Sunday, April 19, 2009

Unit Orders (Picture is Clickable)

The wedge of Steel: This order is given to the unit, if the combat has some sort of objective that must be reached. Wether an entrance to a castle, an artifact in the middle of a battle field, or a helpless diplomat held hostage in a sea of mercenaries, the wedge of steel will get the job done. Synchronization is the key element in this order. Toughest and most enduring members will stand closer to the “tip” of the wedge, while harder to hit and more elusive members are on the edges of the wedge, with the support and spell casters resting within the wedge. Everyone in the wedge must wait and line up their actions to be synchronized, with the tip of the wedge moving first, and everyone in the middle moving after wards. Most important, is to keep moving. The wedge MUST move every round in the direction of the objective, and within few seconds the wedge will surely capture and reach the desired destination.


Shock and Awe: This order requires fair amount of maneuverability. Ideally two or three, depending on the group with larger ones having three and smaller ones having two, mobile troopers will quickly make their way behind enemy lines and the rest of the unit will slowly move towards the enemy with a steam roller. The fast moving shock troops should run and charge the farthest enemies and act independently. Their function is to draw attention and to tie up the enemy’s focus. The main unit will form a tight formation and slowly advance and kill whatever is closest to them, usually focusing fire on one foe. If done properly, Shock and Awe has many uses. If foes will ignore the shock troops and go for the main units, they will pay dearly as the Shock troopers will hit them from the rear. If the foes will fight the shock troopers, the main unit will have little resistance in fighting whatever they face. If the foes turn all of their attention on the shock troopers, or flee away from the main unit, they will run into the shock troopers and will be cut down. Or if they chose to fight the shock troopers when the flee, the main unit will have an open powerful charge into the enemies rear.

The Killing Pocket: This order is incredibly simple to master, but yields amazing results. In order to set up a killing pocket, every member of the unit lines up in a obtuse “U” shape and attacks anything in the pocket. Ideally, the casters and the lighter troops will be in the middle of the “U” throwing spells into the killing pocket. The foes would have only a few options. They could attack the edges of the pocket and slowly die from the spells wreaking havoc, or they could take their chance and go into the killing pocket in order to attack the casters. If the foe uses the ladder option, the pocket will be able to literally swallow and overwhelm the foes going for the casters. The crucial point of the killing pocket is to maintain the U shape without closing the “gates” for the foe.


The Thousand Blades: This order is also very simple to preform. One foe is chosen to be destroyed and clearly marked in the beginning of the battle. The group fully surrounds this foe, even by placing the casters within the arms reach, and the unit focuses on that particular foe. Those who are able to control the field, would push or move the enemies away from the target of the Thousand Blades. Immediately afterwards, another target will be chosen and the Thousand Blades will be placed on him. Rinse and Repeat.


Tell me what you guys think!

4 comments:

  1. Looks good to me on first glance. However, we do need to develop contingencies for highly mobile foes - many of our enemies have had teleportation abilities, or the power to simply wash straight through us (think the Firelasher). Not to mention the increasing frequency of dazing, stunning, and otherwise disabling attacks. Unfortunately, we don't have too much access to those powers yet, and we need to find a good way to compensate.

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  2. Only the wedge of steel would suffer from stuns dazes and other effect.
    As for the mobs that dont play by the rules, we can issue a thousand blades order. These are just some of the unit formations that we can use. They are by no means represent a "golden" formula, but we can have general orders that would work in some cases.

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  3. Looks good to me,and it will be good if we can work as a more tactacly sound unit. We need to make the tactics more personalized to our group, giving people roles to play to bring them into light.

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  4. One of Tim's strengths is limiting exposure - no one *wants* to walk through a wall of fire or a poison cloud, and we kept a really tight unit together using these spells as walls in Xan's homeland. This tactic can also be used to block flanks in limited-access halls or trenches, giving the party reprieve from ranged attackers for several rounds. If need be, an order can be issued in the face of overwhelming numbers to set up a defensive corridor like what we used then, leaving the tanks to block safe entrance to the core at the neck, and allowing our ranged fighters to take out what limited numbers can get shots off at the core of the party.

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