40k - Planetary Empires

So,
whilst the Scorpions are pending, new distractions come along.
And having access to new stuff is nice. However, it also means
that its hard to separate hobby from work.

Anyway, here is this month's sneak preview.

Planetary Empires
By Rick Priestley and Jervis Johnson

After the success of mighty empires
last year, GW's finally completed
their campaign rule set
for the 41st millennium.

Packed tightly into a typical vehicle-sized
box, are 6 sprues that contain
a lot of plastic, and 1 rulebook.



6x One standard Sprue



Back of the plastic sprue.


Inside the box are 6 sprues of the same design. The box contains the following:

• 48 hexagonal tiles

• 12 Power Station pieces
  
  
  
• 12 Command Bastion pieces
  
  
  
• 12 Shield Generator Pieces
  
  
  
• 12 Manufactorum pieces
  
  
• and 96 banners to be painted in your army's colours!

• One multi-lingual rulebook.
  The rules are simple - only 5 pages long. It includes how to set up a campaign and a random map generator, special advantages for each type of tile (with building) that you control (the points generated vary for different races)
  

Interesting notes include - battle bonus points - you can either spend them on your own army, or on mercenaries, or on allies, taking up the force-organization slot. Might allow a few broken combinations, but hey, what's another excuse to use more models or come up with a wicked story of why that Chaos Lord of Slannesh was consorting with the local Imperial Guard Lord-Commissar????

Playing the campaign

Its an open-battle system - the more battles you play against players in the campaign, the more chances you have to conquer tiles - its easier to conquer tiles adjacent to tiles already under your control, but you can conquer tiles from anywhere across the table - its just a harder roll on 2D6. Some modifiers apply to the roll, to reflect things like moral victories, presence of spaceports - to reduce the ability of a winning player to conquer multiple tiles - there is a -1 modifier to the roll for every additional tile you attempt to conquer.

As for campaign drop outs - any player that wins can try to conquer the dropped-player's tiles, using the result from one of their battles (the two players fighting over a piece of dropped pie?).

New players can be added by adding more tiles - in effect, allowing an expanding campaign. I haven't looked at the rules for the Warhammer Fantasy version, so I cannot compare them.

oh, and to make people go to their direct web store, there is an unshameless plug - the Hive city tile is only available from their direct store. (this tile combines multiple tile types, including power stations, shield generators and more!)

So happy campaigning once you get your fingers on it.



E.o.M.