“Talon Tuesdays” is an article series appearing on InsideGMT periodically on Tuesdays.  It features articles from the Talon development team regarding the game’s design, development and upcoming release.

Issue #9

We didn’t add terrain to Talon until about a year into the development cycle. The game offers enough interesting choices and the counters are large enough that the map wasn’t really screaming to be spiced up with terrain, at least initially.

We knew we needed to add it, it was important chrome plus it would help with the Space Empires crossover rules. Naturally, we thought to add Asteroids and Nebulae first since they appear in Space Empires and are decent enough SF tropes.

Our initial brainstorming sessions had some pretty wild terrain effects, some of which may get molded into other terrain pieces for expansions. A number of the effects started out with long reference tables and additional roles when moving into or firing through Asteroids/Nebulae but, like many things in this game, we were able to streamline and refine the concept.

Both Asteroids and Nebulae affect fire — you (-1) the die roll for each terrain hex fire passes through. Lower die roll numbers may cause the shot to miss or do less damage, depending on the weapon. This is also one of the very few times in the game where “line of sight” is used– and only barely.

An Aside on Line of Sight

If it wasn’t clear in the extended example of play from a few weeks back, line of sight is NOT used in this game to determine if fire from a given weapon hits a given shield side. Instead, the firing arcs and the shield arcs are “the same”.  In other words, if the firing ship is in the target ship’s (say) left side firing arc, the firing ship’s shot hits the target ship’s left side shield. Its very easy once you’ve laid out the counters on the map to see whose shots will hit what.

Now, like I said, seeing if terrain affects fire is (pretty much) the only time a straight edge (like the side of the player aid card) is used to figure out line of sight– but you probably don’t even need the straight edge.  The hexes and counters in this game are really big. You tend to only need to draw line of sight if you’re firing from really far away and there is terrain in between you and the target.

While Asteroids and Nebulae affect fire in the same way, they have very different effects on ships that enter those hexes.

Asteroids and Nebulae

Asteroids directly damage ships when you move into them (but only when you move into them, not when you are “stopped” or move out of an Asteroid hex) and Nebulae cause your ship’s shields to shut down completely. They have no effect on Fighters or Missiles.

From a tactics standpoint, even a few terrain pieces can have a major impact. Large ships might be comfortable moving into an Asteroid field for cover, taking one damage on their beefier shields.  They would definitely want to avoid the Nebula, however, as it would “shut down” ALL of their shields as if they had the “Shields Down” critical damage effect.  This means all damage goes directly onto their hull. If the ship leaves the Nebula, its shields come back online to whatever level they were at (no need to mark off on the counter). Forcing big transport ships into a nebula cloud was a common escort raiding tactic during the First Talon War 🙂

Small craft, especially Fighters, can use the terrain to help screen out enemy fire or run from enemy pursuit. Fighters won’t take damage from the Asteroids and have no shields to lose in the nebulae. Other small craft, with minimal shielding might be OK with running through a Nebula — they didn’t have much to lose anyway.  This, to some degree (terrain favoring smaller ships), mimics the effect of Asteroids/Nebula on the firing class in Space Empires. In that game, combat in an Asteroid/Nebulae forces all ships to fire as if they were class “E” so even big ships with “long range weapons” in that game are on par with the smallest ships.

While play testing the Battle of Saturn, Patrick coined the term “Asteroid Speed”. Let’s say you’re a Terran cruiser and you want to move into an Asteroid hex. If your Power Curve is 2-4-2, you’ll get AP twice this round and move 4 times. You won’t necessarily get AP in the same impulse that you’ll be moving.  However, if you’re Power Curve is 3-3-2, the way the Impulse Chart works, you’ll actually get AP every Impulse that you get Power. Since you use your AP before you move in a given Impulse, you can Reinforce your forward shield then move into the Asteroid. The damage from the Asteroid will hit the shield reinforcement and NOT your ship’s shields. Hence, any speed that allows you to always get AP before you move is called “Asteroid Speed”.  I thought it was really elegant how that worked out.

There are also Planets which are important for certain mission objectives in addition to acting as a “wall” for fire.

Later down the line, we decided to add black holes.  They are a REALLY powerful terrain piece and can have a huge impact on the game.  Once per round (every 6 impulses) the black hole “pulses”, dragging all ships on the board closer to it.  This could cause collisions with friendly ships or help to line up perfect alpha strikes against enemies. You can even use the pull effect as a kind of “slingshot” maneuver if you approach the black hole from just the right angle.

Black Holes also serve double duty as Worm Holes in certain design-your-own scenario battle types.  They represent a point of exit from the battle that a transport or group of ships might be trying to use or defend.

These are just a few examples of how a bit of terrain can alter your play style and decision making in a big way.

Within the scripted scenarios the choice of terrain is fixed. Since terrain is printed on the back side of the ship counters, this was necessary to ensure the ships we wanted in a given battle would be available.

In design-your-own games or Empire War you are not as limited. You can add a random amount of terrain to a battle AND randomize the type of terrain included.  We created a table of terrain “patterns”.  These are set groupings of terrain hexes. You roll 2 d6 on the table to select your random terrain pattern then you can place it into your game.  We grouped the terrain tiles like this to help make game set up move quickly. The rules for placing the selected terrain onto the board favor the Second Player (the one without the Initiative) since they are more or less on defense and might have had a moment to position their ships in response to the enemy coming out of FTL.

Randomized terrain was particularly useful in Empire War mode — some of the combat zones in Empire War mode use randomized terrain to simulate battles taking place in different areas of a much larger zone. More on Empire War in another post.

We’re really happy with what terrain brought to Talon.

Previous Article in the Series: Talon Tuesday Issue #8: Under the Hood (Part 2)

Next Article in the Series: Talon Tuesday Issue #10: Empire War Report

If you like Talon or are interested in space games in general, check out these other GMT titles:

Space Empires (Reprint on P500 List)

Space Empires: Close Encounters

Space Empires: Replicators (P500)

Author: Bob Seifert