Fire on the Mountain Review | Legion Wargames | Wargame Historical Game | US Civil War

[@johnponiske2789]

Zilla, dynamite balanced review! We worked hard over the last four days playtesting the balancing rule that allows a more accurate historical scenario while still allowing players to introduce Anderson's Division as an optional rule. When playing the optional rule with Anderson, you simply play the game as originally designed. To answer the question how the OOB problem ocurred - this design is well over a decade old. When I did the original research I used an erroneous OOB and unfortunately did not compare it with other available OOBs. If I had, I would have noticed the problem. I believe we found the sweet spot with our new "Desperation Bonus" which eliminates Anderson's Division but provides enough of a boost to the Rebs to provide decent play balance. Again, Thank you for your interest and your kind words.

[@ZillaBlitz]

Thanks John! I'm enjoying this quite a bit, and that's great to hear about the work done on the Desperation Bonus. I look forward to giving it a shot! Thanks for stopping in and for the kind words! :)

[@StackingLimit]

Great detailed and balanced review. I appreciate how specific you were on each of your likes and dislikes.

[@ZillaBlitz]

Thanks, Andrew! I'm glad you found it helpful. :)

[@NerdWorkshop1]

You always do great game reviews, nicely done Sir!

[@ZillaBlitz]

Thanks, Nerd Workshop! I'm glad you enjoyed it. :)

[@neilrefusekid]

That looks cool! I was apparently the first person who watched this too, haha

[@ZillaBlitz]

Nice! It definitely flows well and looks great. It's been fun to play.

[@jonclark299]

Thanks for your view of the game mechanics. I'm going to keep an eye on this series of games for further development.

[@ZillaBlitz]

I'm thinking I might revisit this after a bit too, once things get settled with the Order of Battle and related rule changes. :)

[@RiccardoMasiniWLOG]

Greatly informative and balanced review! This confirms the impressions I had upon watching your playthrough: we have a very good potential game system here, light and engaging but quite detailed... maybe with just a little more rules polishing and the needed OoB correction we could have a real gem in our hands! As it stands, I am going to buy this game now (living in Europe, I cannot be sure how long the supplies will last!) and try to give it a go, while evaulating some of your observations. Yes, the small game management issues can be annoying, but I don't see anything too dramatic there. The surrender rule... I agree with a proposed 2-turns -1 SP penalty for the escorting unit, abstracting the rear lines movement. If that escorting units is 1SP unit to start with, well you can always use it as a 0 SP "cadre" marker: the unit has no SP for 2 turns and cannot attack nor be attacked, but will be able to move and will be reintegrated. I don't know if that works in the general balance of the game, but I will try it out. Anyway, thanks for those videos: great and useful content!

[@ZillaBlitz]

Thanks for the thoughts, Riccardo! I'd be curious to hear how you like it once it makes it across the ocean and you get a chance to play! I think the surrender system is probably more a matter of personal preference than anything else, I haven't had it happen too often yet either. :)

[@johnnymustang760]

I went over to BoardGameGeek and read your questions and their answers. They need to clean up the rules. The rule that got me was you asking about moving adjacent to 2 enemy units and the answer was you have to surrender and then changed to you can attack them both. That tells me it isn't fully developed the way one would like it to be. Granted I'm not sure that there is any game out there that is perfect, but this one seems a little worse than some. Good honest review.

[@ZillaBlitz]

To their credit, they've been answering and working out the details, and things are fairly crisp now. I have 3-4 questions in note form from my last game that I will post on BGG later this week if they haven't been asked yet, but I only have a couple of places where I'm unsure yet how to handle things. The exciting part is that there is an energy in the gameplay that is fun and challenging, so on the whole I'm quite optimistic for the game (and a potential series). And thanks!

[@ateeqrahman870]

Hi sills how are you great video

[@ZillaBlitz]

Thanks Ateeq, good here, I hope you're enjoying your summer!

[@ateeqrahman870]

@@ZillaBlitz good to here kinda board with my summer but ye I'm enjoying a little bit

[@ZillaBlitz]

Sorry to hear that, maybe start a YT channel? :)

[@ateeqrahman870]

@@ZillaBlitz don't really want to do KZbin but ill find something to do I'll think of doing it in the future maybe

[@Tombonzo]

This was a great “Constructive Critique” of this game as it stand right now. I bought it too. Not had much chance to really play yet. I like your idea about surrendering. Just take them off the board. Or Maybe, put that 1 marker on the unit that is escorting to act as a -1 modifier, for the next turn (or 2 turns)…. Then remove the marker afterwards simulating the escorts have returned.

[@ZillaBlitz]

Thanks, Tom! I'm glad you liked it. I'd be curious to hear how you enjoy the game when you get it to the table. :) I like that for a middle ground, Tom, for surrendering. That's an interesting idea. One of the other reasons I wasn't sure about surrendering is what happens if a unit surrenders to a 1-strength unit? In the situation I had in my first game, I actually wanted a routing unit to surrender to a 1-strength cavalry, but I wasn't sure how to handle it.

[@Tombonzo]

@@ZillaBlitz - Surrendering to an already 1 Strength unit?! Good point…. What to do? Well, I would lean towards the 1 strength unit having to “escort” (leave the battle for a 2-3 turns.) Like you said though, I think it’s just easier to remove the unit that surrendered…. end of story. Simple yet effective!

[@ZillaBlitz]

@@Tombonzo Right, but if you have the 1-strength unit escort the prisoners off the map, where does the 1-strength unit return to the battle? When you pull a strength point off a greater unit it can just return to the unit, but if you pull a 1-strength unit off there's nothing left on the board. :)

[@ThymeKeeper]

I don't understand how the OOB issue even happens. I'm just a bit flabbergasted by that.

[@ZillaBlitz]

I'm not sure of the details, other than the original OOB that was the source many years ago was likely off. Having extra counters is definitely better than having fewer counters, and the positive is that it can lead to some alternative scenarios once they sort out the necessary changes to the rules. The rule changes to balance the newer OOBs might take some time for testing, though, as it's a considerable amount of force that the South loses. I look forward to seeing how it develops!

[@ThymeKeeper]

@@ZillaBlitz That's true and I don't intend to obsess over it, but that is way off. Oh well, at least they are addressing it.

[@ZillaBlitz]

Yes, it's unfortunate because it's a foundational type of thing that play balance is probably structured on, which in turn means you're looking to tweak rules in a way that's probably going to take a fair bit of testing to address. Play balance at the moment seems pretty solid, so I'm hopeful that the changes they will make will end up in resulting in a solid historical core game in addition to the current scenario.