The War at the End of the World

On game and fiction development…

I have been playing games for as long as I have been an adult. My first miniature game was BattleTech. I no longer play it. There are many personal reasons for that. However, I still own some Mechs. My husband and I also own a smattering of CAVs and more than a few Heavy Gears. We also own tanks, and I mean lots of them, in 6 mm scale. Most are modern

There have been a few things bothering me throughout the Ukraine War. Since we also play Flames of War but cannot see using their modern version of the game, it’s a range thing to recreate that war…we have a problem. Yes, other rulesets could adequately simulate the Ukraine War. MHQ and Fistful of Tows come to mind. But they are both slow and do not consider this war's peculiarities.

One of these is the increased role of infantry with modern anti-tank weapons. A few infantry squads with Stugna-P or Javelins can stop an armored column. This happened both at the Battle of Kyiv and Vugledar. The other is the role of drones. This is not just larger units, like the US Global Hawk, first used in the global war on terror, but also loitering munitions, as well as homegrown Ukrainian remote control vehicles and hobby drones. Most modern rule sets do not take those into account.

Vugledar also saw one of the highest armor losses for the Russian army. There was some tank-on-tank action, but most were infantry with anti-tank weapons. So, one of the components of this new game will include a modern set that will take into account these vagaries of the battlefield that are very particular to the Ukraine war.

What started me on this path…

I have played games for all of my adult life. I tested some years ago and developed a role-playing game that included a light miniatures game. But this was not the origin story for this pursuit. I was starting to create, or instead redevelop, a sci-fi setting. It’s a space opera, but one thing I wanted to do was to use miniatures to determine the result of fictional battles.

So, at first, I used some of those same BattleMechs I already had. But in reality, the setting I am developing has giant stumpy robots, but they are not the show's stars. Initially, it was not going to, but Russia, the US, and Japan are developing these in real life. What the US is doing is more like battle armor, while the Russian Ministry of Defense was developing a Mech before the current phase of the war in Ukraine started.

Granted, the Ukraine war likely stopped this, but in a future setting, one of the factions is Russian descendants. Since they are doing this for real, well, decided to incorporate them into the game. Even though in the recycled fiction, I call them war-frames. These range from mostly power armor, which black navy Marines might wear for boarding operations, to the Tsar, one of the largest of these machines.

Why should these guys have this machine? This is why the Tsar tank developed on the order of the last tsar near the end of the First World War:

Unlike Heavy Gear and BattleTech, they are not the kings of the battlefield. They have a considerable weakness. It’s called sky lining. Ergo, they are easier to target; look at the original Tsar Tank. You try to hide that in a forest. That tank had other weaknesses, and it never saw use in any battlefield. I thought it was supposed to be able to drive over trenches.

In this future world, that War Frame is large, but not as well armored as it should be. Though armed with two rail guns. It’s also slow

The Universe of the War at the End of the World

The world is somewhat based on the fictional world I developed for the RPG of Future Nexus. However, I have already made some significant changes. One is that Earth is no longer a densely populated world. It’s more like a nature preserve. The other is when the timeline starts. This places the story in the 26th century.

Also, there is some lost technology from the early age of colonization it’s not better than present tech, but one faction chases after it. For them, it has mystical significance.

I have incorporated ideologies such as Cosmism. They say to write what you know, and these days, I know this very well

While humanity has expanded among the stars, this is not an inner sphere with thousands of worlds the more you think about the cost of civilization, this will not happen. It’s a tad more hard sci-fi, like some of the in-and-out-of-game fiction I read over the years. When I read early BattleTech, the world of Galatea made an impression on me it was the domes. In some ways, it emphasized the idea of the golden age of science fiction, one where not every world would look like Earth

There is a similar pattern with The Expanse. So some worlds, like Tancredi V, are tidally locked, with most cities in the umbral zone. Others, like Rigel, are mostly underground, with domes. The only reason for it to be developed is resources because it’s not friendly to any life. And yes, some are friendly to human habitation.

Current knowledge in exo-planets has yielded a few super earths. We know there are Earth-like planets; however, systems are far more exotic than we believed even ten years ago, so a few of these worlds are tidally locked to a gas giant because it’s fiction. I am going to make a few concessions to the writing process

One is that it’s possible to cross the ocean of space. While Warp is possible, theoretically, I am using jump engines based on membranes and string theory. In reality, it’s a sci-fi trope, so if you want to envision them as something more familiar to you from other universes, it’s fine. Though no engaging of warp drives, because it’s not the way I am going. This also means drop ships are all aerodyne because it’s more efficient to rack and stack than link round objects to a jump ship. Think of these as your pallets crossing the Pacific, except it’s space.

The other is time. In reality each human world would have a local year and local time. Even though I am keeping this to a few worlds…it’s the energy cost of setting up a colony; it quickly would become untenable to work up that many local times and global time, based on Terran standard. Locals who never leave a world would likely have those local calendars. But the story is told from the point of view of people who travel across the stars.

Oh, and money, just because I don’t want to think too hard about this, at least not yet, use the dollar as the universal currency.

The Game

There are two schools of thought about game design. Also, things have changed over the decades. When I started playing BattleTech, we all had time so spending a few hours, even the weekend, playing a game was expected. This is the era of chit games. You probably know about these, hex maps, battalion level, and even higher simulations that could take weeks BattleTech, in that context, was fast.

These days we all have less time. This is why I said no to other games to determine my fiction. So the first design parameter is that the game needs to be fast. It needs to be a modern war game. This way you can play a significant action, with plenty of models, in a couple hours.

It also needs to be tactical. Yes, six sided dice will be used. It’s a nice statistical distribution, plus most people have them. But a single lucky shot cannot determine the course of the game, especially early on

It will reflect some realities of the modern battlefield. And the fiction setting should accommodate any model you have ranging from 6 mm to 10 mm. If you have 15 mm, you could play it as well, realizing ranges may feel off. Yes, play testing all these scales

The underlying engine can also accommodate modern, so slowly coming up with stats for different armor and soft-skinned vehicles. However, we have been talking at home of the peculiarities of the Ukraine war. So, at some point, a separate set of stats may be needed for a skirmish game, where infantry will be more important than armor. Since I do have them, will test these on a 28-32 mm scale. I am not sure if that will work, especially since my feeling is that saves slow down gameplay. These tend to be standard in that scale.

For the moment I am at the alpha stage of game development. But at some point will bring it into the wild. The first step is to edit what I have already for clarity I also have a few things to do…

• Fine tune artillery.

• Bring in infantry fully.

• Develop the fine points of Anti Tank vs Anti Personnel, as well as problematic skin vs. soft skin.

• Edit names of some weapons. Old habits die hard, and I called rail guns gauss weapons. Though in reality, this is what the Navy calls them. However, the US Navy is ditching them because of the same reason particle cannons are not practical, in fact. They are absolute energy monsters. Why there are no particle cannons. However, rail guns are feasible, especially with fusion reactors, or other more fancy energy sources.

As you follow along, you can read the series of decisions made in game design it’s not just lifting a veil it’s an exciting process. I will put up some short fiction as well. Like One Page Rules and other modern games, this is a labor of love. It’s also a way for me to help develop a world and have fun on my tabletop with miniature, sometimes going back decades.

Some were rather dusty by the way…