Escape Path

[AndySlater]

As stated in another thread I've been trying to get a few games of Space Hulk under my belt in an attempt to get to grips with what I believe is a problem with the Escape Path core rules.

To that end I have now played mission 1 from the 1st edition several times with very interesting results: the terminators have been trounced every single time!

There's little point in me posting the mission 1 map here without the whole of the 1st edition rules to go with it. You either have the books and will understand what I'm referring to or you won't. If you don't then suffice to say that it is very similar to the map for my Brock's Bad Day scenario.

The point is however that I'm getting the distinct impression that SH1 mission 1 is heavily biased towards the genestealers in the same way that BBD is heavily biased towards a fast swarm.

I believe (as there are lots of differences with the rules) that 'on the surface', the reasons for the bias are different however I am very interested to observe that in both cases there is a similar junction at the heart of the terminator's/team's problem. Could it be that those kind of junctions will, by their nature, be hugely problematic with any kind of game rules (as I guess they would be in real life)?

If you have SH1 it then perhaps you'd like play that mission a few times, and let me know what happens?

[AndySlater]

Well I've played that mission another half dozen times and the Marines are consistently getting their butts kicked. Seems odd for the first mission in the book. Maybe I'm doing something wrong.

[Hank Cowdog]

IMHO, the basic SH missions are like logic puzzles: find the right tactics, and you can win the majority of the time. Without the winning tactic, the marines lose the vast majority of the time.

If you play with the Deathwing expansion, the game balance swings much further back in the marines favor.

The Genestealer expansion broke the game as far as I am concerned.

TACTICS
We developed an approach that would allow the marines to win the first mission perhaps 70% of the time. Bad dice rolls and large Genestealer reinforcement draws would make winning far from certain.

A couple of tactics:
1) turn _before_ moving around a corner - you can then move diagonally and fire as you enter the intersection

2) preventative flaming an intersection to keep the GS blips/models back

Careful selection of where to place the seargant and the flamer marines in the initial deployment also make a difference.

[AndySlater]

Thanks for the input.

We've played quite a few more games since my last post and along the way we discovered a couple of errors in our understanding of the rules. One of them helped to improved the marines chances and although the other was in favour of the stealers, on the whole it seemed to improve the balance.

I agree with what you are saying but am particularly glad that you posted the first tactical tip because our understanding was that you couldn't do that because you don't have line of sight before moving. I just double checked in the first edition rules and there it is, paragraph 2 on page 20: "For purposes of targeting, the fire takes place from the square the marine moves to".

So we CAN do that!

That'll help.