Oh boy… cards on the table, this is a scenario I’m going to have to replay to get the full skinny but I feel like I know enough about it to still review it.
Archaeo-hunters is, in concept a fun and challenging scenario in which two gangs have arrived at an archaeo-vault they want to break into for the riches. Trouble is, there’s a massive vault door. Good thing is, there’s a giant robot that can take it down. It’s just damaged and powered down, so someone needs to walk it over to the vault and have it go to town.
Every gang that gets fighters into the vault is is worth d6x10 credits, which could turn into real money. It is a Random (d3+7) crew selection so this is not an Underdog scenario as, even with the random selection, most gangs in my experience are between 8-10 fighters and this scenario could potentially allow all of them. Worst case for large gangs is they might have to select one guy who doesn’t get to go.
In theory this could be a fun scenario. But I did not have fun. Part of this was bad luck and part of it was the battlefield construction.
The battlefield was set up in such a way that there were several choke points through which fighters had to pass in order to get to another part of the table, in this case, the area with the vault door. Well, it also turns out my opponent is a big fan of grenades and he essentially just shelled my gang at the spot they had to emerge to move on and by the second round I had three seriously injured gangers, one of whom was also ablaze and even my 5+ cool leader had broken. (Enough fighters catch serious injuries within three inches of you, even a 5+ eventually fails…) It was a real bad time and, if I were to play it again, I’d have lots of corners but there wouldn’t be the choke points where someone with one kind of weapon can dominate the field.
Another flaw is that the robot, sorry, automata, has a base move of 4-inches. On a 3×3 board that is 36-inches across, even placing the automata in the center cakes three activations minimum to reach the vault door. Add to that choke points it’s forced to navigate around, as was the case with this board, then it’s going to take 4-6 rounds minimum to make it to the vault and that assumes the fighter who activates it successfully makes an intelligence test every round.
The end result was that I bottled and my opponent got a massive windfall of cash because he still had every single member of his gang alive and uninjured.
A Few Tips
As mentioned above, there were a couple of issues with the board, number one with a proverbial bullet were the choke points. This made fragging a gang to death a real possibility and forced repeated break tests. But it also made whoever was controlling the automata have to navigate around a massive swath of the battlefield four-inches at a time.
So keep a relatively open battlefield.
This is Necromunda, obviously there should be regular line of sight breaks and lots of scatter terrain. But forcing a gang through one open pathway and everything else a climb over a way is a bad battlefield. There should always be multiple means of egress to the an objective that don’t require things like climbing up and jumping down (and risking failed initiative checks).
The above point is doubly the case when something unwieldy like the automata is involved. With a 6+ initiative it is essentially impossible to navigate anywhere but on a level surface and, so, should always have multiple ways of getting to where the scenario demands it must go. Any battlefield design that prevents this should be redesigned before play.
I would also tweak the reward rules a little bit. Currently, if a gang bottles out, the opponent gains d6x10 credits per ganger not seriously injured or out of action. In a game like mine where he had all eight fighters on the board, this seems like a lot. I would change this to d3x10. And even if the normal rules are left in place generally, I’d make this change for sure if the automata was destroyed. No automata, no vault, so there’s no getting those sweet, sweet rewards.
This might even encourage the losing gang to destroy the automata if they think they might bottle. But knowing that destroying it might put an upper limit on their earning might encourage an opposing gang from lobbing too many grenades in its direction.
Lastly, I would change it from Random (d3+7) to maybe a Random or Custom (6) scenario. Just make there be some choice as to who takes the field.
Needs a Second Try
When this scenario was proposed it sounded like a lot of fun! The mechanic of operating the automata and having it open a vault door that both sides could benefit from seemed like a rich story idea. I wasn’t opposed to the idea of a scenario where there could be come cash earnings for once. And, normally, I like my opponents terrain. There’s usually a lot more ways to traverse it than there was this time.
I would like to try it again and, if I do, I’ll add a fresh review here, but I wouldn’t do it again unless I was there to help set up the table. I would need to see that all of the things mentioned above were taken into account so that whomever went after the robot had at least a fair chance of getting it into place and that no one could have their entire gang cornered.
