Midnight Dark #003 - Command Decisions...

I seem to be reporting a lot on the changes to orders and command in Horizon Wars: Midnight Dark, but so far it's the part of the re-write that is occupying the most time and engaging me intellectually the most.

My early conceptual thoughts got refined and these have now been through more playtesting to see how they pan out on the tabletop and that has led to yet more refinement. We're getting to the point where I can really see how it's going to look, with only the details to be finetuned.

Leadership and command is going to be a significant feature of the new edition - much, much more than it was in the original and at least partly inspired by my thoughts on moral leadership in combat.

The ideas I posted in my last Midnight Dark post have been crystallized somewhat, and the principles I laid out there remain the same. Your Command HQ (CHQ) will generate a certain number of orders at the start of a turn that you allocate to your battlegroup. Elements without orders can still be activated, but only to do very basic stuff in a very limited way. You need to then activate command elements (the CHQ or other elements with a command upgrade) to generate *more* orders if you want every element in your army to activate.

But there will be a certain amount of careful calculation needed on the part of players, because if you generate too many orders (more than you can allocate to the available elements), you will create command fatigue.

This brings me to the refinements I've made to the damage system. This is largely unchanged from the original edition, but instead of having generic damage that goes both to a damage track and to stat attrition, I've called the former "fatigue". This means that you can have weapons and effects that cause fatigue as well as damage. And whereas in the original edition there was no particular penalty to fatigue except to make recovery harder (and eventually impossible), in Midnight Dark there will be additional penalties as, once fatigue reaches a certain critical point (still being worked out), elements will be exhausted.

The details of what exhausted will entail are a little nebulous, right now. But it might, for example, mean it is only possible to allocate a maximum of a single order to an exhausted element, or that those elements cannot perform certain actions.

This also allows me to play with that moral component in scenarios and missions. Poorly-motivated elements may have their fatigue threshold lowered, for example. Isolated elements might begin missions already exhausted. Or elements that are exhausted may be more likely to surrender under the right circumstances.

We'll also be able to introduce elements from games like Tomorrow's War that I enjoyed, such as troops quality. You may be able to field a more numerous force, but at the cost of being able to issue fewer orders to them. Or more elite elements might have a wider range of action choices even when given no orders, for example.

Obviously, I'm still brainstorming the full potential of the system. I still hope to keep it as streamlined as possible, but this, I hope, illustrates my desire to be able to provide the increased granularity of both mustering and play experience without burying players in weapons tables.

As I currently have around 500 minis on my tabletop, right now, I'm also finding myself regaining my enthusiasm for the hobby side of things, which waned a great deal last year. If you're not following me on Instagram yet, please do, as you'll see some of the stuff gradually tumbling off my painting desk.

Last of all, entirely unrelated to all of this, one of the things I've been doing to try to exercise my creative muscles over the last few months has been writing fiction. I've made several attempts that... haven't gone well. But my latest one has moderately decent momentum and might last long enough to reach some sort of conclusion. It's Warhammer 40,000 fan fic - just to prove that for all the criticism I point at Games Workshop, I still love that setting. If, like me, you've always wanted to know more about the under-explored era of the Age of Apostasy and the Reign of Blood, I decided to write a fan-fic version of the career of the Imperium's most notorious figure who wasn't a mythical superhuman: the very human, very ordinary figure of Goge Vandire. I'm trying to participate in the Writathon, this month, which means a target of 55,000 words. I probably won't make it, but watch this space.