DEFIANCE: VITAL GROUND
A miniature war game rulebook
Game designed by Demian Rose
Published by Majestic 12 Games
Finally out after more than 2 years of delays, Defiance: Vital Ground (DVG for short) is the "version 2" of out-of-print Starslayer, which was also published by Majestic 12 Games. The rulebook, currently available as a PDF download and a print-on-request book (for $22.95), is a hefty tome clocking at 250 pages. Some 60 pages make up the actual rules (divided into basic and advanced or additional rules), while about 70 are devoted to Army Customizer, a tool for creating your own troops and in fact entire armies from scratch. The remaining pages consist of Defiance Universe, a "fairly hard" science fiction setting. The section also showcases the possibilities inherent in the Army Customizer by presenting four full army lists for the galactic powers of the said universe.
One brief note before we delve any deeper into the book: I myself and my gaming group have been involved in the latter stages of play testing this game. I can't therefore claim completely objectivity on the subject, but I urge you to check out the review nevertheless and gauge my bias afterwards.
With that in mind, let's get on with the business at hand...
Universal Basic -- the core rules
To offer a concise definition, DVG is a battle level scifi miniature game with alternating unit activation, for 28-30mm scale miniatures. When I say "battle level", I'm talking about games that are designed to handle several dozen models (perhaps up to or even over a hundred) per side without bogging down and in general also require more than a dozen models to yield a truly balanced experience (I understand that the historical miniature gaming crowd has a more stringent definition of the term). A prime example of this type of game would be Warhammer 40.000 from Games Workshop.
Unlike the illustrious Wh40k, DVG is not in the upper echelons of "battle level" when it comes to the number of models you can expect to field in a normal game (that takes less than the entire day to fight out). While DVG troops generally take orders as a unit, each individual model’s combat resolutions (targeting enemies etc.) are still handled separately. Also, there is a special troop type that can have any number of models in the unit activate on per-model orders. By involving a larger or smaller percentage of such troops (and individuals such as heroes and commanders), you can easily tweak a DVG game towards a larger battle or a smaller skirmish according to your preferences. There is also an official option for playing the game with 15mm miniatures (and semi-official ones for 6mm), so you are not tied to a single miniature scale either (although it must be said that 15mm scifi models aren't the most common thing on the market today).
The above broad categorization also obfuscates the fact that the game mechanics of DVG differ relatively much from those of the "run of the mill" miniature games (popular or otherwise). While most (if not all) DVG rules can probably be found to have relation or precedence in some other game, their combination can still be called unconventional, even unique in many regards. While this means that DVG has enough "personality" to make it stand out, the downside of "the path less taken" will be that the players aren't most likely going to feel immediately at home with the all of the mechanics.
Perhaps the most important deviation from the "norm" in DVG is the fact that it is strongly based around the morale of the troops. In many miniature games, the morale rules are (probably intentionally) something of an afterthought with relatively little effect to the eventual result of a game (the most extreme example is perhaps the new Starship Troopers game from Mongoose, where no morale rules per se exist at all beyond a type of suppression). In DVG, the morale has a crucial effect on a game's flow and outcome. "The morale rules are meant to weave unit size, unit quality, unit leaders, army strategy and army commanders into a cohesive whole", the author Demian Rose explains. An individual trooper's courage can be called to question in various different situations, for example when enemy shots begin to fall too close to the mark. A unit on the other hand is in danger of loosing the will to fight if casualties suffered reduce its numbers below a threshold set by its training level. Eventually even the entire army's morale will crumble as the casualties continue to mount. The game also features various options for the way an individual or a unit behaves when its morale breaks, making different armies react to the battlefield stress in widely different ways.
Another important variation in DVG mechanics is tied to the way the troops to activate are selected. In most games where players alternate activating their units (or individuals) the players themselves decide which unit they activate when their turn comes up. This often leads to a game mechanical "artefact" I like to call "activation rushing": the player with more units can activate several of his units in sequence at the end of the turn, the other player having no troops left to activate. DVG removes this artefact by assigning each unit in the game an activation card (normally this is just a regular playing card). These cards are then all shuffled into an activation deck and dealt out in order. When a unit's activation card is dealt from the deck, it must activate. This makes the order of activation totally random, although there are a certain number of special abilities that can stack the deck in the favour of a given unit activating early (or late). With this combination of activation mechanics and morale rules, D. Rose aimed for "a game that simulated the sense of 'ordered chaos' that my many readings on historical battles had given me".
Obviously DVG also sports several other less crucial "special features". Some are tied to the streamlining needed to facilitate games with large numbers of miniatures. Examples of this would be that hitting a target and damaging it are most often tied into a single dice roll, and the highly (perhaps even a little overtly) abstract terrain rules. On the other hand, in some situations the game remembers its subtitle of "Universal Skirmish System": the aforementioned special unit type that can be activated on a per trooper basis is one example of this. Of the features not clearly tied to the level of detail in modelling the combat, it's prudent to mention the lack of traditional, distance based unit coherency and the somewhat complex suppressive fire mechanic. The former means that each member in a unit can be almost anywhere on the board and still operates both at full capacity and as part of the unit for the unit morale purposes; a feature that some players consider pointless novelty seeking at best, although it does model rather well for the fact that real world troops don't need to be within sight of each other at all times to act efficiently in a combat situation. The latter also has precedence on a real battlefield in the form of pouring "untargeted fire" in the general direction of the enemy in order to keep them pinned, but the DVG mechanic itself (which we shall not go into in detail here) is probably not the smoothest possible "simulation" thereof. As the morale rules do ensure that all fire is suppressive to a degree, I've yet to see the actual suppression rules used in our games.
Overall, the mechanics produce a game with at least tenuous ties to real world military tactics and combat outcomes, at the cost of including some features you probably haven't encountered in a scifi miniature game before (including a few "quirks" some players may have hard time accepting). That DVG accomplished the former (most miniature games don't) while still playing smoothly and without resorting to full scale simulation is in my book a reasonable trade-off for the somewhat steeper than usual learning curve and even an occasional oddity in the rules.
This basic part of the rules is available as a free PDF download from Majestic 12 Games. The site also offers a list of "archetypal" armies which should allow anyone with a reasonable collection of miniatures to test the rules out for themselves. We can expect to find the number of armies available through either the Defiance official site or the Majestic 12 message board to increase as people get around to using the Army Customizer (see below).
Universal Advanced -- the optional expansion rules
Universal Advanced rules offer a number of additional features that can be "modularly" added to the basic rules to broaden the DVG experience.
These range from additional rules for competitive gaming to simulations of electronic warfare and camouflage. This section also covers a few combat scenarios that once again fairly represent challenges that may come up on a real (modern day) battle field, and offers some "genre options" that can be used to emulate popular scifi gaming subgenres (such as cyberpunk, mecha combat and space fantasy) with DVG rules. There is even an "ultra realistic" genre option that historical gamers are more likely to find of interest (as opposed to scifi gamers). In fact almost the only thing that comes to mind as being fairly common to miniature games that DVG entirely lacks "out of the box" are campaign rules.
As stated above, all of the Universal Advanced rules are optional additions that can be included in the games once the players feel they are confident in the use of the basic rules.
Army Customizer -- the beef
A large part of the book is quite rightly devoted to what is likely the most important selling point of DVG: the army generation rules. Strictly speaking you don't even need to read them in order to play, but I'm sure most people will want to try their hand at using them instead of force fitting their model collection into the mould of either the DVG official armies or something found on 'net (either at the official site or elsewhere).
The Army Customizer is quite detailed and therefore not the easiest to use of its kind published in a miniature game. That said, you can get by with a pen, some paper and a pocket calculator if you follow the guidelines laid out diligently enough (and a computer applet of some sort is likely to be made available for the task in the near future).
Starting from the technology level, you can tweak numerous tactical and strategic parameters for your army, including the army's ability to put up with casualties, the variety of different troop types available and the maximum points values that can be used for different classes of weapons. Actual troops and weapons are then selected according to these parameters from various tables that contain dozens upon dozens of different infantry and weapon types with varying degrees of exotic effects and abilities: you can specify terror inducing weapons and flying infantry, anti-vehicle munitions that burn through armor like paper and troopers linked by gestalt consciousness and much, much more. Obviously the more powerful and exotic troopers and weapons will cost more points and therefore be available in smaller numbers than lowlier grunts. In addition to infantry and their weapons, you can also "build" vehicles for your army, although they are more limited in variety, the emphasis of the game being clearly in infantry operations. You can further tweak the troops you create with various augmentations on a per game basis. The points values that get assigned to the final product are a combination of statistical analysis (hidden in the tables provided, the calculations required from the user are simple stuff) and extensive play testing. All in all, the Army Customizer provides for an extremely versatile tool kit for creating varied armies based on the models you have in your disposal.
Furthermore, as I previously mentioned, all of the "officially sanctioned" DVG armies are also produced entirely with the Army Customizer. This means that the developers of the game have considerable faith in the system's ability to create balanced forces even for competitive gaming. My still somewhat limited gaming experience with DVG does seem to validate this trust as I've yet to discover any obvious imbalances. That said, truly achieving the balance does require you to adhere relatively closely to the suggestions given in the book on the size of the board, the army points values in games and the amount of terrain used.
In practise, this requires you to "think big". The board must be quite large (6' by 4' is close to a minimum, although in a pinch you can alleviate this by using the 15mm measurements with 28mm miniatures), and the points values to be used and consecutively also the number of model deployed must be fairly high, as must be the amount of terrain on the board. These requirements may in fact be impossible to meet for a "rookie" miniature gamer, although I suppose the point is somewhat moot as beginners are not too likely to get into "obscure" games such as DVG anyway. A more experienced miniature gamer and collector should not have any trouble meeting the suggested limits however.
Another limitation bought on by the Army Customizer's ability to produce competitive forces is the fact that there is a distinct upper limit for options a single army can contain (from a vastly larger although obviously not infinite number of options theoretically possible). Especially the number of different vehicles that can be made available is strictly controlled. When converting from a pre-existing template, for example an army list in another game, this can lead to some headache. Fortunately, there is an example of how you can work around this problem in the official army lists section of the book: the Human Confederacy army list requires you pick a "national force", each of which is a legal DVG army although the whole of the Confederacy army is too large to fit the parameters. You can similarly partition your force into "doctrines" that share some troops and exclude others.
Defiance Universe -- the fluff
A short word is in order on the fiction (or the "fluff" as the term coined by Games Workshop goes) contained in the Defiance book. The Defiance universe as envisioned by D. Rose has roughly the same amount of hard scientific credibility as Babylon 5 TV-series, which is perhaps not a whole lot but enough to up it to the category of science fiction as opposed to pulp or space fantasy.
According to the back story, the alien Vobian Hegemony has dominated the known Milky Way galaxy for nearly a thousand years, but now their interstellar empire is collapsing under the combined effect of an intergalactic (and partially interdimensional) invasion of the enigmatic Starslayer Founding and their former vassals and competitors seizing the opportunity to cast off the yoke of the Vobians from their backs. The "rebels" include the silicon-based life forms of the Meraxilla and the non-humanoid Altai, as well as the Human Confederacy, a conglomeration of human colonies created by Vobians from abducted and cloned Earth humans (in addition to collecting samples, the Vobians have also clandestinely affected Earth's history for several centuries -- a fitting scenario in a game produced by a company called Majestic 12). In other words, the time is now, the place is here, and the stakes are nothing less than the control of the Milky Way galaxy itself.
For now, the fluff is little else than an entertaining read (for miniature game fiction), and the official army lists mostly act as a comprehensive example of the power of the Army Customizer. The situation is about to change however as Iron Mammoth, a small British miniature company, is currently prepping the first official Defiance miniatures for production. And of course it wouldn't be too difficult to create the Human Confederacy forces at the very least by combining models from the many existing science fiction miniature lines.
The layout
The layout of the book gives the impression of a futuristic e-book and is clean and practical, but not in any way rife with eye candy lavished on their rulebooks by the likes of Privateer Press, Rackham or Urban Mammoth.
While the Defiance book may appear a bit bland in comparison, the more important factors such as readability, number of examples and descriptive diagrams and the general concise and exact presentation of the rules nevertheless make the book stand out in the contested market. This mitigates a lot of the learning curve I mentioned earlier in the article.
DVG even has an index in addition to the contents page, which is a welcome and still all too infrequently appearing feature in miniture gaming products. The sparsity of watermarking on the pages is a definite plus for a PDF publication, especially since the few watermarks used are once again a little too dark. Fluff section contains most of the original artwork in the book and while their presence does somewhat degrate the overall functionality of the layout they are quite good illustrations on their own right, giving valueble insight into the aesthetic of the different cultures in the Defiance universe.
In the tradition of the miniature game rule books, a number of templates and markers are printed in the final pages for the player to cut out and employ in their games. I leave it to each player to decide for themselves how necessary they are, I've been using markers from other games as well as well as different dice (DVG normally only uses D10s) to denote status information required.
In conclusion
Although DVG is quite able to function as a "full service" science fiction miniatures game that is scaleable to many different playing styles and army sizes while adhering to a sort of "realism" as to the outcome of the decisions made at game time, it is still first and foremost a "generic" miniature system targeted at gamers both willing to work on building their own armies and having at least a reasonable collection of miniatures to apply to the army lists they create. While it does face stiff competition in this category as quite a few generic games vie for a market share (as opposed to what the situation was some 2 years ago when DVG was first projected to come out), the development effort poured into the new edition and the experiences learned from the previous one (the Starslayer game mentioned at the start of this review) ensures DVG is top of the line when it comes to producing balanced, variable armies from scratch or converting them from various other game system into a single rule set.
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