Scenario Play, List Building Overhaul, and More for No Zaku!


"Fuck he's right behind me isn't he?"


It's been a couple months since I last posted about No Zaku, and I've been certainly busy working on it. Every view, and every viewpoint presented to me, has meant a lot. Knowing that a little over a hundred people look at this blog at this point is kind of nuts to me, as I'm not exactly a professional, and I tend to make things for my own enjoyment, so knowing that many people are on the same wavelength just floors me. No Zaku being statistically the most popular article by a pretty wide margin, it seems that the small population slice you guys present is predominantly in that Gundam and wargames overlap that I was skeptical existed besides myself. Anyways, enough feely, onto the content.

Let's start with the list-building overhaul. First thing I did was increase the points scale by a factor of ten (eg, ten point grunt suits become a hundred points). This allows the second thing to slot in without any decimal shenanigans, that being points costs on weapons. I noticed frequently when playing my TL1 Zeon Shitbox Platoon against a friend's TL4 Tekkadan list, that it seemed optimal to take a swarm of obsolete Mobile Suits and equip them with their (100% free!) anti-MS weapons. The hope is that the points costs will curb this meta somewhat, and make complimentary weapons in a Mobile Suit's loadout a little more important. As a side bonus, my percentage based Pilot Skill now works better since there's less fiddling with decimals, and all of the strange rounding interactions that can bring.

Second thing I did with list-building, and with wider effects throughout the system, is a Pilot Skill overhaul. I've opted to split Pilot Skill into three discrete skills, being Melee, Maneuver, and Marksmanship. Everything that used to be Pilot Skill, save melee attacks, is now Maneuver. This skill denotes competence at the controls, Mobile Suit footwork, et cetera. Melee attacks are now handled by the new Melee skill, pretty much the same as before. Shooting attacks have seen a big change, now working how melee attacks once did, just using the new Marksmanship skill instead of Melee, or the old Pilot Skill. The hope is that this makes speccing out an all-around ace more difficult, and might give more variety in list strategy.

The last thing, and what I'm most excited for, is the new Scenario Play. What separates a flat wargame from a wargame with tactical depth, is objectives. Now rather than just being a deathmatch slugfest, there's a score to tally. You could lose everything and still win, if you were playing the objective harder. And so, there are currently ten such scenarios to play. Rules as written, you roll them on the table at random, but you could also easily agree to a scenario. The real spice to the soup here though, is ulterior objectives that your opponent wouldn't know about. You could be effectively carrying out your ulterior while playing the scenario objective, being just behind your enemy, only to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat from clever tactics and good play.

To wrap up, many keywords have been introduced and redone, an ammo system has been added, and multiple new Mobile Suits have been statted up, but you'll see when you read it. The living rules document can be found here. As always, thank you for reading, feel free to share your thoughts, and have fun!

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