Just some reviews and Battle Repost.

Reviews:

Wargame Vault 1:
 If you have a large pile of Sci Fi miniatures you always wanted to paint, or painted an army and the system collapsed or company went out of business, these rules will breath new life into your collection.

What Agis has written is a very comprehesive set of near-future to far-future Sci-Fi rules that should be able to fit nearly any collection of models. Vehicles and Infantry run the gamut and you should be able to tweak a unit entry within the rules to fit anything you should like to put on the table.

This ruleset focuses more on the ebb and flow of combat, allowing for a chess-game of activations between the players rather than simple I-go-U-go back and forth. Players will nominate a unit they want to activate and test their commanders to see who will get the initiative. The commander who fails the test places their unit back in the unactivated pool to attempt to activate later.

As the commander you have resources to spend effecting this roll. Command Points represent of finit pool of buffs and tricks you can use to augment units, seize the initiative and outwit your opponent.

This focus on what units are doing, rather than how awesome they are individually, makes all Victory Decision games feel engaging. There's never a long wait for your turn and the game can feel like a dance between armies rather than two gunlines pounding away on each other. This can seem strange to players not used to this format, so when teaching the game bear this in mind!

The game scales well. Between 1000 and 2000pt games will allow you an hour or so to an afternoon of battles.

The game focuses currently on Humanoid combat. If you are looking for bestial or mixed unit (monsters and humanoids) armies, a supplement will be released covering these. types of armies. As a final thing, the designer is super approachable! Head over to the Lead Adventure Forum (home of the Victory Decision Games) and ask him whatever you want!

Wargame Vault 2:
I've quite enjoyed my gaming with this set of rules so far! The initiative system is quite fun, leading to some exciting tension in gameplay. There is a large array of special unit and weapon rules, and rules for hovering tanks and airborne attack speeders. It lends itself to fast games and flexibility in army creation.

The main limitation in this core set of rules is the focus on human forces, from low-tech (late 20th century) human forces to high-tech power-armored human forces, with robotic drone support (Drones being modeled with the rules Single-Minded and Untrained, meaning they are immune to the morale effects of being Shaken and Suppressed, and they make less efficient use of cover).

Wargame Vault 3:
This is now my go-to game for all 15/28mm sci-fi gaming. I find that most other "Design-it-yourself" sci-fi games are either too simple or too complicated for my liking. ViDe strikes a nice balance. Additionally most other games have either no point values (not very handy if you want to play pick up games) or have point systems that are easily exploited. ViDe uses points to build balanced forces, but does not let players min-max to the point the game becomes broken.

ViDe FC uses the same core rules as the WWII game. I see this only as a good thing as that is an excellent set of rules to build upon. They keep both sides in the game, minimize time spent doing simple tasks (like moving units through difficult terrain), keep infantry in the spot light with a long list of available combat actions and have the best morale rules I've ever used in 20 years of table top gaming. New to this version are command points and overwatch for even more tactical choices.

There is a large list of sci-fi unit types and an even larger list of sci-fi weapons. While all basic troopers in WWII had the same stat line, ViDe FC has different types of humanoid infantry units with different levels of protection and additional abilities to reflect the technological impact of advanced personal armour. In addition to tracked and wheeled vehicles, there are also hover tanks, VTOL units and walkers - all in a variety of sizes and relative technology levels. New weapons include: several varieties each of lasers, plasma cannons, missile launchers, sonic weapons, rail guns, guided mortars, particle accelerators, microwave guns and kinetic pulse weapons.

So if you have a bunch of minis hanging around from games that have gone by the wayside (or hey even if you have some new sci-fi minis!) I highly recommend this set of rules.

Rival Species Reviews:

Wargame Vault 4:
A wonderful set of 'generic gribbly alien' rules to add to Future Combat games.

These rules do two important things in my mind;

1) They don't reinvent the wheel with new terms. If a Bio weapon functions in basically the same way as a weapon from the main rulebook then those rules are used. Terms like 'bio grenade' don't replace 'grenades'. Makes the expansion nice and consistent (and lean).

2) You can use these rules with pretty much any 'alien menace' miniatures in your collection. Instead of being too specific, the units are more like a 'template' for the size and type of monster you're adding to your force. Whatever models you want to use... these rules should let you get them in!

So if you're looking at adding some drooling, clicking, sneaking, murderous aliens to your games of Future Combat... this is well worth your cash.

Battle Reports:

Zac’s Test Game

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