Mantic's Deadzone: AI Edition

There have been a couple of surprising developments in the world of tabletop gaming over the last couple of years. Firstly, how successful many new games have been on Kickstarter. Who would have thought there were thousands of gamers out there willing to front up millions of dollars to advance the production of a multitude of games and gaming accessories? Secondly, how much demand there has been for single-player versions of many of these same games. Who knew gamers wanted to play with themselves so much?

Well, I always did. I'm one of those guys single-player gaming can really appeal to. I get out and play, don't get me wrong. But with a working wife and two kids to take care of, one trip a week to the local club is about as much as I can guarantee each week. So the opportunity to play many of the games I have spent hundreds of dollars on while at home and alone is very welcome.

She made me buy this table to 'eat' on. Hah.

This week I received my second-wave shipment of Deadzone from Mantic games. Deadzone is playable solo in two ways; with zombies which are also useable as npc's in two-player games, and with the purpose-built AI card deck.

I have built up thirty zombies and even found time to paint twenty of them and will be trying them out in a game with a friend later in the week. But I also managed to get in several games alone using the AI deck and this post will be concentrating on that experience. Rules for using them come in the 'Contagion' expansion book.

In the classic AI game you set up your own Strike Force and an opposing Force of matching points. The game board and cards are then set up, pretty much like in a two-player game, but with a couple of important changes.

For a start the AI team gets two mission cards, both of which you can see from the start. This helps you work out what move the AI models will take as the game progresses.

They also tend to only start out where you can reach them without getting up.

When it's the AI teams turn you draw the top card from the AI deck. All the Deadzone models have been allocated to one of five classes, Command, Assault, Heavy, Support, and Line, and most of the cards will tell you to activate one of these classes, choosing the qualifying model either closest to or furthest from the enemy. Once you have figured that out, each class has a list of activities they can carry out, arranged by priority. So a Command-type model will first make sure it cannot be assaulted by an enemy model. If it is in a safe spot it will then attempt a Command action. Assault troops will prioritise closing with the enemy, Line troops shooting at them, and so on.

So, the big questions: does it work, and is it fun? Well, the answer to the first one is 'most of the time'.

Knowing which models to activate is generally straightforward and easy to do. It can get a bit murky though when you get to figuring out which action that model will prioritise though. The rules tell you AI models will essentially gravitate towards objectives and choose sure-things over maybes and when they will use cards and so on. But you can still find yourself in some complicated situations.

Having two missions often doesn't help as their objectives can be contradictory.

You guys go for killing the enemy, I'll do guarding this bit right here.

In one game, for example, the AI Plague drew a survival mission and an infiltration mission. For assault models this was ok as they just raced across the board towards the enemy. For the slower moving guys though there was the difficult decision of which way to go when it was their time to move. Should they move into firing positions where they might be able to shoot the enemy but risk getting shot back? Or follow the 3d's across the board, but more slowly, thus also risking getting shot down?

Only the Leader understands 'Cover'.

Using the cards also gives your AI models a distinct lack of tactical nouse. Whereas a human player would be willing to build forces in one location to provide overlapping or overwhelming fire on an objective before sending a model out to capture it, the AI will sometimes suicidally rush towards the nearest objective on the board. If they're unlucky in the activation order this can leave models all alone and easily picked off. Sometimes shooting at the enemy is the sensible option, but the rules still tell you a model runs off to sit on an objective.

We knew you were going to charge us. We just don't care.

Knowing what the enemy will do next is also a big advantage. In the last game I played as Orx I knew I did not need to move my Commander to a safe position out of charge range of two Plaguehounds because they had the Infiltrate mission and would run straight past my model to get off the board. Instead I could do a Command action and leave him where he was behind a corner.

All that said, I think the answer to the second 'big' question is still 'yes'. Yes, that is, if you understand and accept this is not like a two-player game.

Games play out faster than two-player ones and the AI models can be dumb. They will not supply the same tactical challenge of a human opponent. Sometimes you will need to roll off to decide which action a model will take or you will find the action priorities nonsensical. Let it go. Sometimes human players do daft things to or catch you off guard.

Most of the games I played were still surprisingly close. Even though I, the human, won them all, several times the AI came within a couple of points of beating me.

With  two mission cards the AI can score points very quickly. The first game I played the AI was getting a VP on each card for every turn they got through with fifty percent of their points on the boards. You also get 'bonus points' VP cards in the AI deck and can choose to start the AI with one, two or three, points from the get-go. The AI then, was getting up to five VP's just for surviving the first round.

The challenge becomes in achieving your goals as fast as possible while having to hold off the enemy from achieving two of theirs.  The game knows the AI is dumb and it is weighted towards giving them fast easy VP's. Be faster.

Think of the bonus cards as a kind of handicap. Give them one if you want a fairly easy expedition, three if you want a real test of speed and tactical awareness.

 A couple of tactical notes:

• avoid giving your AI faction points-heavy, high command total type models. With their default action, assuming they are in a safe position and they should be if you set them up fairly, is Command. Plague Stage 1's get six points in their Command pool and will most likely just stand on the spot using them.
• choose factions you know well for the AI. You have twice as many cards, dice, counters and models to keep track off than usual. Knowing your AI faction's special abilities and stats will help.

And a suggestion:

• prioritise one of the AI faction's missions over the other from the start. Still let them score points for both, but deciding for example whether infiltrating or capturing is more important will make their actions easier to determine and possibly make a tougher opponent.

I like Mantic's AI system. It is not perfect but its a good start. I think it could do with a few tweaks, but we have a great community who tend to be good at that sort of thing.

I have all six Deadzone factions, but have only played games using three. I'm looking forward to using the AI deck as an opponent to help me learn the others.

Lawhammer

Thats the new name I'm giving for whenever GW's lawyers get sicced on whatever target has been deemed to somehow infringe upon, impinge upon, or otherwise irritate the head honchos in Lenton.

Today's entry is a prospective one. That is, no lawsuit has been filed that I am yet aware of. But it seems a good possibility. Check out 5m 21secs of this video:




UPDATE: the video has disappeared! Did Lawhammer strike it down?

Speed-painting Fortifications for Deadzone

The next Mantic Open Day is coming up soon so I've been spurred on to get some more DZ terrain and models painted up and ready to go.

Although most of my terrain tiles are done I had left the fortification clip-on sections alone and I decided it might be nice to paint them a different colour to the blue-grey I have used on the rest of the scenery. This is partly because its generally a good idea to paint items made of different materials in different colours or shades of the same colour and partly to provide some visual contrast to a table. From a narrative point of view, if Shensig buildings are made of repurposed freight containers, maybe the fortifications are made of sterner stuff, deployed by military units when the need arises. Such as when the Plague breaks out.

I still wanted to get it done quickly though.

So, here are a few pics of my fortifications, followed by how I did it.

1. Stick your tiles onto a sheet of cardboard or a long stick with blu-tack. Make sure the tiles are all aligned the same way up.

2. Undercoat with a spray of black paint.

3. Spray a layer of dark blue paint on top of the undercoat. Spray from the direction of the top edge of the pieces. This will allow a little of the black undercoat to remain on the bottom of raised edges and give you a built-in drop-shadow effect. You could, of course, use a different colour undercoat, it would just mean you would need to apply the base colour a bit more thoroughly to make sure none of the undercoat remains visible. I used an airbrush and Vallejo's Model Air Blue Angels but any dark blue will do, even one from a spraycan for extra speed.

4. When the dark blue is dry, use a piece of packing sponge, the kind you get in model blister packs, to sponge on a lighter blue-grey. I used Citadel's Shadow Grey. I think the closest available alternate now is their 'The Fang'. Use a corner of the sponge to dab on the paint. Avoid the temptation to drag the sponge. Raised edges and corners are your friend as they will stop the paint completely covering the piece, giving you dark corners and a broken up pattern. This helps you get a natural look to the paint job. You are not trying to uniformly cover the tiles - thats what brushes are for. You're trying to get a patchy or blotchy look.

5. Make a thin wash of a light earth tone paint. I used Citadel's Steel Legion Drab. This is the key word here. It needs to look almost like dirty water. If you're not sure, add more water. Its better to go too thin, then do it again with a slightly thicker mix than mess up your tiles by painting on too much dirt. Make sure you get the wash into the cracks and crevices on your sections. When it dries you want nice dusty effect. On the flat sections you will get a 'filter' effect, where you can see the blues and greys you painted on but through a yellowy brown layer that is almost imperceptible to the conscious brain but that registers as different anyway.Make sure your tiles are standing up straight while they dry so the wash drifts downwards.

6. When the dustwash is dry, mix up a wash of a bright orange. I used an old pot of Citadel's Blazing Orange. It looks quite harsh on the palette, but it works well on the colours I painted the tiles with. I think Vallejo's Hot Orange is probably a good  substitute.This mix is going to be a little bit thicker than the dust wash, but still fairly close to coloured water. You want a consistency that flows around raised details and pools in the corners when you touch the brush to the piece, rather than something it feels like you have to paint on. I put it on the rivets on the wall pieces and around the teardrops and vent holes on the bulwarks.

7. For extra weathering, I also rubbed the side of a standard HB pencil along most of the raised edges. This gives you a nice sharp edge highlight, as well as giving the pieces a subtle metallic look. Its the simplest and easiest technique, but it can really make parts stand out nicely.

Thats it for the painting. Here's how my completed sections look when mixed in with the scenery I painted in earlier guides and some of my Plague and Marauders mini's.

Thats it for post #100 :) As always, feel free to ask any questions and click on the ads if what you read was helpful. Thanks for reading.

Mantic Cases and Battlefoam Bag

Here's a quick video showing what you can fit into Mantic's two sizes of plastic cases and an overview of the Mantic branded Battlefoam bag.



Foam and cases are bog money these days - there are so many great models being made and people want to take care of them. I have found the Mantic cases to be a great solution.

They are not the most glamorous bits of kit. They are a lot like VHS cassette boxes. Youngsters, google it. But with a bit of foam on each side, they hold models in place and provide hard protection against impacts. Stick them in the BF bag, also very attractively priced, and you've got a great way to carry round your Deadzone and Dreadball mini's.

Deadzone Terrain Weathering

If you have been following my previous guides to speedy and even speedier painting of the masses of tiles that came with the Deadzone Kickstarter packages, you should now have a tonne of nicely painted two-tone grey tiles. Are yours not so nicely painted? Well, thats ok too. Its art and art is subjective.

So, that two-tone scheme is a really fast way to get paint on your tiles, but there is no reason to stop there. In fact its a good idea to add more colours to the tiles as all that grey, even with accents, can look a bit monochrome en masse.

I am going to show you here some ways I have added a bit more colour and texture to my collection of terrain. One is as easy as it can be and uses something you are guaranteed to have in your house. The second requires buying a GW paint (although there may be other substitutes out there). The third uses paints you probably already have, and the fourth requires an airbrush and some specialist consumables.

1. Pencil edging. For this, all you need is a simple graphite pencil. If you run it across the edge of your tiles and the edges of raised areas, you can give your tiles a subtle outline that will add definition and a metallic sheen. This is great when you want to fool the eye into perceiving your tiles are made of metal. Where you have salt-masked your tiles, concentrate the pencil edging on places where the darker 'base' colour shows through.

Its hard to photograph though >< In the above picture, you might just be able to pick out the thin dark line along the beveled edge of the tile. I have done it on the edge of the raised square in the tile's centre as well. 

 

2. Washes and Sponging. For my floor tiles I wanted to produce an effect that simulated the combined weight of thousands of footprints, containers and gear, and general atmospheric dust on the surfaces. I've said it before and I'll say it again, Steel Legion Drab is great for producing nondescript dust-coloured washes, particularly as a contrast to the grey colour of the tiles.

I tried not cover the entire tile in wash - I wanted some areas to look a bit closer to their 'intended' colour than others - an made sure the wash got into the recesses and corners as this is where dust and dirt would naturally accumulate. You have to be a little bit careful of pooling though. In the picture above it can look like some of the tiles have got tea stains on them. In real life its a bit more subdued than the camera makes it appear, but you want to avoid tide marks when the wash dries.

I have also sponged on some darker colours, like Scorched Brown, in a few places. I used a packing sponge, just like in the speedier guide, but I smeared rather than dabbed this time. A real industrial floor can be a patchwork of colours and spills, the trick is making yours look random. Again, its art.

3. Blood for the Blood God. GW released a handful of technical paints just before Christmas. Most of them I don't see the point of, but Blood is a good one. You can splatter it, drag it, and pool it, and it dries to a gloss and looks like fresh human blood. There were ways to simulate blood before this paint of course, but this paint just looks fantastic.

In the picture above you can see the same tiles from the previous shot, with a little BftBG dabbed on. Here's another photo of tiles from the same batch with washes and Blood.

4. Weathering powders. Weathering powders are like painting black magic. Everyone has heard of them, but few have used them. Or know how to. Its mainly beardy types that build scale models of tanks and stuff. But, I'm here to tell you, they are surprisingly easy to use, with a little care, and can produce some great effects on your terrain.

 The first thing I did with them was add some to the wash I used on the floor tiles, then reapplied it. I used a mix of earth coloured powders, although I probably used too much of the darker ones in places.

If you look closely at the gaps between the square in this tile, you can see how the powders give the wash a granular quality. Basically it makes a more muddy than dusty powder.

You can also just apply a few spots of powder to your tile and smudge them in with a sponge. This is a great way to simulate soot, scorch marks, and the general accretion of dirt you might see in a place like the Deadzone.

And finally, here are three videos demonstrating how to use weathering powders with thinners and an airbrush to dirty-up your terrain facades. The front bits.




To start with, I sprinkle weathering powders onto wet thinners I have sprayed onto the tiles.



Then I spray some more thinners onto the powders, allowing it to form a paint-like liquid and flow into the recesses of the tile.


The finishing touch is to cover the dried powders with a matt varnish to seal them in.

I reshot the last video in the sequence for two reasons. For one, I had the camera set at the wrong resolution for the first run through, which is why parts 1 and 2 are a little blurry. For the other, I went a bit heavy on the powders on the batch in the first two videos. So I have shot a different batch in the last vidoe, one that is a bit lighter, a bit more dusty than muddy.

I went in a bit lighter on the first batch I weathered too. I think the patchy dirt is more effective looking than the heavier mud for this type of terrain.

That then is how I am weathering my tiles and breaking up all that grey. As always, if this has been helpful, please click on the ad because it helps me buy more weathering powders :) And comments, questions, or suggestions are also equally welcome below.

Mantic's Next New Game

At the most recent Mantic Open Day, Ronnie mentioned the possibility of taking on other franchises for the tabletop games treatment in the manner of Mars Attacks. The success of that Kickstarter, he said, showed Mantic could handle someone else's ip respectfully and innovatively. He also said there were other properties he would love to take on - Aliens and Predator perhaps having been one of them, although Mantic were never actually in the conversation about any rights to make a game from those franchises.

So what properties was he thinking of? Here are a few I would like to see:

1. Game of Thrones. Games like Spartacus have shown it's possible to build intrigue into tabletop games alongside violence, but the massively popular book series also has great potential for a massed combat system - an army of white walkers versus the elite Black Watch, anyone?
2. The Walking Dead. There already is a boardgame based on the comic book/tv show. But I can also see this as an adaptation of the Deadzone/Mars Attacks rulesets with missions to recover foodstuffs and medical supplies and so on. Players could choose from factions including original survivors, Woodbury, and the hunters. Perhaps you could even choose your band of survivors from all those characters - Rick and the Governor working together! - and fight against card controlled zombies. The options for a Kickstarter exclusive are clear - if the game is based on the comic, you can get TV versions, and vice versa.
3. Netrunner/Magic/any other ccg. With Mars Attacks, Mantic took a series of collectible cards and made a game out of them. Netrunner and Magic are already games of course, but they don't have collectible miniatures - yet. Personally I'd love to see an adaptation of Netrunner's covert ops and skullduggery into a miniatures game. Mantic love putting cards in their games so it's not such a long stretch.
4. Star Trek, Star Wars, and/or Stargate. Three sci-fi franchises with legions of fans both within and without the tabletop gaming community. The success of X-Wing and Wing Commander shows the two bigger franchises have support, but this may well mean the rights to them are all tied up. As far as I know though, there is not a Stargate game on the market. 
5. Planet of the Apes. The rights to this could be pretty hot with a new raft of movies being made. But I'd still love the opportunity to tell my opponent to take his stinkin' paws off me. The damn, dirty ape!

So thats my top five(ish) ip's for Mantic to take on. What would you like to see them develop?

Deadzone Terrain - Even Speedier Painting Guide

A few days ago I put up a tutorial/report on how to quickly paint Deadzone terrain using a couple of spray cans and a salt masking. While a lot of people seemed to like the guide, a lot were perhaps also put off by the use of an airbrush and even the salt.

So, let me present an even easier way to paint your terrain, using no airbrush and no salt. The effects you get aren't quite as great looking, in my opinion, and take a little practice to master, but are fast and simple to produce.

Start off with the first few steps as shown in the previous guide:

1.  separate your tiles into vertical and horizontal piles (that is, walls in one pile, floors in the other).
2. blu-tack your tiles to a strong sheet of carboard or other firm, flat, and portable surface.
3. prime them - this time it doesn't really matter what colour, but I still recommend black.

It still looks like this.

Now, the first departure from the first guide's technique - go straight to painting on your main colour layer. In my case I am still using Vallejo's Model Air Pale Grey Blue and airbrushing it on, but you can use whatever colour you want. Use a lightish colour though like Army Painter's Wolf Grey (in theory you could just go straight to this step and skip the black primer!). Slightly patchy or uneven paint is still ok but you're still going to want to try to spray your wall sections from the 'top' to try to keep some of the black primer on the undersides of raised edges.

You will need a dark grey paint for the next bit. I made mine using pure black with just a hint of grey to break it up a bit, but you could just use something like Games Workshop's Mechanicus Standard Grey.

Now you take a piece of clampack foam - thats the dark grey sponge that comes in many 28mm miniatures, such as Dreadball MVP's - and use it to dab the dark grey paint onto your tiles.

• Don't load the sponge with lots of paint. Think of it as being a bit like drybrushing - too much paint will spoil the effect.
• Concentrate on hitting edges and corners. 
• Don't smear the paint on, you will just get a sooty look. Dab it on. 
• Mix up the angles you do it at to avoid getting repetitive patterns.

et voila

It might take a few goes to get the hang of it and understand how your sponge puts paint down. But thats the same with any technique. The good thing is a little experimentation here cannot hurt - the more worn, and messed around with your tiles are, the better they will look on the table.

In my previous guide I used salt masking twice; once for the paint chipping effect, and once for applying an accent colour. You can also sponge on the accent. I highly recommend you do this on at least some of your panels or you might end up with a slightly monochrome board.

 To do this, I masked off the area I want to colour. Then I dabbed on my accent, Golden Yellow, before reapplying my dark grey around the edges to bring back that chipped look.Dabbing on a little bit of the Pale Blue Grey would also help with that worn look.

Compared side by side, you can see how the two techniques come out. The dabbed on chips tend to make the tiles look more smoky while the chipped paint seems cleaner. Both are fine to put out on the table though.

One area the sponge technique is probably better for is small parts. Crystallized salt can come in large chunks that are difficult to apply accurately to little things like handrails and ladders. From now on I plan to sponge those parts. The trick there will be making sure the paint I dab is the same shade as on the salted tiles.

So there you have it - a fast, easy, and cheap way to quickly paint worn looking tiles that does not use an airbrush or any kind of advanced technique.

Later on I plan to play around with adding more weathering effects like rust and blood to some of my tiles so let me know if there's anything in particular you would like to see or know how to do.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below and, if you like the guide, please click on the ad as it helps keep me in spraycans :) And check out my guide to weathering your tiles here.