Christmas break - Fallout 76 and Cruel Seas

Out of Office on - check
Work phone switched to answerphone - check
Time to relax :-)

I'm guessing a measurable part of my free time over the holiday period is going to be taken up with Fallout 76, and Cruel Seas. Surprisingly they seem to have a lot in common. 

Fallout 76 is a long awaited computer game from Bethesda that launched a month or so ago to much fanfare, which rapidly turned into a cacophony of criticism a the game was riddled with bugs and errors. I won't go into details on those here, because life is too short and you can spend a wasted couple of hours googling "Fallout 76 bugs" if you really want to. Cruel Seas is the much anticipated tabletop wargame from Warlord Games set in WW2 based around coastal forces. And it is riddled with bugs too.

My wife works in adult education. She has explained to me the "sandwich method" of giving feedback, which is always give negative feedback between two sets of positives, as it is better received and more productive. Here goes.

I've had enough time to read the rules and play some games of Cruel Seas. And I rather like them. The style of writing is interesting and engaging, and the layout is first class, glossy and beautifully illustrated. The game also plays well, and has a very nice fun feel to it. Other than a few issues with quality (more later), the supporting material in the box is excellent. On the whole the game mechanics are solid enough, and the use of a "wake marker" on each ship to track speed is actually quite novel, reduces record keeping and makes it easy to see what speed a ship is travelling at. I liked that. I also liked the ruler with the common shooting modifiers printed on the back - very good idea, even if for some reason only one of the three in the set has it.

The problem is there are rather a lot of errors and omissions. Chief of these are rules that read one way, but are explained in a totally contradictory way such as turning, or rules which just seem to be incomplete or missing,  such as how a ship reacts after a collision, or how minefields actually work - there is a "roll on the mine table", but no actual table. These really should have been caught by anyone proofreading the draft, but clearly were not. There are also some very strange situations created by the rules mechanics and which should really have been caught by playtesters, but again seem not to have been, such as searchlights which are invisible to anyone other than the person using them and the target, or the way a loaded tanker can turn inside a motor boat, or that it is easier to hit an E Boat moving at 14 knots than a tanker moving at 12 knots because the tanker is going full speed, where the E boat is just idling along. There are also some problems with the various statistics listed for some ships, and a points system which fails to take into account the speed a ship can travel- quite a problem with a set of rules where your speed has a significant impact on your combat capability. Similarly all ships have a "hull rating" that equates to damage points, but no explanation of how this is arrived at. Lastly there are some plain historical errors, such as giving Japanese MTBs "Long Lance" torpedoes, or Soviet Bronekaters 57mm guns, and they don't get the names of the Vosper boats quite right. These are, in truth, not going to register to most players I would think, but should really be corrected.

I mentioned the quality of the supporting materials. The counters and islands and similar bits are all of good quality thick card, but there are two items that are clearly going to fall apart quickly. The first is the damage trackers that are supposed to clip on to the ship stat cards, but in reality are so flimsy that you would be well advised to throw them straight in the bin and use small plastic paperclips or similar and save yourself the stress. The other issue is the wake markers. I feel for Warlord here. The wake markers are a good idea but because they need to be placed underneath the model they have to be thin or the model will not sit on them. The card they have used is so thin as to be almost paper, which feels as if it will not last long or take any rough handling. Reminds me of the city sector markers in Dropfleet Commander which were kept thin to allow ship bases to be placed on top of them, and were loathed by players because they were so flimsy. Lastly, the rule book itself has some quite flimsy covers more akin to a magazine than a set of rules. Mine are already curling up at the corners, but it is a minor issue really.

A fortnight after publication Bethesda released a patch to fix some of the bugs in Fallout 76 ,  and coincidentally a fortnight after publication Warlord released a ten page errata that addressed some of the layout and editing problems, but not the rules issues. In some ways they shot themselves in the foot here because they went for exactly the same lavish and well illustrated style of errata as they used in the rules, so what could have been half a page turned into ten pages, which sounds a lot worse.

So back to the sandwich. The one thing I have not mentioned is the models, which are VERY nice. The starter set has six Vosper MTBs and four E Boats in plastic, and these are first class. The expansion fleets are mostly resin models with metal detailing - I have the British set and a tanker and again these are very nice models.

I think Fallout 76 and Cruel Seas both have a lot in common. They were highly anticipated, released to much fanfare, and were both clearly rushed out before they were ready, I suspect to hit Christmas deadlines. The other thing they have in common is I think that they will both recover and do well in the long term. I certainly expect to play them quite a lot.

So on that note I will leave you with two pics that sum up each game. Firstly, this is a screenshot of my Fallout 76 character who has fallen through a "hole" in the games terrain mesh and cannot get out.

The second is taken from the Cruel Seas errata, which shows a Vosper MTB launching a torpedo, sadly the torpedo seems to be leaving the tube backwards! I don't think that will end well.

Merry Christmas