The Road to Release: Dev Log 1

Hello everyone, Jackson here!

Marcher has been in development now (rules-wise) since 2022. This means that at present, we’ve been tinkering with the rules for close to four years. During that time it’s undergone a number of tremendous changes and expansions, the most dramatic of which have occurred within the last year. 2026, however, is a momentous year, since this is the year in which the game finally goes to print. And so, we now only have around four months remaining to get the game into its best shape.

To that end, there’s a lot to do, and I’ll be doing my best to document parts of it with these development logs. Each of them will focus on a particular system of mechanics, my thoughts on them, and ways in which we’re thinking to improve them.

Today’s mechanic that we’re going to focus on is Suppression.

Marcher’s action economy is arguably the most impactful and interesting system in the game. It provides us with a way to differentiate units not only in their equipment, but in how they behave on the battlefield. Standard Actions were part of the very first draft of the rules, alongside Suppression. Suppression acted as our morale system in these early drafts, along with being the clear difference between troops and vehicles (though Basic Type keywords came along much later, for some reason.) 

In early drafts all weapons applied suppression tokens, and then Suppressive weapons applied an extra token. (Possibly more, I can’t fully remember.) This provided an amount of tokens that early playtesters noted as being “entirely unacceptable.” The idea was that if they had half as many tokens as they did HP, they would be Suppressed, and lose an action, and if they had more than their total, they would lose their whole turn, and also some of the squad would flee. This is a system that sounded good in theory, since suppressing fire in real life is often performed with whatever weapon systems are at hand, not just machine guns. In practice, too many tokens, too much math.

So the system got cut down to machine guns and SMGs. Then it got cut to just machine guns. Then, when that was too much, each type of machine gun in the attack pool. The system stayed there for a very long time. Over 2 years with no core changes beyond some slightly updated wording. This was fine, but during that time the game grew up, and grew past the system, leading to the current iteration. Beset on all sides with resistances, upgrades, officer traits, army specializations, and attaches, suppression as a mechanic was largely an afterthought. A full system of the game that could be turned off with a slight amount of effort during list building.

So, many conversations were had, debating how to solve the issue. And after some time we came to an interesting and extremely important conclusion. The fundamental mechanic behind suppression, though clean and easy to understand, was a bad one.

Essentially what it came down to, was that the mechanic didn’t feel good for either player. It wasn’t something that caused interesting tactical decisions or exciting moments on the battlefield. When it worked, neither player felt especially good about what had happened, because the mechanic had made it to where they weren’t actually playing the game. The unit skips its turn, move on. In a card game, a mechanic like this would be fine, because there are more cards and things will move on quickly. In a wargame, in which every unit fielded requires hours of work and a solid sum of money at a minimum, this was simply a recipe for bad feelings.

So, as one of our last major overhauls to the game, we’ve been working to revitalize this mechanic.

The major thoughts as to the changes are these:

• More interesting player choice: Old suppression resulted in a lack of player choice, new suppression must make for interesting decisions.

• Variable resistance: Many old resistance mechanics provided total resistance, we want to get away from this all-or-nothing approach, and introduce randomness.

• Simplicity: The last year has taught us a lot about how to teach mechanics, and the way suppression tokens were applied has caused a lot of confusion. The new system needs to be more straightforward in its application, even if it’s more complicated overall.

So, here’s the wording for the new version of Suppression that we’re testing:

Suppressive: After Attacking a Unit with this Weapon, apply a Suppression Token. You may not apply more than Four Suppression Tokens per Attack Action.

With this wording, we’ve unlinked the tokens from the number of unique weapons, and instead just implemented a flat cap. This is easier to teach, which lends itself towards our simplicity goal. More tokens mean that the mechanic is more likely to actually have an effect. The full picture, however, becomes clear with the second part of the rule.

Suppression Token: When this Unit Activates, roll a Suppression Check. Afterwards, for each Token applied to it, the following effects are applied until the end of its Activation.

1. Suppressed: This Unit may not perform Difficult Actions.

2. Pinned Down: Free Actions this Unit takes must be performed as Standard Actions.

3. Trapped: All Attacks this Unit makes are Obscured.

4. Broken: For each additional token past the 3rd, this Unit must roll a Morale Check. To do so, roll a D10; on an 8+, one model in this Unit is removed from the battlefield.

Once all effects are resolved, remove all Suppression tokens from this Unit.

This rule has many moving pieces, but all of them work towards our goals in important ways.

• Player Choice: With this system, players face a restriction of choices, rather than a removal of them. The “feels bad” moment of your unit skipping its turn is instead replaced with a unit that does get to activate, but has become tunnel-visioned by the bullets overhead. The addition of a morale effect means that there are new avenues for getting rid of stubborn units.

• Variable Resistance: Since the new rule has a built-in resistance, it provides the opportunity for heroic moments and helps to balance the onslaught of enemy fire. There’s worth in applying large amounts of suppression to a unit that you really want to keep down. This also provides us with design space for resistance abilities that can modify this check, instead of just directly shedding tokens.

• Simplicity: The new rules do have the downside of being more complicated; however, we think this will balance out in better overall game feel.

With this, we’ve also gone and written new versions of the various resistance upgrades. Here are some of the most important:

• Battle Hardened: This Unit's score for Suppression Checks is 6+. When this Unit activates, it may roll a D10 for each Concussion Token Applied to it. On an 8+, that Token is shed without applying its effects.

• Combat Stimulants: Once per Game, this Unit may reroll all failed Suppression Checks.

• Rally 'round the Flag: All Units within 12" of this Flag may reroll 1s and 2s for Suppression Checks.

As you can see, increased variability is the main idea. This is to avoid the idea of certain upgrades as being “Mandatory” since they no longer provide absolute assurances that they will do their job.

These are undoubtedly massive changes to the way the system functions and will require a good bit of relearning for current players, but we feel that this is necessary for the long term health of the game. For such an important mechanic to be both underwhelming and unfun wasn’t something we could let go to print. 

Overall, we hope this new system will result in more engaging games, more impactful weaponry, and more tactical decision-making. Most importantly, we hope that this continues to make the different kinds of units feel more distinct and useful. This said, I do want to emphasize that these are experimental rules. While the system will definitely be changing to something similar to this, we want feedback before fully implementing it.

That’s it for this post. This is the first in a series, but I am still figuring out how exactly to write these. If you have feedback both about the ideas and the style here, please let us know in the comments!

As always, keep marching on!

• Jackson