New Melee Phase: Part 3

Here's the next two pages of the Melee Phase. Some of the rules have been edited some more, but mostly it's just the remainder of my previously-finished melee bits spaced out a little more.

Melee Phase: Deux Redux Two

Yeah, it's changed again. For the better though. :)

The thing about wrapping up the last turn phase in a game where you've already written 3 tightly-bound phases (and a couple of intro chapters) already, is that every little change you make to the final one has to be checked and propagated against the first three.

Or more simply put... I keep having to edit stuff in 3-5 other chapters every time I work something out in the Melee Phase. Usually because I want to avoid having 2 only slightly different versions of the same rule in different places.

Melee Phase, Part 2 Redux

Had to make some changes to the last couple of pages I posted on the Melee Phase, as I realized that I'd missed explaining a couple of things. If you ever wonder why I use a lot of large illustrations throughout the book, this is one reason. So I can add new information without having to mess up the layouts of the pages that come after.

Action Phase Tweaks: Part 7

Here's the next section in the tweaked Action Phase. I'm kind of proud of the fact that I was able to condense and simplify 4 pages of armor save rules, and some overly complex examples, into just 2 pages that read very simply. Which means that the total page count for the section remains unchanged. Even though I added a couple of pages of rules on resolving charges.

The corresponding Melee section will be next.

Thoughts?

New Melee Phase: Part 2

Here at last is the next two pages in the Melee Phase. In working on this and the Action Phase in tandem, I've been able to avoid re-writing the same rules in a melee context (makes the section shorter), while I make sure that earlier rules that also apply to the melee section explicitly say so.

You may notice the "ganging up" rules for melee, which were inspired by a commenter here on the blog. While the Heavy Armor rules that I had added to the Action Phase (after the last post) were then moved over to here to avoid a rules precedence issue (later numbered rules always take precedence over earlier numbered ones). Since rule [4.4.6] could have been interpreted as overriding Heavy Armor if the latter didn't appear after it.

Thoughts?

Action Phase Tweaks, Part 6

Here's the next two pages of the Action Phase. Notable changes are the rule which clarifies that each model can only fire one weapon, and the changes to Hit-Stress that clarifies that units will only lose initiative from a salvo if actually hit, and that units that split their fire cannot cause Hit-Stress. While I added another rule, "Heavy Armor", for units that don't care about small arms fire (like tanks). They'll only take Hit-Stress if something hits them that can penetrate their armor.

Action Phase Tweaks, Part 5

Here's the next two pages, which cover the final two sub-sections before we get to rolling attacks. Since this is where the Melee Phase is at the moment, you'll see more parallel Action/Melee Phase posts coming up.

Action Phase Tweaks: Part 4

One page of additional Wall, Obstacle, and Building rules for Charging.

Action Phase Tweaks, Part 3

You'll have seen some of this before, but then I realized that I needed to work out the rules for Charging into/within buildings. So these pages got some new illustrations, and the charging rules will be finished up on the next page.

Last Bit Of The Movement Section

A few wording tweaks here and there, in addition to the graphics optimizations, but nothing much else of note. Except that I'll be moving on to the Action & Melee sections next, which will have a lot more new stuff going on.

Movement Phase Tweaks, Part 5

Today was mostly, apart from our fiber being installed (yay!), a boring morass of nuts & bolts crap like switching domain providers and looking for some good forum software to use in the future. But I did get these two pages updated from the Movement Phase to current layout/image standards. Actual rules changes are minimal apart from the renumbering that was required due to earlier changes in the section.

Action Phase Tweaks, Part 2

Here's another update to the Action Phase section. With the separation of Charging from the Melee Phase, I needed to re-work the available orders a bit, and then define what you can do during a charge move. I'm glad to say that I successfully boiled down 3 pages of detailed charging rules to the bit more than half a page that you see here. While each rule is quite simple, their interactions are quite interesting.

Movement Phase Tweaks: Parts 3 & 4

Here's 3 pages from the Movement section of the rules. The first two, pages 67 and 68, are pretty much the same, as all I did was optimize the graphics to have exactly as many pixels as needed for display on a retina iPad or iPad Air. For the third though, I re-worked the illustration quite a bit and added some flavor text.

Comparing Cameras: Nikon D7100 vs. iPhone 6s

I was in the local camera shop today, looking for a particular kind of fill light, when I struck up a conversation with one of the salesmen. Once I mentioned that I'd given up using my Nikon D50 DSLR in favor of an iPhone 6s (with the 645 Pro app) for studio shots, he was aghast. Maybe... MAYBE... A 6s could do better than the relatively ancient D50, but there was NO WAY that the image quality of an iPhone could compare to a modern DSLR! ESPECIALLY in low-light situations! He pointed to the counter, where they had a nifty little graphic that showed the relative sensor sizes of phones versus those of DLSRs. "I flat-out don't believe you." he told me, when I described the comparisons I'd seen on the web using $1500 Nikons.

Well... Ok, let's put this to the test then.