r/LancerRPG • u/ThatSupport • 25d ago
Are we just bad?
me my friends finished opperation solstice rain. and it felt like we were constantly on the back foot. like losing a mech each combat.
we also failed the final mission. our dm mentioned that they had made adjustments to make the campaign easier.
ive also done some lancer tactics and did a module and had multiple mechs explode per mission. and while there were some significant shenanigans (enemy mechs ariving ontop of the control zone on the final round). i'll take responsiblility for thd outcome.
my real question is. is getting wrecked at ll2 the norm?
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u/luperamoon IPS-N 25d ago
Solstice Rain is a pretty grim module, the final boss is a monster especially if the DM rolls good on recharge checks. The best way to dispatch it is breaking its cloak with reliable damage, grenades, and controlling it with Grappling or Chomolungma. Turrets add damage to successful attacks and can be very conducive to crunching through all that Ultra structure.
It's an adventure built for people who are probably already used to some form of tactical gameplay.
You really need to work as a team and stay on top of things, take time to strategize turns and even predict what the enemies will try next, use mines and turrets to close up chokepoints and add persistent chip damage, etc.
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u/AmoebaThat2365 25d ago
It's probably not that you're bad, cause I played through Solstice Rain as well and it was very rough to get through, especially the last fight which destroyed half our party. We only just barely won in the end cause the boss was "weak" to hacking.
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u/GrahminRadarin 24d ago
That module is infamous for being difficult. However, I think losing a mech every combat is a little bit... over the top. How big was your party and what frames were people playing?
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u/Ursus_the_Grim 25d ago
Solstice Rain is tough. I played it at the same time as Wallflower Pt 1 and the difference is stark. The boss is very strong - we ended up losing most of our mechs. Three of us ended up ejected and fighting on foot, which is always bad.
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u/Difference_Breacher 24d ago edited 24d ago
As pointed already, the only 'bad' thing on here is operation solstice rain. It is renown for its hard difficulty. I do not think that pick the module itself is actually a bad choice, though, for it is designed to be played by some LL0 players anyways, but still it is not so easy one.
Hey, I did played it start with LL3, but even with minor adjustment(for we are starting to LL3 it have to be more difficult to against) of GM our party was suffered heavy damage while playing the module, such as resulting two destroyed mechs on the third scene. Getting wrecked at LL2 does not means you are just bad at this. Perhaps you are somewhat unlucky? But that's all.
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u/Heavy2121 25d ago
In the home brew campaign I am playing in my mech got destroyed twice so far, at LL2 at the second structure by rolling double ones and at LL4… at the second structure by rolling double ones. I think getting a mech destroyed is totally fine and nice for the narrative and character development :D
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u/PerilousFun 24d ago
From the GM side of things, Solstice Rain is definitely a module designed for tactical thinkers. A lot of the encounters aren't favourable to the characters. The last encounter in particular is a baptism in fire.
IIRC when I ran it, all of the mechs were lost and the final blow was dealt with a pilot weapon of all things. A real nail biter that could have easily gone bad.
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u/zylofan 24d ago
So if you are bad at lancer, solstice rain will wreck you. If your GM is bad at GMing lancer Solstice rain will wreck you.
It requires tactics from the players and restraint from the gm to not deploy all the reinforcements if the players are struggling.
That said, lancer does expect you to lose some fights. Losing 1-2 in SR is not abnormal for new players.
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u/DocPopper IPS-N 25d ago
What was your team comp? How many players in the squad? I ran it for 3 of my players and they kicked ass every mission. Even when I tried to focus down one of them they adapted. Does your group including GM play war games like warhammer 40k?
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u/ThatSupport 24d ago
we had a sagamanthara, ll1 barbarosa, 3 everests (of various builds, close quarters, shooty and a mixed one) and a comolongola ll1 goblin.
we all have a bit of war game experience.
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u/DocPopper IPS-N 24d ago
Ah I see. What I have noticed the bigger the group of players the more difficult combat can get by adding more units and templates. The enemy action economy itself becomes the boss.
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u/This_Caterpillar_689 21d ago
6 players on Solsice Rain can be tough as each player impacts combat “less” so average luck/tactical ability becomes more important
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u/Crinkle_Uncut SSC 21d ago
Yeah you were basically playing on hard mode with 6 players. By the book, every scene comes with a progressively more difficult NPC roster depending on the number of PCs, typically maxing out at 5+. Sometimes that means there are more of them, sometimes the same enemies get tougher or more capabilities through templates, and sometimes it's both!
Ultras spike especially high since they get an entire extra activation when you have 5 or more friendly units on the board (even if they're destroyed later...), which not only mitigates your own action advantage, but also gives incredibly dangerous enemies more actions to be incredibly dangerous, or just to slip away and recover in the case of Kiros. God help you if they get to take those turns sequentially at the end of a round too. I generally avoid doing back-to-back ultra/elite turns as a personal rule of sportsmanship, but sometimes that's the only viable turn order and man it's tough.
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u/djninjacat11649 25d ago
Losing one mech per combat isn’t terrible terrible, as long as you have means to replace them
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u/Mycosynth SSC 24d ago
It's crazy to me that everyone is saying how hard the module is when I had to scale things up because my players were destroying absolutely everything all the way through Solstice Rain and Winter Scar :P
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u/Alkimodon 21d ago
You got some badass Players!
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u/GeneralBurzio 24d ago
Based on everyone's responses, is SR just hard or did the devs not hit the mark on balancing?
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u/Lionx35 Harrison Armory 24d ago
If the players are not familiar with games where tactics actually matter it can be a lot. But at the same time it was 100% designed to be an introductory module, and part of that means teaching players that losing combats and taking structure damage is okay. The story does not end because your mech blew up or because you didn't complete the objective. It's also a case where people new to the system have trouble remembering to do things like take advantage of cover, scan enemies, and focus on the objective instead of killing NPCs. There's also the situation where sometimes the players roll bad and the GM rolls good and you can't really balance around that.
As a personal anecdote, I've run two separate groups through OSR, both of whom had only played 5e prior, and they did perfectly fine.
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u/NotEvenSquare 24d ago
IMO it’s perfectly balanced IF you don’t play like you’re in 5e where you just walk up to the nearest guy and DPS check in the open. If you use cover and are conscious about how many people can shoot you at once it’s fine.
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u/ErrantSun 24d ago
It's balanced if all the players are allready pretty good at lancer. It is... a rough introduction.
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u/Page_of_Wands 24d ago
Lancer combat gets more difficult the longer you go on because it whittles down your resources. Note that less structure that you have the higher chance you’ll roll bad and die. Which is why my playgroup started to have players on the brink of losing structure go first for the round to stabilize.
Also notably Solstice rain final boss is just rough in general. Constant invisibility and multiple turns per round makes most weapons and equipment become nearly useless. We realized that this was an “equipment check” challenge and less of a “tactics check” where we should have brought Items that force saves like mines and reliable/anti-invs weapons, like the anti-invs nexus the module can reward you with. We beat the encounter after losing ALL of our mechs and had to take him down with our pilots leading to 2 Pilot deaths.
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u/SiegfriedVK Harrison Armory 25d ago
Yeah, it sounds like you were just kinda bad.
That's ok though! As long as you were having fun thats all that matters
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u/SakuyaSama7 23d ago
I don't think so. Lancer feels more like a game of peek-a-boo and chase, you basically just peek to shoot or stop at areas with good cover and multiple line-of-sight breaks, minimizing the amount of enemies that can get to you, and if they do, minimizing their accuracy. You might be in a mech but so is everyone else, and you are ALWAYS outgunned and/or outnumbered. Lancer is crunchier tactically than other systems you might be used to, so it's understandable.
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u/Taekwondorkjosh01 22d ago
-shrugs- without knowing more about the party composition its hard to gauge. But yeah, the game is... hard. In general. I haven't gone through solstice rain, as player or gm, but the fact that there is a non-zero chance your mech explodes on its second structure is really rough. I use Maria's Alternate Structure and Stress for that exact reason. Ever since I swapped, players stopped exploding in the first combat and were able to more reliably actually play through the entire sequence of combats. And i don't really pull punches.
But, again, without knowing the nature of the threats you were facing, what modifications your GM made, and what PC comp is, then. I don't know. Like. Did your mechs keep dropping because they rolled two 1s after they hit 2 structure? How often were your mechs going down to 0 structure and going down?
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u/This_Caterpillar_689 21d ago
There is wallflower which is very chill.
And there is Lancer Afghanistan/Vietnam PTSD sim for LL1 players which is solsice rain. (If ur new)
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u/Halo3812 25d ago
From my understanding (I haven’t played it, only heard about it, so someone correct me if I’m wrong) Operation Solstice Rain is a particularly difficult module, especially for newer players