Fleets of Ossia: War Machines

Fleets of Ossia: War Machines is a little naval skirmish wargame based on razorborne's Fleets of Ossia block. Build your fleet and choose your stratagems, then try to defeat your opponent and sink their flagship before they do the same to you. Choose from one of 10 fantasy island factions and vie for control of the entire Ossian archipelago!

War Machines is currently in Beta - all 10 Isles are finished and playable. The official Roll20 campaign is here: https://app.roll20.net/join/1079940/bEUbAQ

This thread is for discussion of the game in development. Comments and criticism appreciated!

I'll work out all the story backgrounds later, but here's some names for secondary flagships:

Korrath: I'd probably switch Claw to the second one, it feels like a better fit. (at least mechanically. maybe some of the names need to be shifted.) for the other one, I'd call it The Whispering Fang
Teth: The Masked Grotesque
Qelan: Mesik's flavor doesn't really work here, Mesik stayed on Qelan until she went to sea with Temik. she never had her own ship. I might switch The Wildsong to the new one and call the old one The Seascreamer
Blackrock: Boulderdown
Kemil: I'd switch the two just because I think it lines up better with the inevitable mechanics of the Barge, but I'm fine with The Crimson Arrow.
Telimar: The Child of Vines. although may want to do a different weapon because that implies an association with the Vinechildren. which it probably should be since they're the ones who are responsible for setting up traps and such.
Milor: I'm really hesitant to make a ship that is literally the Soul of Waves, because the Soul doesn't really actually leave the Crystalline Chamber. the card represents the influence of the Soul acting through the rest of the Wavekin, but I don't know if an actual Ship makes sense. I think the most likely thing flavorfully would be to call it The Tempest and flavor it as a cloud of Lightkin, but I don't know if that works with the mechanics.
Epala: I'm fine with The Twilight Flower.
Chirom: you don't have this one there yet, but The Goredriver is an option.
Dragonroost: I agree it should represent Narrin's ship, but Narrin's ships are pretty small. maybe this'd be a good place to do flagships with different point costs, where The Fangbow is a large, powerful ship, whereas Narrin's vessel (I never really got around to naming this because it's a small individual craft that Narrin mans basically by himself, but I would probably just call it The Swiftpad) is small and fast and lets you have a larger fleet but mostly just tries to stay out of the way.

All factions are finished. Will make a Roll20 campaign and try to get in some games over the weekend.

I don't know how powerful this would be, but if you wanted to do Narrin's ship without having it be purely keepaway, it might be nice to start it small and give it a passive ability to gain a crew every turn. that way it flits away at the start to go hide, but later on it can swoop in and commandeer ships really easily.

Interesting idea. Dunno if it's worth the bookkeeping, but it's something to keep in mind for future expansions.

I added two example scenarios at the end of the document, in case anyone is interested in playing but feels daunted by the number of choices in fleet construction. They're also a starting point for balance tweaks. One is a Kemil vs. Dragonroost introductory game based on All Aboard!, while the other is a more complex Blackrock vs. Telimar attack/defense scenario.

One of my RL friends agreed to playtest this thing with me over the weekend. I'll have a go and see how the game plays out over the table.

War Machines now has an official playtesting Roll20 campaign!

Edit: Preliminary playtesting with my RL friend shows that all the ranges were way too short. Right now we're balancing Kemil and Dragonroost, two of the most generic Isles in terms of mechanics, so that we can get a sense of where the numbers should be.

New in Version 0.03:

• Winning a clash now deals 2 damage to the enemy ship rather than capturing it immediately, which makes games that come down to a single clash less anticlimactic. If you would destroy a ship this way, you can commandeer it, which will give you the ship and heal 1/2 of its damage, rounded up. A Reeling ship now automatically loses all clashes.
• Added a new comeback mechanic, Second Wind. If you've lost more than half your ships, you can call on the Second Wind at the end of your turn and take an extra turn after this one. The Second Wind is a one-shot bonus: only one player can claim it, and only once per game.
• Korrath's Fang weapons now have Range 5" instead of Range 4".
• Kemil's Arrow Volley weapon now has Accuracy 3 instead of 2. This is to reinforce that they're the best at ranged combat.
• Dragonroost's The Fangbow and Saurian Frigate now have Dodge 6 instead of 7, to make them less frustrating to fight.

I'd up the accuracy on Barbed Rain too. situations where you use a stratagem and it does nothing are really unfun.

I'm free if anyone's up for playtesting this weekend.

I may be able to do some time sunday but probably not but I'll let you know

This looks really cool. I might be interested in playing at some point, if time ever allows.

Thanks. Feel free to PM me anytime during the weekend.

Wow !
You are awesome ! This seems better then most "actual" miniature wargames!

Thoughts :
1) Second Wind is a bad mechanic. It works fine if one player dominates another. But if players are close to each other, it enforces weird gameplay, stalling, and suicide maneuvers to trigger extra turn.
Suggestion: make it trigger when one player has like, 40% less points in his ships then another player.

2) Choice between flagships and strategems is interesting. But comlectation of fleet from 4 options is underwhelming.
Suggestion: permit a player to ally with one another isle, either to buy their ships for extra ~20% cash money cost, or to have an option of spending like, up to 30% of starting points on their ships. (For original cost)

Hi UselessCommon, thanks for reading and commenting.


I'm okay with this to a certain extent. I like that the optimal strategy in this game is to fight aggressively and go straight for the flagship; it means you're never truly behind, since you can always call on the Second Wind. Stalling tactics generally don't work in this game because there aren't enough CC mechanics to block fleets from diving the flagship; the game is all about how much damage you can stick.


I don't personally find the choice underwhelming. Even in a game like StarCraft, your army is made up of like four kinds of units, maximum. I feel that adding more units at this early stage would make the game harder to balance and more unnecessarily complicated.

1) Sure. It resolves works.
2) Not a fan of RTS, but I know that StarCraft II 's simplest strategy, space marine drop, requires 3 units: space marines, marauders, transport ships. And more complex strategies, like Protoss OMFG can take like 8 or so units. And each faction has ~14units.
Choosing ~4 of ~14 units is not like choosing 2-4 of 4 units. In MTG terms, it's not like creating a deck, but like adjusting proportions of diffrent cards in a well-known archetype. Considering the fact that the most important cards go in 4-packs (in this game: flagship is forced) and you only adjust utility card proportions.
How would you make an optional or casual faction alliance system ?

On factions, there's also the fact that the game has 10 different factions, each with different mechanics. That means the diversity within individual factions is less important -- but I still tried to create two viable playstyles for each faction, as you can see from the two different flagships. So that's 20 fleet archetypes out of the box without going into stratagems or differing fleet compositions.

The simplest way to combine factions would be to field two 200-point armies, in effect making moves for two players at once.

This kinda works, because you can focus on inter-faction synergy, and/or cover one army's weaknesses with another army's advantages.
But... it still doesn't makes choice between units very interesting. Like, together those armies are something new, but separated, they are as typical as they are in "normal mode".

Also, how stratagems and flagships should be distributed ?



You did almost all the pre-combat work yourself. You designed all the archetypes and provided all needed tools, no more and no less.
MTG analogy: Duel decks. Balanced against each other, fun to play... but leave little room for experiment and game exploration.