Review: SpaceMaster Armored Assault

Review: SpaceMaster Armored Assault

This is something of a digression from my usual topics, where I talk about GURPS or D&D. I want to talk about a book that fascinates me but the one that I haven’t even tried in a game yet. Aside from tabletop RPGs, I’ve always been interested in tabletop wargaming. Of course, the most popular thing is Warhammer 40k, but I’m not a big fan of it. I played it with friends through VASSAL and Tabletop Simulator, and it just… doesn’t play that well; it feels that the game is decided not on the table, but on army roster creation. I do find the concept of collecting, building, and painting miniatures, but without this aspect, the game feels absolutely hollow to me. A few years ago, I decided to search for a generic and reasonably crunchy sci-fi wargame. I scoured an incredibly long list of games on BoardGamesGeek, but most of the games were either too specialized or too light on the rules. There was a couple of exceptions, however, and one of them was Spacemaster Armored Assault.

When I opened the book, I thought, “yes, that’s almost exactly what I want!” And I’d like to tell you why I liked it so much, because I’ve seen literally zero discussion about this book online. I haven’t found even a single review.

Let me start by explaining what Spacemaster Armored Assault even is. Armored Assault is a supplement for Spacemaster, which is a sci-fi book for the Rolemaster RPG. The book was published in 1989, as it’s a little bit older than me. While it is a supplement for Spacemaster, it can work completely standalone, so you do not need Spacemaster the Role Playing Game book. However, Armored Assault can be integrated with the normal Spacemaster rules and even with Spacemaster Star Strike, which is a spaceship combat and design book for Spacemaster RPG.

In terms of setting, it is 99% generic. I think there are literally only two setting assumptions spelled out in the book. First, nuclear and antimatter weapons are outlawed. However, if you do not want that, the book has optional rules for such WMDs. Second, vehicle crew plays a very important role in the vehicle’s performance. Yet again, the book also provides rules for robotic vehicles, if you do not want to bother with crew.

Spacemaster Armored Assault is a hex-and-chit wargame that uses a hex grid, but there are optional rules that would allow you to play with miniatures or without a grid at all. The main resolution mechanic is a d100, but there are some cases where a single d10 roll is required. Many of the d100 rolls are what the book calls “open-ended rolls.” I think that nowadays, this is more often called exploding dice. This means that if you roll 96-100 on a d100, you roll again and add the result to the original roll, and this additional roll may “explode” too. If you roll a 1-5 on a d100, you roll another d100 and subtract it from the original result, and this too can theoretically go on infinitely. You don’t get the beautiful bell curves of “3d6 roll under,” but you get much more granularity.

Since this uses basically the same mechanics as Rolemaster, you get a lot of charts. If you don’t like tables, this is not the game for you, but if you love tables like I do, you’re going to have a field day. For example, if you are attacking with a railgun, called MLA in Spacemaster – magnetic linear accelerator, you make your combat roll and cross-reference the result with the armor type of the target on the MLA Cannon Attack Table. Then, if you rolled a critical hit, which is a quite common occurrence, you look for a proper critical effect table roll. For example, for the aforementioned railgun used against a small vehicle, you make a d100 roll on the Pierce Critical Strike Table vs Small Vehicles and cross-reference it with the severity of the critical hit.

Now let’s talk about the superficial aspects – take a look at the cover art. This evokes the feeling of 70s-80s pulpy sci-fi, perhaps something you’d see on the cover of the Starship Troopers. But that’s only the
cover, the art on the pages inside the book is very different. Black-and-white pictures that are nonetheless very evocative. I really like this art style, and I greatly prefer it over the almost abstract black-and-white art of GURPS.

In terms of time scale, each turn represents one minute of real time. However, each turn also is split into six 10-second combat rounds. In terms of unit scale, each counter represents one vehicle, one powered armor trooper, or an infantry team. Each hex is 100 meters across. The game provides you with four example map sections that can be rearranged to create different battlefields. Each section is around 13-by-17 hexes across. To me, this seems to be something of a downside – this is a game that supports very different environments, and terrain plays a very important role, but all we get with the game is these four maps that are quite uninspiring. So, to get the most out of the game, you’ll have to make your own maps. Also, if I had to criticize the game, I’d say that it has absolutely no guidelines of how many units should be on each side for a map of certain size. There are several premade scenarios, but it would’ve been nice to have clear guidelines for scaling the game up or down.

What I cannot complain about is the variety of units. Many of sci-fi wargames seem to focus on a single unit type – tanks, ships, aircraft. Spacemaster Armored Assault lets you have infantry, powered armor troopers, walkers, jumpers, hovertanks, tracked and wheeled vehicles, ships, submarines, grav sleds, aircraft, robots, spaceships, and even mechs. Mechs are called MIRCs – maneuver interface robotic comboids. I think the only vehicle type missing is some subterranean tunneler.

There are twenty different types of armor, plus the force screens. Weapon arsenal is quite diverse – you get autocannons, lasers, plasma cannons, disruptors, ion beams, blasters, railguns, rockets, torpedoes, shaped charges, chemical warheads, smokescreens, mortars – you name it. Every weapon has a power rating – the mark number. While this may seem lame to some, it helps making the game generic. For example, what would be “RGX-500 Fusion Cannon” in-universe, would be a Mk. 35 Plasma Cannon in mechanical terms.

The game seems to emphasize the effect of terrain and positioning. Thus, facing and weapon mount firing arcs are very important. The number of terrain types is staggering, which yet again makes the maps that the game is supplied with seem lame – clear, brush, sparse wood, medium wood, dense wood, jungle, broken/rocky, rock spires, crater, gully, softsand, mud pit, marsh, magma – and that’s just natural land terrain. You can have roads, barricades, trenches, bunkers, buildings, ruins, and all of the above can be modified by slopes of different degrees of inclination, snow, sogginess, or ice. Even water terrain is much more varied than just “water” – you have different degrees of turbulence. With slopes in mind, you can even have vehicles travel along the bottom of a body of water. It really reminds me of Total Annihilation – this game supports anything you can imagine! If this is not enough, you can even add weather effects with optional rules.

The books separates itself into three sections – base game, standard game, and advanced game. The base game is quite barebones – many of the rules are simplified or cut. It is mostly there to make the reader familiar with the resolution system and movement. The basic game to the standard game is what GURPS Lite is to GURPS Basic Set. However, the basic game does some things better than GURPS Lite as an introduction. For example, it has notes everywhere saying what will be different in the standard game and what will stay the same. This is a very nice touch. The basic game only supports wheeled or tracked vehicles and nothing else.

The standard game is where Armored Assault goes all-out. Well, almost all-out. The difference between basic and standard games is drastic, while the difference between standard and advanced is much less pronounced. The standard game has almost everything – the advanced game merely adds aircraft and submarines. There is also a section with optional rules that can be used with either standard or advanced games. I really like this modular approach, it reminds me of GURPS – you decide what rules you want and what rules you don’t want to create the kind of experience you are looking for.

One of the important distinction between the basic game and more advanced rulesets is the initiative system. The basic game is “I go, you go.” Standard and advanced games use a very involved initiative system. The initiative order may change between turns, not combat rounds, and it is tied to platoons of vehicles, not each individual one, even though there is an option for that in the optional rule section. If you have high initiative, you may simply delay your actions and perform them later to interrupt a platoon with a lower initiative. This applies to everything – from movement to shooting. This makes the game much more interactive.

There is another mechanic that may take some time getting used to – movement declaration. At the start of each turn, you must decide which units will move this turn and place a move marker on them. However, if you placed a move marker, you must move the unit, if you are able to do that, during any one combat round of this turn, then flip the marker over. This move marker is important, as it defines certain combat penalties and disallows some maneuvers.

You know how most wargames that are tied to a specific setting only let you assemble an army from predefined units? Armored Assault is different. While there are some sample units, the book also gives you a robust design system that lets you design anything from an infantry team to a 1,000,000-ton tank. You may let your players design their own units, or have a library of preconstructed vehicles and units for them to choose from according to their faction.

If you want more prebuilt units, you can check out a companion book – Spacemaster Armored Assault: Armored Reserves. That book has many new vehicles, scenarios, and even two new optional rules.

What I like about Armored Assault is that is predisposed to narrative play. Vehicles can sustain damage that disables certain systems and mechanisms that can be repaired between combat. Crew may gain experience. If a vehicle is disabled, the crew may even have a chance to bail out and survive until the next battle. And as I said before, the crew plays an important role in this game. This way, you can have named characters and even integrate player characters into mass combat, if you’re playing an actual Spacemaster game. Even if you’re playing, for example, GURPS, it will be easy to transfer crew stats between the systems.

Overall, the system is quite heavy – the turn sequence for the standard game takes up an entire page, and an advanced turn sequence is even longer. There is a lot to track – the amount of bookkeeping will be high. Despite that, the game feels much more approachable than, for example, Advanced Squad Leader. It is easy to find where all the required rules are, and the rules themselves usually are quite intuitive. I know that many people scoff at mathematics, but you will have to do a lot of addition and subtraction. The game will not be fast, especially if there are many units on each side. By the way, multi-sided games are supported perfectly here, so you can have a free-for-all. However, since you do not need any miniatures, Armored Assault would play perfectly on a VTT. Something like a play-by-post environment using Discord or its analog would let you do all the bookkeeping in one place, and resolve the turns at your own pace, when you can easily open the book and read the rules without worrying about taking too long. I’d love to try that someday.

Now, let me talk about the downsides. I already said that I didn’t like the maps that are provided with the book very much, and the lack of scaling guidelines. There is something else – while the game is very generic and allows you to do almost anything, it leaves out non-sci-fi fantastical elements. For example, psionics or magic, huge monsters or cavalry. On the other hand, the book does tell you where to insert psionics into the turn sequence if you’re combining Armored Assault with Spacemaster, so I think you can take a look at Spacemaster psionics to see how it would work and work from there. However, you’d need to come up with a pricing scheme for the design system.

As for cavalry and giant monsters, you probably could come up with new unit categories for them, using infantry as the base for cavalry and walkers as the base for monsters. Adding new weapon types would require you to create a new big combat table to be able to resolve attacks, but that shouldn’t be that difficult. Adding new armor types, however, would require you to expand all existing combat tables, which I imagine would be a chore. So, if you want organic armor, I suggest reflavoring an existing armor type and treating them as equivalents.

Another criticism would be the number of typos. Oh boy, the book really could use some proofreading. My favorite typo is that 18 multiplied by 2 is 32.

Overall, I think this is an excellent book, but you should take my opinion with a grain of salt, because I haven’t actually played the game, even though I’d love to give it a shot. It is generic, crunchy, very flexible, easily modifiable and expandable, and would work perfectly with any VTT that allows a hex grid. I wish it got more attention online – I see many people complain about tabletop wargames, and I think that Armored Assault could be a solution to many of these complaints. You can still buy the books on DriveThruRPG.