OK, I should've posted this ages ago...

So I've been working on another update. Well, I say working on, I finished it. And went over and corrected/smoothed over it. I guess I missed the cue to blog...

The update is for the first half of the rulebook. (Work on the other half's already begun. I am THAT late with this.) I've totally rewritten most of the rules, adding clarity and definition to some sections and rewriting everything in order to restructure the turn sequence. Such a simple change, but it needed rewriting of pretty much the entire core rules. I did add reactor points in as well, but it'd have been the same without it, probably.

DoS is now totally different from 40K. It's come a long way; two years ago it was a 40K spin-off. (Literally - I actually submitted it to Specialist Games and everything; obviously, they ignored it. I'll teach 'em.) With the latest change, models now activate individually - a system that I'd feared would ruin the game's tactics, but actually enhances them, and is a heck of a lot more fun. A turn or two of playtesting at a friend's suggestion was all that was needed to convince me.

Action points are of debatable worth, they could be fiddly, but slaving every possible action to them does give a feeling of these mechs having a finite amount of power, and allows better control over how much firepower a mech can lay down . A model being able to spend 4-6 movement points and unleash up to 10 heavy weapons, two of which are paired, is just ridiculous... especially if they're all missile weapons. You know the one. 36", Strength 2D10, AP5, Shots 4. 89 cogs, if memory serves me right. 44 shots with the pairing on the shoulders. Put that on a Rn 8 Leader, that's an average of 32 hits a turn if there aren't any shooting modifiers. During playtesting I had a Leader cause some 90 damage on an enemy super-heavy with just three such weapons (two of which were paired). No more. Take a nerf bat to the face, missiles.

I've also taken the opportunity to firm up the rules a LOT, partly inspired by the new 5th ed 40K rulebook which is a lot cleaner than previous, and partly because of how my own outlook on games design's changed since I wrote out the previous incarnation of the rules. Podcasts, forum usage, and starting Warmachine have really emphasised the importance of rules clarity to me. So I added some. :)

As well as that, I added leader abilities - ten of 'em, in a chart upon which your leader rolls a D10 before the start of the game to determine their ability. These range from providing their Psychology to any friendly model on the table, to the good old Hard as Nails, to forcing models within D6+2" to take Reflexes tests or fall over in lieu of shooting. These'll make leaders more interesting, important, and tactically different - even two people using the same army will play differently depending on which skills their Leaders have.

Part Two of this update is, as I said, in progress. I'm going to be adding more variety and versatility into the weapon choices, making Rail Guns a separate class altogether, removing negative special rules (Jam, Overheat) in lieu of altogether more painful ones (Grinder and Focused!) and giving the poor underestimated energy weapons Surge as a basic rule. Many more special rules will also appear - I want 4 for each weapon, maybe five, with more for the alien weapons (one from each other class plus one or two unique ones).

More significantly, I'm changing the system from cog limits to weight limits - which you can break. Each upgrade has a weight, and if you pile too much weight onto your mech it gets encumbered, represented in-game by a loss of Reactor Points. Also, if you put too much weight on a weapon it becomes ordnance, encumbering you further and becoming harder to fire - but you can break that limit, the possibility is there! Light weapons won't have a separate maximum profile, instead a light weapon is one under a certain weight limit (upgraded Strength values are going to be very heavy, especially the higher powered ones).

The overall aim is a more realistic game, and one that's a bit more balanced too. One where mechs don't immediately vapourise when more than one enemy shoots at them, and where missile weapons don't rule over everything else. And, hopefully, a bit more variety in terms of both tactics and armaments. Wish me luck!

So the first update is enacted!

Well, the first update is up! For six days now, actually. The forum has yielded results. A power boost to CCWs is the main rules change; the majority of edits have been corrections and clarifications, trying to tidy up the wording and fix confusing or bad rules. The next step, of course, is to playtest everything.

This is where it gets fiddly... There are programs you can use to play wargames over the internet, but I'm considering creating a dedicated Duel of Steel version myself. It wouldn't be an easy programming job, but it'd help a lot. Other than that I'm limited to people near me, and reports from anyone who manages to persuade their gaming group into helping them along. It's slow progress; as of yet the forum community consists of three people... (I have six members, including myself, but three of them don't do anything.) Luckily one of the other two does live near me, in fact I know him personally, so that enables him to come down and play. The other guy lives in Norway though...

Anyway, playtesting. Much needed. I have a feeling that after the recent health boost to all mechs (I doubled their hits, or Mass, during an update), the serious damage grids are going to fill up much more quickly than that health goes down, meaning 95% of kills will be from exploding reactors, or mechs will simply fall apart after having all their limbs blown off and then get ignored, even if they still have some 50-100 damage left! Whether this is true will show itself during testing, though.

Better get programming if I want that software any time soon...

Factionalising

Turns out that I'm going to be factionalising (is that a word?) anyway. I'd never intended to create army lists; DoS doesn't work like that. But this is now reversed and I'll be adding rules for some 15 different factions. Each with a special character.

Well, one of them's the 'mixed team' comprising of gangers from all different factions, so it doesn't really count. The other 14 will get rules though. It's going to go like this, I think...

- Individual special rules. A faction model, even if it's part of a mixed team, will get a couple of special rules that'll affect how it's built and/or its in-game effect. So an Emnian ganger, say, is immune to morale checks, but automatically fails Proximity tests and has to charge wherever possible. This places a greater role on manoeuvring and stuff, as the Emnian player tries to set up good charge angles and firing solutions, and the opponent tries to trick them into doing the opposite. I'll probably have to add another rule boosting their potency, mind, because the opponent has a slight advantage here methinks, and Emnians are always trying to be the best.

- Faction specific upgrades. Some of these will be allowed for faction models within a mixed team, others only for those in a uni-faction gang.

- Team-wide special rules, for when a team is comprised of one faction. Provides access to the special character as well (some characters won't join mixed teams - I can't see a normal gang putting up with the Warpriestess for example... yeah Warpriestess, the Light of the Angel special character. Think an unstable, zealous psychotic strapped to the front of a giant killing machine).

- A skill table. Models in a uni-faction team can buy a roll on this table before the game for, oh, +20 cogs or so. The skills should be quite significant, probably worth more than +20 if they were bought as upgrades. Special characters will have some of these as abilities, as well as the Leaders' Hard as Nails, which I can give to a couple of the factions' skill tables (Mercs and Die Hards [gangers who've largely set aside their affiliations in the name of fighting] come to mind).

I think that'd be enough... A page's worth of rules and a special character. No army list, no cheesy weapon or unit selections. Well, I hope, anyway; the characters are obviously going to be deservedly overpowered or unique, but of course with a correspondingly high cost!

The rules are up!

So I wasn't going to post the rules up on the internet until I'd finished the update, was I? *Facepalm.* Well... I'm putting them up anyway. They're perfectly playable as they are, so it won't hurt to let anyone take a look. The link on the left - 'DoS Current Rules Download' - will take you to the forum thread where I'll keep a link to the current update of the rules. It makes it easier than updating every link on every page...

All I can say is, thank God for MediaFire. Free file hosting for ze win.

F1RST P0ST!!!!! (Only joking.)

Hello. This here be the book of secrets of myself as Duel of Steel developer. This blog's basically a place for me to muse online, make jokes and wax lyrical about both DoS and anything else I feel like scribbling about.

I'm mired in A levels at the moment. My exams haven't actually started yet - I start a lot later than most of my friends by the simple expedient of not having any re-sits - and I have my first this Thursday. Yes I know I should be revising. I've been listening through my audio notes and internet surfing at the same time. So it counts, ok? :) Still, the revision and course work has shunted Duel of Steel brutally to the wayside for several months, along with all other personal projects. Luckily, I have a loooong summer ahead of me, so even with the hoped-for summer job, I'll have some time to work both on DoS and my armies. Which I need to finish, or in one case, start. All five of them.... yep.

(A couple monsters to paint up for my mammoth Tyranid swarm, 1500 of needs-painting Eldar infantry, 1850 odd of Battlefleet Gothic Chaos ships, a 500 point Cryx force for Warmachine, and a proposed 2000 points of Tomb Kings which I've barely started.

Yeah. Wish me luck.)

However!... I have aspirations for Duel of Steel. A big massive fluff revamp, as in huge amounts of new background and a full history; I want the game to be openended enough so people can easily make up their own background, like 40K is, but at the same time with a fleshed out background and a real gritty feel to it. Again like 40K is, I suppose.

As well as that, I intend to finish off my rules update. The advanced rules need redoing and I need to add in the scenarios to the basic ruleset, as well as a few other neat tactical things (strategic locations mainly - vantage points, killing fields and that, stuff that'll transform a game by the simple expedient of existing), which'll probably get written into the Advanced rules now that I think of it.

Weeeelll, I think that'll do for an intro... I won't post much, if at all, until after the exams (my last is on the 18th, so I might do some DoS work on the 19th, that is if I get up on the 19th), but as they say when they're trying to create an almost childishly false sense of suspense and expectation, "watch this space".

...I remember seeing that for the first time ever in a kids' magazine when I was 5 or 6, and being a literal minded child, staring intently at the blank space below the sentence, thinking it contained some sort of stereogram type effect. I was crushingly disappointed, realising eventually that it didn't mean that and I'd have to wait a month for the next issue to come out. Moral: Don't show idioms to kids, people.