 Hi everybody, welcome back. So we're here in the studio, here's Dr Matt. Hello. All about what's changed in Firefight. Okay, well we've taken the opportunity to have Firefight been around for a while now. Good slug of tournaments, lots of games being played, lots of feedback online. Awards. Awards as well, yeah, it is a great game. And we've taken all of that feedback, not just on the rules themselves, but on the units and what people want to see and what they like, what they don't like. And we've kind of scooped all that up and put it all into one place. So looking at rules, units, everything, all at once. Yeah, so it's the awarding game just even better. Absolutely, yeah, sounds good. Boosted, in fact. Yes, so where do you get all your feedback from? A mixture of places, so obviously we've got Firefight tournaments happening, so the tournament organisers, especially if they're active in the community, will either feedback to us directly, or they'll feedback via Facebook groups and forums and things like that. We've got a number of people that we know from other game systems that are very active, who obviously want to see Firefight and Magic Games doing well. They will always feedback to us on their thoughts and where they think things are good or need some adjustment. And as with any of our other game systems, we've got a rules committee of active players or players who are very passionate about the game, very knowledgeable about the game, and they'll filter all of that feedback and come up with solutions or suggestions on how to improve the game or tweak it. Great stuff. So that's quite a unique model. Yeah, I think so, certainly with the rules committee. You know, they are fanatic fans of the game, very dedicated to the game, a huge amount of passion, and they have a lot of leeway working with us to develop the game that they love. So we've sometimes had beta lists come into the game. We've had one that's now made it into the book that's coming out, so can you tell us about them? Earlier on we had actually the first Firefight kind of full release was Maison Labs, the first new army. But that went out as a beta list when it came out with the models. So that's now made its way into the core, if you like. So it's now published, a fully published list. So that's probably been some tweaks and things since the beta was published, alongside all the other slew of changes that have affected the game as well. That would have been adjusted. Yeah, that's now kind of, it's not the Paul Cousin anymore. As a beta, it's now an official list along with everything else. And for anybody who doesn't know, Maison Labs is a shady corporation doing all kinds of... I think all the corporations are pretty shady. They're all pretty shady, especially shady, but up to all kinds of experimentations. They have access to zombies and some plague things, but then also lots of private military hardware as well. It's quite a fearsome mix. They've got the money to hide their operations and do what they want really. Yeah, fantastic. Okay, so we're talking a little bit about the rules. What are the biggest rules changes that have come in? It's a mixture. So there's some subtle things and there's some bigger things as well. So in terms of some of the subtle things around assaulting, so there are some... Assaulting could be quite powerful. In a game where there should be guns dominating, we've had a look at that. Change the rules for when you're disembarking from a vehicle. So you're always going to be hindered and you can't see your target, which is effectively a double minus one when you're doing that. If your vehicle is already sprinted, you can only advance out of it, so you're not going to be able to get a charge off. Because coming out of a safe vehicle into the face of you is a big scary thing. But then there might be some exceptions. There might be some assault vehicles, for example, which will then allow you to do that. Because they're built for purpose. And as I just alluded to, so if you can't, if a unit when it charges, can't initially see its target, it's a minus one. Okay. So there's a little subtle things like that. Certainly around dice rolls, one of the things that was in the rules where if you need more than an eight to hit, it was half dice. We've got rid of things like that because it was almost never came up. So now if you over need eight to hit, it's just eight. Okay. So there's some little subtle things like that. There are some more impactful things, but add a lot of flavor. Okay, that sounds good to me. So something like the faction orders. Yeah. So one of the unique things about Firefight is the command dice that you are in, that resource that you have to spend on the cool things that you want to do with your army. Um, so we've doubled the number of faction orders for every faction from three to six, but you're now limited to only using one of them each per round so you can't keep spamming the same one over and over and over. Yes. You've now got to think about what you want to do, but now there's a lot of flavor within each army. Yeah, I had a look at some of those this morning and they're very, very thematic. And even just kind of reading down the list of names, it all feels like the kind of things that the forge fathers would have, all the marauders would do. Yeah, exactly. And one of the things we've also done is a new keyword called a trademark. So each army now has trademark weapons and then some of those faction orders will, you know, key into the units that have got those trademark weapons. Yeah, so it's enhancing all the stuff that makes it unique. Yeah, exactly. So for like no pistols, no rifles, for example, will be the Asterians trademark weapons. Yes, okay. And then Gendlings for the reinforcers. Yeah, exactly. That kind of thing. Yeah, great stuff. So Matt, have there been any changes to actions and the term structure? Yes, they have. So there are two new actions. Talk about those in a second. So in terms of the term structure, again, it's one of those subtle changes. So the person with initiative can now choose whether to go first or second. Okay, that sounds good. The subtle change. And when you spend a command point to do an extra activation, you now can't do that if you're the first person going first in that turn. So you can't do a double tap before your opponent gets to do anything at all. Yeah, because that was definitely one of the things that we had to take feedback on before. Yeah, it could be a little bit overpowering. People were combining that in all sorts of ways with other things. Yeah, it could be a little bit overpowering. There are two new actions. So there's now an Overwatch action, which is a short action. But it allows you to do something else that's a short action. Go into Overwatch, put the token down next to them. If that unit is, despite the fact that they've activated, if they then get assaulted, they can still make an assault reaction by spending it by using that Overwatch. And there's also now a steady aim action, which allows the unit, when it's shooting, to ignore a minus one. So we can ignore the fact that someone's in cover or smoke or something like that, which is quite cool. Sounds good. I suppose my next question, harking back to things we've heard from tournaments, is terrain. We had lots of kind of a system of rules around terrain that was a very particular way of doing things. Has that stayed the same? Has that changed? We've taken the opportunity again with that feedback to clean up the terrain rules and the building rules as well, because they were a little bit clunky, I suppose, a little bit confusing. So we've taken the opportunity to do both. We cleaned up the wording, we put some tables in to show what types of terrain and how they interact with people. And one of the other things we've done is we've changed the wording around the amount of terrain that we recommend people use, which is again, which was feedback. And we had a lot of tournament organisers or RC members saying that they were quite surprised at how little terrain people were using on the tables and then wondering why I think it was just blown away. Because there was no cover. Yeah, exactly. Yes, okay. So we've changed the wording around that and the recommendations. And we'll have some pictures in the book as well of example terrain set up. Okay, give you a feel or else I'm just in words. Yep. Yep. Okay, that sounds good. Cool. So Firefly is a game with plenty of keywords in. To how we kind of give things theme and flavour. Yeah. Any changes there? Yes, again, based on feedback and just reviewing the keywords and just the number of them. So we've basically heard all the wording on a lot of them. Okay. Plenty of things up. Yeah. FAQs and all that sort of thing. We have adjusted some of them and added some new ones as well. Smoke was a great idea but I think caused a lot of problems with certain army builds and things like that. So smoke is one of the good examples of where we've changed the keyword. So there's no templates used there anymore. Basically, if you've got smoke launches or something like that, you target a friendly unit and if you hit them, then they have stealthy until their next activation. Okay. So it's just a different way of approaching the same thing but you get the same theme but a different way of doing it. It's not so usable as a rule to lay template everywhere and et cetera. Yeah. And there's some new ones that we've added shore-footed, devastated, battle damage which is related to vehicles. So yeah, they're good to overhaul of that and clean up of that whole keyword system. But I think overall, existing firefight players are going to look at this system and think, okay, 95% of this is the same game. It's the same mechanics without the 5%. Wow, that makes a real difference. Cool. Of course, all of these rules they serve to allow us to take our forces on missions. So what's happening there? So actually, we've left the narrative missions as they are. We've left them there. But what we've done is we've taken the eight battle missions, pushed them to one side and put eight completely new ones in as well. Fantastic. So there's new challenge for everyone as well as obviously learning the new nuances of the game and their army lists and things like that. Yeah, eight completely new missions. One of the things that the old missions were lacking was the use of unit strength, which is in the profile. Something is obviously taken over from Kings of War as a lot of the Kings of War scenarios use those two. So I think at least four of the eight missions now use unit strength as a way of scoring. So that's now a key part of your... On the profile is now key to think about. So you can't necessarily score a big objective with a tiny unit, that kind of thing. Yeah, or you can if there's lots of them and then you outscore your opponent. Right, yes. That sounds good. So it stops you from gaining the system in an unrealistic way. So with our strike teams, we have to arrange those in a particular way. And I remember the old force organisation chart. Does that state the same? It's changed slightly. So again, some subtle changes. One of the things we've introduced is something that Kings of War uses. And we brought into firefight because it works. And that's a limit on the number of times you can replicate certain units. And that will scale up with points value. Because they're rare or special? Yeah, or they're a particular unit that you don't want someone to just... I mean, from our point of view, we'd love people to spend as much money on the models as possible. But if you turn up for an event and someone's got 20 of one particular unit, which is horrifically... Then Korea is just a very broken army. It's giving people the flexibility still within their army list, but not allowing them any abuse of certain units. So we've introduced that limit system. So it's the same as Kings of War on certain units. So it might be that up to certain points of value you can take one, then two, then three, etc. So as usual, it's all about what makes the game fun. Yeah, and what creates a balanced, more realistic makeup or composition of the stroke force. Okay. So on the subject of vehicles, we've obviously got a few sitting in front of us here. People may recognise bits of some of them, and a couple of things are going to be totally brand new. So we have variants now coming in, which I can see on the top of our flyer and our tank over here for the forward fathers and the enforcers. But these two look completely new. Can we talk about that? Yeah, so we look at... So we've obviously, and Ronnie had kind of teased this at the last open day, I think, that we have a big focus on vehicles, which we have. So throughout the force lists, as well as looking at the force list generally, obviously making changes to faction orders and things like that, we've looked at every single unit and made a lot of adjustments here and there. We've introduced a lot more vehicles and vehicle options. Yeah, this is most definitely not all that's... There's quite a lot on the way. And which we'll talk about in a minute, there's a vehicle mode of playing as well. So yeah, so we've taken the opportunity to take a lot of our existing kits and add new components to them, new weapon options, command options. There's an assault tank variant of this guy. Obviously, there's comms variant, the hornet's now got... It's going to swap out for more guns on the sides, you've got a gunship hornet. And we've also done some collaboration with some of our partners in the industry. So you may recognise some of these. So this is the warring tank from Ark on Studios. Do we work with Kings of War? Yeah, absolutely, doing our plastics. And this one is Combat Drone. This is now a Pathfinder Combat Drone. That's from Warlord Games. So we're working with other partners as well, so they can showcase theirs. The vehicles, they become part of our game. So they're now fully part of the enforcers. GCPS get this, Marauders get this. Yeah, so as far as if that gets bigger and better, it's a chance for some of our partners to come in almost guest-starring. Absolutely, you know, I will, really. But we're making them ours, so they get profiles in our game. Change the names are appropriate, like the warring here. Obviously the kit itself comes with a gun. We've now also got an ABC turret in the section you can put on top as well. That will come with a tank, so you can use it either way. So as well as taking the existing plastics from our partners, we can do the same thing as we've done with warring ones that add resin alternatives to them as well. Yeah, that's very exciting. Forward Fathers have had the Monopoly on tanks for a little while, too long, so it's now time to sort of strike back from a few of the other factions, because GCPS will get this, but of course other factions can use it as well. Yes, the Plague get it, I believe, and the Maison Labs don't, because what we've said is that this is actually quite an older technology, so it's kind of garrison forces, kind of third, fourth, fifth sphere corporation technology. So, well, it's because it's robust and it's easy to prepare, that's why they keep it up there, but Maison Labs being kind of the cutting edge of technology, we'll use more modern tech than these guys will, but yeah, the marauders have got these as well. Yeah, good stuff. So with all these vehicles, we've obviously brought in some, and this is really, with Firefight, this is, I'm just getting into it now, this is what I'm here for. We have a brand new set of missions and a brand new mode called Annihilation. Yes, so with all of these vehicles, Ronnie was very keen to have a kind of vehicle mode in the game, so that's what we've done. So I guess in the similar vein to how, in Kings of War, you've got, you can play either ambush or you can play legendary games, or you can play Siege, yeah. So there's a section of the book now in Firefight, which is called Firefight Annihilation, which basically turns the force organisation on its head a bit. So you have mechanised units and then non-mechanised units. I'm smiling because I've read it, and it's very, very good. So for every two mechanised units, you can then, if you want to, take one non-mechanised unit. So it's heavily weighted towards vehicles, bikes, walkers, that sort of thing. Within there, there's a little bit more detail for vehicles. So they have front arcs, back arcs. It's obviously more advantageous to shoot them from the rear. Once they've taken over half damage, there's now a quite simple vehicle damage table you can roll on to see what effects they have on them. And on top of all of that, they've obviously got their own missions as well. So there's now five missions specifically for annihilation. So get out your vehicle collection and blow lots of tanks. Yeah. Well, we've got lots of nice hard plastic vehicles already, and we're about to bring in a whole bunch of resin upgrades and new plastics from our partners. So it's all getting very, very exciting. Absolutely. Good times. And that's probably it. There's more coming in the rest of the year for firefight as well. So we've got vehicles now, which will be shipping in August. We've got a second wave of vehicles that's going to ship in September. And then after that, we've got terrain and new things for enforcers and all kinds on the way. So that's the exciting stuff planned in 24 as well. Fantastic stuff. Well, thank you very much, Matt. Thanks for joining us. And we'll see you all soon. Thanks.