Getting into Pilot Mode

One of the goals of MAC Attack is to put the players in pilot view

This is where they focus in on the active unit, look at its modules, track its heat, speed, and facing, and learn to exploit the same factors in the opposing MACs. Of course you’re looking at the battlefield from a top-down view, but a big appeal of the mech genre is the nitty-gritty feel of piloting a particular machine.

This one needs to keep moving to avoid getting hit. This one runs hot if you fire all its lasers. This one needs to wait patiently for a sitting duck target. This one handles like shit over rough ground. This one absolutely must not let itself get hit in the rear. 

The initiative deck feeds into this. You're never asked “which of your units should you activate first?” 

No! You just pull a card and whoosh, you zoom in on that unit and you're the pilot now. What do you do?

The way I use counterplay in the game also feeds into this, and requires breaking it down into two types.

Strategic vs Tactical Counterplay

(Forgive me that Strategic and Tactical might not be the most accurate terms here, but they are the most memorable, which is more important)

Strategic Counterplay happens before the game starts. Like when you show up with a few anti-tank guns and I show up with an an infantry horde that renders them a bad pick. You bring a melee-focused faction and I take an army-wide ability that makes my units harder to hit in melee. That was a good pick for me. You can think of this as an abstraction of all the logistics, intelligence, and large scale manoeuvring that happens outside of the scope of the battle.

Tactical Counterplay happens at the table during the game. You have lots of archers so I avoid a direct charge, advancing through the woods. You’ve bought a superheavy tank that I’m not well equipped to fight at long range, so my mortars drop smoke in front of it, forcing it to stay put or advance into a more vulnerable position. 

For MAC Attack, and perhaps in most cases, I want Tactical Counterplay. Again, this focuses on “What would a good pilot do” more than “Which of these army lists wins?” 

This is a slight revisit of a topic discussed previously, but I’ve had more time to mull it over.

I've been fine tuning the module list to work toward this goal.

An example of where I’d gone wrong is a now-deleted weapon type that I tested out. The gist of it was that the weapon did more damage to bigger MACs, but was useless against Infantry and Vehicles.

Now this was wide open to strategic counterplay. If your force is all Light MACs and Auxiliaries then this weapon is junk. Worse, though, if you bring a bunch of Heavy MACs, because you like big bots, then I’m coming in with a huge advantage. There isn’t really a tactical answer to it other than “Keep away from that giant threat”. 

I already had a weapon type that executed this idea in a more tactically interesting way. Piercing weapons let you roll additional attacks for each hit you cause, meaning it’s very effective against easy targets, and less effective against difficult targets. Big MACs tend to move more slowly, because they consume more heat to rush or jump, so by nature these weapons already tend to favour attacks against heavy MACs. 

But the important thing. If you bring a force of heavy MACs and I have a load of piercing weapons, you can respond to this by, at the very least, not standing still and giving me easy targets. You might even rush or make more use of cover, anything that makes my shots more difficult. You can make tactical decisions to counter my counter. 

Active vs Engaged

We’re going down another tangent here, but this still connects to my goals around Pilot View. 

The Active Player is the one taking their turn right now. 

The Engaged Player is the one currently engaging with the rules.

These aren’t always the same.

I don’t want module effects that need to be remembered by a player when they’re not currently engaged.

So Plates are fine, because their passive effect occurs when the non-active player is engaged, specifically when the active (here, attacking) player says “Okay I hit modules 3, 4, and 6” and the non-active player (here, the target) looks at their MAC sheet to see what’s actually been hit. In that moment the non-active player is engaged, so we can expect them to notice that their Plate has been hit, triggering its effect.

Cloaks are not fine, because their effect (harder to hit at a certain range bracket) occurs when that player is unengaged, specifically when their opponent is adding up motion dice and modifiers to calculate the Target Number of the attack. In this moment the non-active player is unengaged in a mechanical sense. Even if they’re still paying attention to what their opponent is doing they aren’t necessarily looking at the specific modules of the MAC being attacked.

For this reason I’m chopping and changing a lot of the hardware modules to allow for Tactical Counterplay and for effects that occur when that unit’s player is Engaged. 

The current version of Cloak (pending testing) allows the unit to set its Motion die to 6 when it doesn’t Move, making itself harder to hit at the cost of limiting its own attacks. This is a nasty pairing with Guided weapons (which ignore your own Motion when you attack) but there are some pretty clear tactical counterplay options available (keep moving, drop Markers on the unit, forcing them to move or become an easy target, or bait them into moving with a juicy target of your own).

As always, this is a case of preference, not purity. I reserve the right to break my own rules, but keeping them in mind is bringing MAC Attack closer to where I want it to be. 

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