AT-43 The Full Rules

Introduction

This article is a review of the full rules of AT-43, based on the English language rulebook which I received the other day from Rackham. It is also intended as a follow up to my earlier review based on the starter set Operation Damocles.

BTW, I would like to start by saying that the Rackham order service was faultless, but rather expensive. I would have bought my rulebook from Salute (which is next weekend, as I write), but this year I am not able to go, and I know of nowhere else where I can get hold of the rulebook apart from the Rackham online store. So I spent 25€ on the rulebook and a further 12€ on postage! (same for postage to UK) Well, at least it arrived quickly.

Book Quality

I was pretty excited when my package arrived. Although I was quite critical of the starter set, I retained faith with Rackham. A big part of the reason is that I played the starter missions over again, this time with my son (who is 12 years old, nearly 13), and we had better games than before. So I decided, maybe I had been unfair. But I have to say the other reason is that I have recently played a lot of W40K and it reminded me how much I want a change.

Anyway, I wasn't disappointed with the book. It's a thing of beauty, more of an artbook than a rulebook. It's softback but with a high quality finish and of course full colour throughout. I wish I had some knowledge of publishing and book binding, then I could describe the technique they used, as it is I will just have to use words like "glossy"!

I've had it for a few days now, but I still can't resist just picking it up and thumbing through it.

Book Layout

The book is split into the following sections (I have used my own names and numbers):

1. Brief introduction
2. Basics of miniatures, dice, etc.
3. Background of the AT-43 universe and the different races
4. The main rules
5. Composing an army
6. Missions
7. A short section on terrain
8. A sample battle report
9. Glossary, etc.
10. Brief sample from the army lists for The White Stars and The Therians

Now, I don't want you to rush off in the middle of reading this, but let me tell you that the main rules section is actually available to download free from the Rackham website. I discovered this just after ordering my rulebook. I was slightly annoyed, but I have got over it. Ironically then, I had actually read most of the rules before I even received the book.

So is it worth buying the book even though you can download the rules for free? Well, I would say yes, but see if you can avoid the 12€ postage cost!

It is still a little annoying though, because the rules are the meat of the book. I mean, most of the background is all fairly stupid stuff to be honest, and the army lists supplied are really only the basic minimum to get going. I am disappointed that they followed the Games Workshop model and are selling separate army books. I know a lot of people love that concept, but personally I hate having to buy another new book every time GW make the slightest change to their armies (mainly just illustrating them with newer miniatures and rehashing most of the old material). I am prepared to accept that it is a fact of life, but I'm not 100% happy about it. After all, I know it's going to be hard to find other AT-43 players so I will have to raise two armies and that means you can't have proper battles until you have spent an awful lot of money!

If anyone from Rackham is reading this, feel free to send free samples for review :-)

But anyway, if you are going to play this system, do it properly and buy the rulebook!

The Rules

Summary

So, are the rules any good?

Overall, yes I have to say I like them a lot. I have hardly any criticisms of the rules themselves.

Language Issues

My main criticism BY FAR is… and I suspect anybody who knows Rackham will know what I'm going to say… the quality of the language. Yes, I know it's translated from French and not everyone in the world can speak English, but why can they not get the rules properly proof read by a native English speaker? Is it really that hard?

Now I don't want to go on about the language if you are only interested in how the rules work. You can read the PDF extract from the web to see a sample of the 'unusual' style that Rackham write in.

I can cope with it, it's just hard to read. The game is basically simple, in fact very simple, but some rules you will have to read over and over again to get the meaning, simply because it is badly worded.

The only really bad part concerns recruiting your company (i.e. building your army list). I have read it many times, but I'm still not 100% sure what they are trying to say. It is not helped by the number of typographical errors which crept into the two simple army lists at the back. Hopefully they will fix these in later print runs. I will mention army building later.

One more thing before I move on - there is sometimes some very strange 'terminology'. For example, the Combat Engineer has a special ability for blowing up items of terrain. I love this concept, but they have bizarrely called this ability "sabotage" when it should be "demolition". Other examples - they use the term "grounded" instead of "pinned" or possibly "suppressed", and they use the term "soldiers" to describe normal infantry (as opposed to, for example, crewed weapons) when of course "soldiers" is a profession not a unit type and applies to all the military.

Another example is the Sergeant. Now, every unit has a leader, but you can pay to upgrade the leader to an Officer. The strange thing, however, is that the lowest Officer rank is Sergeant, which of course in normal military terminology is not an officer rank at all, but an NCO. And if a Sergeant counts as an Officer, then what rank is an ordinary 'leader'? This isn't going to ruin the game, but it does make it harder to understand.

Another strange one: White Stars "TacArms" are equipped with 'Gyroscopes' which confers the special ability "stability". That sounds fine until you read what "stability" is - it means they are not 'grounded' (i.e. pinned) by indirect fire weapons. Huh? What's that got to do with having stable weapons due to their built in gyroscopes? What it should be is something like this:-

TacArms have the special ability "stable firing platform" and "immune to fragments".

Stable firing platform - TacArm weapons have built-in gyroscopes which enables the TacArms to move at speed and still fire; their movement is x cm (already factored in to their card), with no firing penalty;

Immune to fragments - TacArm pilots are encased in a suit of thick personal body armour which makes them immune to small fragments from grenades, mortars, etc. TacArms are therefore not pinned by indirect fire weapons;

BTW, even the way the term "indirect fire weapon" is used is not strictly correct. What they really mean is area effect weapons or high explosive (HE), after all you can fire HE over open sights (direct fire), it doesn't have to be indirect. Anyway, I'm being pedantic now.

Issues From Operation Damocles

I would like to address the rules by revisiting the queries and complaints I raised from my review of the starter set Operation Damocles. I am pleased to say that nearly all of the serious issues raised are addressed in the full rules. My conclusion is that Rackham just wanted to scare people with the starter set rules. The minor issues are however mostly the same in the full rules, and just reflect the super simple style of these rules.

In my humble opinion, I think they would have been better adding a little more complexity to the starter set rules. For example, damage locations on Combat Striders - I don't know why they left that out?

So, let's look at them in turn…

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.

Yes, this seems to be true. But it just comes from the simplicity of the rules - why complicate it by making a special rule? If you want to shoot a soldier with an anti-tank weapon, go ahead!

In fact, in the starter lists at the back of the rulebook, it says that the Golgoth's Nucleus Gun has the 'Sniper' special ability, which means it can specifically target individuals in a squad or AFV locations, as long as it remains stationery when firing. So not only can it auto-kill a squad member, it can actually choose exactly who!

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.

Yes, again this is still true in the full rules. There are options to play Leadership Points to alter the activation sequence.

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.

Again, yes this is true.

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"?

Also still true.

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.

Er…also still true. If you use Officers, the models should be easier to tell apart, but I must admit that I am thinking of painting leaders slightly differently so they stand out (unfortunately I can't use the obvious ruse of sergeant's stripes because, as I mentioned before they class sergeants as Officers, not NCO 'leaders')

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.

Well, AMAZINGLY, I still have the same problem! I cannot find any reference to this fundamental issue in the rulebook. It always talks about activating units as if each is unique, but if you have e.g. two units of Storm Golems, the cards are identical and the models are identical in the two units, so how do you know which is which? I must be missing something.

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.

The full game DOES have area effect weapons (grenades, etc.), it even has laser designator type weapons (TacArms can have an upgrade to ' tag' targets for hits with Indirect Fire Weapons).

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.

Thankfully, in the full rules yes there is a simple die roll to determine location, so you can destroy a weapon or damage the legs. This is so basic I don't know why it's not in the starter rules. So simple I will give it to you here: 1,2 = legs hit, 3,4,5 = frame hit, 6 = weapon hit. The card indicates how many Structure Points each part has. When the legs are destroyed, the vehicle is immobilised. That's it. Oh, and any surplus hits are carried over to the frame, and it goes without saying that when the frame is destroyed, the vehicle is destroyed.

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.

The full rules includes rules for pinning (called "Grounded") and covering fire (called "Overwatch"). There are also rules for grenades, although I have to say that there is ambiguity here. I presume what it calls grenades are in fact grenade launchers, because the range is far too long for a thrown grenade. In reality, the range for a thrown grenade is so short that they can only effectively be used in attacking or defending buildings and trenches, where there is physical cover for the man throwing the grenade [Hence, BTW, the rules for frag grenades in W40K are actually realistic, despite the abstraction!].

Is there anything I would change?

So, finally, is there anything I would change in the rules? Well, I can only think of one area that I'm not happy with, and that concerns the Specialists: Combat Engineer, Medic and Mechanic. Their special abilities work automatically, which is very boring. For example, the Medic enables the player to ignore the first casualty in a unit each turn. So all that will happen is that the player will say "oh you killed 3 guys, well in fact it's just 2 because I have a Medic." That doesn't seem very exciting to me. In my opinion, much better is simply to say that the Specialist has to roll for his ability and it's only successful on a 3+. So two-thirds of the time it will be successful, but there's always a bit of risk, a bit of drama, and there is a positive action that the player (representing the Specialist) has to actually do - much better.

There is also what seems to be an army list error concerning Specialists. The army list says that you can have 0-2 in every unit, but they are free. Now, you have to understand that a Specialist is exactly the same as a normal infantryman except with extra special abilities. In other words, there is NO disadvantage and a huge advantage in having them, and they are free. In other words, what idiot would NOT take the maximum two in every unit? That can't be right, surely? After all, why not just assume that every unit has 2 Specialists. And it seems like an awful lot of Specialists!

You can also take both the same specialist. So, for example, you could take a minimum size six-strong Steel Troopers unit and give it two Mechanics, and just use it to keep repairing Fire Toads.

This is a very important point for me, because if it is right, I will paint a white helmet and red cross on several of my Steel Troopers and make them Medics, and convert others to be Mechanics by adding plasticard spanners. I don't want to do these conversions if I've got it wrong!

[I've just come off the AT-43 Forum and someone has raised this same issue. It seems that I have understood correctly. So I think all AT-43 players will be getting out their paintbrushes!]

Army Building

One of the really important sections is of course the part concerning army lists. We are all keen to know what sort of armies we should be putting together. How big is a typical army? How many models do I need to buy? Which ones should I be buying?

Rackham seem to have the view that we as consumers are dutifully just going to go and buy each new release every month, but I would rather use my brain and pick my own army list, firstly based on what works well but also based on the models I like.

Of course you must use your brain, because you can be sure they won't package the models so that they fit in with armies! That much is obvious from the Specialists rules. Like I've already said, every UNA units should have 2 Specialists, so why do they only come in the Attachment box, and only 2?

Well, the army list structure seems reasonable to me, but this section of the book does seem to have more errors than normal in the rulebook, plus it is very confusing and ambiguous about numbers of men and especially special weapons in a unit. Part of this is the bad English, but I suspect it's still confusing in the French edition.

The main problem is this: it talks about minimum size units (which, confusingly, it calls 'standard' units) and maximum size units, but the number of special weapons allowed in these are different. So, e.g. if you can have a min. unit of 6 Steel Troopers with 1 special weapon and a max. unit of 9 with 2 special weapons, then how many special weapons can you have if you have say 8 Steel Troopers? The conclusion I came to is that the '2' figure only applies when you take the maximum, and that is the same conclusion they came to on the Forum - but they just don't say in the rulebook! It had to read it a few times just to be sure that the unit sizes are in fact minimums and maximums. And just to confuse things some more, if you take an Officer you can increase the maximum size, so it's not a maximum at all! Incidentally, why you can have a larger unit because you have an Officer, I have absolutely no idea.

Anyway, the army lists are of course just starter lists, and in fact only include the basic troop types (e.g. Star Troopers, Steel Troopers, TacArms and basic Fire Toads in the case of the UNA). But they do introduce some very important special rules, like Specialists for the UNA and Routines for the Therians, also Grenades (read 'Grenade Launcher') and Flamers. To get the full lists, you will have to buy the Army Books.

The lists have made me realise how much in the hands of Rackham I am. It seems I will have to buy a lot of books and a lot of models before I can really enjoy the hobby.

One more thing to mention - Triple Lens Helmets. This is a special upgrade included in the UNA starter lists. The significance of this is that upto now we just thought that those models with different helmets were just cool, now we learn that they actually have different rules, so you need to plan your heads if you want a squad of these guys. This is another example of how you can't plan a model collection until you've got all the rules. Arguably another is Wraith Golgoths. According to the starter army lists, I can't use my second Golgoth until I have a few more other Therian units in my collection. But these are not complaints.

I'm looking forward to putting together proper armies, it's just frustrating to wait to have all the information you need. I'm also pretty sure that I will be painting the models. At the least, I will be overpainting the "01" on my second Fire Toad and painting Medic crosses on some of my Steel Troopers, but in fact I think I will be going further. Having got used to looking at the very high quality studio painted miniatures in the rulebook, the models straight out of the box look very poor.

Overall Summary of the Rulebook

Despite the faults, I like the rulebook, and I like the rules.

They are simple, simpler than W40K, and maybe for some people too simple. But I like simple! And yet they add some tactical thinking through the Leadership Points system.

Like I said, the only thing I would consider changing is that Specialists should only succeed on a 3+. But in general, I am a big fan of having Medics and Mechanics.

One of the advantages of simple rules is that you can tinker with them if you like. For example, one person on the AT-43 Forum spoke about a House Rule that says the Medic can't fix up a guy who has been auto-killed by a weapon (like a Golgoth Nucleus Cannon). That seems very sensible to me, after all a guy whose been hit by an anti-tank weapon is unlikely to be brought back into action with a bandage! However, it's always possible to see another point of view and in general I would avoid customisations. In any case, in this particular example, I would use the Golgoth's Sniper ability to kill the Medic first!

Of course the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and I have yet to play a decent size game with the full rules.

The book is also lovely and I enjoy flicking through and looking at the pictures.

The only serious downside is the quality of the words, not just typos and grammatical mistakes, but mainly in a very quirky and difficult-to-read style, and finally in some very strange military terminology - I'm going to insist that my Combat Engineers have the ability "Demolitions" and that my enemy are "pinned" by my artillery!

[BTW, in case Rackham are reading this, the normal meaning of "grounded" is To restrict someone, especially to a certain place, as a punishment, "pinned" in the military context means Held fast in a spot or position, "sabotage" means deliberate subversion, causing obstruction or destroying property (by enemy agents) and "demolition" means destruction by explosives. "Demolitions" (plural) is a noun and refers to the explosives used in demolition.]