Giant Sized Scape Battles

[Yodaking]

Alright, I've been promising to take some pics and I finally got them done. I couldn't find that Fortress America game I once had that included mini helicopters and tanks but I managed to pull out some other similar game pieces from different games.

When we first started talking about building a game around the Pacific Rim figures and including other properties around the same scale like King Kong & Godzilla, this is what I was imagining a game board would look like in my head.









Game play would involve giant monsters rising up out of the sea and trying to demolish a city. Naval forces would first meet those monsters and try to stop them without any real success, but maybe they inflict a wound or two. The monsters don't have to stay at sea and destroy all the ships, they can just continue past them onto land. Once on land, tanks and cannons try to defend the city, also with limited success but again potentially doing a few wounds. Monsters just push past the annoying tanks and start demolishing buildings. The giant Robots arrive and go toe to toe with the Monsters.

Monster win if they destroy a set number of buildings or kill a set number of humans. Defenders win if they take out the Monsters before they reach their destructive goal. This could then be expanded to ditch the sea part and just have an inland city being attacked by King Kong or Decipticons or Martian Invaders or whatever. The 'attackers' goals are always the same, destroy or kill a set number of things with the 'defenders' goal always being to stop them before they can hit that set number.

Here are some scale pics of the Pacific Rim figures. The tanks and cannon figures came from my copy of Risk: Legacy.



Ships were pulled from Battleship, about the right size but I'm not willing to cut off the pegs so they are just being used for scale. Those Axis & Allies ships would be my go to option for boats.



Here is a Titan figure from Games Workshop, while the game I pulled these minis from is long since discontinued GW more recently launched an Armada themed game that included these types of minis so some can still be found. The smaller robots would be difficult to find but I wanted to use them here for scale purposes. I see Optimus Prime and Megatron level Transformers as being about this size if we can find some.



Here are some other GW figures, one is just a Reaver class Titan but the other is a Tau Battlesuit that I think looks a little like something Japanese.



I also pulled some figures from a Star Wars game I own to show off how other game pieces might be used by us.



Since I didn't have and helicopters or jets to use, I included some pics featuring X-wings & Y-wings. Just like the tanks earlier, it looks like only 2 such figures would fit per hex.



Earlier I had mentioned the Rampage video game that was recently turned into a movie as being in the same theme. Big monsters running around trying to destroy a city. So I pulled some minis for those guys too. The wolf figure from Heroscape could easily work as the giant wolf figure from Rampage. Then I pulled some ape figures I use for my Gorilla City Warriors. They could be the giant ape from Rampage, or depending on how we feel King Kong should scale with the Pacific Rim stuff they could also serve as a King Kong figure.



Depending on how big you wanted Giant-Man to grow, you could use the Giant-Man figure as is or the smaller Yellow Jacket figure.




I imagine some of the other Heroscape or other miniature game figures could be used as new units for this scale too. Several of the Soulborgs would make good Battle Suit defenders. A Lizard could be the lizard from Rampage, maybe a dinosaur figure for Godzilla.

[Tornado]

Cool. What are the buildings from?

[Yodaking]

A really old GW game called Adeptus Mechanicus. Making similar buildings out of paper, cardboard, or Styrofoam shouldn't be difficult though. You could even just make buildings out of lego bricks.

[Tornado]

Good stuff.
I always get happy when I see buildings on a Heroscape map.

[IAmBatman]

Originally Posted by Tornado

Good stuff.
I always get happy when I see buildings on a Heroscape map.

Very cool!

[MrNobody]

Wow, thanks again YK! That looks really fun and pretty much exactly what I had imagined. I can picture maps both with and without water.

Those buildings look awesome, but we're a big fan of using Lego at our house so we'll probably end up doing that.

I've never gotten into Rampage (I like it from what I've played but never purchased it for myself) but that's another really cool franchise to throw in there!

Just a thought, it might make sense to start with Pacific Rim (maybe something like 3 Jaegers and 3 Kaiju) and work out from there? I dunno, just a thought, since they already have minis that are somewhat available and all in the same scale.

[WatchmanWatcher]

This all looks amazing! Now all we need is to do some work on actual stats... Maybe this for a 'small' model?


Small Combatant

Life 2
Speed 4
Attack 3
Defense 3
Range 1 or 4

Small 3

Special Rules

[INSERT RULE HERE]

[MrNobody]

Originally Posted by WatchmanWatcher

This all looks amazing! Now all we need is to do some work on actual stats... Maybe this for a 'small' model?


Small Combatant

Life 2
Speed 4
Attack 3
Defense 3
Range 1 or 4

Small 3

Special Rules

[INSERT RULE HERE]

I was thinking most of the Transformers would be something like this, yeah. Maybe the heartier ones (Optimus Prime, Megatron, Grimlock, etc) could have 3 life. I actually think Giant-Man (using an Ant-Man figure) could be fun in that scale too, because I usually don't see him being as big as a skyscraper.
I'm going to try re-watching Pacific Rim soon to get ideas for those figures. I still haven't seen the 2nd movie, so maybe I'll watch that too.

[Yodaking]

I was thinking we start with the easy to acquire Pacific Rim figures as our core and work out from their as well. It is a good idea to brainstorm some of the smallest/weakest units though as we make their cards to keep in mind what the floor will be for units and make sure the big Pacific Rim figures are scaled appropriately stat wise.

A few general thoughts I had.

1. The Kaiju should have a defense that isn't too crazy high (3-4 range), which would allow for the tanks and planes (att. 1 or 2) the possibility to inflict damage, but then their life should be really high (8-12) so that it would take a lot of tank rounds to take one down. The Jaegers I would do opposite, higher defense (5-6) for taking a beating from the Kaiju (att. 4-5) without being damaged, but then lower life (4-5) so when the Kaiju does damage the Jaeger is it significant.

2. We should amend the LEA rules for our game to read that LEA only occur when units of the same size disengage or when a unit larger than the unit leaving is disengaged from. This would allow the Kaiju to just move right past the battleships, tanks, planes, etc. without taking LEA's and without having to make that a special power, but if a tank tries to flee from a Kaiju then the Kaiju still gets to take a LEA against it. The Jaegers however would be big enough to engage the Kaiju and keep them from advancing on the city. This is also where the knock back idea would come into play, a Kaiju can knock a Jaeger out of engagement with them to free themselves from the LEA risk and turn their attention back to the city.

3. Similarly, I feel the High Ground bonus attack/defense die rules should be amended for this game. High ground bonuses can still happen if your base is on a higher level then your opponents base, but now it also requires your combined base level + height to be higher then the other units base level +height. This keeps a small 1 tank from gaining a high ground bonus on a large 8 Kaiju when the Kaiju is in the water and the tank is on the beach. A large 8 Jaeger could still get a high ground bonus on a large 8 Kaiju when it's base is on a higher level though. Likewise the small 1 tank could still gain a high ground advantage on a large 8 Kaiju, but their base would have to be 8 levels higher up then the Kaiju's base. This essentially means the small 1 tanks will rarely get a high ground bonus, but say a level 4 Optimus Prime could still achieve a high ground bonus on a level 8 King Kong if he were up on top of a building, but not from a 1 level hill of grass.

[MrNobody]

Originally Posted by Yodaking

I was thinking we start with the easy to acquire Pacific Rim figures as our core and work out from their as well. It is a good idea to brainstorm some of the smallest/weakest units though as we make their cards to keep in mind what the floor will be for units and make sure the big Pacific Rim figures are scaled appropriately stat wise.

So the Pacific Rim set has 10 figures;

Spoiler Alert!

001 - Gipsy Danger
002 - Striker Eureka
003 - Cherno Alpha
004 - Crimson Typhoon
005 - Coyote Tango
006 - Knifehead
007 - Slattern
008 - Raiju
009 - Scunner
010 - Leatherback

If we were to go for 3 Jaegers and 3 Kaiju, Gipsy Danger and Stiker Eureka seem like the obvious Jaegers, but I don't remember the movie enough to say who the best 3rd Jaeger or the best Kaijus would be.

Originally Posted by Yodaking

1. The Kaiju should have a defense that isn't too crazy high (3-4 range), which would allow for the tanks and planes (att. 1 or 2) the possibility to inflict damage, but then their life should be really high (8-12) so that it would take a lot of tank rounds to take one down. The Jaegers I would do opposite, higher defense (5-6) for taking a beating from the Kaiju (att. 4-5) without being damaged, but then lower life (4-5) so when the Kaiju does damage the Jaeger is it significant.

This makes sense thematically too. Godzilla and friends don't really make efforts to defend themselves from tanks and such, they just shrug it off.

Originally Posted by Yodaking

2. We should amend the LEA rules for our game to read that LEA only occur when units of the same size disengage or when a unit larger than the unit leaving is disengaged from. This would allow the Kaiju to just move right past the battleships, tanks, planes, etc. without taking LEA's and without having to make that a special power, but if a tank tries to flee from a Kaiju then the Kaiju still gets to take a LEA against it. The Jaegers however would be big enough to engage the Kaiju and keep them from advancing on the city. This is also where the knock back idea would come into play, a Kaiju can knock a Jaeger out of engagement with them to free themselves from the LEA risk and turn their attention back to the city.

3. Similarly, I feel the High Ground bonus attack/defense die rules should be amended for this game. High ground bonuses can still happen if your base is on a higher level then your opponents base, but now it also requires your combined base level + height to be higher then the other units base level +height. This keeps a small 1 tank from gaining a high ground bonus on a large 8 Kaiju when the Kaiju is in the water and the tank is on the beach. A large 8 Jaeger could still get a high ground bonus on a large 8 Kaiju when it's base is on a higher level though. Likewise the small 1 tank could still gain a high ground advantage on a large 8 Kaiju, but their base would have to be 8 levels higher up then the Kaiju's base. This essentially means the small 1 tanks will rarely get a high ground bonus, but say a level 4 Optimus Prime could still achieve a high ground bonus on a level 8 King Kong if he were up on top of a building, but not from a 1 level hill of grass.

Agreed with all of this as well. I think there might be a few other special rules we might want to add, like how many small characters can fit on a single space, or letting the Kaijus stomp on them and crush them, but I think a lot of that can be done by the cards.

[Yodaking]

Just some thoughts I've been having on the 'floor units' since taking those pics.

TANK SQUAD

Spoiler Alert!

Race = Human
Common Hero

Class = Army
Personality = ?
Size 1 Small

Life 2

Move 2
Range 3
Attack 1
Defense 1

TWO-UNIT SQUAD
When attacking with this unit, you may attack one additional time if their are no wound makers on this units base.

ARMOR PIERCING ROUNDS
Figures attacked by this unit roll 1 fewer defense die.

I'm trying something new out here. I made the Tanks Squad's common so you only needed 1 card to run a bunch of them, but then I wanted them to have 2 life (1 for each Tank), so I tweaked the rules here so you place the wound marker on the base of the unit that took the wound rather then placing it on a card. A slow moving ground unit that offers up a double attack a -1 defense. Pretty much just looking for a whiff with the 1 attack die, so they deal 1W every once in a while but that is about it.

CANNON EMPLACEMENT

Spoiler Alert!

Race = Human
Common Hero
Class = Army
Personality = ?
Size 1 Small

Life 1

Move 0
Range 6
Attack 2
Defense 1

DEFENSIVE BARRAGE
When a figure that was 5 or more spaces away from this unit moves within 5 clear sight spaces of this unit, roll the 20 sided die. On a roll of 13 or higher, that figure must end it's movement on that space.

A more traditional common hero here, 1 figure w/1life. It can't move but can be used as a defensive item that triggers as a Kaiju approaches the city. Draft a bunch of them and layer them up to increase the odds of slowing down a Kaiju's approach and protect the city from destruction. If you do end up using it to attack, range 6 isn't too bad.

BATTLESHIP

Spoiler Alert!

Race = Human
Uncommon Hero
Class = Navy
Personality = ?

Size 1 Small

Life 3

Move 3
Range 5
Attack 3
Defense 3

NAVAL UNIT
This unit must start the game on a water tile and may only move over water tiles. This unit does not stop it's movement when entering a water space.

ALL HANDS ON DECK
When attacking, this unit rolls 1 fewer attack die for each wound marker on this card.

Went uncommon hero here with 3 life and 3 defense. With the attack of 3, it had a decent chance to wound a Kaiju and maybe even inflict multiple wounds so it would initially be a threat to one. The Kaiju doesn't need to completely destroy it though to minimize that threat though, if it damages the ship the attack goes down as weapons and crew are destroyed and killed.

FIGHTER JETS

Spoiler Alert!

Race = Human
Common Hero
Class = Air Force
Personality = ?
Size 1 Small

Life 2

Move 7
Range 2
Attack 2
Defense 2

TWO-UNIT SQUAD
When attacking with this unit, you may attack one additional time if their are no wound makers on this units base.

HIT AND RUN TACTICS
Instead of moving and attacking normally with this unit, you may move this unit up to 5 spaces. This unit can attack at any point before, during, or after this move as long as this unit is on a space where it could end its movement. When moving with Hit and Run Tactics this unit will not take any leaving engagement attacks.

FLYING

Another one of my common hero two figure unit ideas. The fighter jets can quickly approach a threat with it's high move number, but need to get pretty close to the action with it's short range. Once there though, they can start flying around disengaging and attacking as needed. Their higher speed and agility gives them a higher 2 def.

HEAVY BOMBERS

Spoiler Alert!

Race = Human
Common Hero
Class = Air Force
Personality = ?

Size 1 Small

Life 2

Move 4
Range 1
Attack 2
Defense 1

TWO-UNIT SQUAD
When attacking with this unit, you may attack one additional time if their are no wound makers on this units base.

ARMOR PENETRATING BOMBS
After attacking with this figure, if it inflicted 1 or more wounds, roll an additional unblockable attack die against the attacked unit.

FLYING

Slower moving bombers are easier to hit and destroy since they can't disengage like the faster fighter jets. But when their bombs hit they can do extra damage.

Then I was thinking the human military units could have some kind of command and control unit situated in one of the buildings. The Kaiju must destroy the building the command and control unit is in to take them out. Until that happens you could put an OM on the Control and Command card for some OM flex and double turns with common human units. You could have a couple of different types, each in their own building.

AIR FORCE COMMAND
After revealing an Order Marker on this card, you may take a turn with any two Human Air Force Common Heroes you control or one Human Air Force Uncommon Hero you control.

ARMY COMMAND
After revealing an Order Marker on this card, you may take a turn with any two Human Army Common Heroes you control or one Human Army Uncommon Hero you control.

NAVY COMMAND
After revealing an Order Marker on this card, you may take a turn with any two Human Navy Common Heroes you control or one Human Navy Uncommon Hero you control.

JOINT COMMAND
After revealing an Order Marker on this card, you may take a turn with one Human Army Common Hero, one Human Air Force Common Hero, and one Human Navy Common Hero you control.

So combine this kind of line-up for the floor human units with the idea I mentioned earlier about the Kaiju having a defense of around 4, but with a life of 8+. The tanks and planes and ships can try to chip away at the Kaiju's life with a bunch of little attacks, which the Kaiju can take for a while before finally going down.

[WatchmanWatcher]

Originally Posted by Yodaking

Then I was thinking the human military units could have some kind of command and control unit situated in one of the buildings. The Kaiju must destroy the building the command and control unit is in to take them out. Until that happens you could put an OM on the Control and Command card for some OM flex and double turns with common human units. You could have a couple of different types, each in their own building.

AIR FORCE COMMAND
After revealing an Order Marker on this card, you may take a turn with any two Human Air Force Common Heroes you control or one Human Air Force Uncommon Hero you control.

ARMY COMMAND
After revealing an Order Marker on this card, you may take a turn with any two Human Army Common Heroes you control or one Human Army Uncommon Hero you control.

NAVY COMMAND
After revealing an Order Marker on this card, you may take a turn with any two Human Navy Common Heroes you control or one Human Navy Uncommon Hero you control.

JOINT COMMAND
After revealing an Order Marker on this card, you may take a turn with one Human Army Common Hero, one Human Air Force Common Hero, and one Human Navy Common Hero you control.

So combine this kind of line-up for the floor human units with the idea I mentioned earlier about the Kaiju having a defense of around 4, but with a life of 8+. The tanks and planes and ships can try to chip away at the Kaiju's life with a bunch of little attacks, which the Kaiju can take for a while before finally going down.

I like this. The alternative would be to just give each of the different HQs a bonding ability that works for only its specific units, but that's kinda what you already have! Maybe that's the ability each building can have?