Lancer: Battlegroup (Part 2)
This is the conclusion of the critical analysis of Lancer: Battlegroup. You can find the first part here.
5. Disassemble Engine
Games have a flow, which, when you hit, the game pretty much runs itself. It is extremely satisfying. After examining the interactions of game elements, we single out the most important - the one that sets the pace of sessions, or even campaigns. We focus on how that engine works, how it makes the game move along, and what to do to make it do what you want to do - and how to keep it running clean.
Ludo
Lancer: Battlegroup has a structured, cyclical play: you are briefed on your mission and the enemy forces, establish the consequences of success or failure, prepare your battlegroup and lay down fleet strategy, engage the enemy, and live through the aftermath — until you have to do it all over again.
You would expect engagements or something that happens within engagements to be the lynch-pin holding the play-routine together and pushing the game onwards. But it is not.
It is battlegroup creation.
Engagements may be tense and devastation, but are where you witness the outcome of your preparations and decisions. And those come down mostly to how you modified or created your battlegroup. Every battlegroup has the same budget, which can be used for bigger capital ships and smaller craft. The limitations of battlegroup creation offer a great range of options: while it is impossible to design a bad battlegroup, it is also impossible to make an all-ranger; no matter your fleet doctrine when designing your battlegroup, you will have big weaknesses. As such, you are pushed for experimentation and to constantly go back to battlegroup creation, modifying the ships at your disposal with new loadouts and/or replacing vessels and hulls. Based on intel, you will try to prepare the best battlegroup to tackle this engagement — and only this engagement; but even then, you cannot unleash the full potentials without having other player’s commanders designing battlegroups that synergize with yours, so if they change something, you also may want to do some modifications of your own.
And that’s how battlegroup creation is the engine powering Lancer: Battlegroup. It is not something you do once, “solve” and have one or more battlegroups for any given opposition; it is not even something that you only look at once per cycle of play. No, battlegroup creation is always there, something you can jump on at any moment outside of engagement proper, with a vast range of satisfying way to tinker with your toys.
There are rules for commander creation, where you pick traits and a background; however, that is not really where the commander character is created; the choice of battlegroup, how and when to do they change it, before you realize you realize that establishes who your commander is more than anything else you could write in a Lancer: Battlegroup sheet1.
Brad
Lancer: Battlegroup is the solution to your demented lust to run a mass battle. If you have a group with a player who is hungry to experience huge fleet battles, this is the cure. Because between choosing your battlegroup and experiencing the visceral run of its fleet actions you will sate that hunger.
Building a battlegroup is a wonderful properly fiddly experience, choosing to invest in fighter squads and which capital ships will define your commander is better than any gear selection, and the fact that you can adjust it between combats with no additional caveat really makes it fantastic.
The Combat sings, as you get closer to your opponents on the battlemap, you will find new actions and new modifiers and slowly get a chance to discover which combat-ecological niche you enjoy, and can then make a rapid adjustment.
6. Essentials For Session One
So, you got this game, you going to play it, but you don’t have the time to read everything. Or even worse, your have read it and now it is all jumbled together. Here we break down the things that you absolutely want to try to get right and/or hit during your first session, so you get the felling of what makes this game stand out from similar art.
Lucrécia
So you have one hour and one session to get the deal with Lancer: Battlegroup. But there are so many moving parts What to do?
Honestly? Don’t even worry about getting to “play the game”; just make some battlegroups together.
So much of the game is tinkering with battlegroups, and so much of the enjoyment comes from that, that is where what makes this game unique and worth playing lies.
Make a battlegroup by yourself, reading what you need for that:
Battlegroup building basics (pg. 62)
Ship Hull Summary2 (pg. 97)
Weapons (pg. 98)
Systems (pg. 104)
Smaller Craft (pg. 110)
What all that terminology means (pg. 57)
If you still have time, you should try your hand at designing enemy vessels. They have an asymmetrical design that is interesting but abides by its own rules (pg. 164). They are simpler but quite versatile.
By “default”, you make 1 NPC battlegroup per player battlegroup.
You don’t build ships like players do; instead you pick from NPC archetypes.
Pick a single Capital ship from the capital ship archetypes for each NPC battlegroup. This one also counts as a flagship for effects and benefits.
Add 1-3 Escort archetypes ships to accompany the Capital ship.
You may add Ace archetypes to a battlegroup for extra challenge.
Then, bring what you learned to the table, make some battlegroups together and if you still have time, bash them against the NPCs you made.
Brad
Lu’s advice and mine are identical, you will go far to follow it.
7. Playing The Game Wrong
Games are played wrong. Rules will be misunderstood, interactions will be confused, the importance of certain tech disregarded; etc. This is good, and it is good to acknowledge for: you cannot have the designer at your time, and even if they were, they would be just another player - and entitled to play it wrong. After identifying stress points of the game, things that don’t connect that well, we think of the things that are more likely to be (our have been) “played wrong”. What happens when you forget a line in page 273 clearly saying this is impossible?
Ludo
For an intricate wargame, you would expect Lancer: Battlegroup has many stress points. Oddly enough, the careful and intentional design locks in place neatly. During actual engagement, you use maneuvers and tactics that are by themselves self-explanatory. Time-sensitive payload weapons and relative ship position are important elements to track, and warrant special attention; issues during engagements are more likely than not be related to those. Additionally, boarding actions interact with other elements of engagement in a non-intuitive way, so it is worth to be extra careful when boarding actions are being resolved.
With it being something you come back to over and over, the enjoyment of Lancer: Battlegroup lives and dies by it. When working proper, the design is finely adjusted that it and its interactions with engagement that “bad” decisions feel like the consequences of different fleet doctrines coming head on rather than “playing the game wrong.” However, this does not work if some important limitations are ignored. As such, you should keep the following in your mind:
You can have up to 1 Battleship, up to 2 Carriers and up to 3 Frigates.
Every capital hull has custom abilities, and they often are more significant than their class’s abilities.
A crucial exception is the Carrier class! Carriers give you back 3 points that can only be spent in lighter ships. I repeat, do not forget this!3
System slots are very versatile but hard to come buy outside of dedicated builds. However, your flagship has some neat bonuses — including a free Systems slot. Always approach your battlegroup design with this guaranteed System in mind.
Your budget goes out fast! Do not be afraid of filling slots with zero-cost options; they may not be as busted, but all of them are amazing role workhorses that you do what you want them to do.
Slots and budget are not the only thing to consider: Unique components mean only one per battlegroup — not just one per ship! Limited components do not impose any battlegroup design restriction but indicate how many time they can be used per engagement4.
Do not bother with all-rounder battlegroups. They will disappoint you once you see what a for-purpose, other player synergistic battlegroup will do.
If you stick to these stress points, the carnage develop as expected.
Brad
Flagships are key, it sounds obvious, but it took me a chunk of time to get used to that. They have an extra system and it can be battlegroup defining, also to hone in on Lu’s last point, don’t be afraid to coordinate with the rest of your group to build the most specialized battlegroup possible, you will have way more fun.
8. What to Steal
Experiencing good art is the most important step in making good art. We look back at the things that worked and did not work about this game, see what we learned for design work, interesting tech and just a general overview of things that we will take from this game and bring into others. Or more honestly: since many of us may not play this game and we have it in our library, this way we can get some use out of it.
Lucrécia
It is hard to nail down what to get from Lancer: Battlegroup. The system is quite tight and works together to do what it does; it is not something you can really tinker with and replicate in other ways. Brewing with Lancer: Battlegroup is a delicate, arduous process; any change or expansion has such an impact on the way things come — or not — together, that it requires one to pretty much have to remake the game to accommodate that.
If one wants to compare with Lancer, one can take something about the contrasting approaches to mechanical complexity. Lancer may be modular, but any addition increases the complexity5; Lancer: Battlegroup is a complex game, but every decision is a simple one, with most of the cognitive load being taken with checking payloads and tracking boarding actions. This happens because handling that load was front-loaded: the design is very careful and intentional to make things work without extra assistance — either from a carbon or silicon brain.
There is nothing to learn from how the game was produced. The conditions imposed upon them are atrocious and one should be careful to seek any correlation between that crunch and the quality of the game; Lancer: Battlegroup is what it is despite the environment of Role, not due to it.
Perhaps, the main lesson to get from Lancer: Battlegroup is knowing when to leave things be. Sure, it will be a lot of work if it is scaled up at any point. Yes, it is a bit of a niche of game at the intersection of wargaming and TTRPGs that is very focused. None of that diminishes Lancer: Battlegroup: it is the most “put together” game of Massif Press yet, it is a masterpiece of its genre, is an artistic piece of enduring transformative impact and is the best tool yet designed for this job.
Does it need to be anything else? Or it is a good moment to see the foolishness of pursuing the release of Treats and Content and just make some ships.
Brad
Steal commitment from Battlegroup. All too often we will see a game do a spin-off that isn’t much more than a fresh coat of paint, Battlegroup is a dramatically different game than Lancer and that is a huge portion of why it works.
Using negative-space for commanders much better than Lancer does with mech pilots; the longer a game goes, the deeper there is to the identity and connections of our undead commander — while as games of Lancer go on, pilots tend to sublimate further and further into a pile of talents and licenses.
Don’t forget to check the special abilities of any hull you pick and give you added Carrier budget!
Almost every single engagement I lost using carriers has been because I forgot this and went into battle seriously underpowered.
And their use is tracked not by battlegroup or ship but by the component!
To the point that to this day I have not met anyone that plays Lancer without its powerful digital tools.