Balance, and Bombers in Blood Red Skies

Morning everyone!

Yup it's just gone 5am here in Renkoville and I can't sleep so I thought I would try and get a blog post out. I've been slipping of late, mainly due to some work\life\game balance issues, so I thought I would try and kill 2 birds with one stone, and look at some new scenarios Andy Chambers is working on for Blood Red Skies. First up is "Transport Hunt" - which can be found in it's beta form here on the  Ready Room Facebook Group (where all discerning BRS players meet) or here on the Warlord Games BRS Forum for those who prefer not to sell their soul to Facebook. Transport Hunt is one of a batch of interesting new scenarios Andy is developing for a future BRS expansion, and he kindly agreed to allow me to publish it early to give players something to do with their Ju52s and DC3s.

The scenario is based around an offensive sweep of fighters through an area being used by transports, with some escorts thrown into the mix. It's an interesting game because the transports only appear when the sweep finds them, and then they head for safety as fast as possible. However there have been a couple of  queries raised about balance, and rather than pop a quick answer on FB where it would probably be lost in a week, I thought it may be better to give a fuller version of my thoughts here (where it will be lost in a fortnight). So - balance and bombers in BRS.

The fundamental issue with bombers (and transports) in BRS is that the game is about fighters. Andy Chambers made a decision early on that bombers and other non fighters would really play secondary roles, basically as targets or objectives. The scenarios are all written with this in mind, and to me it makes a lot of sense. The problem with bombers is, they're not fighters (doh!). Their role in the air war is pivotal but essentially passive - they go from a to b, do their thing, then go back (hopefully) from b to a. Enemy fighters will try and stop them, and friendly fighters will try to protect them. So, point 1, bombers are not fighters :-)

Point two is about players and game styles. BRS was written with a large audience in mind. Parts of it are pure historical \ scenario driven, but it also tries to include a more casual \ tournament style of game play, where you just turn up with 500 points and get stuck in. It is extraordinarily difficult to get the two to mesh because the historical features of bombers are not the same as fighters (see point 1) so working out a "points" value for them using the same formulae for fighters is not going to work. The way Andy is trying to get around this is by broadly assuming that most bombers are functionally similar, so a Blenhiem is broadly equivalent to a Do17 or SB2, and adding elements to bomber missions based on that broad type, so a mission will include up to six single engine bombers, or three twin engine, or two four engine bombers. It is broad brush, but it does work. A fighter pilot really doesn't care if the target is a Do17 or a Ju88, and nor should we.

However where there is a problem where the broad brush approach does stutter a little, and that is is pilot (in this case crew) skill.  In "Transport Hunt", and indeed all the bomber scenarios, there is no mention of crew skill levels. Partly this is my fault - I asked Andy to trim the scenario down to a manageable size for publication on The Ready Room. It is part of a bigger document and some bits are still in development, but also when written I suspect Andy didn't think crew skills were that much of an issue, but players sometimes have different viewpoints and questions about crew skill have appeared. Anyway, here is my solution to the "what crew skills should my bomber have" question. It depends!

Option 1 - use the random crew skill option. Page 3 of the BRS Scenarios booklet has a random pilot skill table you can use. This is mainly designed for the historical scenario players, and can result in some wild variations. There are some problems with using this option in games with lots of bombers as it is easy from a management point of view that all the bombers move together as far as is possible within the advantage system, but with relatively small numbers involved it works.

Option 2 - rate all bombers the same. The KISS option. Assume all bomber crews are reasonably experienced and rate them as Skill 3 (or 2 if the scenario is about rookies).

Option 3 - use an average skill rating over all the bombers in a Squadron. For instance three twin engine planes could all have skill 3 crews, or one could be skill 4, another skill 3 and the last skill 2 - they average out at skill 3 so overall should balance. This is more interesting for the mini-max players out there.

So there is my insomnia dealt with, plus some ramblings and suggestions. I'm hoping to try another playtest of Andy's draft scenarios this evening - "The Way Home", a battered bomber formation struggling back to home and under attack, and then on Friday I'm at Nottingham where we will be having a go at trying to sink some ships with Mosquitoes - watch this space :-)