Deadzone Redux Campaign Changes Review (Beta)

Bright colours for this Deadzone


The recent rules drop for the Deadzone Redux has seriously got me back into my gaming, not just Deadzone, but back into painting Mini's and planning further things.

One of the bits I love for Deadzone was the additional rules around the Campaign, and I want to take a bit of time to talk through them and the improvements I think they offer to Campaign gaming.

More after the jump...




Killing off members of your team.


A Stage 2A, deciding if he can make the jump to the tasty human
In the original version of the game, if a model was killed in a game, then it was for all intents and purposes killed outright.

You had to spend precious resource points (which would otherwise go on new gear / men) to have a chance to resurrect the model, and when I say chance I mean a pretty good one, but still things go wrong.

Old world it used to be that the model would still die on a specific dice roll, this meant you would spend resource to bring a model back, that might not work (in essence wasting your resource), and if it did work there is a good chance they would be injured.

In Redux a model is 'killed' when its taken out of a game for the purposes of that game, but in the Campaign they might have survived and it was simply the shock of the injury that took them out of that battle.

You still need to roll a dice (with no cost to purchase this one) and you still have a chance of the model dying, but actually because you don't have to spend resource to do this, it makes it easier to gain attachments to models as they are likely to be around in the campaign for longer.

Leveling Up

Version 1 had you gaining levels when you reached an amount of XP equal to the level, and you would reset to 0 after each level up.

Redux has a table for you to consult... much easier.

When you level up you get more choice for your upgrades, as in you can upgrade your stats by picking the one that is most beneficial, rather than picking your worst stat and making it better, before you can move to your best stat.


A Snipers view of the enemy
Scavenging

This didn't exist in Version 1.

Between campaign phases you get to roll two D8's one representing the 10's the other the digit's and get a result from 11-88.

You then look at a chart and find out what happens. Generally this chart will give you some additional items for your stores, but can occasionally cause your team to come under fire, which costs an item to fix, or you take a casualty.

There are also strategic objectives included in this things like Ammunition Depots, Medical centres, that become a boon to your strike team.

Once you control it though, if you lose a game your opponent can choose to take the objective off you instead of rolling on this chart.

This does remind me of Necromunda, however a big part of why Deadzone appealed was an alternative to Necromunda, and all my childhood memories of games vs my brothers, so I don't mind if some of the campaign bits are a little bit similar.

The one downside to this is that there is only one chart for all factions, where as some factions (like Enforcers) are really only going to be heading out for strategic locations, rather than to rifle through dead civilians.

Something I would like to look at in the future either myself or from Mantic / Jake / the Fanbase would be faction specific tables, I suspect a few of them will share the same table, i.e Marauders, Rebs & Plague. However I think that the Veer-myn (well maybe these guys don't know enough about em yet!), Asterians, Forgefathers & Enforcers probably warrant their own one.


The Enforcer hides out of sight up high
Strike Team Options

In Version 1 all models had a card specific to them, generally with any specific rules & points.

In Redux the cards are out, and you can buy upgraded weapons for models.

At the moment this applies to all models, making some interesting conversion options, and silly model / weapon combos.

I believe this will be toned back slightly, with some restrictions as to what models can use what weapons, but overall I quite like the idea of it.

Changing my Rebs commander so that they don't have a sniper rifle anymore would be quite cool, if you want a leads from the front kinda guy/girl.

It also should help drive Mantic towards plastic rather than restic models to increase your modelling options.
Watch out for Windows!

Strike Team Leaders

This sort of crosses in and out of the Campaign I guess, but the leader has an impact on the strike team now on what In game bonus they get on the Command dice, and the teams Recon value.

There were comments on the Games Designers blog that actually they should also affect force composition, and this sounds pretty nifty, but may be restricted to Special Characters as we haven't seen any of this yet.

Overall
I am very impressed with the new rules for the Campaigns, and even if I wasn't going to get the Redux rules when they come out I would be incorporating a lot of these into any campaign I ran using Version 1 rules.


The Plague HMG surveys the battlefield
Can't wait to see the finished article, and we will see how much of this makes the final article!

What are your thoughts?

Comments

Tristan M said…
Thanks for posting this - I haven't had a lot of chance to read through them all but it is definitely motivating me to think about deadzone models and scenery again.

I did really like the blaze away mechanic you discussed in previous post, but agree with most that it is way too powerful. I would have preferred nerfing it but still allowing anyone to do so no matter what weapon they have.

Really dig your idea of faction specific scavenging charts - that would be really cool.

I'm also assuming they will change up the weapons options, can't have Zee's running around with massive weapons usually requiring a Grogan to carry. On that note I hope they bring back the rebs different stat lines instead of all just being rebel soldiers.

Also - ps. as a backer of the original deadzone you will still get a digital copy of the updated rules, that was something I asked Mantic about at beginning of Infestation and they confirmed it. :)
Kraggi said…
thanks for confirming about the digital copy, i though that might happen (possibly because i read it somewhere and didn't really take it in lol).

I would love to claim credit for the Scavenger ideas but I read that somewhere as well, although the original poster was very upset at the idea of the Councils elite Enforcers having to scavenge from a fluff point of view.

I can see it working both ways, sometimes they need to (maybe the deadzone & quarantine have been going on for so long that they no longer get all the supplies, or they don't get them onetime, or another faction intercepts them etc etc.

Blaze Away... hmm I used it too much as a Plague player, get the HMG's on the table suppress all of the Enforcers, roll up to them to hit them in combat.

Now without that mechanic I have to think more which can only be a good thing.

For the Rebs I agree they need to make all the different races bring something different to the table top as a reb. I would love (and have been debating) incorporating some Special species from the DBX Kickstarter that i haven't really used.

Love the idea of the Rock people / Crystal people, monks, etc contributing to the Reb cause and maybe having some interesting rules to help out.

The Weapon options I think needs to stay as part of the advanced rules, but with limitations on who can get what (as technically the Drone mounted weapons for the Asterians could now be on an Overseer / Cypher, again a crazy idea).

Overall definitely getting my zest back for playing Deadzone, Redux needs some tweaks to be sure but is moving it in the correct direction, Suppression maybe needs to come in as some form of Long Action (rather than Short) I could take that as a better way of doing things, and then making it some form of Moral / Nerve style check, against Survive to see if you end up pinned or not.

There is also only one level of pinning that i can see so you can always do something because cancelling it is a short action, so you at least always get the chance to change position / shoot back etc.

I actually quite like the idea of a modified blaze away being a long action for just that reason, then your positioning matters more because you cannot change cubes etc.
VaultAge said…
"Suppression maybe needs to come in as some form of Long Action (rather than Short) I could take that as a better way of doing things, and then making it some form of Moral / Nerve style check, against Survive to see if you end up pinned or not."

I posted on mantic forum beta feedback thread a rule proposition regarding having a nerfed down.
- target applicable is a cube : all models in target cube are affected by either being pinned and/or suffer potential damage.
- you cannot target a cube if los to that cube crosses another cube with standing models in it.
- make a standard shoot roll. Models in the target cube do a survive test. They can choose to hit the ground to get a +1 (model is then pinned)
- process the results as normal (nb of potential damage...) for each model in target cube

So basically blaze away would be a second shooting mode that affects a group of models.
You do not get standard shoot modifier as it is not a precision shoot (no bonus for clear shot, elevation...)

Optionnally the rule could be extended to have the suppression fire lasts until end of the round. Any model entering the target cube will be subject to the incomîg fire then (survive test and such).
Kraggi said…
I like the idea of blocking the cube line of sight by another occupied cube, that makes sense (can't really try and suppress peopel behind others that just ignore your efforts...

I still think given how much of an impact Suppression, even in its improved form can have that it should be a Long Action, because that way it prevents people just being suppress and then suppressing others.

Potentially even making it so that you cannot do this modified shoot action on the command dice (as they really only give Short actions (other than fight of course).

Other than those comments quite like the idea!