AT-43 Operation Damocles

Introduction

I have just gone mad and splashed out €80 (that’s about £50) on the “initiation set” of Rackham’s new sci-fi game AT-43, called Operation Damocles.

I have read a couple of magazine reviews (in Battlegames and Wargames Illustrated), but they said very little about the game itself, instead they were mainly concerned with the implications for the industry of the first game with pre-painted miniatures that you can start playing right out of the box. I will concentrate here on the meat: i.e. is it any good?

Value for money

I don’t really have a problem paying €80 / £50 for a new boxed set. By comparison, Games Workshop’s starter sets are typically £40 or £50. Of course, the huge attraction is that it is literally ready-to-play, with pre-painted miniatures and terrain, rulebook, dice, even a Rackham tape measure.

Now I quite enjoy painting miniatures, but that really means the occasional model, or occasional bit of scenery, maybe a squad here or there, or doing something special on a character model. However, painting whole armies can be a chore, and I end up spending too much time painting and not enough playing.

For example, I also splashed out on Starship Troopers a couple of years ago but never got to play the game. The miniatures were relatively easy to assemble and paint, but the sheer quantity of them, in combination with all my other painting commitments (this was always going to be a “side” project) meant that I never finished painting more than a dozen Arachnids before I ran out of time, and I ended up offloading the game when I realised I had too much stuff and had to concentrate down my collection.

Am I making the same mistake again now? Well, I think no, because I am ready to play straight away. Playing is what gets you hooked into a system.

I can still spend painting time on my Seven Years War figures or even my Warhammer 40,000 collection, but it doesn’t stop me getting into a new game system. Of course I am hoping that this will replace W40K, because although I’ve had a great time with W40K over the years, I’m ready to move on.

No, hats off to Rackham for doing something new, giving people what they want, and moving forward.

Initial Impressions

Well, the initial impression is very good. All the components are of high quality, and I like the overall ‘look and feel’, which is very important for a product like this. I was most impressed with the terrain pieces.

It’s a multi-language game. The rulebook is split into language sections, so you don’t have to worry about getting the English language version, and in my case it means I can buy it from a local game shop here in Madrid without getting a Spanish version (my Spanish is still very basic).

Of course English speaking people are normally spoilt, since most wargames seem to originate from the UK or USA, and so one downside of a product like this is that it is clearly translated from another language (French in this case). The text is not very slick and you get a few language errors on top of the expected occasional rules “bugs”. Non-English speakers will no doubt be used to that, in the same way as they are used to watching badly dubbed movies!

One of my “Combat Striders” had a broken leg, which I will have to repair with some superglue, but otherwise everything is pretty solid. Some parts are moveable, others not. The painting standard is good, at least good enough for me, with particularly nice weathering effects. I don’t have any desire to get my paintbrush out. If I did, it would only be to paint face detail on the human models.

The box comes with a set of cards with the stats of the miniatures on. I am fairly ambivalent about whether this is a good thing or not, but I will say that the cards are of very high quality and it does permit things like sophisticated unit activation which is otherwise hard to achieve. Whether it is any different to consult troop stats from a card or from an army roster sheet I don’t know.

The Rules

OK, so after a bit of drooling, we get down to the important bit, and in my experience the bit that companies find hardest to get right (my own area of “expertise”): the rules.

Now I must confess that I can be really picky. I am a stickler for detail. And hence we should not be surprised that I can find things to criticise. Most people probably wouldn’t even notice some of the things I will point out.

The artwork and graphical presentation is as you would expect from Rackham, to a very high standard. The words are not so hot, I guess because of the translation from French. Plus there is the very occasional typographical mistake.

There is a short introduction to the background, which is as stupid as you would expect, quite similar to the premise of Starship Troopers. I think that’s fine, I like the simple goodies versus baddies and it gives scope to create your own scenarios. However, later when I came to actually play the game, it suddenly became obvious that I knew almost nothing about the protagonists and their motivations, which detracted a little from the playing experience.

They make it clear at the beginning that this is just an introduction and not the full rules. Straight away I was a little disappointed with this, and it turned out to be the set’s biggest weakness. The reason is that the game did not really play all that great, and so you are left feeing unsure whether the whole system is good or bad, or whether it is just the starter rules?

I am nervous about paying a lot of money for a badly worded source book for this game system, any source book. I think Rackham have to take this seriously if they want to crack the huge English-speaking market.

Anyway, the rulebook presents some basic rules, then a series of missions which each introduce new rules gradually. These extra rules are summarised at the end, together with a couple of interesting, more advanced rules under a heading New Rules.

The basic rules essentially taught me about two things: squad coherency and squad activation. Strangely, they do not include movement or shooting, which are introduced with the first mission. Furthermore, the first mission is a fight between two Combat Striders, i.e. it does not use squad coherency or squad activation.

The basic rules for moving, shooting, damage, line-of-sight are all fairly standard stuff, based as they are on a stats line/stats card and D6 dice. It is clearly designed to be a unit-based battle game, not a skirmish game. This fact became apparent playing the missions.

I skipped ahead to read all the rules before playing my first mission. After navigating past the occasionally clumsy wording, I was left with quite a warm feeling. The rules are basically simple, and not vastly different to W40K, but with some nice aspects that I expect to add some depth, like Leadership Points and Unit Activation. These should add some more ‘realistic’ elements which I’m definitely keen on, after playing a lot of W40K.

There is a simple 5+ cover save which applies regardless of the weapon and no equivalent armour save, meaning that troops should want and need cover in a realistic way, rather than standing around in the open. Another big difference with W40K is that range to target has a big impact on weapon effectiveness, with range bands every 10cm.

By the way, as you would expect from a French company, all measurements are in the European standard centimetres. This could be a shock to American players used to inches, but at least you get a tape measure included in the box.

First Games

I have just come back from playing four basic games of AT-43 with the starter set. I played with a friend who is another W40K player, in the shop in which I bought the game (Excalibur in Madrid, nearest metro Diego de León).

The verdict is inconclusive, I would say, although a little disappointing. The game played “ok” but was not particularly exciting.

Firstly, it was difficult to relate to the protagonists because we know very little about them. I played the Therians but I didn’t know what comical things to say to goad my enemy, like you do (yes, I know I’m a big kid!). Should I be making alien sounds or animal sounds? Do they make sounds at all? Are they organic or machine? No idea.

The tactical choices seemed relatively limited, but you have to realise we had very few units. Some rules issues arose, and some of the rules didn’t ‘feel’ right. And overall it felt a bit like a dice rolling exercise, a bit boring.

Now, the big question is – was the game boring because we needed more units, because we need the full rules, were we playing the rules incorrectly, had we failed to grasp the subtleties of the game, or is it genuinely boring?

It is difficult to give a fair appraisal, because we played very small games on a small board with the starter rules. But even so, I had got the impression that the starter box was self contained, i.e. it was possible to have decent games, if limited scope, with just the box contents. In fact it seems that this is a game designed for battles with lots of units, so the whole idea of a self-contained starter set with just a few units is a bit of an anachronism.

We played the first three AT-43 missions, then got bored and decided we would have a better game if we just faced off using all the models over a battlefield where we placed our own (urban) terrain. We did this for the fourth game and it was our best game. Tactics were just starting to emerge in my mind (for the Therians, concentrate on trying to kill the enemy Missile Launchers, which are a big threat to the Golgoth, and move the Storm Golems into contact as quickly as possible, using all available cover; for the White Stars, try to protect the Missile Launchers at the same time putting them in a position to shoot at the Golgoth, keep the Storm Golems at arm’s length, don’t commit the Fire Toad to a one-on-one with the Golgoth, instead consider using it as a reserve).

Maybe we would get a better feel for the game after another battle or two, but we have lost some of our enthusiasm already.

From memory, the following issues arose:

• Is it right that the Golgoth can target infantry with what I would call its ‘anti-tank gun’? At close range, a hit is automatic and damage is also automatic, but it feels wrong, like a Tiger tank blowing apart a single enemy infantryman with its 88mm gun.

• Is it right that troops can shoot, then move into contact, then close assault all in one activation? And all without the enemy fighting back? And in the next round, if you activate first, you can get another round of attacks in, with the enemy still not fighting back? Surely that can’t be right.

• Is it right that an Engaged unit can simply disengage, move back and then shoot at their former close combat opponents? Imagine doing that with a Missile Launcher? Well, it seems to be legal.

• The cover and casualty removal system felt a little strange in practise. For example, the rule that says if more than half a unit is in cover then the unit counts in cover, and vice versa, sounds good on paper, but in practise it feels weird when you have half a unit invisible behind a wall and the other half completely in the open in front of you. Obviously you fire on the men in the open, but do they count “in cover”?

• The idea of measuring distance from the unit leader sounds good on paper, but in practise it is just a pain to keep swapping the leader for another model to make sure the unit always has a leader, not helped by the fact that the models do not include any obvious leader figures (especially for the Therians), so it becomes an arbitary convention who is the leader.

• The unit activation sounded good on paper. In practise, it seems pointless for just one to three units a side, which is all you get in the starter set. And how do you differentiate between two separate infantry units when the models and the cards are identical? I think the answer is that in this case you can choose which actual unit of that generic type to activate, but I don’t remember it saying that in the rules.

The mission with the Workbots seemed to be flawed. Only one can be activated in a turn (sorry, a ‘game round’), but the White Stars start right next to them, so in the game they simply destroyed all of them before they could be activated, or immediately after activation.

It was hard to get a feel for the different weapons. They all seemed to involve rolling a few dice with slightly different odds, they all felt very similar. In the starter set there are no area effect weapons, no laser designator-type weapons and only one multiple shot weapon. Even the ‘aliens’ don’t seem to have anything exotic. And when you hit a Combat Strider, all you did was use a die to mark damage until enough was done to destroy it (I used a die to mark the model, I don’t remember the rules saying what to do). There is no immobilisation or weapon damage, no weak armour at the rear, nothing with any ‘flavour’. I know this is the starter rules, but it would add very little complexity and tons of flavour to say roll for damage caused to the Combat Strider.

It became clear that the Storm Golems were slightly better in close combat and slightly worse in ranged combat. But it would be nice to have some background text to explain the relative strengths and weaknesses of the different troops choices and weapons. They all seemed too similar.

Sometimes it seems that there are rules missing, e.g. Locked Shot weapons just means that they have a standard to-hit irrespective of distance, but surely there should be more to it than that? What about concepts like pinning and covering fire? What about grenades? etc.

Oh boy, I’m being really critical now! I hope I’m being fair, I desperately want the game to be good (especially after investing my €80).

One more thing – the rules really need to be more specific with definitions, and ideally change some of their terminology. Personally, I prefer the term ‘Infantry’ to ‘Soldiers’ (strictly, Soldier is a profession, not a class of battlefield unit), and I don’t like the general term ‘Fighters’. The rules mention ‘special weapons’ but don’t define what a special weapon is. Likewise we assume that a Combat Strider counts as an ‘armoured vehicle’, but the rules don’t actually say.

I ignored the starter ‘easy to use’ special tables at the back of the rulebook and just used the Universal Resolution Table (in fact, quaintly translated as “Universal Table of Resolution”) for everything – it seemed simpler and more elegant to me (although I’m slightly concerned by the ‘linearity’ of the system, e.g. weapon effectiveness should fall off sharply with range according to an exponential gradient, not linearly).

Now Rackham will probably argue that this is just an introductory set primarily aimed at non-wargamers and children. But I think this target group will have exactly the same problems as I’ve described, probably moreso because a lot of wargame concepts will be new. Experienced wargamers like me are more likely to persevere with the game, despite flaws in the starter set rules, but novices may not bother.

Conclusion

Well, I can’t help feeling a bit disappointed. I love what Rackham are doing and I support them. The package is great, the minis and terrain are great, but the rules are not well translated into English (maybe they are that bad in French too?) and a little clumsy and overly simple. In particular, they lack flavour. The starter set games are a little bland, and you are left hoping that the full rules will be better. I’m not sure I can be bothered to play any more games until I have the full rules. I just pray that they get someone to properly proof read the English version.

Addendum

There are some interesting issues raised in the AT-43 forums, which shows how ambiguous and sometimes unrealistic the rules can be. Here’s a good one:

…a pair of units moving in columns could bring a lot of fire power to bear in an enclosed space:

Unit A: A
Unit B: B
Target Unit: T

AAAAAAA-----------T
BBBBBBB-----------T

T would be subject to fire from both A and B in the corridor or tunnel but the troops within in A and B would not be in a zone of fire from their own people.

It is interesting to read complaints similar to my own about the over-generalisation of the rules, to the extent that some people have put off buying because they really need to see the full rules. The implication is that unless the rules are changed, they don’t want to buy.