A Big Havok Battle

I set up both of my entire collections of Karn and Nexus and pitched them against each other, not worrying about points, but just to play the game.

There were a few special rules I wanted to play with, and as far as Havok 2.0 is concerned, I’ve backtracked a lot of my changes largely returning to Havok’s original rules with only a few slight changes.

You can find the main rulebook here:

https://havok.fandom.com/wiki/Rulebook

I’ve kept my modifiers to rolls when shooting, instead of multiplying or reducing dice for range and cover.

When a unit shoots and scores hits, but fails to score enough to cause their target to make a single save, you roll a D3 and multiply the number of hits by the result. If that’s enough to cause a save you do, if it’s enough to cause more than one save, you still only cause one. It worked well in game, mostly allowing weaker or damaged units to claw back a little, especially against other infantry, it hasn’t yet helped anyone deal with a vehicle.

The other change to the main rules, was that when in melee combat I had the loser have their armour reduced by the difference in the number of hits scored for their armour save (to a minimum of 1). When playing with the rules as written before I found melee to be a little inconsequential, whereas I always imagine melee to be a significant thing, and I don’t like it when stuff gets locked in combat.

A fun strategy I noticed for the Karn was the suicidal Glaive Rider charge. When a Glaive Rider is killed they explode. Which means any miniature in base contact with them has to make an armour save. Since most units have low saves (bar Battle Forms), and higher strength stats, bypassing strength is a pretty powerful ability. So whether the Glaive Rider wins combat or not, the enemy will be making a save, and most likely being killed.

I’m going to have to include more units with heavy fire power. The only unit I had in this battle that could make a heavy shot was the Nexus Comms Officer calling in his orbital strike, but it worked really well and broke a bit of the games monotony up. Having tanks, battle forms and the odd infantry unit have access to heavy fire power would really help the game.

Heavy weapons have an infinite range, have a fire power of 1, 2 or 3, and roll to hit as normal, however you multiply the number of hits scored by a D6 roll and reduce the targets armour by the weapons power.

Heavy weapons would help you deal with Battle Forms and tanks without having them dominate the battlefield and hopefully add to that nice rock, paper, scissors situation.

I’ve also come to notice how good Havok’s basic system melee system is, some units are far more effective against others because of their strength bonus making them effective melee units. However when they are outclassed in the strength category they run into trouble. For example a Nexus Battle Form rolls 6 dice against Suma-Kai and they only roll 2, however a Suma-Kai rolls 4 dice against a Storm Trooper and they only manage 2 in response. It creates a real rock paper scissors element in melee.

One special rule I did implement, was a modifier to the roll off to determine who gets to activate a unit next. The Karn Warlord and Synthoids added 1 to the Karn roll and the Nexus Captain added 1 to theirs. I think this was a simple way of implementing officers without adding too many additional rules.

I also played around with morale rules. When a unit loses half of its models from one unit shooting it, it takes a morale check. To do that you roll 2D6 and add the Psyke stat of the unit, if the result is 7 or higher they pass, if it’s lower the rest of the unit flees from the battlefield.

At the end I actually had to calculate how much stuff each side had destroyed, and out of interest why not figure out how many points of Karn and Nexus I now have. Well, it seems the game was more balanced than I had initially thought!

The Karn Empire lost 910 points and had 264 remaining, meaning they had 1174 points in total.

The Nexus Rebellion lost 851 points and had 328 remaining, meaning they had 1179 points in total.

The Nexus were victorious.