Re: SG2 Question for WH40K Players

Allan Goodall wrote:
> 
> I had a question for people using GW's WH40K figures for playing
> Stargrunt 2. Do you make use of the full Power Armour rules for Space
> Marines. I realize that in WH40K these guys are supposed to be in
> Power Armour, but SG2's Power Armour seems to give them an unfair
> advantage. In particular, they get to double their roll in Close
> Combat. In a recent game, 9 Orks attacked 5 marines and the marines
> completely wasted them with one casualty on average die rolls. This
> seemed to be a bit extreme.

I'm not all that sure on what Space Marines are supposed to be able to
do, because they don't go into as much detail in the Epic games as they
would in 40K.  I know nothing about 40K, so I don't have all the
information.

But I have now played a couple of trial games of Stargrunt II using GW's
Epic figures.  Stargrunt II will let me do this, I think, because I
don't need to customize much for individual figures.  There's only so
much I can do with those little guys.

As I said, I don't know what an individual Space Marine is capable of in
40K.  So my thoughts are just what I picture them being.

I've been using the Space Marines as light PA.	Slow, because in Epic I
don't see them moving any faster than other infantry.  I'm using
Terminators as Heavy PA.  I'd agree with Jon about making the Space
Marines light full armor, except that I like the tacticals as light and
terminators as heavy.  But neither really have the look of the PA guys
you see in the SGII book.  As light full armor, I'd think of them as
Star Wars stormtroopers.

I don't like the idea of giving them that much close assault strength,
either.  But I haven't gotten to the close assault rules yet, anyway.

The first game I played was against my wife, and I already described
that here.  The second was Saturday night.  We only played partway
through the game, because we had decided to demo various games, to see
what we'd like to do in the future.  We started with Necromunda, went to
SGII, then Squad Leader.  We were going to finish up with Full Thrust,
but somebody went home early and we didn't play.

I had set up the SGII game before hand.  I had a battlefield made of 7
Geohex pieces in this layout:
     __
  __/  \__   That just gives you a feel for the size of the game, if you
 /  \__/  \  are familar with GeoHex.  I think it could have been
smaller.
 \__/  \__/  There was a stream, a couple of bridges, slopes, and woods.
 /  \__/  \  It was very much like my first game, for which I hope to
 \__/  \__/  have pictures soon.  It did have some appeal in the look of
    \__/     the battlefield, which is partly what draws me to it.

I didn't have time for much preparation, so it was another encounter
battle.  I explained that we'd prefer to have missions, but I really
wasn't intending to play this game all the way through, just get a feel
for it.  The Space Marines were having trouble getting rid of
suppression so they could shoot back, and the Imperial Guard was taking
down a bunch of Marines.

General impressions from players:
1) The battlefield just looks neat at that scale.  :-)
2) "The rules seem needlessly complex."  I think this idea went away as
we played the game, and it became clear that the same mechanics are used
pretty consistently.  Everyone got the feel for it pretty quickly.
3) It seemed hard for people to actually take damage.  But we had a lot
of people stopping in cover and then firing from there, at second
through fourth range bands.  On the other hand, the PA guys were falling
in the woods at one end. :)
4) While playing Necromunda, we were talking about leaders being the
guys with the biggest stats, typically GW.  In SGII, our leaders did
nothing the whole game but activate squads.  I still have to read rules
for EW, observing, etc.
5) I think it was pretty clear that morale, leadership, and troop
quality were the most important issues in the game.

I did loan out a rulebook.  Next time I'll make sure to prepare with
missions, different kinds of terrain, etc.

andy

-- 
Andy Skinner
askinner@avs.com