PDA

View Full Version : Planetary Empires



Valdore
08-15-2009, 06:50 PM
Ok, now that it's been released, what are peoples thoughts on Planetary Empires?

What rules do you like in the book? Which don't you like?

What would you do differently about it if you were running a campaign with it?

Is it worth buying Mighty Empires as a companion to it?

You know the stuff, lets get discussing!



Myself, I'm not a great fan of the randomly setting up a world, I'd rather one person put some effort into a campaign and build up some fluff around a planet that they have built for said fluff. Though I'm sure for simple tracking of games it would be quite useful.

Fighting battles to take a tile, I don't like that you say which tile you're going to take after you've battled. The way I'm going to run it is that you try to take a tile, then play a battle for it, setting the terrain up depending on what's present on the tile, for instance if fighting in a crater then I'm planning on having no terrain except craters on the battlefield, making it a whole different ball game for most people (including myself) used to fighting with ruins on the table. Similarly, places like random tiles would have a limit on the number of terrain pieces of a type.

Another aspect I'm planning on adding in to unsettle things is having two generic sides (eg Good & evil) or possibly three, (Imperium, Chaosy, Other) maybe splitting other into other good and other bad. Depends what players I get! But these races aren't always going to be fighting allied with each other, so to represent that each player will be receiving a secret objective, for instance Daemonhunters might be tasked with analysing the extent of the corruption on the planet, and using whatever means necessary to stem it. For this they would have to secure certain areas of the map to find out the extent of the damage and to be able to call down an exterminatus or other method of annihilating the Chaos corruption and any who may have fallen prey to it (ie Guard armies, Marines, Eldar etc) The Eldar however might be trying to ensure the safety of their warpgates from the Chaos and Imperium threat, but what if one of their allies holds a tile that is vital to their warpgate network?

As to Mighty Empires, I'm undecided so far, I'd love to have the mountain tiles from it, and others like the rivers, but I'm not so certain about the rest, having not seen them, and the sheer number of tiles in planetary empires is enough for me for now I think!

bob
08-15-2009, 07:12 PM
Your unsettling things by going the basic route? with the sides for the campaign I mean.

But I do like the idea of the objective based campaign , could be really cool with well thought out ones

Valdore
08-16-2009, 01:35 AM
Nope, the basic route is to have each side working together for a basic goal, I'm going to be giving each player a secret objective that may mean he has to wrestle tiles from his 'allies at times if he can't convince them to hand it over peacefully. Meaning that although the sides are working together in a broad sense there will be internal fractions etc.