Cities of Death in 6th Edition

 In the new year I plan to run a Crusade of Fire based campaign at my local gaming club. As any battles fought over Hive City tiles require a Cities of Death game to be played, I thought I'd have a look over the rules and bring them in line with sixth edition.

For starters, I'd say we need to take into account the rule changes sixth edition has brought. To that end, there are some basic rule changes to clear up first.

NOT all units are scoring, nor does it matter how many survivors there are in a scoring unit. Troops only score, others deny, and unit strength is irrelevent.

Deep Strike, Reserves, Dusk and Dawn, Random Game Length, Infiltrate... these are all basic parts of the game now, so anywhere that says "If these rules are being played" can be ignored. Likewise anything that let's that rule be played is fairly irrelevent.

Anything that talks about determining Line of Sight can be ignored, we use True Line of Sight now.

I will also suggest using the secondary objectives that we have come to know in sixth edition.

 All good so far? I can see you're enthralled!

Moving on, deployment. Now Cities of Death missions all used table quarters deployment. I did consider updating this to 6th ed deployments, but with the fact that Cities of Death had it's own different deployment when it was released and it isn't updates that have left it looking different, I will stick with table quarters. There will not be a specific order to what you deploy or alternating deployment - player 1 deploys their forces in their quarter, not within 12" of the centre. Player 2 then does the same. Player 1 gets first turn, unless player 2 siezes the initiative.

 A couple of other specific changes to the rules as listed in the book.

Page 9 - Rubble is listed as a 4+ cover. This needs to be a 5+ to bring it in line with 6th ed.

Page 34 - Command Centre - the secondary option for this is in relation to the long out of use Target Priority Checks. Best just to ignore this secondary power and stick to the primary power if you use this strategem.

Page 40 - As mentioned earlier, deep strike and infiltrate are now part of the game, these strategums are redundant. The sewer rats strategum is still useful though.

Page 45-46 - All rules are in line with 6th edition, these pages can be pretty much ignored.

The Missions

Firesweep
At the end of the mission each planted flag counts as 3vp.

High Ground
The objective building is worth 3vp to the side that claims it.

Domination
Each occupied ruin is worth 3vp to the holder.

Maximum Attrition
Each unit destroyed is worth 1vp to the opposition.

Urban Assault
Each objective building is worth 3vp to the holder.


There are also some special missions, but they're different enough in their own special rules that they don't really need modifying. Just use a little common sense and you'll be fine.

Hope all this is useful to someone, and I will be blogging about the campaign over on my personal blog when it all starts off, and will try to keep the writeups both characterful and also useful to anyone who wishes to run their own Crusade of Fire campaign in the future.