Killteam - Joint Operations Trial

[@benc3342]

I appreciate the effort your putting into this. Thanks

[@Thedagda801]

Great stuff! Thank you

[@Pomwarlock]

So, I really like the idea of removing dice rolls from the NPOs for the sake of speeding up the game. But I feel that the trooper marksmen become useless if they only get 2 hits. Coz for most operatives with 4+ saves, 1 auto pass for cover, and then 2 dice average is 0 damage. Making it almost no downside to moving somebody into cover on engage to get all the ranged NPOs to engage and shoot, on average dealing 0-2 damage. So no threat. And at 1 save & 1 cover, they take 3-7 damage in return. I feel that punishing the player for bad plays is the best way to firstly, teach the game, and also to make the co-op / solo game have some risk to it. It may just be my own personal preference, but a game needs to have risk of losing for it to feel fun. So my idea is NPOs hitting on 4+ get 3 auto hits. 3+ get 4 auto hits. Just to punish bad plays & have damage going back & forth. And it reflects the NPOs having CP or ploys which they don’t have. For melee, do the same. But because ceaseless lets you reroll 1-2 dice on average, I’d say they get 1 auto crit and 2 hits for 4+ and 1 crit and 3 hits for 3+ NPOs Saves I agree with you. 5+ is 1 auto save I’d say 4+ is 1 auto crit save. & 3+ is 1 crit 1 normal auto saves plus an additional save for cover. I feel that accuracy reflects a real opponents odds after using CP etc :) Agree that troopers should have Groop activation 2 with themselves coz elites just got so so many counteracts. Also I felt like reinforcements should be 3 models each turn divided as evenly as possible. So 1 heavy 1 tough & 1 trooper for example. 2 wasn’t enough. My angels of death wiped out the NPOs 2nd turning point without taking any casualties & from them I just jumped on objectives and won. I feel it would have been a better game if the map was short table edges? So a narrower but longer board to travel across? But that probably just adds more time to the game. Perhaps the best way to balance it is to give it a 4 turning point cap? Coz rules as written there isn’t a time limit. These are my thoughts. Good video tho :)

[@optimalgamestate]

I've taken my time before replying to this as it's a great comment and I wanted to think about it for a while. To start at the end first, having a turn limit and / or escalating NPOs would definitely help. The current situation of infinite turns and minimal respawning NPO's definitely takes the pressure off the player(s). The Troopers are a bit weak, but they do pretty much reflect the weaker operatives like the Death Korps Trooper (4 ATK, 4+ Hit, DMG 2/3). They do have a chance of getting 4 crits, but conversely the players do have a chance to fail all their saves. So on one hand I do think they're a fair reflection of the Troopers but from a story perspective it does make narrative sense for the Troopers shots to be pretty much nothing to the Astartes level marines. I think having that weak NPO operative is fine, but maybe we should be actually assigning points do them rather than going with the simple wounds. We only have 6 profiles after all, it shouldn't be too tricky to point them up. For the Brawlers, I've found melee very reliable for the NPOs. The version I ran in this has 1 less hit on every melee NPO compared to my previous game where the NPO Brawlers were super scarey. That might be me underestimating how scarey melee is in a normal game of killteam though, maybe it should be this terrifying. For my next game, my current plan is to use the first solo scenario in Stargrave Quarantine 37 - Get to the Lift! So the player team starts in one corner, there are two locked exits spread across the other side of the board. The scenario starts with 6 NPOs on the board and then randomly adds more each round (typically 2). I'll probably up the numbers or make them scarier. The idea then is just for the player operatives to get to an exit, unlock the exit (1AP 5+ to unlock). Then exit. So should be straight forward, but it's got a clear mission objective and escalating enemies until the players are eventually overwhelmed.

[@yumanoid5753]

I'm about to try coop killteam, till now we played non-scifi coopversions of other games. I agree, that npo should be scary to the players. What i get from both posts here is, that the balancing is made with astartes as player squad in mind. Would that transition well to other troops as well, or would a strong opposition as mentioned above totaly whreck the likes of breachers and guardsmen variants?

[@optimalgamestate]

@@yumanoid5753 the version I used in this video has the low level trooper NPOs a bit weak because they never got lucky, instead I had fixed averages. So the heavily armoured Astartes maybe had it a bit easy. This version should play fine teams like Navy Breachers or Guardsman. You might find cases where an elite NPO is performing a little better because it's always averaging out to kill a Guardsman where in the normal game, sometimes it gets unlucky and when it gets very lucky it doesn't really matter as the Guardsman would have been dead already 😆 All in all it doesn't matter though. It's likely the AI team will be a little weaker as it doesn't have special abilities and tend to be smaller. My recommendation would be to try a game, see how it goes, tweak it to make it easier or harder for yourself until you find that sweet spot.

[@Pomwarlock]

@ I have been playtesting this extensively and have now play tested with kasrkin & Vespid & blades of khaine and have come with some updates So NPOs no dice rules. 5+ saves = 1 auto pass 4+ saves = 2 auto pass 3+ saves = 3 auto pass Cover adds +1 auto pass (3+ saves never benefit from cover) the piercing rule reduces how many auto passes NPOs retain. NPOs can NEVER save critical vs critical hits. Ranged weapons. 6+ = 1 auto hit 5+ = 2 auto hit 4+ = 3 auto hit 3+ = 1 critical & 2 auto hits (So heavy’s getting 4 auto hits was too much for most non Astartes teams. With 1 crit and 2 hits, everyone can still save all damage if lucky, abilities like kroot cold one’s Hardy, which reduces critical damage, are still useful to have. Also makes smoke grenades really useful when fighting very heavy marksmen coz you reduce the crit to a normal, remove a success, so that’s only 2 hits. If your in cover your very likely to take no damage. NPO melee. Hitting on 5+ = 1 hit Hitting on 4+ = 2 hits Hitting on 3+ = 3 hits If operative has Ceaseless ADD a critical hit. NPOs never parry, be it that they happily die for the emperor, blood for the blood god, or fodder for the hive mind. After many many dice rolls with the heavy brawlers, 1 crit 3 hits is actually pretty average and often you are getting off lightly. With melee specialists you can easily parry out 1crit 2 hits with minimum damage. In return, or alpha strike them. Remember that when a NPO is injured their BS/WS is affected and so they start dealing trivial auto hits. Becoming much less scary. I do consider these rules as “hard mode” and are 2 friends who want a challenging PVE co-op experience, playing to the best of their abilities, taking the best operatives at their disposal & still having a chance of losing. 3 out of 4 games I’ve play tested with this version of the rules were successful. But it was down to the wire trying to capture the last objective. I will point out, that we never went over the 90 NPO wound limit, always taking 2 heavy marksmen, 2 heavy brawlers, 3 tough marksmen, & 1 tough brawlers. Or 2 heavy marksmen, 6 trooper marksmen (2 with special weapons) and 2 tough brawlers.

[@Pomwarlock]

@@optimalgamestate oh as for reinforcements, 1 heavy or 1 tough +1 trooper, or 2 troopers. Always opting for the 1 heavy if available. Then place them where ever is worst for you

[@johnmc181280]

I think it sucks that they don't use an official 3-player mode. This “We play in threes but one party shares a squad” is not a real 3-player mode, but actually just a 2-player mode, quite nice for beginners.

[@optimalgamestate]

to be fair, I've never worked out how to do a 3-play gam. There's always the risk that 2 player will team up against the other. Very tricky to make it work as a format!