Post by RED_NED on Sept 22, 2015 17:51:51 GMT
WARNING - this review is way too long and fucking anal.
*Disclaimer – I am not particularly a Halo fan, I've played the first computer game, but have little to no interest in the background or universe. As such, I will be reviewing this game purely on mechanical merit rather than it's attempt to adhere to the computer game lore.*
Overview
Halo Fleet Battles is the latest ship combat game released by Spartan Games, based on the Halo Franchise. It's essentially the 4th iteration of the same system they've been tinkering with for years (the previous versions being Uncharted Seas, Firestorm Armada and Dystopia Wars). Each player assumes the role of either the Covenant or the UNSC Humans (United Nations Space Command) and both bring a fleet of equal size. The ships in the fleet are organised into squadrons, which consist of Battleships, Cruisers and Frigates. The players take turns activating one squadron of ships where they move, fire weapons etc in a Chess like fashion (though a squadron cannot be activated twice in a turn). You can also launch fighters, bombers and boarding craft. Each player also has a Commander. You roll 6 command dice each turn and can 'spend' these during the turn to influence dice rolls, representing commanders orders and tactics. Players gain victory points at the end of the turn for controlling sections of the table, plus additional points for enemy ships you destroyed this turn. The first player to achieve the pre-decided Victory point total wins.Contents
The basic game costs £80, compared to Games-Workshop's recent release Age of Sigmar which is £75. The models are good and you get about the same number of miniatures as in Age of Sigmar (Though the Age of Sigmar sculpts are a lot more detailed obviously) The models are fairly simple to put together and are colour coded for your convenience with the Covenant in shocking purple, Nice! The rulebook is full colour ( the layout and ease to use is really disappointing) and the tokens/terrain templates are pretty but incredibly flimsy – several of the tokens ripped when punching them out. The box is really thin, feeling more like the card sleeve you would slot over the actual box and as such it's not really suitable for holding the models once they are assembled. The game comes with custom dice too, which at first glance look splashy and exciting, though I have issues with them (as I'll explain later).The Rules
*I haven't played enough games to comment too much on balance, though it seems like the Covenant are more powerful than the UNSC. I will focus more on the mechanics of the game than on the tactics and balancing.*Bases and Squadrons
In Halo you place your ships on large bases that often consist of more than 1 model on a base. You then put these bases into squadrons, with each squadron consists of 6 Build Rating (BR) of ships. Squadrons have to consist of at least 1 Frigate base and 1 Cruiser/Battleship base (though you can have some special formations that break this rule). What this means is that 3 frigate models on 1 base is essentially a single model, and aside from feeling like you actually get a lot less models than the box claims this can lead to some confusion on the tabletop. Placing your 3 Frigate models in different positions on the base changes the rules of the frigate base, which is akin to an alternate class of Frigate. I can see how this could be desirable to have multiple classes of ship using the same model, but having 6 bases of 3 Frigates, making a mass of 18 Frigate models in a squadron can be hard at a glance to know the exact makeup of your opponent's force.Also, you can place a Frigate model on the base of a Cruiser or Battleship. This seems odd to me, because you put frigates and cruisers into a squadron so if you wanted a cruiser and a frigate together then why not have a cruiser base and a frigate base rather than a combined Cruiser and Frigate on a single base. (The BR is the same either way, so it's not to cram more ships into your squadron) It gets more bizarre as the first expansion allows you to put 2 cruisers on a single base – Is this better or worse than 2 cruisers on seperate bases? It seems like you should either have all bases be individuals where you use a base of multiple frigates on it's own, or that each ship should be based individually and to simulate squadrons of multiple ships you put them into squadrons (so 3 Frigates on seperate bases form a squadron). Using multiple models on a base AND multiple bases in a squadron seems unnecessary.
Most wargames have a player organise their force into some kind of 'Elements' be it blocks of napoleon infantry, a squadron of tanks, a squad of space marines or even have models be individuals in skirmish style games. There's a few reasons for this, the most obvious being ease of use. It's more convenient to push forward a base of 100 vikings than it is to move each model individually whilst similarly allowing the grouping of attacks rather than laboriously doing one at a time. I feel that having the models in a squadron move at the same speed is also important. Having some models move 5" and some move 6" is barely noticable but goes against the ease of use when models have different speeds.
Another bonus of 'Elements' is that you can seperate types of troops. Having the heavy infantry be in one Unit and the light cavalry be in another Unit is visually appealing – it gives structure to the Unit, it allows players to easily recognise the role of a Unit at a glance, and it gives Units specialised roles and weaknesses, creating a more dynamic flow to the battle.
One advantage of Units in the Alternate Activation system is that some Units are better than others. A Battleship is a large powerful unit whereas a small Unit of frigates is weaker, you can have heavy Cruisers that are more powerful than regular Cruisers. This leads to a dynamic use of the turn structure, where differing activations are not of an equal powerr and along with the fact that once a Unit is activated it is expended this leads to a cat and mouse effect, where you are trying to bait your opponent into using their more powerful Units while placing your weaker Units into danger first - like Pawns in a Chess game. This is one of the huge strengths of Units with different power levels in an alternate activation game, and is especially brilliant because it isn't written into the rules and instead emerges as you play the game.
Halo forces a player to have different types of ships in squadrons making awkward movement, with different move values and ships that turn differently. The squadrons are less defined as you are forced to homogenize most of your squadrons into a 'basic' squadron that doesn't fulfill a specific role It also makes the activations a lot more flat in their power level which I feel is a huge detriment to the game system.
Custom Dice
You can play either Scenario or just a normal battle. I haven't played any of the scenarios yet, because to get a feel of the rules a 'line them up and knock them down' game will highlight a lot of the rules in a game without relying on special outside factors. I will just cover the basic battle rules here.
One thing I will touch on is the custom dice - as they are used to determine the kind of battle you play they are the first thing you roll. Custom dice are great. Hark's first reaction was to be excited about dice with cool symbols on them. Being the heartless robot that I am, the appearance of the number generators had little effect on me and I was more interested in how they affected the game and how they were better suited than a regular die.
So the game comes with 20 'Halo Dice' which have 6 sides (1x FAIL, 2 x MISS, 2x ONE, 1x TWO). Essentially it is a D6 (1 = FAIL, 2-3 = MISS, 4-5 = ONE HIT, 6= TWO HITS). I will do a bigger discussion on this later, but here is the first problem and please bear in mind the game does comes with two D6.
To determine the scenario you are playing, each player rolls a 'Halo Dice' and then consult a table depending on the results. Your first instinct is "Ooh, that's cool" because you are using the new special dice, but looking at it further it highlights a big problem – the over saturation of 'specialness'. The game is essentially using the special symbol dice as a normal dice here (and they do it everywhere in the rules) which dilutes the coolness of them, because you are using them in a mundane way. To keep a unique playing piece cool and exciting you need to have some restraint in the way you use it, or it isn't special any more.
Setup
Okay, so the basic scenario is pretty good. The table is split into 2'x2' squares that are called 'Sectors' and you get 1 Victory Point at the end of the turn if you have a model in a Sector and your opponent doesn't. This is a fairly basic scenario in wargames, because its an attempt to force the players to move around the board and engage with one other rather than hang back and be inactive. It's pretty much the same scenario our gaming group uses in our modified version of the Uncharted Seas rules we play.
Unfortunately it gets muddied somewhat because you gain Victory Points depending on the Build Rating of enemy models you destroy. This wouldn't be a problem at all if the models of similar BR had the same points values, but the fleets in Halo are slightly asymmetrical, with the Covenent ships being more powerful than humans but have the same Build Rating. BR is used to create squadrons, doubling up to use them as victory points doesn't really work in my opinion. Warhammer 40k used to have a scenario that granted 1 Victory Point per squad killed regardless of number or quality (5 little grots being worth the same as 10 powerful terminators for example) and was generally disliked.
Setting up the terrain is kind of interesting. For each Sector, the players both roll a dice (A 'Halo Dice' of course) Effectively on a 4 or 5 you place one piece of terrain, on a 6 you may place one. This, on average should mean 1 piece of terrain in each 2' by 2' square, which actually isn't that much and when you factor in that about half of the terrain pieces are smaller than a ship's base it really feels like playing Warhammer where most of the boards have 1 tree on them as terrain. Setting up your fleet is pretty standard, you each take turns putting a squadron on the table.
Commanders
At the start of each turn, both players have a Commander Card representing their commander on a space station or planet nearby. This is interesting, most games with commanders put them on one of the ships (though to be fair it's nearly always the most powerful vessel) to add incentives and change of gameplay if they are killed. I'm not against having them off table, but I feel you lose very little and gain a lot by adding 'mini objectives' by allowing you to deny resources to your opponent by killing their captain.
You roll 6 'Commander Dice' - nice colour coded dice with symbols on them. These dice are D3's, with each symbol repeated twice. The 3 symbols are: Attack, Defend and Command. Depending on what your Commander does, you can 'spend' these dice to gain a little bonus effect. At the end of the turn you can choose to reroll unused dice or keep any until the following turn. You spend the dice to do 3 main actions:
Attack – Re-roll a 2 Attack Dice. Bear in mind that when a squadron attacks, it may roll over 30 dice, so this is a small effect.
Defend – Reduce an enemy attacks hits by 2. This is pretty good, and can save your ship from death.
Command – Reorganise your squadrons – This is a terrible concept and implementation of that concept.
You also get to combine dice, you can spend 3 Attack dice or 3 Defend Dice to do a special power but I found these to be too situational and expensive and I've never used one. Hark was excited by the commander concept, I've seen similar designs so knew that it was something that could work and I was optimistic. Here's some of the problems I have:
Firstly, they already did a similar thing way better in Uncharted Seas, through the use of Race Decks. These are 26 card decks, unique to each race that you draw from and the cards can be played to add a special effect. One of them, for example was to reduce the number of enemy hits by -2 (like the Defend power above). On the surface, both systems are pretty similar but I feel cards have a significant advantage. Hidden information is a powerful tool for a game, and one that wargames often struggle to use elegantly. Poker is a game of nothing but hidden information and bluffing and you can add that whole aspect of the game into yours with very little effort or complication. Having an opponent move his ship into a vulnerable position then playing an opportune card when you move to attack it is fantastic – the reveal is exciting. Being able to see your opponent has 2 Defend dice, you know that is their only response by contrast isn't exciting because there is no bluffing.
The shooting system this game uses requires rolling a number of dice, and getting enough 'hits' to equal the enemy ship's defence and cause them damage. The original system is amazingly elegant and satisfying, but it does generate a feeling of helplessness when you put your models into danger. This is where the hidden cards can give you some protection – even if you don't have the correct card you can bluff that you do, making your opponent overextend slightly to kill your unit so that they are sure you can't protect it. Also the Cards add immense flavour to the game. Having 26 unique cards for each player, with quotes or cool sounding names really enhances the game and serves to make each fleet feel more different which is incredibly important. Rolling 4 Commands and 2 Attacks does not have the same emotional weight especially because the effects are also small and have little gravitas to them. In Uncharted Seas, one of the cards is called "From Hell's Heart I Stab At Thee! "And causes your ship to explode when destroyed, especially useful when performing a suicidal Ram attack. The card has such great emotional feedback, and adds a lot of strategic depth when both players play around cards like that. If the Human player has 3 Attack icons, he can add some dice to a boarding attack he makes. It's fairly powerful (though limited in it's use and no surprise to either player when he can use it), but the reaction in comparison is incredibly weak.
Finally, the Command icon allows you to form squadrons together. The game system can lead to stragglers of squadrons, where most of the ships are destroyed and only a weak frigate remains. The original Uncharted Seas design dealt with this by allowing any ship to be a threat. They made modifications to the ruleset (making them worse in my opinion) which means stragglers are much weaker. Reorganising Units is a hard concept to pull off, and I've rarely seen it done well. Similar to the reason mixed squads are a problem, having your wolf rider become part of your catapult crew in Warhammer would feel rather contrived. Some games have a 'last man standing' rule where a single model has to check each turn or die to try and clean the table up from small ineffectual units running around. Having a third of your special orders devoted to this makes it feel like a 3rd of your order rolls are blanks. (though each Command also gives you +1 to see if you go first each turn which feels weak, but even it it was powerful isn't exciting or tactical in the least). Also the concept of having lots of little squads fly from opposite ends of the table to reform seems unlikely in the short timeframe of the game, at least not common enough to have a third of orders devoted to it. And again, the confusion of having squads be so fluid and models forming and reforming squadrons is aesthetically unpleasing to me, especially if you paint your models with squadron insignia.
Movement
The player's roll to see who goes first and the game begins! The games uses Alternate Activations (my preferred method of playing wargames), where each player activates one of their squadrons, move and shoots with it then play passes to their opponent. It simulates real-time battle more effectively than lining up your entire army and shooting with everything before your opponent has a chance to respond. It also allows immediate response to an opponent moving, lets you destroy units before they have chance to activate, but not destroy everything – making target priority important. I feel like Alternate Activations add so much tactical depth to a game purely by the way it works that it is almost always preferable to games where each player moves and shoots their entire army.The movement is pretty good in the game. Mixed Units ruin that for me, because frigates are able to turn on the spot and move quickly, but are then hampered by the fact they have a cruiser or battleship in the squadron. In Uncharted Seas, ships were seperated by class and it allowed for a lot more maneuvering when smaller frigates are allowed to be very nimble. Putting all the models on the same size base also makes the ships feel a lot more similar in their movement than when they are based individually. This is also a limitation of most space wargames however where the flying bases represent the model rather than the model itself. Turning is nice and neat - 45 degree angles, with ships being able to turn at different points in their move depending on their size, and overall the movement rules are solid.
Shooting and the Firepower System
The core Firepower System is one of the best wargame mechanics I've played. It was originally designed from an American Civil War game, but the first time I encountered it was in Uncharted Seas (also by Spartan Games). It's also a system that Spartan Games seems to struggle with, as they don't appear to fully understand the strengths and weaknesses of the mechanic. First let me explain their first system Uncharted Seas used:Each ship has one or more weapons, organised into arcs and being a naval game most weapons have a single arc – Broadsides or Fore and Turrets that could fire all round. This allowed for a lot of strategy in how you moved your model. Firing both sides of your Broadsides effectively doubled your firepower while some ships had only Fore guns which were a lot easier to bring to bear, especially if you were an Orc ship intent on ramming your opponent! Turning to fire your broadsides usually meant facing away from the enemy model, so you didn't get as close to them when firing as you did when racing towards them with Fore guns.
Each weapon in Uncharted Seas had an Attack Dice value in 4 Range Bands in which it could fire with each Range Band is 8" so the ranges weapons could fire were 8", 16", 24" and 32". Not all weapons could fire in each Band, some weapons could only fire in Range bands 1 and 2, giving them 16" range. Because of this they generally got more Attack Dice. Combine this with weapons having restricted arcs, and you had a lot of room to make weapons that felt a lot different to each other but using the same system. Orcs had strong Fore guns that are easy to bring to bear, but had a short range. Elves had no Fore guns but close powerful Broadsides that they could use because of their fast speed. Dragon Lords had longer range weapons but their effectiveness up close was weaker in comparison.
Most of the Covenant weapons in Halo can fire their weapons in the Fore and the Side (35 of the 40 dice from the Covenant battleship for example). In fact every ship in the game has at least one weapon that can fire in all arcs. This means that positioning is much less important because both sides can bring their weapons to bear a lot more easily. The fact that ships don't ram or board each other and a lot of the nuance of firing arcs is lost. I found the maneuving aspect of the game to be a lot less exciting in this regard. They also do away with Range Bands, and each weapon has a different Range in inches. This isn't necessarily bad, but it makes combined squadrons awkward when the ships fire at different ranges.
Here is how the original Firepower System worked:
When firing you add up your Attack Dice, which is how many D6 you roll and the totals could get quite high - Rolling over 20 dice is not uncommon! You roll your 20 Attack Dice, and are looking for any result of a 4+. Each 4+ is a HIT. Each 6 your roll counts as 2 HITS and you get to roll another dice. This is a fantastic rule, known as the exploding dice mechanic. It allows you to roll potentially a huge amount of dice from a relatively innocious shot, feeling like Luke Skywalker hitting the target on a Deathstar when a little frigate manages to cause catastrophic damage to a much larger Battleship.
Once you have finished rolling, you add up the number of HITs you got. You then compare this to your targets Damage Rating (DR). Frigates had a DR of 3, cruisers have a DR of 4 and Battleships have a DR of 6, if you beat it then you dealt them a point of damage. Each model also has a Critical Rating (CR). Cruisers have a CR of 6 and Battleships have a CR of 12 If you got this many hits then you dealt ANOTHER point of damage and rolled on a Chart to see what special effect you did to the enemy ship, setting it on fire, knocking out its guns, or if you are especially lucky blowing the whole ship up in one lucky shot! Cruisers could take 4 points of damage, and battleships could take 8. This meant that it was much harder to kill battleships and they generally got worn down over multiple turns and attacks. Modifications to the roll is nice and simple – If the target is obscured you halve your Attack Dice and firing at a small target meant you needed a 5+ to score a hit, not a 4+. It is simple and easy to work out in the middle of an activation when a player is deciding who they want to shoot at.
So why this system good? Firstly, you are rolling A LOT of dice. Warhammer is commonly derided for its 'bucket of dice' system, and you may think that applies here, but it doesn't and actually works well for ship combat. The fact you roll a lot of dice has a feeling attached to it (one that Warhammer does convey) and that is the feeling of a lot of individual shots. In a game where you roll one die, it feels like one action taking place. When you roll a lot of dice it feels like a barrage, lots of cannon balls flying and hitting your target.
One aspect that Warhammer suffers from, is that you are making a series of rolls that diminish the effect of the initial roll. If you roll 50 hits, then roll to wound and fail half of them, then your opponent makes 75% of their saving throws, you makes 3 times as many dice rolls and each roll is causing less to happen. This Firepower System causes a large initial roll, and the exploding dice gives hope of potentially INFINITE hits. A majority of the time the extra 'exploding' dice rolls don't have an impact but emotionally each player is invested in the outcome, especially because the attacking player is attempting to reach a fixed target number. If the Critical Rating of a ship is 12, and the attacking player rolled 10 HITs with 3 rerolls, both players are on the edge of their seat for that final roll. Unlike the Warhammer System, you are always Rolling up and creating more results, more hits which emotionally feels really good to play and leads to tension, which is brilliant. Also, the scaling Damage Rating into Critical Rating means even if you get a bad dice roll where you should, on average, have caused a Critical, still gives the consolation prize of a point of damage. Similarly, if you use a card to reduce your opponents HITs by 2 and reduce that attack from a Critical to a normal damage, the attacker still got something out of the attack, so neither player feels completely cheated.
Finally, the abstraction of weapons into Firepower means the same system encompasses all weaponry, be it dragon's breath, catapults, cannons or laser beams. In fact you can add special keywords to weapons that represent fire causing weapons or attacks that kill a lot of crew on board the enemy ship which allows you to add small effects to attacks. The system is so versatile, that all you need to do is slightly change some of these values (+1 Critical Rating for hardy Dwarf Ships for example) and entire fleets start to feel very different from one another.
One big problem with this system is that there is too much focus on the dice result of a 6. Spartan Games has struggled with this in their adaptations of this system, mainly in Dystopia Wars, their second Naval Game. Because the 6 causes two Hits AND a reroll which could be yet another 6, if you don't roll enough 6's then it feels like your dice roll was wasted. It makes the results of firing very swingy and it's because 6's are so important. Spartan Games attempted to fix this by adding multiple different weapon types that use different Firepower Systems. One weapon type that is the original weapon – 6's are two hits with a reroll and these are the most powerful weapons. Then you have second tier guns where 4+ is 1 hit and 6 is 2 Hits, but no rerolls on the 6's. The final weapon is 4+ is 1 hit, and no re-rolls, so you don't care about the 6's.
This blows my mind. Having 6's be 2 hits and reroll is too swingy, BUT you want to have exploding dice because Exploding dice are incredibly exciting. Also, one great strength of the system is the uniformity of weapons, meaning they all use the same system and you give them more or less dice to represent how powerful the attack is. The natural response should be make 6's 1 Hit but you get the reroll, keeping a bit of swingyness on the 6 (which is what makes the exploding dice work) but doesn't mean that you must get all 6's. A little bit of math tells you that under the original Firepower system, each die creates 0.8 Hits, but changing it to 6's being 1 Hit, then each die provides 0.6 Hits. You then increase the firepower values of the weapons to make the weapons on average still deal the same amount of damage and your problem is solved. You already roll loads of dice, so rolling 24 instead of 20 isn't a problem, and if anything means you have more dice so they explode a little more often which is the fun part.
Okay so that's how Firepower worked in Uncharted Seas, a tiny bit of tinkering and it's elegant, fun and easy to understand. How does it work in Halo? Well I think they made a pig's ear of it with nearly everything being worse. Gone are Range Bands - Weapons have 2 ranges such as '12/24' with the first value being short range and the second value being long range, and an Attack Dice value that is the same in both ranges. When firing, you have to work out your Firepower Rating (as an aside, to show how poorly written the rulebook is, I tried to look for the values for this in the shooting section, and instead its at the begining of the rulebook). You begin at Firepower Rating 4 and you gain or lose Firepower Rating depending on things such as being at long range, shooting through asteroids etc. Once you have worked out your Firepower Rating, this tells you what the symbols on the 'Halo Dice' do.
Now this really pisses me off. If I am playing a game with custom dice I want to know what the symbols represent. Here is a reminder of what the dice have: one FAIL symbol, two Miss symbols, two symbols of a '1' and one symbol of a '2'. Using abstract symbols and having them change depending on conditions has been used in games before. In Blood Bowl, the dice has a symbol that represents both players getting knocked down. If a player has a specific skill then they don't get knocked down by this result, meaning that different playing pieces of the game act differently to the same result. But the symbol is designed in a way that it doesn't feel like the symbol is wrong when you roll it against such a player (The symbol is a hybrid of a success and a failure, highlighting that it sometimes succeeds. Its actually a really well made dice design).
Here's a quick rundown on the Firepower Ratings:
Rating 1 – You can't fire.
Rating 2 – '1' and '2' result count as 1 hit. Fail and Miss are no hits.
Rating 3 – '1' counts as 1 hit. '2' counts as 2 hits. Fail and Miss are no hits.
Rating 4 – '1' counts as 1 hit. '2' counts as 2 hits- and let you re-roll a Miss (but not a Fail) dice.
Rating 5 – As above but you can r-roll Fails as well as misses.
This is such a mess: Sometimes a '2' means a '1' which is so fundamentally wrong to me. You could design the dice differently with a small explosion and a big explosion (like X-Wing does), maybe make the big explosion have be red to differentiate it. Having a die read a number but it actually means another number BUT ONLY SOME OF THE TIME is crazy, making the symbols lose their meaning. You use these dice all the time, so what a 'Fail' result means is blurred. Sometimes it means you miss, sometimes its a 'hard' miss where you can't reroll it. Sometimes it means that you can't place terrain. Other times it means your human MAC weapon causes a special effect, sometimes a '2' result means you cause a critical, its a complete shambles and so basic that a dice with symbols should be used only when you want those symbols to mean something. There's a reason you don't roll Blood Bowl block dice when attempting to pass the ball or dodge away from an opposing player.
Another issue is that this makes 'on the fly' decisions a lot more difficult, because they added an extra step where you have to work out your Firepower Rating and then add your Attack Dice up. I haven't worked out the exact maths, but if you wanted to play this game at all competitively you would learn the chances of each Rating and it adds extra unnecessary complication.
The capping of exploding dice where you can only re-roll certain dice is an odd choice. This barely makes a difference when rolling a lot of dice because there are twice as many Misses as '2' results, so mainly has an effect when you are rolling a very small amount of dice and exploding dice on small attacks is where it's needed to allow a damaged or small ineffectual unit to still be a threat. Under this system, small amounts of firepower are unable to get high rolls which is an awful design decision.
A less pertinent but annoying problem is you only get 20 'Halo Dice' in the game, and are frequently rolling more than that. Custom Dice seem to work best when rolling a small number like in X-Wing or Bloodbowl rather than buckets of them especially when they are barely any different to a D6. Plus a mass of 30 symbols seems a lot harder to differentiate the hits easily compared to D6, as there is a lot more visual noise. Colouring the symbols would have really helped in this regard. Or better yet, take a leaf out of X-Wing's book and do away with the 'Fail' result and have the 'miss' faces on the dice be blank, that would be massively more helpful.
Okay, so you've fought your way through the Firepower system and the Damage Rating and Critical Rating system is gone. Instead, now each ship has defense dice. This is to make up for the lack of Race Decks I assume and give the feeling of being able to defend yourself, but it means that the elegance of the system is lost.
'Buckets of Dice' systems suffer when you make a lot of dice rolls and end up with little to no effect. The Firepower System has a lot of individual rerolls from 6's, but because it is an isolated dice roll (no saves or anything), and is the only dice roll you make then it is allowed room for a little rerolling here and there without becoming tedious. Once you go through the effort of working out the firepower Rating, rolling the attack Dice, rerolling '2's THEN your opponent can roll to save making it all pointless. Even worse, when you roll little amounts of dice the hardcap means you can't get too many saves. This is probably why they implemented the hard cap rule – to prevent saves from getting too ridiculous.
But Covenent get a lot of dice to defend - a Battleship gets 11 dice to defend against Human Missiles, which would work out at about 8 saves. (when rolling to save you count as having Firepower Rating 4, which as a concept I find strange) Bear in mind thata high missile attack gets about 18 dice, averaging about 15 hits and unless either side get's a swingy result you will only get 7 hits. In Uncharted Seas, 7 hits would deal a point of damage to a Battleship. In Halo they changed that system: Instead, each ship has 3 hitpoints whethers its a frigate or a Battleship which I assume is to reduce the amount of bookkeeping needed (You need a lot of little dice in Uncharted Seas to keep track of damage). The side effect of this is that you can't have ships take damage as frequently or the game would be over in 5 seconds. So instead of Uncharted Sea's Damage and Critical Rating, they opted for a scaling Damage Rating System.
A human Cruiser has a Damage Rating of 7/6/3. This means you need 7 Hits to cause the first point of damage, and once that has been achieved you then need 6 hits to get the next point of damage. Its actually a pretty neat idea, but kind of messes the game up. The reason being that attacks now become all or nothing. A Covenant Battleship has a rating of 11/10/8, meaning that unless you focus a lot of fire at it then most of your shots won't have any effect. In the original System getting 6 hits was quite easy, 12 was more of a gamble, leading to a comfortable chance of doing some chip-away damage and you were rolling for the big bucks. By making it so that it feels like you have to essentially cause a critical hit each time make a lot of dice rolls end up disappointing. This also means small amounts of firepower will usually do nothing to big ships, which flies in the face of the spirit of the exploding dice.
Gone are critical effects, instead if you cause a point of damage, you roll a 'Halo Dice'. On a '1' or a '2' (4+ basically, but the designers were scared of using the D6) you put a Vulnerability token on the enemy ship. These Tokens reduce the Damage Rating numbers of the ship by 1. Its kind of a neat idea, but feels too small an effect and is really underwhelming from a cinematic point of view. You can't knock weapons off-line, cause warp-core breaches or hit the command deck, which seems par for the course in a sci-fi game.
Human Ships also use MAC weapons ( Magnetic Accelerator Cannons). The way these work is you add the 'MAC' value of the guns firing. Cruisers have MAC 2, everything else (including Battleships) have MAC 1. Then you roll a 'HALO' die. If you have MAC 2-3 you give the enemy a Vulnerability token on a roll of a '2' (a D6 roll of a 6), MAC 4-5 You do it on a FAIL or '2' (5+. Yes, here a FAIL is a success. What the fuck.) on MAC 5+ you automatically put on a token on the enemy. This is a cool idea, but happens so rarely that its a coin flip as to whether it works or not. It's meant to enable you to consolidate your fire on one ship but it's rare that it happens. THEN you find out that at the end of the turn, each models rolls for each Vulnerability token. On a '1' they remove it, on a '2' they remove 2 tokens, so most of them vanish at the end of the turn anyway, so you need to get a MAC hit early or it will often go at the end of the turn.
Boarding Craft
At the start of the game each capital Ship comes with a number of Boarding Craft tokens that you put on the base of your ship (2 on a Cruiser, 3 on a Battleship). You can pay extra points to upgrade these to become Spartans for the humans and Zealots for the Covenent, though these are quite expensive with a spartan costing as much as the cruiser he is on.
After all the squadrons have Actived, you alternate launching Boarding Craft at enemy vessels within 12". The opposing ship can attempt to shoot it down using their point defense, rolling 3-5 dice needing 4 hits to destroy the craft, so it is unlikely but possible. If they get through then a Boarding Action begins.
The Attacker rolls dice equal to their Security Detail (2 for a normal craft, 3 for a Zealot, 5 for a Spartan). So 3 boarding craft roll 6 Dice. You roll using Firepower Value 4, so will get about 5 hits. The defender rolls their Security as dice which is about 3 or 4. You compare each sides number of successes then you roll on the boarding table, adding +2 if the attacker won (+4 if won by double) -2 of the defender won (-4 if won by double).
You roll 2D6 on the Boarding Table where only a result of 8+ or more has an effect other than just killing each others boarding craft – you put Vulnerability Tokens on the defending ship, two tokens if you rolled a 10. If you get an 11 or 12 mean you plant a bomb on the enemy ship with the most disappointing countdown rules ever made and a 13+ means you blow the enemy ship up. This means you need to get lucky on the boarding roll AFTER the rigmarole of rolling point defence to shoot down boarding craft and rolling off against each other's Secuirty Detail. Its jumping through a lot of hoops for little reward. You do this after firing with your ships, so there is a high chance that even if you do put any vulnerability tokens on the enemy ship they will be removed at the end of the turn before you have a chance to benefit from them.
A Spartan costs as much as a cruiser and adds +3 Dice (2-3 hits) in the roll off and THEN adds +2 to the final boarding roll, so it's pretty powerful especially if you use a boarding order from your command card, but the weight of the final boarding dice roll is so high to gamble on such an expensive model. And here lies the trap for rules like this - It is a game about space ships. IF Spartans were a focus point and really powerful then games are decided by little cardboard tokens that dictate the battle and the actual ship models are less important, which is crazy.
Bomber/Fighter Wings
Finally, let's tackle the Wings of the game - bombers and fighters. At the start of the game, each capital ship brings along some of these and they start the game launched as if they are sperate squadrons. You have Bomber Wings and Fighter Wings, and you put the thin cardboard counters in piles to represent a Wing. This means that at a glance its hard to tell exactly how many bombers are in a Wing because the counters aren't thick enough..I'm not going to get into too much detail on these, but they have very little effect on the game. The designer stated that he wanted them to feel like flies and not have much effect and he achieved that.,yet the rules are complicated with a separate phase just for activating wings, having fighters lock bombers in position, dogfighting with a lot of dice rolls back and forth, rolling to do annihilation damage after dogfights, its one of the worst parts of the rules in how complicated it is.
If 2 bombers (which is what a Cruiser carries) attack a Cruiser, the defending model Rolls 4 dice for Point Defense, and for every 2 hits he will kill a bomber. So they are likely to kill one of the bombers, then the last bomber rolls 2 dice and the defender rolls his defence dice which is 4. You reduce the amount of hits the bomber makes by the amount of successes the point defense has, meaning on average the point defense will negate all the bomber's hits.
If the bomber gets lucky and gets more hits than the point defense then what happens? Oh, it's treated as a normal attack and you have to get enough hits to beat the Damage Rating of the cruiser. WHICH IS 8. A bomber, by definition of the rules cannot score more than 4 hits with 2 dice. Even as I write this it sounds insane, as if I am making a mistake. But no, you need a huge amount of bombers in a wing to even cause a point of damage to an enemy cruiser. The amount of faffing around and pointless dice rolls that Wings cause is frankly an embarassment and I hate these rules.
Final Thoughts
Okay, so that review was way too long. Unless your a rules nerd like me or play wargames a lot then it was boring and academic, but I talked about the game in as respectful and reasonable manner as I could, but in this closing statement then I'm not.
FUCK THIS GAME.
This game is a fucking abomination. It takes the original game system and shits all over it, with every new rule and idea being terrible. Its a cacophony of inept and poorly thought out rules that make the game an absolute misery to play. I haven't talked about how the humans are worse than the Covenent at everything with the human player losing on turn 3 while only killing one Covenant frigate. How the game is a nightmare to work out the rules in the frankly amateurish layout of the rulebook. Or the fact that they didn't give you enough base templates (that you slot in the bases) for the extra ships we got in our Gen-Con edition or the fact the summary rules of the fleet rules is a small double sided piece of card rather than 1 larger single sided sheet so you are constantly flipping it back and forth.
The Wing and Boarding rules are a chore to comprehend and then feel like you are misreading it because it doesnt make sense that bombers can only hurt damaged frigates, or that the countdown rules have you add counters and count up over multiple turns to have an effect, and you rarely plant the fucking things anyway.
Go and buy X-Wing if you want to play a space ship game because that game is actually any fun.
TL,DR: The game will make you feel like a pig after the Prime Minister has had his way with you.
