Rebels (Work in Progress)

We are currently writing and playtesting rules for playing Rebel or Insurgent forces. Regardless of whether you call them rebels, revolutionaries, freedom fighters, terrorists, paramilitaries, militias, guerrillas, insurrectionists or renegades, they are undoubtedly important players on the battlefield. If you have any ideas or suggestions for the types of things you'd like to see included let us know.

Themes

In Intervention, as in real life, Rebel units are often comparatively weaker than their conventional counterparts, however, what they may lack in training and equipment, they often make up for in local knowledge, motivation and agility.

Information Asymmetry. Whether it is due to their ability to move quickly, blend among the local populace or their familiarity with the terrain, Rebel armies usually enjoy an information advantage over their opponents and can better exploit uncertainties on the battlefield.

Adapted. Rebel forces very often become hyper-adapted to the conflict environment in which they operate. A rebel force will tend to perform better on ‘home turf’ that it does in unfamiliar terrain.

No Air Power. Rebel armies lack the air units of their conventional foes. This weakness is compounded by a restricted selection of anti-aircraft units and assets. Air units provide a force with highly mobile firepower, which goes some way towards offsetting the Rebels’ information advantage, allowing the enemy force to offset rebel advantages and rapidly respond to unexpected events on the battlefield.

Limited Armour. Although Rebel forces can be equipped with armoured vehicles, they are relatively expensive and do not benefit from many Rebel advantages, such as their ability to blend in with the local populace.

Rebel Heroes. A rebellion succeeds or fails largely based on its narrative, and all stories need heroes. Some rebel units may be upgraded to Rebel Heroes to indicate that they or their unit has exhibited particular skill or courage in the face of the enemy. This is usually represented in game terms by a modest stats boost, coupled with the elite special rule.


With the above themes in mind, below you'll find a list of the units and doctrines we are thinking of running with.

Doctrines:

As with the rest of the Intervention series, the aim is to provide players with a tool-box with which to create their force. In the real world Rebel forces are shaped as much by their by their ideology and environment as they are by their adversary; there there is an almost infinite variety of possible rebel forces that a player may wish to model their force on.

To account for this we have used Intervention's Doctrines mechanic to enable players to shape their force. Each doctrine either opens up unit availability, enables tactical options or adjusts how the rebel force plays in some other way. The current list is as follows, however these are working titles, we may add and/or rationalise.

Freedom Fighters (morale bonus)
Comsec Aware (disrupts enemy targeting)
Tunnel Fighters (May use tunnels if prepared defences are allowed)
Defectors (Prevalence of Conventional Military Training)
Nomadic Raiders (Increased access to Technicals or animal mounts)
Local Knowledge (better adapted to local environment)
True Believers (Morale bonus)
Our Land (reduces likelihood of falling back off the table)
Narcotics Supply (Units can take narcotics)
Ideology of Martyrdom (Can take PBIED and VBIEDs)
Urban guerrillas (Bonuses in urban terrain)
Rural Partisans (Bonuses in rural terrain)
Propaganda of the deed (Victory point bonus for surviving units)
Cell Phone Reporting (additional penalties if the enemy hits civilian units or infrastructure)
Humanitarian Struggle (Cheaper doctors and medical upgrades)
Covert Action (ability to disrupt the enemy before the battle)
Among the People (Enemy must PID units)
Terror on the Battlefield (Some units cause psychological effects in the enemy)
Indiscriminate (reduced penalties for non-targeted fire)
Popular uprising (Angry mobs more effective)
Major Power ally (Ability to take 25% of the force from an allied army list)
Environmental Adaption (
Sensor Aware (advanced sensors less effective)
Boat People (cheap upgrades for moving on water)
Foreign Fighters (may take foreign fighter units)


Units

Given the tension between the almost 'infinite variety of rebels' outlined above and the need to have a usable list of units we have worked to design a unit list that strikes a balance between giving players both structure and flexibility. All forces in intervention are divided into Combat Infantry, Specialist Infantry, Specialist Personnel, Vehicles and Support Assets.

Combat Infantry
Rebel Fighters
Heavy Weapon Team
Angry Mob   

Specialist Infantry
Rebel Sniper
Attack Cell
Commander’s Bodyguard
Dicker
Special Forces Advisory Team
Digger Team

Other
Sympathetic Civilians

Specialist Personnel
Doctor
Foreign Military Observer
Runner
Ideologue
Rebel Leader
Rebel Captain
Commander, Rebel Forces
Warlord
Hero of the Revolution/Rebel Legend
Ammo Carrier
Local Guide

Vehicles
Approx T54 Tank
Approx T72 Tank
BTR
BMP
Technical
Truck (Transport or Armed)
VBIED (armoured and unarmoured)

Support Assets
Light Artillery
Heavy Mortars
Pre-positioned IEDs
RoadBlocks/Barricades
Propaganda
Rocket barrage
Rebel Arsenal
Improvised Munitions Factory
Black Market Access

Intervention and 'Rapid' Intervention

A slightly belated happy new year to everyone.

Just before Christmas, Intervention was updated to include all the feedback from 6 months of BETA testing in the wild. We really appreciate those of you who have sent in your feedback or participated in our hosted games and we're now pretty comfortable with where Intervention is as a system. We will soon be releasing the first four products as a completed bundle on Wargame Vault.

In addition to continuing to work up unit lists we have started to strip down the Intervention rules to create a sub game - working title: Rapid Intervention.

The idea is to use the intervention rules as the basis to create a quick play version of the game that can be used to have a quick game or test scenarios in a classroom, barrack room or other environment where time and space are limited.

The aim as far as possible will be to streamline rules so that as player get more experienced or want to incorporate more advanced features, they can simply import the relevant rules modules from Intervention or Air Assault.

We will also include all the print and play elements from the original Intervention while adding a load more.

Again if you have any suggestions for how you would like to see Intervention and Rapid Intervention progress, please let us know via the comments form under 'More Information'.

Updates - Technical Codex and Points Calculator

Technical Codex

We have just released a significant revision of the Intervention Technical Codex.

There's loads of new content, including rules for VBIEDs, Medical and Logistics units, laser designators, vehicle upgrades, and more.

We have also streamlined and clarified some of the existing rules to increase playability.

The updated Technical Codex can be bought from Wargame Vault here.

Points Calculator

We have also just updated the Unit Points Calculation Tool. The tool is now more comprehensive and puts more information at your fingertips. It has helpful hints if you have made a mistake and now includes costings for all special rules and weapon abilities found in the Technical Codex and Intervention Air Assault.

The next iteration should include fortifications and an overarching roster page.

The Unit Builder and Points Calculator are Pay What You Want and are also available from Wargame Vault.

Design Problems: The Cover-Dash and How We Addressed it

There are several problems that pretty much every wargame designer will encounter when writing a rule set. Essentially they are issues that have no good answers and they usually arise from the fact that you are taking a fluid and imperfect environment and then attempting to impose a standard set of mechanics and constraints in order to turn it into a playable game. 

A classic example of this is how to handle battlefield information asymmetry or 'fog of war'. Generally, by improving the way that a game system handles fog of war, you increase the admin burden, increase complexity and slow the pace of play, which may not be what you are after as a designer. Incidentally Intervention attempts to address this by using a combination of Point of Interest Markers, 6mm scale units and hidden army lists, but we'll probably go into fog of war in a bit more details in another blog post.  

The Cover Dash

Similarly, another almost unavoidable problem that is frequently encountered is that of the 'cover dash'. This problem is articulated well in chapter 1 of Featherstone's Advanced War Games, but it basically comes down to the issue of where a unit is when it is fired upon. Generally we assume that units are fired upon either at the beginning or end of their movement, however this allows units to dash across open terrain between areas of cover and somehow avoiding being fired upon. Incidentally, the name Intervention partly stems (in part) from our initial attempts at designing mechanics to overcome this problem.

For the sake of simplicity, we shelved some of the more ambitious methods at solving this problembut it remained something we were uncomfortable with. However, the issue of the cover dash came into particularly stark relief when play-testing the rules for Rebel forces. A group of soldiers had occupied a cluster of buildings at a crossroads, the Rebel player hopped two VBIEDs between areas of cover to within 12 inches and then drove them right up to the dug-in soldiers. There was very little the defending player could do about it and, in real life they would at least have had an opportunity to shoot back or try to stop the advancing vehicles.

Part of the fun of Intervention is the mini stories that emerge through play: the special forces unit that suffers an injury while fast roping onto a target; the heroic conscripts that charge across open terrain to seize an objective; or in this case the desperate defence of Check Point Omega against the Nasrallah Martyrs' VBIEDs. We want the rules to help generate this sort of narrative.   

 

Designing a Solution

The original published solution was to allow units to overwatch and delay their activation until later in the turn. This allows a player to prevent the enemy from sneaking forward after other units have spent their actions for the turn. However this doesn't prevent a player from moving a unit from one area of cover to another within the same activation. 

In the forthcoming update to Intervention we have addressed this by allowing overwatching units to interrupt an enemy unit's activation. When an opponent has declared their intended action for a unit, a player may declare that they are bringing one or more units off overwatch to attempt to intervene.

While this may seem like a small and quite sensible change, it breaks a core assumption about the order in which units activate. Very quickly serious questions are raised elsewhere that must be addressed in as elegant a way as possible.

• If multiple units on overwatch activate, what order do they activate in?
• What happens if the enemy unit is knocked out before all the overwatching units activate?
• What happens if an overwatching unit is hidden and doesn't get to activate?
• Can an overwatching unit itself be interrupted by an enemy overwatching unit? What order are actions resolved in?
• How/when does crossfire apply?
• How does all this affect IEDs?

These were just some of the questions that needed answering and, while a specific rule could be written to cover each situation, this only adds complexity and would never cover all of the weird situations that players manage to generate. 

The full revised overwatch rules are included in the forthcoming Intervention core rules update, but in essence: Overwatching units activate in chronological order, roll 1xD6 to activate each overwatching unit, on a 2+ the unit activates successfully. If a unit is scheduled to come off overwatch and does not or cannot see the triggering activity, it loses its activation this turn. While not a perfect replication of the ebb and flow of combat, this allows players to respond to enemy activity more dynamically and it helps to avoid the cover dash. 

Intervention Air Assault - Update

Intervention Air assault has been updated to streamline a some of the mechanics and clarify some of the rules. 

Also included is a selection of helicopter only specialist equipment and abilities including:

• Advanced Helicopter Sensor Suite
• Defensive Aid Suite
• Mast Mounted Sight
• ISR Suite

And rules for using Prepared Helicopter Landing Sites (HLS).

Mast Mounted Sight - Designer's Notes

So, full disclosure: We think the Kiowa Warrior (OH-58) is a pretty cool helicopter. We have also really enjoyed playing aggressively with fast-moving light helicopters when testing the rules for Intervention. So, as we are currently working on updates for all four of our published books, we decided it would be a good opportunity to include some rules for the Kiowa Warrior's main feature - its mast mounted sight (MMS).

                Kiowa Warror (Image from Wikipedia)

One of our mantras is to 'build on existing mechanics' rather than 'write new ones'. This promotes consistency and helps keep things simple, thereby helping players understand the rules and minimising the opportunity for broken mechanics.

When thinking about the MMS, we had a defined effect that we wanted to achieve: to enable the helicopter to loiter behind suitable terrain, spotting the enemy without exposing itself to enemy fire. But how best to achieve it?

We initially started looking at the issue from a 'line of sight' perspective, and tried a mechanic that would allow the helicopter to trace line of sight through nearby terrain but not allow enemy units to trace line of sight back to the helicopter. While this approach had its merits and mirrored the approach we'd taken with ground based ISR masts (rules for which are included in the updated Technical Codex), this approach quickly fell apart when applied to helicopters, which operate at three different heights and interact with terrain differently to ground units. Back to the drawing board.

The second approach was to use the way that helicopters benefit from cover. Unlike ground units, (which get a cover bonus depending on the type of cover between them and the enemy), helicopter cover bonuses are dependent on pilot skill. Taking this mechanic as the basis, we decided that using the mast mounted sight requires the helicopter to remain stationary for the turn, but in exchange it gains an additional +2 cover bonus. The net effect of this was to leave the line of sight mechanic intact and provide the helicopter with significant additional protection, without making it invulnerable. We'll play test this a few more times and, if it survives, the Mast Mounted Sight will be included in the next update to Intervention Air Assault, which should be out before the end of the year.

Video: Kiowa Warrior in action (Especially 1:10-2:20)

Also : Another short Kiowa video

Points Calculator BETA2

Lots of new functionality added to the points calculator. It still has the look and feel of the old one but quite a bit of work has been done under the hood. All the attributes and equipment are now available in drop down / comboboxes and everything in the revised Technical Codex will be costed, including all the new equipment.

Some of the negative attributes (Depletion; AA Only; etc) were quite tricky to cost and then incorporate into the functionality, but they seem to be working now.

Other improvements include a better Hints section at the bottom and a couple of bugs being ironed out.

All the points values are still work in progress so if you think something is under or over priced feedback is very welcome .

Although it won't be in this version, BETA3 should include a force force summary page and a page for fortifications.

Rebels

We have started producing a rebel force to develop and playtest the new rules for Rebels.

So far we have: 2 x Complete rebel platons; 1 x almost complete rebel platoon; 3 x Snipers; 2 x Stinger teams; 1 x Machine gun support squad; 2 x RPG support squads; 6 x 'dickers'. (All models are GHQ)

View fullsize

Next on the workbench:

2 x Gaz Trucks with Type 63 MLR; 4 x Gaz Trucks with ZSU23-2; 8 Toyota Technicals; 5 Zil Trucks; 5 Kamaz Trucks; 1 x Command squad; 12 x infantry squads; 2 x 'Foreign fighter' squads; 10 x 'angry mob' bases; 2 x mortar section.

That should be enough to be getting on with...

Medics - Designers Notes

We are currently updating the Technical Codex, mainly by adding points values for the upgrades and adding some additional equipment and abilities.

While we were working through we realised that the rules for medics didn’t quite do what we wanted so we decided to see if we could make them better.

When we look at designing rules we think about what the thing (whatever it is) does in real life and how that might be applied to the game, or be effectively modelled.

Medics

Medics in real life treat wounded soldiers, but in intervention, individual casualties are abstracted - obviously this poses a challenge for incorporating rules for medics. 

Our initial solution was to focus on increasing the survivability of the unit. Remembering that prompt medical care is vital for saving lives, we went for the following rule:

"If a unit goes from Unaffected to Knocked Out as a result of a single role, for example in an engagement action, the defending player may make the attacker reroll."

However, on reflection we didn’t feel this was the best way of modelling having a medic in a unit so we brainstormed some alternatives:

1. Medics increase the resilience of the unit.

2. Medics improve a unit's ability to recover their morale condition

3. Medics force attack re-rolls eg if an attacker rolls a 6

4. Some sort of bespoke mechanic or special action

We ruled out increasing the resilience of the unit as, although it was simple, it was a bit boring and didn’t really differentiate what a medic added rather than better tactical drills.  Forcing an attack re-roll was tempting but the effect had a side-effect of unbalancing some combats, for example if a defending unit with a medic is considerably better than the attacker. We also didn't want to introduce a new mechanic as we are always trying to reduce the number of mechanics in the game. We decided to focus on improving a unit's ability to recover from a morale condition - the medic could stabilise or check on a wounded soldier, allowing the rest of the unit more effectively engage the enemy or manoeuvre.

We are testing 3 rules:

·       "+1 to morale resolution rolls"

·       "Pinned units that successfully resolve their morale become unaffected rather than suppressed"

·       "Suppressed units receive +1 morale resolution, pinned units go through to unaffected"

We'll see which one works best and add it to the Technical Codex.

Thinking about the about medics also prompted us design some casevac rules to add to the Codex.

Unit Builder Released and Deal of the Day

To mark the release of the Intervention Unit Builder and Points Calculator, we are offering the Intervention Core Rules at a 60% discount for one day only.

Beginning at 10am (Eastern) on 30 October 2016, the special offer will last for 24 hours.

http://www.wargamevault.com/product/185293/Intervention--Cold-War---Modern-Wargame

Good luck.

Intervention Technical Codex and Unit Designer

Just a quick post to let you know that we are expecting to publish the first iteration of the Intervention Technical Codex and the Unit Builder this weekend.

The Technical codex contains unit special rules, infantry and vehicle equipment and enhancements along with some basic doctrines for you to experiment with.

The unit builder will contain rules for building your own units along with guidance on weapon stats.

Both products will be updated as new units are created to ensure they are current. The technical codex will be priced around $5.95 and the unit builder will probably be pay what you want.

Apologies this has taken longer than we wanted, but there's a lot of new stuff to come.

On sale now.

We just launched Intervention. After five years in development, it's finally available.

Intervention is a 1:1 miniatures wargame designed for Cold War / Modern gaming.

You can buy Intervention here and Intervention Air Assault here.

We will also be adding a technical codex, scenarios guide and a unit creation guide.

Rapid Intervention, a stripped down version of the game is also under development and will hopefully be available soon.