Welcome back to Comp Crusade! Our irregularly scheduled column where Ryan and I talk about our development of the competitive play pack for Trench Crusade. Some of you may have noticed that we put out another version of the PDF recently (if you missed it, you can find it here). While we talked about some of these changes last time, we wanted to take some time to create a change log of stuff we’ve worked on and add some additional commentary for said changes to give you all some context on how we got there. So let's get into it!

Terrain

The New Layout

The Problem: While the old layout was a good starting point, it became clear quickly it wasn’t meeting the expectations of the community. People wanted more verticality and more ways to hide models.

The Solution:

We made a new layout! This is a bit different than what you all saw in the last dev diary but the principles are the same. We’ve added much more verticality and eliminated most deployment to deployment sightlines. In addition we added some defendable pieces of terrain near your home objectives in scenarios 2 and 3 (your territory should be fortified after all).

Norman: We’re really pleased with where the layout ended up. A lot of the initial feedback was focused on issues folks had with the layout so we knew we needed to make it our priority. We added a lot of scatter as well as more big line of sight blocking pieces of terrain. We talked about this a good amount in the last dev diary, but in case you missed it, we spoke to a lot of other map designers for competitive events for other game systems (mostly infinity folks because those tables always look sick) and did a ton of playtesting. Like a lot of playtesting. Like so much playtesting that we’re gonna be real mad when we find some glaring flaw that we missed.

The design ethos behind everything here though is the same: “Provide opportunities for sick shit to happen”. All the elevated terrain naturally flows towards the flanking No Man's Land objectives, providing a fast track with some lucky actions to a diving charge onto the enemy. Both flanking lanes are also places where long range shooters can shine, giving some fantastic lane control while not being able to dominate the table. The center meanwhile is what we’ve been referring internally to as The Thunderdome. Melee models love to scrap and brawl in there.

Ryan: As Norman said, our last dev diary has a plethora of information about more of the minutia of some of the decisions we made about the layout. The idea is to fit the experience on our map and feel like more of a playground for skill expression and exciting games, rather than a dry and stripped down version of Trench Crusade. With added verticality, and some more spots to stage big dudes, we have high hopes to hear some dope battle reports from our attendants after each round.

Player-Placed Terrain

The Problem: No matter the changes that we could make, there would always be shortcomings to various playstyles in the terrain. We also wanted boards to be a bit denser but weren’t sure where to put these smaller Obstacles.

The Solution: We added a few pieces of player placed terrain that are slapped down at deployment. You get two obstacles to work with and a piece of dangerous terrain to mess with your opponent. These pieces can’t be put closer than 2” to pieces of terrain or objective markers, so you can’t fully deny access to areas of the table (outside of the games largest models, but they should be cumbersome), but we’re hoping this customization aspect lets players better plan out their approaches to the mission.

Norman: While I think this is a good addition to the format, it’s one of the rules I’m the least sure about if I’m being honest. It by no means has a negative impact on the game, otherwise we wouldn’t have included it, but in a lot of our playtests it ended up being somewhat irrelevant outside the dangerous terrain. Part of the problem is the board is so dense now, there are only so many places you can put the terrain down which limits you a bit, but it definitely did change the way we had to move our models in interesting ways so there’s some positive impact here. We’ll be keeping a close eye on this one.

Ryan: I agree with what Norman said in that last bit - there is already so much on the board, that placing the terrain can get a little more finicky than we’d like. Finding the medium of having players engage with the board-building process while also not having the accidental NPE of “I lost before I even got to play the game of Trench Crusade.” We would rather players have more ways to be rewarded for moving around the board, than be punished by it.

Free Climbable Short Terrain

The Problem: With our big honkin' pieces of terrain, it's hard for models to get around the table to reach the center objectives. There are only 4 rounds in a game of Trench Crusade and you’ve got places to be!

The Solution: Make the shorter pieces of terrain open terrain in regards to moving up it, eliminating the need for a climb.

Norman: I’m gonna be real with you guys, this was always the intention and we were taking for granted all the trench pieces that are free climbable on all the maps we’ve played. When we realized this wasn’t obvious to folks it was one of the first changes we made. Sorry folks, this one's on us.

Ryan: Norman has done significantly more work than me, so I’m not going to say it’s on us, but actually just him. That’s a tough L bud!

Obstacle Objective Markers

Trench Crusade, Trench Pilgrim Communication - Credit: Bair

The Problem: While we tried to make the table and scenarios still feel like the Trench Crusade folks knew and loved things still felt a bit sanitized.

The Solution: We made the objective markers pieces of terrain. This solves two problems actually. First is the one mentioned above, where now it feels more like you’re fighting over something more tangible, and two it means you can get cover while holding the objectives a bit easier.

Norman: While we really like this solution, it does present some interesting challenges. Namely, bigger models have more areas of terrain closed off to them, making getting around the table that much harder. That said, it hasn’t been an issue in our test games, and the added benefits help the situation a lot.

Format

Moving to 800/6 Lists

The Problem: Although 900/8 lists were the way to do one shots before the release of Trench Crusade 1.0, the suggested norm is now 800/6. The lack of consistency added a bit of confusion between what players are familiar with when creating their lists.

The Solution: Changed the list size to 800/6.

Ryan: This one was a pretty simple change. Although we would love to have more toys on the table to play with, as well as 900/8 being how we originally fell in love with TC, changing the ducat limits for lists to be in accordance with the majority of feedback was easy enough. Our first games at 800/6 felt fine enough, and after hearing about the infrequency of players finishing their games at the Essen tournament, having a little less going on might help people wrap up their rounds within the allotted time a bit easier.

Norman: One of the knock on effects here is we’re gonna see less big guys. As a huge fan of our large adult sons, this is a bit of a bummer to me, but hopefully the dual list mechanic will provide an opportunity for them to shine.

Scenarios

All Actions for Scoring Got Easier

Knights of Avarice Priest, Credit - Loxi

The Problem: Losing by not being able to simply pass a 7+ even though you’re dominating the table feels really bad.

The Solution: We added +1 Dice to all mission based actions.

Norman: This was a difficult one for us. In our playtests, we always knew this could lead to feels bad situations but generally the games tended to work out in favor of the player who was holding the upper hand on the table. In addition that high variance is important to making Trench Crusade feel like Trench Crusade. That said the feedback was loud and clear, folks didn’t like it, so we added the +1 Dice. Part of our hesitance to do this was because of how drastic the jump is. You can see the math on this in our Hammer of Math article we did on Trench Crusade, but adding the +1 Dice jumps the success chance of doing an action from 58% to 80%. Does this make the action being necessary irrelevant outside of ending the model’s activation? Not quite but it's fairly reliable now.

I do wanna take a second to talk about our favorite religious friend, the Heretic Priest and the Blasphemous Staff. Originally we capped the bonus dice at +1 to make sure this guy couldn’t abuse the missions. We realized though that this only brings the chances of success from 80% to 91% and if folks want to use their leader to do objectives in midboard and invest Glory into making them consistent, that should be rewarded. The staff stays!

Ryan: I was also in the boat of not being super stoked on the objective actions being too close to a coin flip. We would rather someone win if they made better decisions than have someone lose because they just couldn’t succeed the same action every turn. Trench Crusade is, of course, a dice game, and those situations will happen, but it’s been seen throughout other competitive dice games that even though that element is there, the consistent best players of those games can prevail through tactics and choices instead of gambling on questionable odds.

Changes to Scenario 2

The Problem: Even with the changes to actions, this mission felt too reliant on actions to score points.

The Solution: we changed the scoring to give you a few points for holding the objective at the end of the round as well as points for actions.

Norman: The goal for this scenario always was “do action focused missions work in a competitive context”. Like I mentioned above, the variance is something key to Trench Crusade and we wanted to test what the limits of that are. That said, our games always felt like they were on the knife's edge of losing just because of actions. With this change, players who are dominating the table should win much more reliably.

Ryan: If someone is going to have a comeback on the board, it should be due to the player’s ability and choices rather than a die roll. Saying that, I have noticed across many games that if a game is super tight and very evenly matched, it very often can come down to one singular roll to decide a game in the last round, which is always exciting! If one player is more skilled than another, then they should be able to out-play their opponent and secure the win, and sometimes when doing that you force your opponent to gamble a bit in order to come back. This is a bit of an aimless ramble to just say that although we don’t exactly know yet what characteristics are needed to be able to be the best at Trench Crusade, simply ‘rolling better’ should not always be one of those things.

Changes to Scenario 4

The Problem: Oh boy!

The Solution: Major mechanical rewrites and a fumble mechanic.

Norman: This was always our favorite mission. A bombastic weird and wild way to end the day at the event. Also, what better way to add an American twist to Trench Crusade than adding American football? That said, while it was easy to see how we intended the mission to work, it didn’t really work in the framework of Trench Crusade. Factory Fortress Inc designers Sammie Dae and Jervis Johnson did us a massive solid here, helping us rewrite the mission so it works within the context of Trench Crusade.

We also rewrote the rule that didn’t allow you to redeploy so you still can teleport, but only within 6”. This is a very strong tactic in this mission, but we wanted folks to be rewarded for bringing unique toys to play the mission.

Lastly, there was an issue where TOUGH models could just hold the ball artefact for longer than intended. To solve this we made it so if you go down you drop it just as if you went out of action. We want this mission to be a bloody close quarters skirmish with lots of chaos and we feel this helps accomplish that.

Ryan: Oh my goodness, huge thanks to Sammie and Jervis for translating our GW-ese into Trench Crusadian. But yes, although this scenario has the potential for many shenanigans, this one is absolutely our favorite. Who doesn’t want to see Heavy Mechanized Infantry do a touchdown dance?

Our initial take was that models that can teleport around (Hunter of the Left Hand Path, etc) would break the mission and make it potentially unplayable. Rather than take away your tools that you paid for completely, we had to adjust it a little bit so the last couple of turns have less of a chance to be a really boring keep away game between models that can’t get to each other.

Can you imagine the Lord of Tumors as a running back? Yeah…that wasn’t too fun to try and deal with. Along with the adjustment to how TOUGH models interact with the ball, we wanted our ‘fumble’ mechanic to see some more action too.

Outro

Norman: In addition to all the stuff we listed above, the Factory Fortress Inc design team was kind enough to give our packet a once over and tighten up our wording to not only work within Trench Crusade but also to update it for 1.0.2, and for that we’re very thankful. I also want to give a shout out to everyone who gave us feedback on the packet (with special thanks to Pyromaniacal on the TC discord for some great tips with the layout). We’re working hard to make sure this event is the best it can be and doing recon for what competitive Trench Crusade can look like in the future. It may look nothing like what we have here, but that’ll only because we were able to do this reconnaissance now and with the help of folks who have tested the pack.

Even though we’re done for Adepticon, we still want to hear your thoughts. Please continue to send feedback to CompCrusade@Goonhammer.com. Let us know how the games play, how the terrain feels, and what you think we’re missing. If it's not clear by now, we’re aiming for pretty open development here with all the ugliness that entails so let us have it. For those of you coming to Adepticon, swing by and say hey, and if you’re participating in the event we’re stoked to see you guys play the pack! We have some really cool stuff planned we won’t spoil but I’m sure you’ll see the point in the end. I’ll leave you with one last cool thing, we finally have some art for the event done by our friend Lil’ Stevie, who did a lot of the Malian Scouring art. It's dope as hell and I love it a lot.

Barbed Wire Brawl logo Credit: Lil' Stevie

Ryan: Not to flex or anything, but our event is going to be the most fun, and if you’re missing it, you should feel bad (or if you got put on the waitlist, I’m sorry!). We can’t wait to see everyone play our goofy creation, and to be a part of what we hope is a long series of development for a healthy and exciting competitive scene in Trench Crusade. Please come by and say hi, and feel free to roast us about our pack, how L shaped terrain is ruining your life, and that competitive players are a toxin to the community (actually, just roast me about it, Norman is a good bean and doesn’t deserve that sort of thing.)

Special thanks again to Sammie Dae, Jervis Johnson, Brook Close, Fantasy Fortress Inc, and Lil Stevie!

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Tags: competitive | Adepticon | trench crusade | Comp Crusade