REPLY to Tiberius: 5 Things I Love about MESBG (from Star Wars Legion)

Hey Reader!

Tiberius made a post recently talking about things that bother him in Star Wars Legion that underline things he loves about MESBG, and not to be someone who bad-mouths a game I've invested in and do enjoy playing, I do think that Legion illustrates a new game to the scene that is fun to play, but does have some aspects of it that need a rework in the next edition (whenever that comes). 

As someone who plays Middle Earth, Bolt Action, Imperial Assault, and Legion (and have played Warhammer Fantasy 8th Edition, Warhammer 40k, Infinity, and Blood Bowl in the past), this post is mostly just praising 5 things I love about MESBG that are thrown into stark relief by Legion. If you read my post talking about Bolt Action, this will feel very similar.

(Also I've done a prime on my models and a few other colors, but none of them are done yet; probably won't finish my Legion army until after I finish repainting a bunch of my models for the upcoming TMAT tournament this June, so don't crucify me below for having poorly painted models! I agree with you! :P )

I.  Might Points Are AWESOME!

Turrets, like siege weapons, are awesome. It
would be even more awesome with Might...

In fact, extend that: heroic stats in general (not to mention heroic actions) are awesome! If units in Legion had access to heroic stats that allowed them to better fend off attacks, heroes would feel more heroic (because as it stands, rolling more dice is always a good answer in this game, and some units can do it and some cannot), and you feel like you have more control over your force, and by extension the game.

The biggest issue from this perspective in Legion is that it's actually too easy: activate a unit (which I'm not a big fan of how they do unit activations, but more on that a bit later), take its turn, switch to the other player. This means, though, that there's no force concentration where you can move a large number of guys (Heroic Move), or push more quickly to an objective (Heroic March), or slice through a bad guy droid and move on to another target (Heroic Combat) because...I guess that would be too much for people to handle? Even though the Command Cards determining priority is totally easy to understand? Eh, I'll move on.

And it creates a second issue: since both sides "see-saw" in activations until one side runs out (in which case, by the way, they do have a Pass mechanic, but a lot of the time one side will just run out of activations and then the other side gets to finish out with all of their remaining activations), it means that not only can you not get force concentration through strategic planning, thanks to the suppression mechanic (which we will talk about later), there's a heavy incentive to put out a lot of activations just designed to suppress the enemy, which simplifies tactics dramatically. And if you do this with the Confederacy (who can't be suppressed, because they're droids), it's even easier because the opponent can't do it back to you in return.

So if you've ever hated playing against "Gun Line" factions in a game, Legion actively rewards this way of playing due to their activation mechanic: there's no reason not to go for high activation count and then focusing fire on specific units just to panic them off the table.

II.  Rolling to Hit Is AWESOME!

Believe it or not, the troopers do better at shooting
than the "machine gun guy" because there are more of them...

Do you know what helps to fix the issue of "dakka shooting" or mass melee attacks? The fact that about half of them (depending on the faction) will miss. In MESBG most models have a 3+ or worse to hit, and then when you factor in the penalty for moving and shooting, In the Way rolls, and line of sight, you won't see rolls to wound for more than half of the shots, more or less (naturally bonkers rolls happen, and that's fine! It feels exciting and heroic! Even if you're on the receiving side!). And then from there the target to wound is roughly a 5-6, so only 33% of all hits will actually wound.

In Legion this is not the case: if you have sufficient range with a red attack dice, you have a 75% or higher chance of dealing a wound with every one of those red dice, because...I guess tanks in Star Wars never miss? They always do some damage?

In Bolt Action (and Tiberius had a bad experience with this), tanks have to roll to hit, and if they hit they have a good chance (typically a 2+ but could be as high as a 5+) of dealing damage to the target. But in Legion, anything that rolls more than one dice - tanks, turrets, walkers, speeders - will basically always do some damage to a target: they never miss. The only question is how brutal the damage is.

And I get it: it's trying to streamline the system, and this is not uncommon in Fantasy Flight Games. The issue is that in every other game of theirs for Star Wars there is actually a miss mechanic: a massed battery of turbolasers, ion cannons, and missile launchers on your capital ship in Armada have a decent chance of missing, especially since a lot of targets can evade and then suffer damage on shields. In Imperial Assault lacking range to the target is an auto-miss, regardless of how much damage you deal. But in Legion, everyone hits all the time, which aggravates the Suppression mechanic that Tiberius mentioned in his post (which deserves more commentary, but I should really do that on a Bolt Action blog and not an MESBG blog).

III.  Movement Variance Is AWESOME!

The guys on the ground move at Speed-2 (6");
the snowspeeder moves at Speed-3 (8")...

In Legion, the difference between a Speed-1, Speed-2, and Speed-3 unit is actually quite small: really only a 1-2" difference between each distance. And since movement involves unit cohesion instead of actual model distance, you can actually catapult a model quite far ahead or behind to get them near an objective in Legion.

In MESBG, on the other hand, cavalry are dramatically faster than human infantry, which are dramatically faster than hobbits (admittedly the difference between dwarves and humans isn't that much, but you rarely see a dramatic difference in their speed in the movies or books, so that's fine). Having a higher movement speed - especially with the existence of Heroic March, as noted in Point 1 above - adds a level of tactical complexity that you don't get in Legion, where everything - from speeders to R2 units - move at around the same speed.

Now I hear the Legion fans saying, "But Centaur: fast vehicles get a compulsory move, so they will commonly move twice in a single turn, which is way faster than other models!" And while yes, they move further, 1) it's may 6-8" further than a model moving 4-6" in the same turn, so it's not a dramatic difference, and 2) were you to compare a cavalryman moving twice in MESBG, or even an infantryman moving twice in MESBG, to what we have in Legion, you'd see the difference: there are no "fast units" by comparison in Legion, because ultimately the ranges of movement are all more or less equal.

And I like fast-moving units - I love being able to race to objectives, push quickly behind enemy lines, slip past defenders that are out of position, reinforce parts of the line that my opponent wouldn't have guessed by eyeballing it that I could reach, etc. So many shenanigans (and useful shenanigans, at that) can be done purely because you get the chance to move very far relatively quickly in this game. And I think that can make some game systems superior.

IV.  Courage Is AWESOME!

You know, the Courage mechanic in MESBG is actually low-key brilliant: it works for its intended purpose, with braver models sticking around with room for fluke rolls to storytell for us, while at the same time meeting other needs that don't always come up in the game but add a new side to strategy (like dead spirits wounding against Courage instead of Defense, or in the campaigns we're designing here at TMAT, using the Courage stat to improve knowledge-related rolls to tell you how much a character would know about the scene in front of them).

And other games have a similar mechanic: 40k, Warhammer Fantasy, and presumable The Old World have/had Leadership, Bolt Action has Morale, and so forth. And in all of these games it led to an alternate way to deal with enemy units: if you can reduce their Morale enough, they will flee the battlefield, so wounding a "Deathstar Unit" isn't the only way to deal with it. 

In Legion you have Suppression...but you also don't, because some models can't be suppressed (like vehicles and droids). And some units (vehicles) can't even be panicked (which is what happens when your Suppression value is doubled or more, causing the unit to run away), so dealing with, for example, a Rebel Snowspeeder or a Republic LAAT Gunship, requires you to wound them (which is hard to do, thanks to their armored plating): you don't have another course of action to deal with them, because you can't suppress them.

At least in game systems like Bolt Action, if you can't deal with a German Tiger Tank, at least you can shake up the crew enough that they panic and flee (they take enough pins to equal their Morale value) by shooting at them a lot, even if every shell or bullet bounces off the hull. But in this game, if you are looking down the sights of an AAT Tank, it's wound or be wounded.

And I love how simple yet effective MESBG is in regards to Courage: Courage is easy to understand (roll 2D6, add your Courage, try to reach a 10+), multi-purpose, tactically superior, and is minimally invasive to the flow of the action in the game. And if you can't keep someone out of the fight through Courage, there's a magic spell to help you circumvent the problem. A+ game mechanic that synergizes well with the rest of the system.

V.  Melee Is AWESOME!

Technically tawn-tawns can charge into melee,
but they are better at range

Unsurprisingly, if you read my post about Bolt Action, I love a good scrum in the middle with two sides duking it out at the end of blades and points. The shieldwall, the breakthrough, the reinforcing of positions, the wagging of firepower from one side to another - I love it all.

And Legion does have melee - with Jedi and Sith, Mandalorians with vibro-weapons, wookiees and ewoks with "more primitive" weapons, and magnaguard droids with electrostaffs and such, melee does exist in the game. But most units are encouraged by their profiles to hang back and not engage in melee - and why would they, as it's generally safer in most games to fire from behind cover than to engage the enemy in close combat?

And with units being smaller and the ability of a Legion force to consolidate firepower into a small area through reaching out with range, the result is armies that can easily "gun line" and make melee nigh impossible unless you have a special/rapid deployment option that drops you in from a new location.

And that's sad, because melee is awesome: there's a lot more room for valiant acts and great deeds when you're surrounded by enemies, and I miss that when I play Legion.

And this is something that MESBG does really well, even above other melee-centric games: you really do feel the rush when Aragorn is surrounded by goblins of, "Will I get a 6? Or will he flub and it will be all over in one swell foop?" There's palpable tension in the melee, whether it's the surrounding of a hero, the crushing of one of your flanks and the thought of how you're going to react to that, or the thrill of seeing which heroic combat will be resolved first (and the inevitable kink that may be thrown into plans if the die roll doesn't go your way). For such a "simple system," it's quite elegant and builds the energy and tension surrounding what could be (and, depending on the factions at play, sometimes is) a dull and boring grind fest.

Conclusion

So lest Gorgowrath gets mad reading this post, because he loves Legion, I like Legion: it's my 5th highest game right now, and my 3rd highest tabletop game (I'm also heavily involved in RPGs, hence the rank discrepancy). It offers a fun and thematic platoon-sized skirmish game, which I love, and on the whole, each unit choice feels different, with lots of room for customization between your squads, so you can make each squad unique if you want. Most games don't offer that.

But part of why I think MESBG has only grown over the past 20+ years, despite not getting a lot of support during those years between The Hobbit and the new edition, is because the bones of the game - its core mechanics, firmly grounded in a very deep and evocative setting - are really strong, and it shows by how many profiles are still the same over 20 years later, and how many mechanics have been retained all the way through. And in an era where we seem to get a new edition of 40k to rebalance the game every 2-3 years it seems, it's odd that part of the GW house has remained basically the same for two decades. It's remarkable, and why I still love it more than any other game.

Do you agree? Am I just a sentimental old fool? Time will tell, :P In the meantime, you know where to find me,

Watching the stars,

Centaur

"Lie back on the floor," said Firenze in a calm voice, "and observe the heavens.  Here is written, for those who can see, the fortune of our races." ~ Firenze, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix