KILLED IN ACTION Game

Fun thing I've been doing and might as well post about: I've spent months making a homemade tabletop wargame for my kid nephew, who loves the Army (his Dad and I are both Soldiers) but is still a few years too young to get into 40k or wargames with a bad price to breakable ratio

@CerebrumHarvest @MDualsense @vikare06 @jtimsuggs Kentucky is not a location in the Star Wars universe, though it's easy to be confused due to several of the films rural country like locations and race scenes.

@KIA_WarGame @MDualsense @vikare06 @jtimsuggs Please k.y

The fact that there are no guardrails in this area because the Death Star was designed by Geonosians that could just fly away in case of an emergency is honestly such a great detail.

@RespectedMan3 @MDualsense @vikare06 @jtimsuggs "It's a trap" is the line you're thinking of.

@KIA_WarGame @MDualsense @vikare06 @jtimsuggs Naaaah its bait

@Clint_Davey1 My wife loves The Scottish Chiefs and was excited then not excited when I surprised her with "the movie version".

When I say I like Mel Gibson as a director, I'm referring to Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto, not Braveheart.

@RENN___3 Drum mag that bad boy now!

@mightydudbolt Attack of the Clones is a way less goofy movie than Fellowship, tbh.

What is the massive gap in quality supposed to be here? Yes, I know, you're going to accuse me of being blind or whatever. But seriously. What are we actually talking about when we say these things? They don't appear, to me, to correspond to any clearly observable reality. And note that Peter Jackson actually updated a bunch of the CGI textures for the 4K release of LOTR (which I don't recall many people protesting), so this isn't even a fair comparison. Yet this still just looks like roughly comparable, high-quality CGI from the same era.

@ConeOfArc It was a sensible move considering Germany's perpetual fuel shortages.

Crazy to think these were powered like a wind up toy instead of using an engine

Whether or not the final drawing matches the complexity of the process, the art for my game markers has PowerPoint ready to melt my laptop ha

Special Weapons are game-long modifications to the standard rules that represent equipping your troops with specialized weapons, non-standard equipment, or vehicle upgrades for the battle. Each card has its own point cost based on utility, as well as associated nations. If playing with the optional county rules, you can only choose from the cards associated to the army you are playing, ie StG 44 rifles for German infantry. The Special Weapons cards let you customize your forces without requiring the creation of tons of new unit types and markers that might rarely be used. They stay in your back pocket until you first use them, at which point you reveal them to the enemy. This also gives an element of uncertainty to every game, as you can't be sure exactly how your enemy is equipped and what they are capable of until your troops find out in combat. I also used the special weapons cards to represent somewhat niche vehicles that you can take in lieu of the standard archetypal ones. As an example, there are Special Weapon cars to let commanders take either US M18 Hellcat tank destroyers (better gun, worse armor) or German Panzer II L Lynx light tanks (better armor, worse gun) instead of the regular light tank. The markers stay the same, but the rules don't. The cost of Special Weapons cards adds up quickly. You can kit out your tanks with better armor, cannons, camo paint, radios, anti-infantry defenses, and superior gun sights, but all that is coming at the cost of 2-3 tanks, and you'll need a lot of tanks to justify investing so much in them. It's a balancing act between force size and force capabilities. Some of the Special Weapons cards:

Secret Plans (based on my nephew's spur of the moment ideas while we played his wargame, "let's add calling an artillery strike", etc) are special one time only actions representing unconventional or special tactics that impact the game in different ways. The cards are wildly unbalanced on purpose and can very much change the pace and outcome of the battle. Your random plan might let you call in bomber support, or it might let you check the backs of a few civilians to assist recruiting partisans. They must be played at the first action of a turn, and are discarded after. Commanders can draw them randomly during force selection for a reduced cost, or pay extra to chose the exact ones they want. Chosing the right Secret Plans is important. Used at the right time they can be the decisive moment of the game, or they can be totally useless for the situation you find yourself in. An assortment of the Secret Plan cards:

The Gameplay Rules: KIA originated with my kid nephew's simple wargame rules for his army men he created and we played, my enjoyment of war games in college, and a want to do something fun for him and a desperate need to stave off boredom in my injured light duty desk job.

@MarsBlut53 @MDualsense @vikare06 @jtimsuggs V/X ragebait, actually

@KIA_WarGame @MDualsense @vikare06 @jtimsuggs 5/10 ragebait

@MDualsense @vikare06 @jtimsuggs There's no excuse not to know this, these are famous films and they put the numbers in giant font in every title. If you don't know Roman numerals, I=1, V=5, and you sorta stack them together to make specific numbers.

@KIA_WarGame @vikare06 @jtimsuggs I am hoping this is a joke and you are not actually this dumb

@vikare06 @jtimsuggs This scene is in the 4th movie, the Geonosians were in the 2nd one.

@jtimsuggs i don't think he had even thought of Geonosians at the time though, no?

@Alaskacryptogi1 @oasishealthapp Watsonville has a ton of other agriculture too, and a large part of the population lives in pretty squalid poverty and/or has some seriously unhealthy lifestyle habits kids are exposed to.

@oasishealthapp I'm completely baffled here. Ounce per ounce spring crops have less of anything sprayed then all of produce. It makes zero sense. There has to be another source of this.

Children living near Driscoll's strawberry farms have a 38% higher childhood cancer rate than average. But Driscoll's can't be sued for any of it. They don't own a single farm, grow a single berry or apply an ounce of pesticides themselves They are a genetics and marketing company making $3 billion a year, licensing plant patents to over 700 farms and taking a cut. Their president said it himself: "Driscoll's is not involved in the fruit farming" Researchers identified 13 pesticides linked to childhood cancer when sprayed within 2.5 miles of a home. 98.5% of those leukemia-linked pesticides were applied in Watsonville, California (Driscoll's main strawberry operation). - Schools sit just yards from the fields - 41,000 lbs of pesticides applied within 1 sq mi of an elementary school - Pesticides linger in the air for up to 72 hours Driscoll's is currently #1 strawberry in the U.S. Check for pesticide testing on the Oasis app

This never got better for Austria-Hungary. By the time WWI rolled around any minority that made up over a certain percentage of a military unit has a right to be commanded in their own language, of which the empire had many. To avoid the risk of revolution, non-German officers were rarely paired with their own ethnicities, and KuK officers were required to learn at least 2 languages of the empire. This was coupled with a social system that saw virtually no casual off duty friendliness between officers and their NCOs. AH officers realistically had limited chances to become seriously proficient in their troops languages. Often they could promote and be expected to start over with a new unit and new language. Europeans are better at 2nd languages than Americans are, but this is still an absurd handicap. It also took time they could otherwise have spent learning an enemy language, which has obvious military utility. The entire Austro-Hungarian army was required to learn an 80 word German pidgn language to let things function at all. Most shocking of all was the Germans did not know how bad this was until after the war started and they realized they frequently couldn't communicate with their "German speaking" allies. (the Austro-Hungarians are still the closest thing WWI has to a good side. My kid things Franz-Josef is Santa too.)

In Imperial Elegy the Austrians have to juggle 8 minority nationalities within their empire. Italians, Poles, Bosians, Croats, Romanians, Hungarians, Serbs and Czechs. You can grant them rights and then maybe grant them full citizenship. It stabilises your empire and can give you an excuse to wage wars of liberation - e.g. if you give the Poles full citizenship you could wage war to take the Polish territories owned by Germany or Russia. It can also help stave off revolts. But it comes at a high cost in Command Points, so you have to spend some big cards to do it. I love this. Always wanted to play a game where you have to lead the rickety Habsburg empire in the lead up to the Great War.

@oprktr They're both such incredibly fun guns to shoot:

what is your favorite gun during world war 1?

@Knightly_Hist It's hard to choose just one! MP18 is still the dream addition though.

Sweet unique little thing

@virtualmage17 The first level of this game felt so long and difficult as a kid that I assumed it was the entire game.

Desert Strike (SNES) 🚁🔥 One of the most unique games on the system at the time… Where does it rank among the SNES classics? 👀

@kyballistics Where'd you get the ammo?!? I own one and I've been unsuccessfully looking for custom ammo for damn near a decade now! (the bolt and an inert round next to a Mauser 98 bolt, a 30-06 and a 5.56 round for scale of this beast)

The German Tankgewehr M1918. The original anti-tank rifle.

@AndrewZ24597481 The Russ looks 100x better with a scaled down main gun that actually fits the turret. #HereticalOpinions

@AndrewZ24597481 Unpopular, borderline heretical take: The stock Russ looks bad because the gun is so absurdly oversized that a shell couldn't fit in the turret. The Dorn at least corrected this a bit.

The Rogal Dorn Tank - I know there are some complaints with this tank, but overall I love it. I like how she is proportioned and how it looks like there is more room in the turret for the main gun. I especially like the suspension and how wide the tracks are. Overall, she’s a cool looking tank.