A REAL Swarm Army

[Zelc]

The Swarm


Some background:
I keep seeing people talk about swarm armies.  Usually, they refer to the Undead and the Umenzi.  But I don’t feel like they’re true swarm armies.  OK, the Umenzi can have a wide line, but usually they’ll only have some Shamans and maybe a couple of Atlatlmen in the back row.  That's not surprising; back-up units usually aren't that good in this game.  Two 150-point units fighting one at a time will lose to a 300-point unit.

But screw that, I want a real swarm army!  9 wide, 2 deep!

Fluff:
Insects.  Insects as far as the eye can see.  They cover the green fields in a wave of brown and black chitin.  They mostly range from the size of small cats to large dogs, with a few giant ones standing as tall as humans dotting the sea.

The defenders fought bravely with all their resources.  They cut down wave after wave, but yet the swarm kept coming.  Eventually, they faltered, and the city was breached.  Brief screams punctuated the air, then all voices fell silent.  The carpet of creeping doom continued spreading across the landscape, leaving only bones behind.

Crunch:
I’m trying to capture the swarm fluff in several ways.  First, I want an average point cost of ~143.  In a 2000-point game, that’s enough for a 9-wide line with 5 backup units.  Of course, people can modify this setup as they wish and go for more cheap units or a shorter line with more backup units and higher quality units.

Since backup units are normally penalized, these backup units will have to grant bonuses to units they’re backing up.  I also slightly increased the back-up radius to 2.5”, so it’s easier for each unit to back up two other units, and so it’s possible to have one unit backed up by 3 units.  The fluff here is the swarms of different types of insects aren’t distinct.  They mingle amongst each other in one big swarm, which grants the different types of bonuses.

I still want them to rout.  Even though they’re under the influence of the Hive Mother, their flight instincts still occasionally kick in.

Unit Abilities:

Swarm: Units with the Swarm ability are called Swarm units.  While unengaged, Swarm units backs up other Swarm units whose rear center point is within 2.5” of this unit’s front center point (this range is reduced by terrain modifiers), and whose rear center point is closer than its front center point to this unit’s front center point.

Swarm units get A(+1) +0/+0 on Engaged attacks and C +1 for each unit with the Swarm ability backing it up.

Swarm units have the Relentless Swarm ability.

Note: this allows each Swarm unit to be backed up by a maximum of 3 Swarm units, although the third one has to be placed exactly right.  Each Swarm unit can back up a max of 2 Swarm units.

Relentless Swarm: If a Swarm unit is invoking the back-up rule or using the Relentless Swarm ability, one Swarm unit backing up this unit may simultaneously move to where this unit was before it invoked the back-up rule or used the Relentless Swarm ability.

Unique Swarm Bonus: Swarm units may grant an additional bonus to themselves and to other Swarm units it’s backing up.  This is indicated on the card.  Multiple instances of the same Unique Swarm Bonus do not stack.


Faction Abilities:
Hive Mind: When you spend a Command Action to take Direct Control of a unit or change a unit’s Standing Orders, you may instead take Direct Control or change the Standing Orders of two Swarm units.

I don’t consider this to be a true faction ability since this just reduces the disadvantage of having twice the number of units to control, especially since they usually need to be in pretty specific places to grant the backup bonuses.


Swarm Tactics: During your Movement and Command phase, you may spend one Command Action to mark the Swarm Tactics box.

Swarm Replacement: At the end of any Movement and Command phase, you may erase the Swarm Tactics box on a Swarm unit.  If that unit is alive and not routing at the end of combat, you may swap the positions of this unit and either a Swarm unit it's backing up or a Swarm unit backing this unit up.

Swarm Resilience: When Swarm unit takes damage, you may erase the Swarm Tactics box on that unit.  If you do, you may split the damage between that unit and any Swarm units backing it up in any way.  Alternatively, you may erase the Swarm Tactics box on a unit backing up the Swarm unit which took damage.  If you do, you may split the damage between those two units in any way.


Command Cards

Commitment Pheromones
Choose one:
Play after one of your units fails a rout check.  Reduce the result of the Courage check by 1, and further reduce it by 1 for each unit backing this unit up.
OR:
Play during any Courage phase.  All of your units gain +1 Courage, and an additional +1 Courage per unit backing this unit up.

Aggregation Pheromones
Play during any Movement and Command phase or during an attack.  This unit gains A (+1) +0/+0 and C +1 until the end of the turn.  If this unit is a Swarm unit and has at least one Swarm unit backing it up, it instead gains A (+1) +0/+0 and C +1 for each swarm unit backing it up until the end of the turn.

Alarm Pheromones
Choose one:
Play during any Movement and Command phase, and choose one of your Swarm units that hasn't benefited from any Command Cards this turn.  Double the unique swarm bonuses on this unit (including any unique swarm bonus it grants to itself).  This unit can't benefit from other Command Cards this turn.
OR:
Play during any Movement and Command phase, and choose one of your Swarm units.  This unit and all Swarm units it's backing up gain +1 MC.

Propaganda Pheromones (aka Insects are jerks)
Choose one:
Play at the beginning of your opponent's movement and command phase.  Choose an enemy unit.  That unit can't be direct controlled or have its standing orders changed this turn.
OR:
Play during an enemy unit's attack.  The enemy unit gets (-2) -0/-0.

Signal Pheromones
Choose one:
Gain two Command Actions.  These may only be used for the Swarm Tactics ability.
OR:
Draw a Command Card.


Units:
The first three units don’t grant unique swarm bonuses.  Their baseline stats will probably be something like A (4) 4/4, D 1/1, C 10, H 3/2/2, M 3.5”.

A really cheap swarm speed bump: ~55 points, but it automatically invokes the backup rule and forces backing up units to automatically invoke the backup rule on it.  Might need to be impulsive as well.  A decent way to get an extra (+1) +0/+0, and can tank in a pinch, but isn’t that good at tanking since it doesn’t stall for the even turns.

A swarm speed bump: ~80 points, but without that annoying bit forcing the backup rule to be invoked.  Much better for stalling, but you pay for it.

An acid spitter (swarm unit), sort of like Atlatlmen: Probably around 110 points.  (4) 5/5 ranged attack, 7” range.


For the next several units, their baseline stat is probably something like A (4) 5/5, D 1/2, C 11, H 3/3/2, M 3.5”

4x combat stat booster units: these guys have unique swarm bonuses.  One grants +1 dice, one grants +1 skill, one grants +1 power, and one grants +1 tough.  To keep the somewhat fragile and swarmy nature of this army, I don’t think I want a unit that grants +1 evade.  These guys will get a +1 to whatever stat it boosts, but of course they don’t get the benefit of the swarm bonus they grant a second time if they’re backed up by the same type of unit.

Impact Hit unit: grants 1 impact hit as its unique swarm bonus.  Probably still 3.5” move.  Might be on the spear unit.  Might also need to grant a power boost on the charge.

1x Move speed unit: +1 MC, base 5” move.  They’re the size of medium-large dogs, and the other insects can hitch a ride on these (that’s how it grants the speed bonus).

1x Courage boosting unit: 13 courage, and grants a +2 courage as its unique swarm bonus.

Maybe include another vanilla swarm unit with the baseline stats, and no unique swarm bonuses.

2x bigger insects.  These guys aren’t swarm units and are similar to standard units from other factions.  Maybe one has 5 total defense and a (5) 6/6 attack, and maybe one is a fast cavalry-type unit.  Because they aren’t swarm units, they don’t get the benefits from other Swarm units.

[leemie]

I like your faction idea. I actually made a faction with the same hive mind ability, but your rules are much more clean.

[RushAss]

This bugs me

[gull2112]

I like your idea Zelc! How about this for a Faction Special Ability May spend a Command Action to place a unit or terrain objective and any units with the Swarm keyword may be given that objective as a move modifier (including units that may have a different modifier which this one replaces).

[Zelc]

I made a few changes:

1. I added +1 Courage per back-up swarm unit.  Otherwise it seems like the front line would just die way too fast, and then the rest of your units would suck because they no longer have backup units.  I might have to lower their Courage to 10 to compensate though.

2. I added a different "Swarm Replacement" ability tied with the faction checkmark ability (the old "Swarm Replacement" is now called "Relentless Swarm").  It seems like having the ability to switch two units around would be perfect in this faction, but unfortunately that ability is already taken.  I had to make it slightly different, and I settled on a delayed activation.

3. I added Command Cards.  Most are OK, not great, and I think some of them could actually be a bit better.  Alarm Pheromones has the potential to be great, but it's situational and the combat stats part locks out all other Command Cards.  On the other hand, Propaganda Pheromones is so nasty and is easily the highlight of this CC set.

By the way, my other idea for Swarm Replacement was if a unit routs, you basically switch the position of that routing unit and a backup unit.  The routing unit is still routing, but it doesn't move except to reform facing away from the enemy units it was routing from, and doesn't take any free attacks.  The problem is it was tricky to word, and also I was concerned this would be too good.

I like your idea Zelc! How about this for a Faction Special Ability May spend a Command Action to place a unit or terrain objective and any units with the Swarm keyword may be given that objective as a move modifier (including units that may have a different modifier which this one replaces).

I think the Hive Mind ability should take care of this, right?

[Zelc]

I guess since I wrote up some design notes on this faction in another thread, I might as well post them here too .


This faction actually used a lot of ideas I thought of from a Spirit faction I was brainstorming about much earlier.  The spirit faction would consist of a bunch of Lesser Spirits, dull grey translucent units with vanilla stat lines.  The army would also have Elementals or Greater Spirits, which would be colorful spirits who fill nearby Lesser Spirits with their vibrant hues (bonuses).

Fluff-wise and crunch-wise, the Spirit army had some potential.  However, I ultimately discarded it as being too difficult to balance.  I had two problems:

• In BGFW, unit stats are multiplicative, not additive.  This is mostly true for units which already have a high point cost; for cheaper units, the difference between the two may not be significant.  For example, a (+0) +1/+1 bonus to attack costs more than the sum of the costs of a (+0) +1/+0 bonus and a (+0) +0/+1 bonus.  For reference, a (+1) +1/+1 bonus roughly doubles the damage your unit does, assuming this doesn't take the unit into double-overkills to hit or wound.  You can see how this bonus would be a lot better on a (5) 6/6 unit than on a (4) 4/4 unit.
  Defense bonuses are also problematic.  I had prototyped a Lesser Spirit with 2/2 defense along with Greater Spirits that boost each type of defense.  This would combine to form a 3/3 defense unit, which is much harder to bust through than a 2/2 defense unit (they take roughly 40%-60% less damage).  There's an especially high jump in defense between a 3 and a 4 in a defense number.
  Thus, it becomes really difficult to assign the proper point cost to the aura.
• I wanted my Greater Spirits to be capable of fighting and deploy on the line, rather than sit in the back.  I thought having a bunch of units that could only sit in the back would be very restrictive in army deployment and would also cause problems with "Poor Man's Foresight" and army control.  However, putting Greater Spirits on the line meant they'd be extremely vulnerable.  If they get killed, the rest of your army begins to suck.  I could give them more health boxes, but then they'd cost a lot and army building would be very constrained.

Fortunately, the Swarm Army's fluff and crunch lent themselves very nicely to solving these two problems:

• All the Swarm units have an extremely cheap base body, so stacking bonuses shouldn't create a huge deviation from the true cost.  Additionally, with the limited back-up range, I effectively cap how many auras each unit can benefit from (basically the cap is 2, with an expensive option for getting a third aura on a unit).  The best stats a unit could get is (6) 6/6 with a 1/3 defense, but that requires 3 backup units which is not efficient or reliable.  Most likely, either the offensive skill or power will be a 5, or the defense will be 1/2.  Given the front line only has 3/3/2 health and 12 Courage (13 with 3 backup units), it won't be long before they start losing some of their stats.
• Any of the Swarm units could be on the front line or in the back line.  They're built to fight just fine on the front line, while providing valuable bonuses on the back line.  This gives people lots of flexibility in how they build and deploy their armies.  Also, I gave them a faction ability to combat the army control issue.

The biggest issue I foresee with the Swarm Army right now is determining just how brittle the front line should be.  The faction degrades very weirdly.  In one sense, a unit's death or rout isn't as bad for this faction as for other factions.  You'll usually have lots of back-up units to fill the gap.  However, when you move a unit from a back-up position to the front line, not only is the unit in that spot weaker, but so is the unit right next to that spot!  Both of them lose the bonuses from having that extra back-up unit.  It's too easy for a few units on your line to die too quickly, and suddenly your entire line is very weak because they no longer have units backing them up.  (It'd be interesting to see whether cavalry is effective against this faction; I suspect they will be effective, but they'd have to be used in tactically different ways).  On the other hand, if they're too sturdy, they'll rip through the enemy line before the front line of swarm units starts to die and back-up units are depleted.