Way late recap of Planetfall game

Hello Gentle Readers,

Been a crazy couple of weeks (EDIT: holy crap..its been a month!), and lets see if I can remember where we left off. So I was hip deep in Relthoza minis for Planetfall and had a game setup. Well as it played out, we did a 2 on 1 game so that my friend Robert could join in. The game basically was a Relthoza core plus a Directorate core (both only half), vs a multi helix Terran force.

I wish I had taken pics...I believe I had even mentioned in my last post that I should take pics...but as the night was a little off the hip...well I had other things on my mind. The game was a little wonky. I thought it would have been easy to simply stick to the normal Planetfall rules of turn order for this game. However, in light that Robert was a newbie, our opponent Tim suggested something off the cuff and play it more like a three player game. That had some pretty major impact to the gameplay because our side got two activations to his one, but it also meant that at the end of the turn, he got to run rampant. So pros and cons for doing it like that. But as it was really just a learning game...all was good.

All in all, things went smoothly. We didn't use the cards and didn't really play with specific terrain rules. Buildings and the like were in play, but movement restrictions and such were all pretty basic.

It has been too long for me to give a round by round recap, so I'll just try to hit upon the highlights. For me, the main highlight was my spires. For some reason Tim decided not to try to shoot them after they landed. I got pretty good rolls for my scatter and each spire hit a good spot. By not shooting the spire with his next activation, it disgorged my troops and cost him a heavy tank, and then put some serious damage to a battle tank squadron (2nd spire group).

Robert's highlight was probably his Trojan tanks doing some serious disruption with the cyber attacks. Very nice to discount shields with those and just muss things up for poor Tim. They were destroyed in the end, but saved high priority targets with their sacrifice.

There were two rules disputes and unfortunately this is going to happen when you have a 1.5 version on the web, and a 1.0 version in physical form. The first and most hotly contested rules dispute was concerning Forlorn Hope. By my reading, as soon as a unit gets enough disorder markers to mean that they will be removed in the end phase, that unit then earns Forlorn Hope, and all the benefits. However, they are still removed in the end phase. Tim seemed to think that the unit gets the Forlorn Hope in the end phase, and then sticks around for another whole turn. The wording between the two versions was significantly changed, but also still not crystal clear.

The second issue was the process of boarding a building. Tim seemed to think it has to be assaulted, even if there were no enemy in it. The rules seem pretty clear that an empty building can simply be moved into by infantry during the move phase. This was an odd one to have come up. Tim has been playing a while and both Robert and I are newbies. However, I am a huge rule nazi. Therefore, I do my best to know the rules as well as I can. So you had Tim's experience vs my rules nazi-ism. Seems like this one should have been easy to resolve, but it wasn't. I'm going to read the rules again and simply make sure of how it is supposed to be.

By the way, Spartan has done some bad practices in rules disputes on their forum. They will actually change the rules as written in a forum post, but then not publish it in an offical FAQ or update. I hate that. FAQs should never change rules to begin with...they are for clarification only. If you are going to make a rules change, then you need to update the actual rules. Hiding them in forum posts is super bad.

All in all though, it was a fun night, the forces of the Zenian League won the day.

Since then, I have primed a core helix for my relthozans. Also, Robert has agreed to purchase the Directorate core helix from me. So full steam ahead with the bugs. I will hopefully get some painting done this upcoming weekend and will post pics of the progress. I'm going with a brown/bronze color scheme so hopefully it will all turn out well.