My groups approach to Maelstrom Missions

[Ang56]

My gaming group has been loving 7th and the new maelstrom missions. I tend to just lurk the forums and not post. But I've been reading a lot of negative things and watching a lot of batreps where they are having not awesome games with the new missions. I thought I would share some of the things my gaming group has been doing that have been giving us a positive experience.

I could get behind discarding the "impossible to complete at any point in a game" cards, but we don't. In a normal game for us there's maybe 3-4 of those in the whole deck. Plus the part of me that likes to suffer finds drawing "destroy a building" on my forest board amusing. After ~10 games with maelstrom I've found the biggest impact is setting up the board.

Move the objectives out of the deployment zones. At/near the edges is fine. Placing them near ground level, more towards the middle of the board while keeping them spread well helps a lot. If half the objectives aren't reachable by a player in 1-2 turns it limits their ability to score a big part of that deck.

Place the objectives in vulnerable locations. No cover, good lines of sight overlooking the markers. I think people naturally tend to just place them in good cover. Putting them out in the open with us has made us cap them when we have the card but not just sit on them unless it's actually a tough unit or we think we need a denial unit on it that turn. They are either left unclaimed or the unit is in the open, making it easier for both sides to clear and score obj's not on their side of the table.

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About a year ago we noticed that our games were shifting more toward gun lines. We really liked the 6th ed rules set, but we didn't like that we were moving in that direction. The solution we came up with was to change our tables.

We didn't want to just pack boards with terrain, so we started experimenting with LoS breaking pieces that wouldn't provide cover saves. We made the first floor of all our buildings inaccessible or have no windows. We use a lot of large short hills/rock formations for non urban terrain sets. The idea was to have all LoS at the lowest level be 18-24" with a few long narrow corridors while trying to not make the board look cluttered. Also to limit shooting from one deployment zone to the other as much as possible. High ground while it has better lines of sight, we've tried to reduce the cover there.

This has changed our game dynamic significantly, it forces a lot more movement. We've been seeing a lot more variety in list building. Being tabled has become really rare since neither side starts taking serious casualties until turn 3-4. Adding objectives that change on a turn by turn basis to the way we've been playing has been much better. Maelstrom seems to go well with the move / counter move gameplay this has evolved into for us.

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Another thing I've noticed in batreps is how large the games are for the table size. 1850pts on a 6x4' table seems like it would be really hard for it not to either turn into a gun line or with good terrain, push your lines into one another and roll dice. You remove a lot of the maneuver element when a table is that populated.

We've been playing smaller games on the 6' board, and made an 8' board adding more terrain to existing sets to fill it for the 1500-2k games. I think restricting lines of sight with terrain and playing less points per foot of table are the biggest changes, they encouraged movement and more varied army lists in 7th and maelstrom missions.

I guess I just think reassessing the way you setup a game can have a big impact on how it plays out. This has improved my groups experience a lot. Most of our maelstrom games have been fun and really close games. Hopefully this helps someone else.