The Debacle on Caldor IV

Posted on 2014/11/23 by tjkopena

Adept Kain’s tentacled machine links withdrew slowly from the interface panels surrounding him. He had to cogitate, quietly, outside the noostream for a moment. Would this be his failure, or a last minute recovery from failures made by those before him? Magos Ferdinand was a fool. This whole expedition had been a miscalculation from the start. From the poor research findings Kain had reviewed so far, he doubted their quarry had ever been more than a myth to begin with. And now the expedition’s position had grown untenable, with incalculably valuable resources being thrown after a madman’s quest. Slowly re-interfacing, he assented to the sector governor’s request for exterminatus. Time to end this throne-cursed debacle.

Yesterday PAGE organized a campaign tournament at Redcap’s Corner: The Debacle on Caldor IV. The core of the event was a fairly rigorous tournament, the missions, scoring, and rules for which we’d hold up against pretty much any tournament around in terms of being fair and formally specified. Around that we wrapped a team event with a light storyline, with the Forces of Order and Legions of Discord working to carry out a strategic mission in the waning hours of the planet’s existence.

All in all it seemed to go really well. Ten players showed up and divided neatly into the two teams. Order carried the day handily, but individual player standings were reasonably balanced. Our victors:

Overall Winner—Order: Patrick S, Imperial Fists (78/100 points)
Overall Winner—Discord: Mike P, Tyranids (72/100 points)
Best General: Byron D, Grey Knights + Inquisition (45/60 points)
The Artiste: Rob W, Imperial Guard + Inquisition (23 votes)

Full details, including the mission packs and other rules, are up on the event webpage. Full results with breakdowns are in the final spreadsheet. More photos are up in the Flickr gallery.

Rob W’s now “award winning” Imperial Guard.

Background

Caldor IV—once a luscious knight world, now a smoldering husk. Both The Dark Ages and The Heresy it outlasted, but the paranoia and isolation of those times set the kernels of future failure. Over the following eons the houses ossified and turned inward, gazing at all about them with mistrust, then fear, and eventually war. Centuries of infighting eventually slagged the verdant paradise into a charred wasteland. In recent centuries the Mechanicum has resettled the planet, though their motivations for doing so are unclear. Intrigued, the planet has since been the target of continual raids and exploratory incursions by the more intrepid and curious pirates, heretics, and xenos. Weary, stretched to the breaking point, the defense forces have finally all but collapsed after decades of unceasing combat. Sensing the weakness, foes of the Imperium have all piled in, lusting for blood or other, more secret, goals. Beseeched by the Mechanicum, loyalists throughout the sector have poured in to match, deepening the ever swirling maelstrom of the planet-wide conflict. But time and resources have run out.

The Forces of Order and the Legions of Discord are fighting over the war torn Caldor IV and whatever spoils it may have. The planet has three continents: Apollon, Hermea, and Juno. Each of them has a variety of areas—city, industrial, raw wastland, etc.—represented by the different tables in play. Apollon contains the Mechanicus headquarters and primary forges. Hermea has a disproportionate amount of the population. Juno… is not a place people go lightly.

The Legions of Discord have formed an uneasy alliance seeking The Scythe of Unbound Light, a war machine of incredible power believed to be still buried amid the planet’s vast fields of rubble and dunes. Their scryers believe it’s on Juno but will not stake their lives to it, and the precise location is necessary to retrieve it anyway.

The Forces of Order are simply trying to extricate themselves as cleanly as possible from a rapidly worsening quagmire. Originally the Mechanicum came to the planet in search of the Scythe as well, but by this point only fools believe it still exists or ever did. Magos Ferdinand, head of Mars’ expedition, is such a fool and refused to leave the planet until it was too late. Preparations are now underway to virus bomb the planet, the situation having been deemed irrecoverable. However, despite his foolish belief in ancient myths, the Magos’ vast machine knowledge is too valuable to throw away easily. Any effort necessary should be expended to retrieve him if at all possible before Exterminatus. He is assumed to be on Apollon, but his location has not been confirmed since the last round of heavy fighting began.

Mike P’s Tyranid swarm sweep the skies clean.

Mechanics

First round pairings are randomly assigned. Starting with the Legion of Discord, the teams alternate assigning a pairing to a continent and the other team picking a table for that pair. In the second and third rounds, the teams alternate putting forward a player and continent, beginning with the team currently leading in total victory points and descending down the win/loss brackets. The other team responds with an opponent and table. The two players must not have already fought, and must be within the closest possible win/loss brackets.

The point of choosing continents is to achieve each or block team’s campaign objective: Discord is trying to locate and retrieve The Scythe of Unbound Light, while Order is trying to do the same for Magos Ferdinand. Two sets of envelopes are prepared with search result cards for a campaign divided by the three continents. Cards reveal the precise location of the target, a clue as to its continent, a false lead, or nothing. At the end of each round both teams draw search results for each continent they control. Control is determined at the end of each round by the accumulated sum total victory points earned in that continent so far.

The Legions of Discord stare into the abyss after a rough first round.

At the end of the day, the team has achieved its campaign objective if it has found the precise location of its target and controls that continent. It still achieves this if it reveals the location in the last round and controls that continent. If one team achieves its campaign objective and the other doesn’t, it achieves a strategic victory. If both teams achieve their campaign objectives the war has been a strategic draw. If neither team achieves their objectives, they have both failed. Tactical victory over the planet is determined by total victory points earned toward the campaign: Match results plus potential bonuses.

To those bonuses, there are a variety of covert missions available. In the second and third rounds the bottom players on the team behind as well as the bottom player on the leading team are given covert missions from a random pool of them. If they achieve these they receive a boon for their team irrespective of match results, such as additional points toward continental control or extra search results.

The Forces of Order discuss their strategy of “We don’t know what we’re doing, but we’re doing it well, so let’s keep doing it.”

Narrative

With an all out press to secure the Magos and any other retrievable resources before the planet befalls Exterminatus, the reinvigorated Forces of Order rebuffed the Discord aggressors and took a resounding lead. Control over all of the continents yielded possible clues to the Magos’ location, while the Legions did not advance in their campaign.

Concentrating on the wastelands, in the second round Discord retook control of Juno but learned no information. A successful Night Lords covert mission on Hermea infiltrated the Order tactical networks through an exposed data port revealed the disposition of Order forces on the continent and substantially closed the gap for control. On Juno Discord managed to capture an Order Dark Angels sergeant alive for interrogation but he knew nothing. Meanwhile, Order firmly secured the primary Mechanicum installations on Apollon and was able to scour the data records, learning the precise location of Magos Ferdinand: Cowering in hiding among the hab blocks of Hive Promethe on Hermea.

Barreling toward Exterminatus, Discord locked up control of Juno but to no avail as their scryers had failed: A daring Night Lords covert raid through Apollon actually located The Scythe at the last possible hour but it was irretrievable, buried in the previously lost Library of House Etrakus, deep in Order’s stronghold on the continent. Simultaneously, a contingent of Space Marine commanders forcibly picked up Magos Ferdinand and carried him into a waiting shuttle as the virus bombs began launching, ending his “foolish” quest. Perhaps fortunately for him, none were the wiser as to what had been right under his forces through all the years of the Mechanicum’s expedition…

Tom M’s terrifying Night Lords mutants lurk in the shadows…

Outcome

In the end Discord controlled the mysterious wastelands of Juno, found but did not secure The Scythe of Unbound Light, and claimed 123 victory points. Order controlled the Mechanicum headquarters on Apollon and the population centers on Hermea, secured Magos Ferdinand, and claimed 175 victory points to take the day. Along the way:

A regiment of Imperial Guard was sent to an unimportant continent to be literally fed to a Tyranid onslaught in vague hopes of achieving absolutely no strategic import…
The Night Lords carried out several successful covert missions under cover of darkness, winning their true objectives while harrying Order forces.
Grey Knights took desperate risks to decisively battle and expel Lord Typhus, Herald of Nurgle in a wall of reality ripping psychic attacks.

And many other acts of bravery, treachery, and foolishness were undertaken.

Patrick S’ Sentinels of Terra will hold any ground.

Next Up

All in all the event seemed to work out well. The rules and scoring capture the crew’s current consensus on how to balance 40k a bit, as well as incentivize hobby aspects and casual social play, without being subjective, informal, or applying outright bans. I think that has already had effect on who came out and what they brought, mostly on the hobby aspects as balance isn’t generally a huge problem at Redcap’s. We noted several minor tweaks to make to the specific missions used and their basic template, and have a good number of thoughts on further tuning these campaign mechanics to keep the narrative competition a bit tighter. Comments and suggestions are more than welcome.

The most tragic outcome of course though is the virus bombing of Caldor IV, a regular setting for PAGE events, in several game universes now. We’ll undoubtedly have to quietly retcon that to avoid actually coming up with a new planet…

Again, full details, including the mission packs and other rules, are up on the event webpage. Full results with breakdowns are in the final spreadsheet. More photos are up in the Flickr gallery.

We are scheduled to run another 40k event at Redcap’s on December 20th. That is tentatively planned to be a skirmish campaign tournament using our Recon Squad variant on the traditional 40k Kill Team rules and ending with our Cataclysm mini-Apocalypse pile-in. See you then!

Never fear, the Maynarkh are here! Lovell H’s alternate Necrons for the Forge World dynasty.

Fullscreen Scaling in Phaser

Posted on 2014/10/26 by tjkopena

This weekend I’ve been playing a bit with nailing down multi-device scaling in Phaser games. This was a bit more confusing than I expected, but I mostly figured out why and thought I’d share.

Update: I’ve posted this example and a state-based project template to GitHub.

My objectives were very simple:

Set logical view dimensions around which the game will be based;
Scale the game to fill the available window when loaded, maintaining aspect ratio and content;
Upon clicking have the game go fullscreen and scale to fill the screen, maintaining aspect ratio and content.

This minimal example demonstrates those (click to fullscreen, again to return):

In the blog view here the game has been placed inside a 300px iframe and scales down accordingly from an 800×600 logical view. After you click it scales up to fill the screen as much as it can without losing content. All of this is using Phaser 2.1.3, the latest release. Note that this is just in Chrome & Chromium. Desktop Firefox seems to have have wholly separate issues, and on Android Firefox fullscreening doesn’t seem to do anything.

This test is extremely similar to Phaser’s dragon and anime fullscreen examples as well as its Full Screen Mobile project template. However, those have a couple issues and do not work ideally for me on both my desktop (Linux laptop, Chromium) and phone (Galaxy S3, Chrome). In the end the problems were small but critical.

First, Phaser’s ScaleManager has an undocumented property fullScreenScaleMode that controls how games scale in fullscreen mode. The examples use this. The project template however uses the property scaleMode. It’s fairly easy to miss that these are using different properties, and that the fullscreen variant even exists. Further, it seems you actually have to set both to get the expected behavior, at least for SHOW_ALL scaling and my two platforms. The code below has a simple chart of the effects under various combinations of setting or not setting both of these.

Second, the ScaleManager property pageAlignHorizontally seems to have a bug. In windowed mode it works as expected, but in fullscreen it actually causes the game to be horizontally off-centered. For the moment I’m planning to put the game into a container div to center in windowed mode. Phaser seems to take care of centering the game in fullscreen mode even without this being set. I haven’t diagnosed this further. My guess is the base code is setting a left margin to center the game if the property is set, and then fullscreen mode applies a left margin again without checking to see if that has already been done.

Third, it’s not clear from the examples and docs what of Phaser’s ScaleManager API is needed and what is not. The project template in particular does several things that don’t seem to matter, for example calling ScaleManager::setScreenSize(). Removing that seems to have no effect with these settings, though the docs say it’s necessary. Conversely, it is important to call ScaleManager::refresh() to have the game scale at the start. Otherwise you have to go fullscreen or cause another window change to have the settings apply. The examples however don’t call this.

In any event, after finally identifying all these the test seems to work well on both my laptop and phone. Code is as follows:

<html>
<head>
  <script src="/deps/phaser-2.1.3-arcade-min.js"></script>
</head>

<body style="margin:0px; padding: 0px;">
<div id="game"></div>

<script type="text/javascript">
var game = new Phaser.Game(800, 600, Phaser.CANVAS, 'game',
  { preload: preload, create: create });

function preload() {
  game.stage.backgroundColor = '#336699';
  game.load.image('logo', '20141026-scaletest-logo.png');
}

function create() {

  // Put a graphic in the center to demonstrate.
  sprite = game.add.sprite(game.world.centerX, game.world.centerY, 'logo');
  sprite.anchor.set(0.5);

  /*
   * How the following modes take affect.
   *
   * On a laptop (Linux, Chromium browser):
   *   FS Scale  Reg Scale Reg Result  FS Result
   *   On        On        Fills       Fills
   *   On        Off       Unscaled    Fills
   *   Off       On        Fills       Unscaled
   *   Off       Off       Unscaled    Unscaled
   *
   * On a phone (Galaxy S3, Chrome browser):
   *   FS Scale  Reg Scale N Result    FS Result
   *   On        On        Fills       Fills
   *   On        Off       Too big     Unscaled
   *   Off       On        Fills       Unscaled; buggy
   *   Off       Off       Too big     Exact fit
   *
   */
  game.scale.fullScreenScaleMode = Phaser.ScaleManager.SHOW_ALL;
  game.scale.scaleMode = Phaser.ScaleManager.SHOW_ALL;

  // Properly centers game in windowed mode, but aligning
  // horizontally makes it off-centered in fullscreen mode.
  //game.scale.pageAlignHorizontally = true;
  //game.scale.pageAlignVertically = true;

  // Docs say this is necessary, but it doesn't seem to change behavior?
  //game.scale.setScreenSize(true);

  // This is necessary to scale before waiting for window changes.
  game.scale.refresh();

  game.input.onDown.add(gofull, this);

}

function gofull() {
  if (game.scale.isFullScreen) {
    game.scale.stopFullScreen();
  } else {
    game.scale.startFullScreen(false);
  }
}
</script>
</body>
</html>

Berks PA Doubles @ Railyard

Posted on 2014/10/20 by tjkopena

Saturday the dynamic duos of Colin and Brett and John L and I went out for a Berks PA 40K Doubles Tournament at Railyard Hobbies. First of all, that place is amazing. I haven’t been to the Railyard before, and it blew my mind. It’s ridiculously huge, and the terrain building supplies are all but endless. Definitely a good tournament venue, and though a bit out of the way from Center City Philly, potentially worth the trip for terrain materials and tools.

Armies were 1500 points per player, battle forged but no other restrictions. Both players on a team fielded a warlord. All partners were treated as Allies of Convenience. A single psychic warp charge pool was shared.

Eight teams showed, with various Marines, Imperial Guard, Daemons and Chaos Marines, a small Eldar presence, Necrons, some Imperial Knights, a couple more Knights dropping out of a Thunderhawk, and oh yeah a C’Tan and his buddies who just happen to also be Knights. Photos are in the Flickr gallery.

For the Emperor.

Armies

John and I fielded what I feel is a well balanced and relatively normal army. Originally we were going to divide into John on offense and me on defense. But then we were both busy and didn’t coordinate at all, so we wound up with a combined thrust across backfield, midfield, and the frontline.

On the Raukaan side:

Epistolary w/ The Gorgon’s Chain
Ironclad Dreadnought w/ Drop Pod
Sternguard x5 w/ 5x Combi-Melta, Drop Pod
Tacticals x10 w/ Meltagun, Lascannon, Lascannon Razorback
Tacticals x10 w/ Meltagun, Lascannon, Lascannon Razorback
Stormtalon Gunship
Stormtalon Gunship
Centurion Devastators (Grav-Cannons and Grav-Amps, Hurricane Bolters)

On the Kingbreakers side:

Captain Angholan (Vulkan)
Squad Harmon (Sternguard x5 w/ 3x Combi-Melta, Drop Pod)
Squad Scolirus (Tacticals x10 w/ Powerfist, Flamer, Missile Launcher, Drop Pod)
Squad Harbinger (Tacticals x5 w/ Combi-Melta, Meltagun, Meltabombs, Drop Pod)
Scouts x5 w/ Sniper Rifles
Devastators w/ 2x Plasmacannon, 2x Heavy Bolter
Knight Errant Greenheart (generic melta Knight)
Inquisitor Hersch (Coteaz)
Imperial Bunker w/ Void Shield

The few “gimmicks” in there are the Knight, Coteaz, the Void Shield Bunker, and the Librarian with The Gorgon’s Chain hanging out with Centurions hoping to cast Invisibility on them. Well, ok, maybe that’s a couple of gimmicks. But it’s no re-rollable 3++ on a 6 HP model or a world-ending god shard. And it’s a solidly fluffy, Marines-out-for-a-stroll force composition.

Come get some!

Round 1

First up we faced Ethan and Dustin with Imperial Guard and Space Wolves with a Knight. Mission was Dawn of War (12″), five objectives, double value Slay (effectively quadruple if you tagged both opposing warlords), Linebreaker, and bonus points for killing both opposing warlords while losing none of your own.

These guys did a good job deploying, in part through simply having so much to field. We had no juicy, vulnerable alpha strike targets and wound up taking risky drops against the opposing Knight, tucked hard into a corner and surrounded by Guardsmen. One Combat Squad went well off course but luckily toward our own forces, and bunkered down in ruins on an objective until it had a chance to pop out late-game and help slag a Punisher. The joint Sternguard attack put five hull points on the traitor Knight but didn’t manage to take it down before being summarily blown off the board. A lone surviving veteran did tie up the enemy Knight in combat for a turn or two, though this mostly just protected it from our lascannons.

Our Knight meanwhile trudged forward dropping melta on Terminators and Guard tanks, eventually walking onto an opposing objective. Centurions defended our center table and wiped out Terminators that made it to threatening positions. Squad Scolirus and Raukaan Tacticals burned out Creed and the Guard’s Company Command, but paid for it when Captain Angholan was forced to face the full withering fire of a Punisher at point blank and was mortally wounded. With things looking grim in the mid-game, the Space Wolves and Guardsmen started taking chances on risky reserve drops with terrible results teleporting in and dropping from flyers, further boosting our momentum.

Scoping out the battlefield.

Creeeeed!

Notes

We wound up with all the objectives and secondaries, only missing out on max points by losing my warlord. Unfortunately I took a bunch of chances on Angholan withstanding the Punisher, trying to tank wounds on him rather than his squad. He actually made it through the main gun pretty ok, but I forgot it would also then be shooting heavy bolters and a stubber at him and it was just too much. On the upside, it seemed like almost nobody got this bonus either.

The big thing here was that we had a bunch of weapons to fight Terminators, enough alpha strike and mobility to pen their army up against their back line, and nothing especially fearful of the Guard’s large blasts or heavy weaponry. Our small Combat Squads all over the place made for inefficient blast targets, and a combination of good line-of-sight blockers and the Knight’s shield rendered the missile launcher and lascannon teams largely moot until we could take them out.

Aaaaaahhhh!!!

Round 2

Next up was Zack and Brad with Imperial Guard and Grey Knights. Mission was Vanguard deployment (corners) for table quarters control with bonuses for Slay, surviving friendly Warlords, and no enemy units in your deployment zone.

Joint Sternguard blew up a Landraider, dumping out the many Purifiers inside on foot, far removed from our central area. The Sternguard along with reinforcing Raukaan Tacticals and an Ironclad Dreadnought spent the battle in an ongoing fight with them before eventually prevailing. Our Knight got an early lucky hit torching the Grey Knights warlord and his bodyguards. Greenheart and our lascannon teams then wore down a squad of plasmacannon Sentinels before they could target our Centurions. Squad Harbinger put a lot of wounds on a Dreadknight, which then shunted right into the middle of half a dozen Raukaan lascannons. Captain Angholan and Scolirus spent the battle in assault with a group of Bullgryns protecting their Lord Commissar, eventually smashing her. A late arriving Vendetta and Valkyrie harried a thinly held rear table quarter, but were slowly attrited away by Stormtalons and lascannons.

No further!

Aaaahhh again!

Notes

We wound up with max points in this one, controlling all the quarters and picking up the secondaries. This battle was very similar to the previous one given the matchup. Again we were fortunate to have many tools, especially the Centurions and Knight Errant, for taking out Terminators. Zack did a great job of drawing it out with his Guard via harrying thrusts all over the board, but with us largely taking out the Grey Knights early on we just had too much momentum.

I really liked this mission. I wouldn’t want to replace standard objectives with table quarters, but it’s a good mix-in. One thing I liked was that because it’s harder to calculate on the fly, and in some ways easier to swing at the last minute, it can be much less clear who’s ahead and by how much, raising the tension throughout.

You’re following the wrong path, commissar!

Round 3

Finally we faced Mike and Al with their four Imperial Knights and Necron C’Tan army. Mission was Hammer and Anvil deployment (long axis) for a combination of kill points and objectives, with bonuses for Slay and each surviving troop unit.

All three objectives wound up placed in a short line along the table center cross axis. We mostly positioned far forward, as near to them as we could, and held on as long as possible. Join Sternguard got a good drop on one of the opposing Knights but its rerollable save via the Adamantine Lance formation shrugged it all off. The Knights and C’Tan hung back for several turns pinging away at our threatening weapons before coming forward supported by Night Scythes. From there the forces of good got slowly rolled up.

Yep.

Notes

We picked up a single point for the Raukaan zapping a Night Scythe, and otherwise gave up an obscene amount of points as all our units except one lonely Drop Pod got obliterated. We felt it was a moral victory that we lasted until Turn 7, but the outcome was pretty much foregone from the start. Four Knights with three in an Adamantine Lance, a Transcendant C’Tan, and four Night Scythes with Warriors is a rough force to be looking at across the board. Playing the long axis didn’t help, as it enabled them to lurk out of range of our lascannons for most of the game. I really don’t know how we could have done any better against this army though.

Hands up!

Outcome

We didn’t come in with any tournament bonuses (early list submission, fully painted, etc.), but it seemed like few people did so that didn’t matter. Despite the third round drubbing, John and I held on for second place by a reasonable margin. First place, our Knights+C’Tan opponents, were ridiculously far ahead. A couple people quietly cheered us as the “non-cheese real winners.” I was happy with how we played throughout, and the final results. Depending on how you consider the NOVA Trios (we got crushed on games but got the 2nd best prize), that maintains what I believe is still a straight record of 2nd place results for me throughout 2014.

Thoughts

A couple more general thoughts.

Tournament

The final mission highlighted issues with the scoring approach being used here, and I gather in several of the Berks PA events. Rather than determining games by victory points and then giving tournament points for wins and losses with bonuses for some special conditions, points earned in missions were simply summed throughout. In that last game the entire opposing army would have only given up fourteen kill points total even if we’d somehow managed to destroy everything. Meanwhile, John and I were each fielding that many units. That’s one thing in terms of the problems inherent to kill points missions, but a huge problem for a tournament if that goes directly into the tournament standings. It wouldn’t have mattered, but those last guys got a massive points boost off John & I between the kill points, objectives, and bonuses, unfair to everybody else. In general, tournament points should always at least be capped, preferably normalized.

That matchup was also a good example of where optional continuous scoring can really help balance the game. If we could have scored points throughout by holding objectives then we could have played a more tactical game, sacrificing units to try and hold up the oncoming tide with no expectation of lasting to the end. We all but certainly would have still lost, but potentially we’d have stood at least a chance of not being completed wiped on points, given that our opponents had so few units with which to attempting claiming and holding throughout.

On a final note, three thousand points total is probably too many points for a doubles game. Somewhat counter-intuitively, they tend to run slower anyway. At that many points there’s just a lot going on to begin with, and doubles games can take a very long time. That’s particularly true if at least one side is active in all the phases. It seemed like Colin and Brett really suffered from this, with several of their games cut short when they would have benefited from more turns.

Conclusion

Despite those concerns about the scoring and the serious balance problems built into 40k itself right now, this was a super fun event, well run in a low key but smooth manner and with a great crowd. Berks is going to run another team tournament in January, and I’ll definitely try to make it to that.

Again, more photos are in the gallery.

Wwwwaaaaaahhhhh!

tjkopena games & stuff

Fortune favors the bold!

The Debacle on Caldor IV

Background

Mechanics

Narrative

Outcome

Next Up

Fullscreen Scaling in Phaser

Berks PA Doubles @ Railyard

Armies

Round 1

Notes

Round 2

Notes

Round 3

Notes

Outcome

Thoughts

Meta

Tournament

Conclusion