Beyond the Gates of Antares; My Rules Mistakes

So, i've had another game of Antares and have started painting some Ghar that I purchased over Christmas, so here's a small update on my activities;

I now own the Ghar starter army, I have built the contents and primed them ready for painting. I converted one of the walkers with a craft knife and some spare piping to make my Commander Fartok (HQ Unit) and have started painting the drones. My plan is to finish painting this lot before the end of the month, at which time i'll have some more photos to add to the blog.

As I mentioned I have run another demo game of Antares, and I must admit, having re-read the rules since the game I really messed up the rules and tipped the balance of the game massively in the Ghars favour (who I was playing against). The biggest error I made, and anybody coming in from games like 40K where you commonly have dice pools will likely make is pooling your dice when your making a resistance test for a unit that contains a Leader.

In the rulebook you have to evenly assign hits across your unit and roll their tests individually, however if every model is identical there is no harm in just rolling them all at once. BUT!!! If you have a Leader in there who can re-roll a failed test which only has a 10% chance of failing, then you are drastically improving the units survivability. For example, lets say a Ghar Assault Squad recieves 3 hits, if you follow the rules and roll for the models individually, statistically there is ~20% chance of taking a casualty. Now if you roll all of the dice as a pool and re-roll one fail by putting it on the leader, the same casualty rate becomes ~3%, making the Ghar somewhat overpowered.

So my advice, don't take shortcuts early on like I did, it seriously tips the balance of the game, just remember that your resist tests are made individually on a per model basis.


Moving on, I have been working on my quick reference sheets, as I prefer not to have to dig through a 250 page book when playing games. Currently I have a data sheet for the Ghar and Concord that contains every unit, weapon and special rule found in the Xilos Horizon Starter Set, handy for running demo games. Further to this I have thrown one together for Orders, specifically the more advanced options you have such as retaining or reactions.


That's all for now,

Regards,

Peak Wargamer Aaron.