Point-Buy Systems Considered Harmful

A few weeks ago in "Sarge's Advice", there was a pair of questions (#8-9) on possibly pricing out individual attributes for a unit, such as movement, hit dice, armor, and morale. I feel like that bears on one of the main themes of this blog -- but when I went looking for a link to a post on exactly that point, I couldn't find any. Here I'll try to rectify that; my main thesis is this:

Game systems that price out individual attributes for figures, on an à la carte basis, are always inherently broken.

So: don't do that. (You'll see in my response Monday that I resisted approaching that idea.) Here are the top three examples that come to my mind:

1. The Monstermark System for OD&D (in White Dwarf #1-3)
2. "Creating New Character Classes" in 2E AD&D (DMG, Ch. 3)
3. "Calculating Magic Item Gold Piece Values" in 3E D&D (DMG, Ch. 8)

You can probably identify others; and not just in D&D, of course. All of these systems were inherently broken and, to my knowledge, no one uses them anymore (they simply didn't stand the test of time). The 3E system probably stands out as the most poisonous of the lot, because at least the other examples had the grace to mark themselves as "Optional", but the 3E system did not. (OMG the rivers of blood that flowed over that topic on ENWorld back in the day, as every player thought themselves immensely clever for seeing that they could make a 2,000 gp infinite-healing magic item.) Now that I think of it, back in the day I also built a robot character in a Champions campaign this way that also completely broke that game.

The basic problem with any of these systems is that there's probably some synergy between two or more attributes that the designer didn't/couldn't observe, that allows constructing an overly-powerful figure when combined. And also: Some number of attributes that overlap redundantly, so that paying points for one becomes a waste as it doesn't have any benefit in the face of the other attribute. Or: The attributes are situational in nature, such that for the same price on one type of figure the ability is useless, while on another type of figure it is overwhelming. Here's what I wrote regarding the Monstermark system (the one I most recently dealt with in detail):

A giant rat given magic-to-hit defense is effectively unbeatable by the PCs it normally fights; but a very old red dragon, given the same ability, would have little effect against its high-level opponents (surely wielding magic weapons already). If ghouls have possibly paralyzing attacks, then it makes a huge difference if they have one attack for 1d6 damage, versus three attacks for 1d2 damage (even with nearly the same expected damage). Centipedes and carrion crawlers, with a base damage of zero, even with poison or paralysis, would generate a product that is still zero by this multiplicative system. And so on and so forth.

Granted that we shouldn't engage in point-buy attribute systems (because they are always broken), we therefore have this corollary:

The acid test is gameplay.

That is: once you've designed a unit, the only way to judge if it's properly balanced cost in the game is to play a lot of games and assess its real, on-the-table, utility and power. This is hard. This is why, throughout this blog, you'll see me emphasizing simulating our game designs in software so that we can test the various units a few tens of millions of times before adjudicating a final price. Of course, this was not a thing that anyone could even imagine before copious computing power was at our fingertips all the time. Historically, I assume that most game design was done by creating pieces for a game, and then pricing them as a near-afterthought (e.g., Mike Mornard has made this point many times); in my game designs the structure of the pieces is only about 20% of the effort, and the other 80% is adjudicating the right price (via simulations).

Examples of systems that we've simulated in software for pricing purposes:

• Book of War
• D&D Monster Metrics
• Star Frontiers Knight Hawks

Blogs where we've discussed this overall issue in passing (search for "acid test");

• Book of War: Pricing and Simulation
• Turnbull's Monstermark System
• Star Frontiers Point-Buy System

Do you have other examples of broken à la carte point-buy game systems? Or any you think aren't broken? Discuss below.

SFKH Scenario Table

One weakness of the Star Frontiers: Knight Hawks game is that it comes with a very small number of set scenario games (4), with no guidance as to how to go about setting up or balancing new games. I've tried to partly address this with point-value costs for the different ships in the game (link). Here's another step in that direction: a short table for random scenarios.

First decide which player has UPF ships, and which Sathar (the Sathar has more limited strategic options; so either dice or give UPF to the less-experienced player). Then players privately buy their fleets by point values -- use 6 points for small game, 12 points for a medium game, or 24 points for a large game. Finally, roll d10 and consult the following table for scenario setup. (Note that simpler scenarios appear first; you may want to play them in order once before using the random method).

Star Frontiers Knight Hawks Scenario Table

1-2: Empty Space
3-4: Rocky Planet
5-6: Space Station
7-8: Gas Giant
9-0: Black Hole

Empty Space

Choose who is the attacker by random method. This player must place ships on the near board edge and make the first move; maximum initial speed is 10. Victory goes to whichever player is last with ships on the board.

Rocky Planet

The UPF player sets a rocky planet (1½" diameter model) at least 12" away from any board edge. Ship are set up the same as "Empty Space" above. Ships moving within 1" of the planet get an extra 60° turn towards the planet at the point of their closest passing. A ship can enter orbit by reducing speed to ½ within 1" of the planet; thereafter the ship orbits at ½" per turn, and can pivot freely. Ships moving directly into the planet at speed are destroyed. Victory goes to whichever player is last with ships on the board.

Space Station

The UPF player sets a rocky planet (1½" diameter model or roughly so) at least 12" away from any board edge, along with an orbiting Armed Station. Sathar ships are the attackers, and set up first on one board edge; then UPF ships may be set up anywhere at least 12" away from any board edge. Movement of ships and orbiting station around the planet is as per the prior scenario. Once one player has no ships remaining on the board, add the point value for all enemy destroyed ships (the Armed Station is valued at 6 points for this purpose). Victory goes to whichever player destroyed the greater value of enemy ships.

Armed Station: HP 80, ADF 0, MR 0; Weapons LB, RB (×6); Defenses RH, MS (×2), ICM (×6).

Gas Giant

The UPF player sets a gas giant planet (12" diameter model or roughly so) in the center of the play area. Ship are set up the same as "Empty Space" above. Any ship moving with 3" of the gas giant can take an extra 60° turn towards the planet at the point of their closest passing. Ships may reduce speed to 1 and enter orbit at any location on the table, moving at a speed of 1" each turn at a constant distance from the planet. Victory goes to whichever player is last with ships on the board.

Black Hole

The UPF player sets a small black hole (1" diameter model or roughly so) in the center of the play area. Ship are set up the same as "Empty Space" above. All ships on the board must maintain a minimum speed or are presumed to fall uncontrollably into the black hole and be destroyed; see the following table. The indicated speed is also the speed for orbital insertion; ships at this speed can be treated as in orbit and pivot freely. Ships must have a higher speed than listed to increase distance from the black hole. Ships orbiting within 3" of the black hole may be placed at any location and orientation within 3" of the black hole on their turn (this represents multiple, unpredictable orbits in a single turn). Ships ending a turn pointed directly at the black hole fall in and are destroyed. Victory goes to whichever player is last with ships on the board.

Weekend Warrior: SF Knight Hawks

Game 2 of a pair of Star Frontiers: Knight Hawks battles with my friend John S. Having gotten an idea of the mechanics in Game 1 (where I handily fended off his 3 Assault Scouts), John went in the other direction this time. In particular, he took note of the SFKH rule that a ship with speed zero (0) can pivot to any desired facing within a turn, irrespective of MR (maneuver rating). This makes for a pretty attractive strategy of taking a single, slow, high-value capital ship and letting it be a stationary, rotating gun platform (even though in other situations the big slow ships are a bit devalued). So giving a budget value of 6 mega-credits to both sides to buy ships, this was exactly enough for John to purchase the big Sathar Heavy Cruiser, while I picked a UPF Assault Scout and Destroyer in response (price 2 and 4 respectively). From John's perspective, the added value was that he wouldn't have to deal with momentum and turning issues so much.

Turn 1-2 --  John starts in the center of his side with a speed of 3. While seemingly minimal, this itself was nearly a misstep, as the big Heavy Cruiser only has an ADF of 1, so it's going to take 3 turns to come to a stop and pivot at-will. At the end of turn 2, I've got my ships positioned together for an attack run from the left side (and I like having my bigger ship ahead to attract and shield any weapons fire).

Turn 3-4 --  I make my close-up attack run, and the dice go very well for me. In particular, I get tremendously lucky with a nuclear torpedo sneaking in through his defensive ICMs and the 4d10 damage dice come up: 10, 9, 9, and 7 -- so there goes 35 of his initial 80 hull points. John targets all his weapons at my scout, looking to score the first casualty; I take evasive maneuvers to get away from his torpedo-fire. However, the zig-zag flight path doesn't allow me to get much distance from the cruiser, so on the next turn John comes to a stop, lines up on my scout, and blasts it out of existence with laser-fire. Meanwhile, my destroyer has come back around for some long-range cannon fire (which misses).

Turn 5-6 --  My destroyer makes another strafing attack, as we trade rocket and laser fire. The cruiser pivots after each of my attacks to shoot with its forward-firing cannon and sequence of 3 laser batteries. At the start of this turn sequence we're about even on hull points, with 40 each; but the fact that he's getting more cannon shots lined up is a bad deal for me. (Generally I get 1 or 2 laser attacks on my turns, versus 4 on his.) Still, I get some very lucky hit rolls and both of our hull points tick down together into the single digits. At this point I'm out of rockets and torpedoes, but the opponent is not.

Turn 7 --  Realizing that I can't afford to give him free cannon-shots while I'm trying to maneuver, I bring my destroyer to a stop, facing off cannon-to-cannon against the much larger ship -- and at just the right distance so I'm out of range of his remaining torpedoes and rocket batteries (which probably a new player would not be able to arrange on the open tabletop play area). Chances are against me here -- he has more guns and I've only got a 20% chance to hit with lasers from this range. But...

The dice come up 19% for a hit, and the Sathar Heavy Cruiser explodes into a ball of flame! Victory to the UPF this time.  John says: "Yeah, that's about what happens with the dice when you play Dan."

Conclusions -- I felt a bit sorry at the end of the weekend for the completely absurd run of luck I had through all of our games for about 72 hours; I wound up winning all 4 games that we played. John played very thoughtfully and absolutely deserved to head back home with at least 1 or 2 victories under his belt, but the dice were just crooked in my favor for some reason. The strategy of the stationary Heavy Cruiser was totally solid (especially for a lone vessel, and a new player wrestling with the movement rules), and while not a lock, he really deserved to win this game more than any other. Better luck next time!

Weekend Warrior: SF Knight Hawks

Another too-infrequent game that I got to play with my friend John S. the other weekend: Star Frontiers Knight Hawks, in the open-table miniature format. I'd gotten John to play this once on the hexmap a few years ago, but this was his first time playing with miniatures, ruler, and protractor (effectively a whole new game). Here I'm using my house rules (e.g., point-value setup; turning spaced out evenly throughout a move; assault scouts with 25 hull points; etc.), and custom miniature duplicates to play.

Setup -- For his ships, John picked 3 UPF Assault Scouts (cost: 2 mega-credits each), while I picked 2 Sathar Frigates. We play on a table covered in black vinyl, with rulers, protractors, and ship and game statistics on index cards. John set up his scouts in opposite corners of the table, while I put my frigates together in the center on my side (all traveling the maximum allowed initial speed of 10).

Turn 1 -- John tries to split the board into thirds with his scouts. I respond by sending my frigates together after the left-most scout, firing all weapons systems (including laser batteries, forward-firing laser cannons, rocket batteries, and torpedoes). Even though the scout gets to use evasive maneuvers to try and dodge the torpedoes, I still manage to connect with one, and this blows that first scout to smithereens.

Turn 2 --  John swings his fast-moving scouts around at me, and I slow down (partly to avoid running off the table-edge) and try to aim back at him. This turn we're out of range for any weapons fire.

Turn 3A -- John brings his scouts in two attack. Unfortunately, one of them is traveling a bit too fast and doesn't manage to get lined up for the assault-rocket shot (left-hand side in the picture). I fire defensive ICM's at the other one and avoid getting hit too badly.

Turn 3B --  Continuing to slow down, I swing my frigates around as tightly as possible to return fire. I don't get them lined up with the forward-firing cannons, but nonetheless I'm in range with laser and rocket batteries, and these mage to connect with scout #2. Below, it explodes into smokey debris.

Turn 4 --  At this point I have an overwhelming advantage. John makes one more suicide-run, and this time I can get the laser cannons lined up and take out scout #3. Victory to the Sathar!

Conclusions -- John was at a clear disadvantage here, both learning the game basically for the first time, trying to manage the momentum from movement in space, and also dice-rolls continuing to be skewed wildly in my favor. While I'm accustomed since age 13 at the SFKH movement rules, I can see from a number of new players that it can be very difficult to adjust to this mechanic (John leaned back at the end said, "Trying to manage the movement is very draining", and he's certainly not the first with that sentiment). Also, strategically it's probably not best to split up one's forces as was done with the scouts here; better to have supporting and combined fire when possible.

One other thing is that I was trying to remember most of the rules from memory (I never printed out my house rules, for example), without having played in about a year. In retrospect I glitched one thing up: My recollection was that forward-firing weapons only work in a 10° arc to either side, but looking up the rule in the SFKH Conversion Booklet afterward, it's actually a more generous 30° arc. I'm not sure if that would have changed anything noticeably here, but for next time I should have some key rules points printed out. Also: Might be nice to have a list of ship names so not everything is "Scout 1", "Scout 2", etc.

SciFi Saturday – Frontier Explorer #7

The 7th issue of Frontier Explorer magazine has just been released! I'm really impressed by what Tom Stephens does with this publication, it's slick, completely professional-looking, and jam-packed with useful content for an old-school Star Frontiers game. Really top-notch. Also: This issue features a very nice presentation of my own "Forging Fighters" articles here on the blog last year (showing all the steps to make custom UPF Fighters minis for Star Frontiers Knight Hawks, starting here). Thanks to Tom for the great editing & layout of that series of articles from me.

You can download it for free (Jim!) at either the Frontier Explorer home site, or DriveThru RPG below. Very nice, so check it out!

• Frontier Explorer Website
• DriveThru RPG Store

SciFi Saturday – 30 Years of Star Frontiers

Last January I started posting about the 30th anniversary of the space-combat game by Doug Niles, published by TSR, Star Frontiers: Knight Hawks. At the time, I figured I'd have enough material to maybe last three or four months. But here it turns out (somewhat assisted by my getting into assembling, casting, and sculpting spaceship miniatures for the first time) that I've managed to make a post about the game every single Saturday for the entire year. That's certainly the most consistent that I've ever managed to be about any art/gaming project.

I've heard it said that one should be careful about what a boy gets into at age 13, because he'll be stuck with it as an interest for the rest of his life. For me, I turned that age in 1983, which was a pretty important year for the gaming hobby, as the D&D boom was still going strong, if tipping into the downslide at that time. Among the important releases that key year:

1. The D&D Red Box Set by Frank Mentzer. It's not "my" version of Basic D&D, but I know that it escorted many new players into the game, so for that I have to be thankful.
2. The Greyhawk boxed set, expanding the earlier folio with more game-able information, which I had on my wall, and set almost all of my adventures in, for many years.
3. D&D modules X4 and X5, the Master of the Desert Nomads series, which for all its playability flaws, has among the most epic set-flavor of any wilderness modules ever. I can still remember reading it on Christmas afternoon 30 years ago this week, on the couch at my grandmother's during the big family gathering, feeling like I had been hit by a thunderbolt.
4. Walt Simonson's legendary run on the Mighty Thor comic began, with its arcane mix of mythology, Nordic adventure, superheroism, and Kirby-esque cosmic space opera. (Some argue that this was simply the best comic series of all time.)
5. Somewhere at TSR, the Marvel Super Heroes roleplaying game was working its way through production channels, to be released the next year.
6. Doug Niles' Star Frontiers: Knight Hawks game was released, completing the Star Frontiers set and allowing us to roam and fight for the stars themselves. (And had sufficient legs as to be cross-referenced by other TSR games like MSH for spacefaring rules.)

All in all, an intoxicating and inter-connected brew of adventure, mythology, science, and wargaming which I was never able to shake off. I think that was also the summer that I spent almost the entirety in the basement with the TSR-80 Color Computer I'd gotten that year, working through the two books of BASIC programming projects from beginning to end on the little chicklet keyboard, and saving programs on the squawky audio tape recording system. And writing programs to let me play things like Bismark and Knight Hawks solo, for example. So that's basically the life-arc that I've been on ever since.

I think that in the mid-80's, Doug Niles may have been about the strongest actual game designer that TSR had producing work for them. His Knight Hawks game really hit all the right notes, I think, and it's taken about three decades years of tinkering with it to really see any flaws, and they still don't bother me very much. (That's high praise.) Likewise, his Battlesystem mass warfare rules were almost-but-not-quite-incredibly-good, a much-needed improvement over the Swords & Spells and Chainmail games that didn't really synch up with D&D anymore, the way it had evolved. It made a big splash, and you can tell that the guy cared deeply about the work with the revisions he made in the follow-up edition. (If not 1983, then the runner-up for most important year in gaming for me would be 1985, with the release of Battlesystem, supplements for Marvel Super Heroes, publication of Unearthed Arcana, and the departure of Gygax from TSR.)

So anyway, these 52 Saturdays are almost-but-not-quite everything that I have to say about the game at the moment. I don't plan to be posting every Saturday anymore, although there may be occasional game reports, and perhaps one last project that I didn't get to complete by the end of the calendar year. You'll see a shift back to more actual D&D-related posts (as per the name of the blog, after all) that I somewhat got away from in recent months.

In a rather beautiful piece of serendipity, just yesterday I received in the mail the limited-edition Star Frontiers 30th Anniversary Commemorative Patch from TerlObar, which is a rather beautiful piece, featuring the Assault Scout design in which all of our PCs would fly around to adventures (and hopefully not instantly blow up in a fight). I'm immediately going to put it on my backpack that I carry to school and class every day, sweet. (There are still some available for ordering at the link above.)

And one last thing:  The 13-year old me would stand in the hobby store at the mall across the state line and stare rather longingly at the brightly-colored boxes of spaceship miniatures for the game, wishing that he had the money to purchase them. Maybe two decades after that I got those boxes on EBay, but still didn't have the gumption to actually tear them open and assemble and paint them. So when I started this year I had zero actual Star Frontiers: Knight Hawks miniatures on my shelf to play the game with. Now I'm happy to say that's been greatly rectified; below you'll see a photo of my overall combined fleet. Both the 13-year old me and the current actual me stand in agreement in saying "pretty cool"!

Thanks for reading this stuff and your thoughtful comments are always appreciated. Hope you and your loved ones are safe, happy, fulfilled, and get even better in the new year. Have some good holidays and we can plan to read each other again in 2014.

SciFi Saturday – Miniature House Rules

Since I've gotten into assembling & playtesting the Star Frontiers: Knight Hawks miniatures in only the past year, I've developed a small set of house rules that I find it conducive to play by. Some of the normal SFKH rules don't work so well on an open (hexless) play space, or become too fiddly, especially for non-hardcore wargamers (i.e., casual friends and acquaintances). Therefore at the end of a year of testing this is how I run the game these days:

1. Generally my basic boardgame rules are in effect, in regards to speeds, orbital movement, docking at stations and carriers, and assault scouts having 25 hull points.
2. Fleets are chosen by my simple point-based method. Each side gets index cards for each ship. Protractors should have the 60° marks highlighted for turning.
3. Defender chooses a board edge or sets up planets & satellites, as appropriate. Attacker then sets up ships on a board edge, documenting initial speed. Defender then sets up ships, on opposite edge or near planet if any. (This is rationalized by defender sensors informing them of incoming fleet configuration, and allowing them to respond intelligently.) Maximum starting speed is 10 for any ship. Attacker moves first. Roll dice if attacker/defender is not obvious.
4. Pre-measuring is allowed before any move or fire designation. (Again, this is rationalized by advanced sensors giving full information on distances, and maintains continuity with the hex-based boardgame.)
5. Measurement is specifically made from front-post to front-post of all ship miniatures. Round to the nearest inch for all measurements (esp. range diffusion: down if under 1/2", up if 1/2" or more). When used, line protractors up on top of ships; usually there's a key bulge that fits into the pen-hole on the protractor.
6. On movement, player must document (write down) all current speeds first, then make actual movements on the table. No take-backs of the maneuvering are allowed once the ship has moved from its initial position. (Unlike in the hex-based game, unwinding movement to change a decision is simply too difficult.)
7. Turning is made via my alternate movement rule: divide current speed by the MR and round down; this is the minimum number of inches the ship must travel before each 60°rotation. (This seems more realistic and makes it easier to move ships otherwise in close proximity.) Note that frequently the protractor edge is the only thing needed to measure these short steps (tape measure rarely necessary.)
8. Defensive fire is taken only against opponent ships' final location in a move. The book rule that permits firing at any closest point on a move is not used. (Trying to mark the closest point in any move versus all opponent ships in open space is much too difficult; and this acceptably simulates constant motion throughout the turn.)
9. Forward-firing cannons can hit targets within 30° left or right of the nose (as noted in the Conversion Booklet). The Head-On Shot rule is ignored (because it is too fiddly and prone to argumentation on the open tabletop).
10. No ramming or collisions are allowed. Place ship miniatures as near to each other as space allows on any close movement.

So that's what works pretty well for me at the moment.  Do you have any boardgame house rules that you think are critical that I've overlooked?

SciFi Saturday – Forgotten Photos

The other day I came across some hi-res photos that I took with my girlfriend's better camera while I was constructing custom Star Frontiers: Knight Hawks miniatures (mostly the fighter minis), but forgot to use in my prior posts as I was casting them. Since they give some nice detail to what I accomplished as an amateur sculptor, here they are today.

First, a close-up of a metal pour as it starts to cool:

The UPF Fighter trio figure:

The Sathar Fighter sculpture as it gets finished:

Sathar Fighter close-up:

Three Sathar Fighter casts next to a quarter for scale:

SciFi Saturday – Ping Pong Planets

Here's the latest addition to my set of miniatures for playing the Star Frontiers: Knight Hawks game -- whereas action around planets and space station is an integral part of the tactical game (and essential to the one-and-only Sathar victory condition in the Campaign game), the official miniatures don't come with any representation of these features. So I thought for a while how I could make my own.

It finally dawned on me that at the game scale of 1" = 10K km, a ping-pong ball is actually very close to the size of an Earth-like planet (like all the inhabited planets in Frontier space). In particular, the current ping-pong ball is 40mm * 1 in/(25.4 mm) * 10K km/(scale in) ~ 16K km, whereas the diameter of the Earth is close to 13K km. So I bought some ping-pong balls and started painting them, as well as assembling standard SFKH stands and bases for them. Below you can see my best take on planets in the fashion of Earth, Mars, and Venus. (The Earth planet is actually the result of a simulation in Maxis' SimEarth game; the Mars one was my best freehand recreation of the real Mars).

The only problem with this, having completed the project, is that of course the SFKH ship miniatures are not at the same scale (they're at a scale of about 200,000 times larger). While this is also true for the counters that come in the boxed set, the visual effect is limited when playing on the hexmap, because the hexes themselves box the figures in to a known, limited space. When playing on the open tabletop the effect is a little more wonky:

I also made a black hole. There's a whole prior post from when I was planning this about what scale to interpret the black hole at, and how the resulting gravitational force would affect the game.

Finally, I purchased what seems to be the only small-scale space station miniature that exists on the open market and set that up on a similar stand and base. Now I think I finally have everything necessary for the very first scenario in the Knight Hawks tactical game book. :-)

SciFi Saturday – Building a Battleship

As I've worked on producing and testing my Star Frontiers: Knight Hawks miniature spacefleet this year, one thing that I've harped on numerous times is that the officially produced Battleship figure is way too small in size. It's off-scale with the rest of the minis, is barely larger than the UPF Cruiser figure, is in fact smaller than the Sathar Heavy Cruiser (see here), and doesn't match the apparent length shown any depiction in the boxed set (see below). That's just the kind of bonkers scaling issue that will bother me endlessly (see also: AD&D time & movement scale).

So I decided to take a stab at fixing the issue. If you compare the existing miniature to the side-view illustration in the Campaign Book p. 6 (see here), you'll see that the figure seems to need an additional piece in the middle, cylindrical and wider than the other parts, that should be about 4-5 cm long. I toyed with some ways to make this superstructure -- that's a big thing to try to mold by hand, and make it look regularly machined, with green stuff -- so I was thinking about getting some dowels and cutting one off the right size. Then at some point it dawned on me that a wine-bottle cork (like the ones I have lying around as mini sculpting bases) is exactly the right size in both length and diameter. So I started with a cork and bits and pieces of stuff from the hardware store, balsa-wood cutouts, green stuff components, and matching connectors on the ends (thanks to Isabelle for some of those ideas). I took some inspiration from the Jim Holloway illustration above and added "conning towers" on both the top and bottom sides. This probably took a week of trying various elements, novice sculptor that I am. Below you can see this new "leaf" piece along with the other pieces of the official battleship miniature:

In the past week, I've been working on molding, casting, assembling, and painting the figure. The relative hugeness of the piece again made it quite a challenge! First of all I put a few coats of polyurethane on my new piece, because I was worried about the rubber mold possibly getting stuck on the wood and cork elements. Then I made two mold boxes (first one was too small), and used 3 pots of play-doh as a bed for the first half of the mold (applying lots of release agent over everything). 

I let the first half of the mold sit overnight, then did the rather tedious play-doh cleaning job the next day. Below I've got the second half of the rubber mold poured, and inside the wooden mold braces. Problem: Even though I thought I was carefully calculating and measuring the amount of rubber needed, I guess the residue sticking in the cup amounted to more than I expected, because if you look closely near the right one of my little "satellite dish" elements is still sticking up out of the rubber. So at this point I had to pour and mix an additional batch of rubber in order to cover up the top of the figure. I've used a lot of rubber here.

Next day: I was a little apprehensive about whether the rubber would detach from the cork and wood parts, but this mold came apart just fine.

One problem with this mold is that the bottom of the figure has a concave divot for where the stern of the battleship will connect, and the rubber failed to fill in that piece. I've got a very obvious gap there, that if filled in with metal would prevent the pieces from locking together. So what I've done here (Isabelle's idea) is to fill in that gap with a little play-doh. This worked reasonably well, but pouring the hot metal in instantly dries it out, so the piece falls out afterward and needs to be re-fit on each cast. Granted that it takes me about 4 or 5 tries to cast something with a new mold, this got a little irritating.

So here I am after about an hour or two in the kitchen, trying my half-dozen test pours (cutting a widening the pour-hole each time), and patiently waiting for the big hunk of metal to cool down for at least 15 minutes each attempt. (A few weeks back I actually did spill molten metal all over my fingers and got a pretty bad -- it healed up in a couple of days but hurt like hell the night it happened. So I'm trying really hard to avoid a repeat of that situation.) This one piece is so big that my ladle can just barely contain enough metal for it; and you have to pour it in about four "dips" as it takes a while for the metal to sink all the way in. Anyway, towards the end of this session I do get one really nice cast.

At this point I have all of my components together: The original battleship bow & stern sections, my new midsection piece, and all 8 engines that came with the original kit. There's a little bit of cleaning work I have to do, filing flash and digging out some remnants of play-doh from pieces I used to make molds before, nothing too bad. I also had to do quite a bit of filing on the connector pieces because my new section didn't plug into them right initially.

Now we're looking at a day later. The first thing that happened when I tried assembling this thing is that, it being so enormous, I depleted all of the super-glue I had available. So I had to go out and get more. Then I had problems getting those big front & back pieces to stay stuck on; I probably re-glued each of them 3 times apiece. Then I was trying to glue all those little engines on in the right way; I did half of them, and then the bow would fall off. I'd re-glue the bow, and setting it down to dry would knock off a couple engines. Then the little knobs connecting the engines were broken, and I had to drill in a new spur; which caused the stern to break off. And so on and so forth. I think I was gluing for a whole night, but I finally got the thing to hang together.

Next up: Painting the battleship, starting with gray-primer and then a blue base coat. On top of everything else, I'm close to running out of blue paint just trying to get this base color down!

Last steps: Doing the dry-brush top coat in reflective metallic silver, and then mounting the piece on the upraised stand. Here I was again worried that the normal stand wouldn't support it (either in total weight or balance), and that I'd have to design some custom four-legged stand. But to my pleasant surprise, this part worked without a hitch, and the normal stand (connected to center-of-mass in my new big midsection) functions perfectly, and the whole thing seems really stable. In conclusion, I'd say that my amateur sculpting skills didn't quite match the level of detail in the original figure, but the overall scale and profile is much more to my liking, so I'm calling this a success. Below you can see the new piece with the rest of the UPF fleet of ships. Now that's what I'd call a Battleship!

Postscript:

SciFi Saturday – Heavy Cruiser Play

On the heels of duplicating the light cruisers for my Star Frontiers: Knight Hawks fleet, I finally got around to assembling and painting the Sathar Heavy Cruiser figure. It's a very impressive sculpture, the largest in the line: twice again as big as the cruisers I cast last weak (see below for comparison to UPF scouts, frigate, and cruiser). I considered doing my duplication job on it, but it comes in five separate big pieces and that's enough work that I wanted to avoid it;besides, the times when you'd have two Heavy Cruisers in a fight are rare enough that it's probably not worth the trouble.

While my boxes of miniatures are apparently in unusually good shape (no visible lead rot), when I started working with it I did find there was a little bit of a chalky residue all over it. So I gave it a very light sanding with fine paper, and cleaning with rubbing alcohol, and it shined up quite nicely. Then I cemented it together (everything fit perfectly) and did my usual grey prime, black-green base, metallic gold drybrush job on it. I think it looks really nice.

Now let's try it out in a game. According to my game-balancing program, the Sathar Heavy Cruiser should be about balanced against 3 UPF Assault Scouts (6 mega-credits per side, according to my point-buy system). Below you'll see me starting that game with the opposition on either side of the table (UPF on left, Sathar on right), so we can see if my game-balancer program is totally insane or not. You can also see my standard gear for playing the game – dice, protractor, tape measure, pencil, eraser, and index cards for all the ship statistics. I also got about a yard of black vinyl fabric as "space" playing surface.

Coincidentally, this engagement appears to be exactly the same as that portrayed on the original Star Frontiers: Knight Hawks box and book cover; a Heavy Cruiser being attacked by a squad of three Assault Scouts (or maybe there were four just a second before the picture was taken). We can tell the target is a Heavy Cruiser based on the number of engines it has. Although the vessel doesn't exactly have the classic Sathar ship profile, the Sathar don't have any Assault Scouts at all, so they can't be the attacker. (The only other option might be a bunch of pirate Assault Scouts versus the UPF's one-and-only Heavy Cruiser, but it seems highly unlikely for pirates to stand and fight in that kind of situation, and an otherwise odd choice of subject for the game's cover.)

Turn 1 – Heavy Cruiser moves forward one single inch. Assault Scouts race across the space at a speed of 15 inches. Weapons are just outside firing range (barely).

Turn 2 – The Heavy Cruiser comes to a complete stop, and the Assault Scouts zip in for close-up attacks (speed 12), with their path avoiding the forward-mounted Laser Cannon on the cruiser. Sathar get defensive fire, and shoot everything they can at Assault Scout III (bottom-most in the picture), hitting with a Laser and Rocket Battery for 20 points of damage (leaving that scout with 5 hull points). Then the Assault Scouts return fire, including their dangerous Assault Rockets (CA fires most of its Interceptor Missiles as defense); one Rocket hits, along with all 3 Laser Batteries, for 24 points of damage (reducing the CA from 80 to 54 hull points).

Turn 3A – The Heavy Cruiser rotates to point its Laser Cannon at one of the Assault Scouts. It's only allowed to do this because of its current zero-movement; in fact, that's why it started so slowly and came to a stop to begin with. (Generally that's the strategy I use with the big slow ships now, to use them as stationary gun platforms; otherwise their cannons can't get lined up at the faster ships. Good idea or not?) You can see in the picture that the enormous size of the Heavy Cruiser miniature makes it a bit awkward to portray this on the table. But the figures aren't to scale, and this does count as the Heavy Cruiser being lined up at Assault Scout II. All of the Scouts' defensive fire misses, while the Heavy Cruiser scores hits with 2 Laser Batteries against Scout III; with another 12 points of damage, it is destroyed. (Cannon, torpedo, and rocket fire against the other Scouts all miss.)

Turn 3B – The Assault Scouts, already traveling at a speed of 12, fly by the Heavy Cruiser, arcing around for second attack-run. Long-range laser blasts shoot out from each side, but none of them make contact (only 5% chance to hit at this range).

Turn 4A –The Heavy Cruiser slowly rotates, following the retreating Assault Scouts with its main Laser Cannon; a rather intimidating sight. While the Laser Batteries on both sides again score no hits (just barely at the edge of their effective range), the Heavy Cruiser rolls a perfect 01 with its Laser Cannon, scoring an unexpected hit on the lead Assault Scout! Rolling 2d10 for damage comes up with 19 points – a thunderous shock, leaving the Scout with only 6 points remaining.

Turn 4B – With the Assault Scouts' only legitimate threat being their short-range Rockets, they fly in for the next attack (traveling 12" and ending within 3" of the Sathar ship). The Heavy Cruiser fires all defensive batteries against the damaged lead ship; while its Rocket Battery misses, all 3 Laser Batteries hit, scoring 19 more points of damage and destroying it. The remaining Scout fires its Assault Rocket; and even though the Cruiser launches its remaining ICMs to fend it off, the Rocket hits anyway and explodes for 13 points of damage (leaving the CA with 41 hull points left).

Turn 5 – The Heavy Cruiser rotates again, zeroing in all its weapons systems on the remaining Assault Scout. The Scout's laser battery misses. The Heavy Cruiser then hits with the lined-up Laser Cannon and two of its Laser Batteries, and with good rolls for damage, hammering home for 28 points of damage; the last Scout is instantly incinerated.

Conclusion – The Heavy Cruiser, sledgehammer of the Sathar attack fleet, wins this fight, and accelerates back into the dark regions of space! While it was only brought down to about half-damage in the engagement, I've played out other fights and in a perfect reflection of the game-balancing program, it does win about half the time. Basically it comes down to the early die-rolls; note that the Heavy Cruiser had spectacular rolls here, eliminating one Assault Scout while none of the Scouts' Assault Rockets landed in the first attack. Reverse that and the game goes very differently.

One particular house-rule point: Note that I don't enforce the "closest point" defensive fire rule (by the book, ships should be able to target their defensive fire at any point traveled by the victim ship in the prior turn). Reasons for the change: (1) It's already the clunkiest part of the game on a hexmap, trying to mark & adjudicate all movement for that rule. (2) It's even more fiendishly difficult, basically infeasible, in open tabletop play without discrete hexes. (3) It would discourage or eliminate this fast-moving flyby attack by the scouts/fighters as seen here, which I really like a lot. (If it was enforced, the CA would get double shots at close-range above; so it would seem that the VS couldn't afford that disadvantage, and instead would have to make a slow controlled approach to get off all their Assault Rockets on a single attack run. Much less interesting.)

Finally, any thoughts on my use of the Heavy Cruiser as a motionless gun platform, rotating in place to line up its main Laser Cannon on each turn? Can you think of a better usage in this or a similar scenario?

SciFi Saturday – Cruiser Construction, Pt. 2

Last week I showed off the mold-making I did to duplicate the cruiser miniatures for the Star Frontiers: Knight Hawks game (the largest molds I've made to date). This week I'm taking them into kitchen for the actual metal casts.


As I take this photo, I've got the biggest chunk of metal I could fit in my ladle melted and hot on the stove. The mold for the UPF cruiser figure has been cleaned, prepped, dusted with talcum powered, and joined together with cardboard and all the big rubber bands I could find.

Usually the first few casts are playing around with how big the pour-hole connector needs to be. Small means the metal won't pour in properly, large means the sprue is hard to clean up and may snap part of the model off when you try to clean it. Since you can open it up with a knife but can't close it down once rubber is removed, I start pretty small and open it up a tiny bit with each pour. The very first pour just clogs up in the pour-hole and doesn't get any in the figure at all. Here on the second pour (shown below), most of the model filled up, but the pour-hole clogged before it was complete.

By the third pour we have metal in the whole figure but a minimal sprue (and so easy to clean up in the nose area). However, a new difficulty raises its head: the rubber bands don't get this mold very tight, and there's a rather large amount of leakage and "flash" around the seam of the entire figure. I try putting on more rubber bands, or placing them in key areas more carefully, but that doesn't change anything. That's going to be a big cleaning job with needle-nosed pliers & file.

Next problem: The cleaning job is so big, in particular the internal space between the engines, that the fairly delicate engines tend to snap off with the flashing as I try to remove it. Here are two casts that have been wrecked at the end of the cleaning because of that, and will have to get re-melted down. (Also shown are the extra engines I'm making to add to each figure.)

Another day, and I decide to bring in some more serious equipment. My partner Isabelle goes to her sculpture studio and brings back a big 3-foot-long clamp for molds such as this. I put the mold between blocks of wood (not just cardboard) and ratchet the clamp into place carefully.

Well, this almost works but not quite. The mold is now tight enough that there's no leakage or flash around the edge -- but the downside is that it's so tight the cast has actually lost some of the detail around the tops of the engines. I try using the clamp a few more times with very gentle pressure, but this issue can't be fixed. After musing about my options, I decide to go with the rubber band technique, get all of the sculpt filled in, and just commit to carefully cleaning the flashing I get around each figure. I'm only planning on making a few of these, anyway.

Another problem: My standard cool-down time is insufficient for these much larger molds. For example, here's the Sathar light cruiser after about 5 minutes of cooling down on the kitchen table. What happened here is that the pour-hole (the biggest volume in the mold) formed a solid shell around its exterior, but was still molten metal inside. Not knowing that, when I went to separate the mold, the pour-hole cracked open and spilled liquid metal over the table and almost myself. (Wouldn't be crippling but probably pretty unpleasant.) Note to self, etc.

Of course, the spindly extended engine-struts on the Sathar ships (which I've always thought the most attractive part of the design) don't always get the metal flowing all the way into them. That's actually not so bad, because I'm intending to snap some good legs apart anyway for additions, and throw the rest of the figure back in the ladle for re-use.

At some point, waiting for a mold to cool down, I realize that the handle on my ladle is actually sliding apart sideways as I watch it! I've had it going so long and hot in the kitchen this weekend that the plastic in the handle has started to melt and slip off the arm. I quickly shut off the burner at this point and rescue the ladle handle, eek.

So: There comes a point where I finally have the duplicate casts I was looking for (a pair each of UPF and Sathar cruisers), with miniature bases, stands, and extra engines, and I get some time in my workroom to assemble them. The official cruiser miniatures only come with 2 engines apiece, which doesn't match the Campaign Book rules, and generally doesn't make much more of an impression than the 2-engine frigates (although having more engines connected would make the mold prohibitively difficult). So below you can see me bracing up the Sathar cruisers, and adding the extra engine struts I cast, for 4 engines total per ship (equally around the radius of each). This involves placing & filing the struts for a smooth connection, drilling the ship & engines with a pin vice, snipping off some paper-clip wire for an internal anchor, and super-gluing the whole thing carefully together.

Nearing the end of the process, I've primed the miniatures with gray spray-paint and set up to paint them. My painting process is exceptionally simple for these ships.

First step is a flat base coat. I make the UPF ships navy blue, and the Sathar a greenish-black mix. On my initial tests Isabelle said the Sathar color wasn't any good, because "it looks like something diseased". At which point I said that was exactly what I was aiming for, because in fact many of the Sathar ships are famously named after diseases. So, a happy little accidental compliment.

Then for the finish I use dry-brushed metallic paint: silver for the UPF ships and gold (kind of suggesting brassy/bronze archaic armament) for the Sathar. These look really good! The UPF ships in particular have all kinds of nice details to them, and the dry-brushing really brings them out. On these large ships I'm happy to have more of the dark base color peeking through, representing some amount of age and battle-damage, and this brings out more contrast and detail to everything (whereas the smaller ships need to look sleeker and faster, and so a bit flat). All I have to do now is put them on their stands and they're ready for use in-game. A success! But not without a lot of trial-and-error, and learning that this is probably the upper bound of what my rubber mold-making technology can handle.