II has some fun design rules but is pretty archaic, I don't like chit-based systems
>Dropzone is good but not generic
>Horizon Wars might be good but I haven't heard it mentioned at all
>Similarly with Laser Storm by Nordic Weasel

Any thoughts?

The main fleet game I can think of that's still in production and has modern models is Dropfleet Commander. That's pretty compact and has a really good value starter box. I can recommend Full Thrust from Ground Zero Games, that's got ship building rules so can be used with any old models, and the rules are available free, so worth a shot.

Basically, you take a 28mm or 15mm skirmish game, reduce all the measurements to their 6mm equivalents, then use 6mm proxies to play the game.

So basically its just itty bitty wargaming.

net-armageddon.org/page/rules

By magazines, do you mean old WD and Fanatic, or fanzines?

5150: Fighter Command would be my recommendation.

>By magazines, do you mean old WD and Fanatic, or fanzines?
I mean magazines for Epic, like Firepower

www.specialist-arms.com/fanatic
www.ifelix.co.uk/epic40k_magazines.html

Is the best I can find quickly. Might be able to try the PDF Archive

Try Scribd too, I never realised how big the archive was on there.

What are the best system for 6mm for a your dudes, the game?

At that point it's less about your dudes and more about your army.

...
Your army, your dudes, your legion, your harem, your personal army.
And the game is? Instead of a reply than doesn't contriboot a thing you could have said what system you find the best for that.

No need to be pedant, user; I don't think your realise the level of abstraction of 6mm. I barely name all my formations in this scale, much less individuals.

Why don't you tell us without buzzwords what you want from your games instead, hmm?

They are pretty much all the same. You don't equip stands, your dudes are whatever you decide on to theme your lists around.

Anybody got the Gaslands ruleset?

A rules games than let's make a very varied force so you can tailor it to what you want, from near futere operators operating, to Planetary fantasy Barsoom like Martian ducking it out with greens.
Then what one has the most fun to play mechanics, or at least an easy one for noobs to play?

Net Epic Armageddon is the typical starting point for many. Though Age of Tyrants is looking good, rules are free on their website.
I reccomend lurking/posting at the Tactical Command forums.

8 more days and this piece of crap term is finally over.
I swear to god, if I don't ace these exams after sacrificing pretty much all of my hobby time for 6 months...

How does this play?

Anyone has tried the Ion Age? I'm liking the comfy lore and the mini style (a bit rough, but they are getting better), the battle suits/mini mechs look good tough.
Also anyone has problems with the Captchas, again? I had to disable the legacy captcha because they are't suported anymore.

I can't remember the last time I had to actually solve a captcha puzzle thing, honestly.

As for Patrol Angis/Ion Age, there are links to reviews and AARs on this page:

theionage.com/collections/15mm-publications

Basically, it's a tabletop version of Wing Commander.

Theme's the same: you've got a couple of fighters on a (space) carrier & you're cruising around, looking for trouble.
And, since it's a Two Hour Wargames' title, it's moving really fast - as advertised.

For making your own fleet from scratch, Full thrust seems the most common generic. Dropfleet is good too, and very focused and flavourful for what it does.
Cheap star ships, you are covered with Gzg or Brigade models for generic. Firestorm will be missed, it was starting to get its own mini corner and the price weren't bad.

/awg/ , I present to you: the Goblins of Yondo. About 95% done. They are finally what I would call a small warband. Maybe I'll up them to a 24p DR warband in the future.

>Dem Zulu shields.
They seem to be from two different culture too, what's they tale?

They are one of my (many) sideprojects. I stole the original idea from a mashup contest winner by wargames factory (pic related). They are made of wgf zulus and orcs (and a GW skull). Compared to my heroic 28mm stuff they aren't more than goblins.
The archers are supposed to be rangers or temple/cave guardians, the red skull guy is a shaman, the guy with shield+axe is a chief and the rest are normal warriors.
I never bothered too much about a background for them, but I listened to a short story while painting last week 'The Abominations of Yondo ' and I figured that it would be the perfect desert for them to live in. I think about adding some demons from the malifaux range as light cav and maybe some kind of hunting companions for the rangers. Or I'll go with a spider theme, which is easy to do because every range has some kind of spiders, but the GW Goblins already do that.

Demons instead of spiders sounds cooler, specially if they are more "ethnic" demons/spirits/monsters.

>need alternative fleet battle games to SW:Armada

Full Thrust (FT) is an oldie but a goodie. Very generic by design so it can fit into any universe (SW, ST, Halo, etc), includes ship-building rules so you can make the fleet you want/that fits your models/universe.

Firestorm Armada (FsA) was a game that sort of took FT, and made it more complex without being much more complicated, although it included some stuff that I didn't really enjoy (why does everyone have MINES?!).

Both FT and FsA sort of turn into slugfests though, with the largest ships generally being better than an evenly-costed amount of smaller ships thus resulting in Capital-only brawls.

There is the old-but-might-be-revived-soon game of Battlefleet Gothic, which is an okay age-of-sails-in-space fleet game. If you are not into WH40K fluff/aesthetics though you should probably steer clear. (also its been 4-5 years out of production so getting 'proper' ships for it will be fun)

The most recent big fleet game would be Dropfleet Commander, which although I am only starting to read up on, has many positives (battles are not straight slugfests, you actually have objectives on the board that make sense and your objective-capturing ships are not paper-thin. Factions are all pretty diverse as well). Do beware though, the models have LOTS of little details, so if you are like me and hate the painting part of the hobby you will be in for a fun time with them. (I also think they are overpriced for being all-plastic but I guess you pay for the details)

>All I ask for is fun rules and cool minis.
That is all anyone asks for, but the issue is that those things are subjective.

By generic do you mean FT-style games that are meant to be bent to other universes and include rules for making units?

For Dirtside II, there are alternatives to the chits, but they are usually more time-consuming than just using chits (see img). I also am not a fan of chits but I recognise their utility in DSII.

Also note that Dropfleet IS about dropping shit on planet. Every mission is D-Day, so if you want to play anything but that, it kinda...doesn't support it.

That is an interesting idea. I didn't think about keeping up the zulu/africa theme. I'll keep that in mind.

Any recommendations for 28mm rank and file Halfling models? Now that Kings of War incentivizes building an entire army of Halflings, I kind of wanted to give it a shot.

Good alternatives for x-wing and armada? All I want is good minis and fun rules.

mediafire.com/file/1zyixbgvs3ycifq/Gaslands.pdf

Yeah, that sort of thing. Like, I enjoy the DS2 unit construction rules, but I’d rather have completely different combat mechanics, mainly involving minimal bookkeeping or heaps of status markers.

I like the look of the ones from thebattleforge.co.uk myself.

Full Thrust?

The battleforge as says, also The Assault Group and Westfalia are your best bets.

Not the user who first asked about this but I see it can be played solo, is it any good at this? I have a hankering for some narrative space fights.

So how do I get some of those Epic Armageddon minis that I see on the web, without kissing every ass in that tacticalcommand forum?

The Space Marines from the old boxsets look like crap

You pretty much have to kiss every ass in the tacticalcommand forum.

The recasters are extremely cagey because people keep ratting them out.

Do yourself a favour and just look into 3rd party 6mm scifi, it's orders of magnitude easier.

Do we have the SBG Battle Companies rules yet?

There are very few games that include rules for making your own units, and even fewer that are generic.

Besides DSII, the only ground-combat game I can think of with unit-creation rules would be Fistful of Tows. The game is aimed more at modern wars (1940~2020) but can be used for things earlier (WWI) or later. It has simple enough mechanics (except the fun of fire support...) and can be used for near-future and sci-fi settings. You would only need to tweak the unit-creation rules a bit to include anything new (like anti-grav, walkers, whatever).

Another thing you could do though, is just modify DSII mechanics to fit your taste. Don't like the chit system? Replace it with a CRT or something. Don't like the alternating unit activation? Make it IGOUGO. Want something in or out? You can make it so. I myself have been looking at the Mongoose Publishing Starship Troopers game and DSII, and have been tinkering with putting the parts I like best from both together.

Thanks for the advice. I suppose I'll just make do and mend DS2, as you suggest. Or maybe look at Horizon Wars.

This. People get their panties twisted about muh secrit club, but the truth is that recasters and forumwareguys get hung out to dry way too often and when that happens, everyone gets fucked.

I don't get how people can be such rabid GW loyalists that they'd taddle on the recasters.

It's not as if there's any loss-of-revenue for GW, they stopped producing new Epic models what, five years ago now?

Laserstorm is 6/10mm ground warfare and has create-your-own units.

It's sci-fi by default (has rules for anti-grav and somes tuff) but you could just...not flavor it sci-fi and not use the sci-fi rules.
There's nothing inherent there that means you have to be sci-fi. It'd cover most modern settings well, but going too far back might get wonky, as infantry basically needs vehicles to be transported around at any reasonable pace, and it doesn't get too detailed for close combat (although there are ~5 traits specific to it)

It doesn't use any tokens - just your unit stands and rolled dice. The rule system is fairly simple, largely rolling over a stat, on a d6.
An important thing to note re it is Ivan intends to update it to a 2e soon (ish?), and judging by his other 2es of games, it'll be a separate purchase.

More like ten. At least.

According to wikipedia, Specialist games officially got axed in 2013. However I guess they stopped bringing out new releases for them much sooner.

Last Spec Games releases I remember were Araby for Warmaster and the Ad Mech ships for BFG, that must've been around 07-09.

I just finished painting a set of Austro-hungarian gasmasked infantry I got for my birthday.
Is anyones interested in a dump?

I'm in need of another interest. I currently play Infinity, Guild Ball and Wrath of Kings. I am not interested in Knight Models or anything GW. what are some other skirmisher games out there?

MERCS, Open Combat, World of Twilight, Company of Iron (if you like Warmahordes), Dark Age (one of the best games on the market in my opinion), SAGA, Bushdio, Torii, Frostgrave and a ton of others I'm sure I'm forgetting.

they're delusional retards who white knight for GW hoping GW-senpai will notice them long enough to bring back specialist games

> Dark age
I've wanted to get into this game so fucking bad but CMON's stock is just not there. It's like a choir to even sniff the game.

How is Malifaux?

>The recasters are extremely cagey because people keep ratting them out.

So what happens?

Does GW file litigation, send the nerd police to slap you with hotwheels tracks, smash your moulds like Jesus running off the money changers?

most 2HWG games are pretty good solo. the chain reaction system sometimes kind of plays itself

Thanks guys. I will give these a look. Building an entire army of halflings won't be cheap, but it will be rewarding.

They can threaten to drag you to court and thanks to how our wonderful legal system works, that is a very shitty prospect. Nobody wants to get ruined over what amounts to some hobby moonshine brewing.

Malifaux is pretty good. The models themselves have a lot of character, and the rules themself ooze with as much flavor. It is pretty well balanced, and is honestly head and shoulder above a lot of other systems when it comes to mechanics. I think you would like it if you are into Guild Ball and WoK.

aye

Spread the love for a fantastic game and setting.

I don't see a general on tg about malifaux. is the wyrd forums the best place for details on the models?

What would be the best system to run a Gundam campaign in guys? I want the battle mechanics to have a lot of depth, but not be overbearing. But I am also trying to implement Gunpla into it, mostly to give my plastic crack addiction an outlet.

There are generals occasionally, but the Wyrd forums are always a good bet.

Are there any good places to talk about Frostgrave to get the creative juices flowing? Got 3 other fellas interested after I played a game with my cousin (being one of the three).

I had so much fun, that I really like to chat about it when I have downtime.

God damn I love Mutant Chronicles. Wish I had people to play Warzone with. My Bauahus are just collecting dust right now.

Yeah, CMON are garbage about stocking shit. Noble Knight Games has a decent selection from what I last saw.

I wouldn't try it here unless you want to incur the wrath of that one dude who gets all foamy at the mouth when someone mentions they enjoy it.

I really want to get into Warzone, but Prodos has been looking shaky lately. It also doesn't help that only 3 of the factions catch my eye, 4 if you count the Imperial Scots as a separate one.

Oh fuck, if you magnetized everything and put it on a metal gameboard you could totally play in the backseat of a car on a road trip

Someone did that already. Took epic 40K minis and make a 'Travel' version of Space Hulk with tiny Termies and Genestealers.

Yeah, they've got some people nervous.

I mean, when you break it down 3 factions out of the 7 available ain't too shabby a spread. Me, personally, I like Bauhaus andCybertronic. None of the others really jump out at me, and I fucking love the setting. I guess Brotherhood are kinda cool looking, but playwise I didn't enjoy them too much.

Prodos is one of the reasons I'm sticking with the old stuff desu.

Don't know much about playstyle. I like Brotherhood and Dark Legion the most. Bauhaus is great, especially the Juggernauts. I like the Wolfbane and trenchers from Imperial, but that's it. Mishima is fun for that 80's Japanese goofiness, even if its not for me. Cybertronics is meh for me, and Capitol just looks boring.

The Mercurian Maculators have to be my favorite models they put out.

Bauhaus was my army way back when. In fact old school Warzone is how I got into miniatures gaming (and I was introduced to the glory of MC through Siege of the Citadel). So Bauhaus holds a soft spot in my heart (especially Venusian Rangers and Hussars), and I just love the nee look of Cybertronic. I'm a sucker for robots and shit.

Brotherhood is cool, DL has some sweet models (Stalkers, Maculators and the new Necromutants look so good). Imperial was my brothers faction of choice (fun fact, my brother is a character in the new game) so I will always hate them a little. Capitol has some cool stuff (Martian Banshees and the Orca), Mishima has that classic 80's charm as you said.

I don't like the new Whitestar faction and am really glad they've not shown up in Warzone yet. But I'm also pretty anti-"the stereotypical hardcore Russians who are just the toughest people ever and kill bears with their hands" cliche that permiates popular culture and games.

Tribes of Earth was cooler, but ofc Prodos couldn't just continue it and let old fans use their stuff.

Flyers and brochures printed, posters laminated, some easy painting tonight and tomorrow evening, table set up tomorrow afternoon and we are locked, cocked, and ready to rock.

As for Whitestar I don't mind them, the expansion they got in the Dark Eden sourcebook and adventure really softened my opinion on them, I thought they were a bit too on the nose before as well but after reading more on them I can see them fitting in more easily. I just really want to see a Dark Eden expansion for warzone, imagine the Sons of Rasputin, Whitestar, Crescentia, Lutheran Triads, and Templars all rendered in crisp detailed resin. Fuck I hope Prodos doesn't die or just pass up on renewing the license before then.

Worst comes to worst, I've been slowly hashing out some rules for the Tribes and the Dark Eden based off of the RPG and old editions of Warzone, so maybe keep an eye out for that later this year.

I'm just over the obligatory Russian faction thing in games. Bauhaus has Russians in it, why do we need a whole new faction of hardcore Russians?

But despite that I still love my Warzone.

So I know I haven't read anything Batman in a while (aside from re-reading my beloved Knightfall), but when the fuck did Gordon rock a power armored suit?

So what is the difference between NetEA and NetEpic?

Because of Chris Burch's Belorussian wife, mostly.

that's adorable

I've been reading 5150 Fighter Command and it looks good, but I am wondering how playable it is without capital ships. I was planning to use X Wangs, my Robotech stuff or Shattered Void stuff when it arrives - but don't have any 1/285 cruisers etc.

Except that White Star shows up in the first edition rulea for WZR, and Birch had no input on that. Yeah they got fleshed out more in the RPG, but they aren't a creation of Modiphius.

So how much does the average WZR army run you, American, if going with Prodos' stuff?

>how playable it is without capital ships
Well, seeing as capital ships are the standard method of delivering fighters to the battlefield, that leaves you (IMHO) only with starbases or orbital stations as staging grounds ...

Damn, I was hoping it could be played like X Wing as just a dogfight game with the other stuff off-table.

I don't like Epic ships in X Wing, they're like titans and shit in 40k and don't fit the scale (I think that 1:285 is the best scale for fighter craft, good detail but doesn't need a fuckhuge table)

A lot but I really hate selling online, I just periodically gift them to friends

You guys think space dogfighting games are overdone? Just got done with a game of endless space 2 and I'm really thinking about game devving one up. Want it to be semi-hard sci-fi however. That way the fighters can pull off some janky movement.

Is there a skirmish game about gangs of Vampires/Werewolves/Templars/Cultists/Wizards fighting it out in modern day?

There was an old CCG+Tabletop Strategy+Roleplaying hybrid game like that called "Behind", but I'd like miniatures and a solid ruleset without the collecting aspect.

Around 2 years ago when Batman 'killed' joker after a fight only too sucumb to his wounds.
Died next to a Lazarus pit though.
Was the conclusion of the last story arch I believe, the one where jokers goes over the edge (also cuts of his face).
Both lost their memory while Bruce was secluded in his home.
Malifaux or Freebooters Fate.
Eden, Spectrse and WWX is also worth mentioning
Freebooters Fate is great.
Otherwise this guy.
What kind of skirmish, fantasy or modern, many abilities, characterful difference, importance of non-model interaction (if you have to manage somethig aside the models ob th table)

Can't think of one in modern times per se, but Empire of the Dead is set somewhere around a somewhat fictionalized steampunk 1900 I think.
The next best thing that comes to mind would be Dracula's America, but that's ~1800.

Though to be fair
>Vampires/Werewolves/Templars/Cultists/Wizards
Everything from that list except maybe for wizards you could find in Infinity. Although that is set in the future.

Osgrey has one but can't speak for the value of it.
But best for it would be 7TV.

Modern is just not that popular.
Carneval, Wolsung and Gangs of New York are all in the past.