Broken Rules

[dave_r]

Great - suits me

Unless facing a select few opponents I want to lose the PBI

[spike]

Lawreance - ONLY the terrain part - the who goes first would remain unchanged under my proposal so the LH player wold likely end up with bad terrain and going second!

So, if you are facing a LH army you get to pick the terrain you want AND move first? What a total disaster that would be. If you are going to face Light Horse (and let's be honest they are fairly prevalent) then why not do what the generals in history did - PLAN FOR IT. It is no good turning up to play a game with no plan of what to do against massed light horse - the Crusaders changed tactics why can't table top generals?

Don't give me nonsense about not being able to, Cavalry, Superior, Armoured, Light Spear, Swd cost 16 points (17 if Drilled) and a good wodge of them will massacre LH. All Drilled MF give LH a bad day and most Armoured Foot aren't bothered either.

I have to disagree with your anaysis and agree with Si. Whilst you think that 2ap for evade off table is a game balance fix, it is curing a symptom of the problem - why not fix the problem it's self, with reasons based on history as to why LH armies did not take over the world (although the Mongols nearly suceeded in that!).

Dave

I think that's exactly what Lawrence says in his post, just his idea of the plan takes place before the battle happens- They get the choice of terrain, and then take the initative by attacking. So what he says has it's merits, (I think its good latteral thinking, and another suggestion worth considering) it's just not only to do with ontable tactics, but strategic thinking too.

So apart from the Mongols, the Skythians conquered Asia, the Turks conquered the middle East, the Sarmations ruled Asia. So as far as I can see LH armies were exceptionally succesful. In fact - can you name me one that wasn't very succesful?

I think that the main reason massed Light Horse wasn't in every army is availability.

There only successful up to a point, as their success is counteracted by their culture and lifestyle- Nomads on the whole don't do conquest well, and their population density is very low, and they struggle when their lands are overpopulated.
So to answer your question with a question!
Other than the Mongols (the reason for their great success/failure is due to their superior organisation)- Can you name one, which was able to consistantly fight outside their home terrain, and hold the ground they took?

However you are right in your last statement

Spike

[dave_r]

Can you name one, which was able to consistantly fight outside their home terrain, and hold the ground they took?

Skythians conquered Asia for 28 years.

[spike]

Can you name one, which was able to consistantly fight outside their home terrain, and hold the ground they took?

Skythians conquered Asia for 28 years.

"Asia" is a "big place" I dont think they got to China, or into the Taiga



They did conquer a significant portion of what we know as the Crimea, areas of what are now Turkey, Kurdistan (in Iraq and Iran), and may have got to the Caspian Sea, so "Asia Minor" then.
Unfortunatly as you say they only held on to it for about about generation- so much for the short lived Skythian Empire, not really an empire for any significant period of time.

Try again

[batesmotel]

Can you name one, which was able to consistantly fight outside their home terrain, and hold the ground they took?

Skythians conquered Asia for 28 years.

Dave,

Out of curisosity, what are you calling "Asia" here, and what time period? Are you referring to the Cimmerian and slightly later Scythian in-roads into the Mid-East and Asia Minor (the classical "Asia") ca. 7th-8th Century B.C.E.?

Chris

[dave_r]

"Asia" is a "big place" I dont think they got to China, or into the Taiga

They did conquer a significant portion of what we know as the Crimea, areas of what are now Turkey, Kurdistan (in Iraq and Iran), and may have got to the Caspian Sea, so "Asia Minor" then.

Unfortunatly as you say they only held on to it for about about generation- so much for the short lived Skythian Empire, not really an empire for any significant period of time.

Try again Wink

A very quick search on google gives:

http://history-world.org/scythians.htm

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=t-SS ... an&f=false

They were a nomadic people - they came, they saw, they conquered. Gathered as much booty as they could find and then went back home. They never bothered to conquer Modern Eastern Asia because at the time there wasn't really anything there.

If several hundred years isn't "consistently fighting outside their home territory" then can you tell me what is? When their homeland was threatened they responded exceptionally violently and were never beaten.

They were never conquered and were in high demand as allies.

As ever Spike you ask for an example, I provide one, and then you change the parameters.

[Splinter]

Hello, at my club in Spain we have played FOG a lot, and we had some discussions about rule themes. I'm not sure if this is the right place to post it, but I wanted to contribute with some ideas for rules change:


- In the first melee, no BG can expand (feed bases). This will prevent BG to contract in column before impact for statistic reasons (LSp vs IF), as they would be probably overlaped in the melee. As every BG can expand even in the Restricted Area to prepare for impact, I think it matches.

- Every BG that evades has to take a Cohesion Test. The evade move is completed unless the BG becomes Broken, where it has to make an Initial Rout Move.

- Every BG must take a CMT test for intercept.


They are just ideas, and my english is too "poor" and "undrilled" to defend them, but I hope that you see the point.
(I'm Christian, the Arab Conquest player from the European Championship in Rome, so greetings for the all players I met )

[lawrenceg]

Can you name one, which was able to consistantly fight outside their home terrain, and hold the ground they took?

Skythians conquered Asia for 28 years.

"Asia" is a "big place" I dont think they got to China, or into the Taiga



They did conquer a significant portion of what we know as the Crimea, areas of what are now Turkey, Kurdistan (in Iraq and Iran), and may have got to the Caspian Sea, so "Asia Minor" then.
Unfortunatly as you say they only held on to it for about about generation- so much for the short lived Skythian Empire, not really an empire for any significant period of time.

Try again

Well, the Byzantines had a lot of shooty cavalry and lasted a long time.

However such questions are irrelevant to the game issue.

The game issue is that you can in effect defeat a LH army (i.e. reduce its combat effectiveness to the point where all its efforts are directed to avoiding casualties and none to offensive action) without getting the 5 point win bonus.

The thing that makes this difficult to fix is the LH army needs a lot of time to win, during which some if its BGs are bound to be pushed off the table. It is still able to win after a significant portion of the army is pushed off the table. In other words 2 AP per pushed off BG is too harsh a defeat criterion for LH armies.

Si has already stated that from his test games with Terry he reckons (IIRC) 1.33 AP for a BG that evades off would be about right. Nik if I understand correctly thinks 2 AP would be about right. Others think 2 AP would make no difference. A complicating factor is that the opponent's tactics change according to the reward available for forcing the LH off the table.

It seems to me that LH players (and their opponents) need to make a careful note of the point in their battles when they decide they are no longer going to take offensive action and are just preserving BGs to avoid the game defeat criterion. And this needs to be done with various AP values for evading off so we can see the influence of risk/reward on the opponents tactics. And this needs to be done not just by top players but also by average ones.

I'll also point out that making LH easier to defeat would have little influence on the scores of LH armies. They might miss out on the odd one or two VP if they lose a bit earlier, but a losing draw gets very similar points to a loss if you do the same damage to the enemy. Once you get to the point at which the LH are just running away, not fighting back, it is really only the points for the last BG that are at stake.

[Ghaznavid]

Hello, at my club in Spain we have played FOG a lot, and we had some discussions about rule themes. I'm not sure if this is the right place to post it, but I wanted to contribute with some ideas for rules change:

- In the first melee, no BG can expand (feed bases). This will prevent BG to contract in column before impact for statistic reasons (LSp vs IF), as they would be probably overlaped in the melee. As every BG can expand even in the Restricted Area to prepare for impact, I think it matches.

Well some have to test in order to expand, so can easily get screwed by such a rule. That aside contracting into a colum has it's own downfalls and since you can feed only one file per round you will most likely end up overlapped anyway.

- Every BG that evades has to take a Cohesion Test. The evade move is completed unless the BG becomes Broken, where it has to make an Initial Rout Move.

That would definitely make skirmisher armies completely useless, especially mostly average ones.

- Every BG must take a CMT test for intercept.

Why? Intercepts are rare enough as is, unless you are in the buisiness of overextending your army badly.


Sorry, but I honestly believe you are trying to fix rules that aren't broken.

[IanB3406]

Since this is being brought up, I think the way the IC works can be changed to help with some of this.

1) An I.C. will only add +1 to the initiative factor, FC adds none.
2) An I.C. will have one additional terrain selection if loosing the initiative, either open or another terrain selection over and above the maximum on the list. (This will allow infantry armies with the IC an additional terrain selection if stuck on the steppe, or a mounted army with and IC an open option if stuck in something with more terrain, which is more likely with 1) above.
3) Remove the magic "IC Umbrella" The +2 to coehesion test modfied really doesn't seem like an historic use of a great commander. Never has made sense to me. Even the +1 at his range is impressive.

Cost would be adjusted down.

I also thought about having the I.C. give a +1 / -1 on cohesion tests, with the thought of Alexander charging through the Persian Cav and whatnot, but I believe there are more cases that can be justified for the great commanders of rallying troops and having them hold out longer such as Caesar / Hannibal that the +2 may be better.

Ian

[madaxeman]

AFAICS no-one is suggesting emasculating LH, no-one here wants or expects LH to be ever caught by HF, no-one wants to see LH-centric armies rendered unplayable or to see them disappear from the table in competitions, friendlies or otherwise, and no-one is proposing implementing a complete suite of rule changes all of which penalise LH. That would be madness and folly of the highest order. The ability to use LH as, well, LH worked historically is excellent, its a great thing about the rules.

I'm glad that you accept there should be LH, which act as Historical LH should, however the idea that MF/HF should have a chance to catch them, because of some "game balance idea" is not a good enough reason on its own to allow it to happen.

I don't think MF or HF should be able to catch LH. That's bonkers. I do think the difficulty of forcing them off table in sufficient numbers (which is the only way to beat them as they can quite rightly evade away) is so great that it is essentially completely impossible to break such an army with a "normally constituted" primarily foot-based army (ie one that is about 4' 4" wide and has some protected troops in it) and is almost impossible even with a specifically designed anti-LH "6' wide and all-armoured" foot army.

I also think that even the occasional the experience of attempting to play a LH-type army with a "normally constituted" primarily foot based army is so horrendous and demoralising (because there is no glimmer of a chance to win) that it has stopped people I know from entering competitions, or even playing the game entirely, and now has a overwhelming influence on (restricting) the army choices made by some others.

Maybe the answer is not 2AP for fleeing off table? Maybe its putting roads or rivers down last? Maybe its making the initiative +1 for 24+ LH instead of +1 for 12+ ? Maybe its not allowing combined terrain features as part of the compulsories? Who knows?? Whatever does the minimum to give some players some hope without emasculating LH is what we should be looking for, not saying "they could run away historically so even if it ruins other peoples weekends, puts them off playing entirely and means many of the most popular tabletop armies are condemned to a soul-destroying slog almost certainly topped off with an ignominious defeat every time they match up against a LH army, that's really not my problem"

Surely its not too much to expect that if there is to be a trade-off between owners of LH armies being prepared to occasionally accept just a teeny, tiny risk of defeat against a normally constituted foot-based army, and giving players who want to use their Hellenistics, Proper Romans, Carthaginians, Persians, Gauls, and in fact anything that doesn't have the ability to deploy close on 6' of armoured, mounted or bow-wielding troops the impression that they might - if the terrain falls right, they play exceptionally well, and they have that little bit of luck - stand a small chance of actually defeating their LH-based enemy, we all should be looking for that tradeoff? So lets debate what it might be...

[philqw78]

Tim, you seem of the assumption that LH armies are too powerful, when they are obviously not that good at all. Of the top placed armies Early period at Britcon there were none in the top 5 and only 1 or 2 in the top 10, depending how the Palmyran was made up, as the Parthian army was based around cataphracts and Pike. This leaves only Dave Ruddock who is, at least he thinks, a very good player....

[madaxeman]

Tim, you seem of the assumption that LH armies are too powerful, when they are obviously not that good at all. Of the top placed armies Early period at Britcon there were none in the top 5 and only 1 or 2 in the top 10, depending how the Palmyran was made up, as the Parthian army was based around cataphracts and Pike. This leaves only Dave Ruddock who is, at least he thinks, a very good player....

NO!!!! I'm not saying they are too powerful, or win too often.

I'm saying they are literally impossible to beat using such a large swathe of fairly popular armies and that this spoils the entire experience of the game for many of their opponents. Whether they win comps or not is irrelevant IMO,

[rogerg]

I played Dave. It was his cavalry, not the light horse, that did the damage. I was using the Middle Assyrians, 8 chariots and the rest were foot. The result was 11-9 to Dave. It could so easily have been a few points different either way. Light
horse rarely inflict enough damage to win big, as the Britcon results suggest.

We need to accept that when light horse and heavy foot armies meet, decisive results are unlikely. This does not seem unreasonable.

It is disappointing to spend three hours chasing LH around the table. What is needed is not rule changes, but more imaginative game arrangements. What about pairing armies by the number of LH and cavalry bases perhaps? I have previously suggested themed tournaments by terrain. E.g. have a woodland period. The armies to be used must have woods as a terrain option and the terrain choice must be woods.

[nikgaukroger]

Can you name one, which was able to consistantly fight outside their home terrain, and hold the ground they took?

Skythians conquered Asia for 28 years.

"Asia" is a "big place" I dont think they got to China, or into the Taiga

No but the Mongols did take all of China, large parts of what is now Russia and the Manchurian forests and the Ghurid armies that took the northern part of India were largely, what in FoG are, Turkish LH. Both were held for a long time - not to mention the diverse area that the the Seljuqs held for quite some time as well.

[nikgaukroger]

For those that play with HF and to a certain extent MF the adding 1AP for evades will not help them. As you've said you have evaded very few so IMO adding an extra point will not help those fighting LH armies. Those with Cavalry Lancers already are quite strong and Cav/Bow just the same those are the armies that will gain.

I think you have managed to miss the incentive and reward arguments that both Tim and I have made - ah, well its probably my fault for not getting the concept over properly

Possibly the sort of thing where it'd be better to sit down with a couple of beers and talk it through - alas I'm unlikely to be up in Mnachester soon. Perhaps Mr R can do it for me in his own unique style

[nikgaukroger]

The main reason that LH armies didn't take over the world are things that would make sense in a campaign context, not in a table top battle and hence not something that FoG needs to handle, at least until a campaign supplement is published.

Exactly. It is important that these are not confused with how a one off game needs to play.

[grahambriggs]

While there are no doubt lots of rule changes that could be made to fix this issue let's be pragmatic here. It'll be a long time before the rule book it reprinted as it's high production quality will make it expensive to do so. So solutions that require rule changes will take a while.

Perhaps it would be quicker to fix this within the things that are easily controlled by competition organisers. Table sizes is one. If we played on 5 feet by 3 feet tables this might well be a non issue (there might be other issues of course). Or the rules of the competition could restrict skirmish battle groups, for example.

The other concern I would have is that in fixing the issue we don't overdo it. Otherwise in a year we'll all be bemoaning the fact that some other army type is too strong.

[spike]

"Asia" is a "big place" I dont think they got to China, or into the Taiga

They did conquer a significant portion of what we know as the Crimea, areas of what are now Turkey, Kurdistan (in Iraq and Iran), and may have got to the Caspian Sea, so "Asia Minor" then.

Unfortunatly as you say they only held on to it for about about generation- so much for the short lived Skythian Empire, not really an empire for any significant period of time.

Try again Wink

A very quick search on google gives:

http://history-world.org/scythians.htm

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=t-SS ... an&f=false

They were a nomadic people - they came, they saw, they conquered. Gathered as much booty as they could find and then went back home. They never bothered to conquer Modern Eastern Asia because at the time there wasn't really anything there

If several hundred years isn't "consistently fighting outside their home territory" then can you tell me what is? When their homeland was threatened they responded exceptionally violently and were never beaten.

They were never conquered and were in high demand as allies.

As ever Spike you ask for an example, I provide one, and then you change the parameters.

Dave

I'm glad your research found that the raided and conquered but did not hold the ground, as that only proved my point. As Nik added, and I had already stated, only have one nomad steppe race (the Mongols) ever conquered and held an empire of any significant size, for any serious length of time. Their ability to hold on to China was due to their organisational and empire building skills, not due to their ability to fight.

Your point about them being desirable mercenaries/allies, shows that they were in demand to fill gaps in other peoples armies- as you already identified and made a good point is that "good Lt cavalry" were always in demand, but in short supply. You can reel off many steppe peoples who have fulfilled this role, but have never created lasting empires (Huns, Alans, Sarmations, Turks, etc).
Their individual successes often resolved around a single leader who, by their own superior political skills, gather individual tribal groups into a nation for a period. Unfortunately they often die (or fail in battle), and with no succession planning, their imperial ideals come to an abrupt end. They end up being displaced by the next population migration, by tribes with more resources- This ultimately happened to the Scythian tribes, when they were absorbed by the Sarmations in about 300 BCE.

I’m not sure of the relevance on how this solves the "broken rules", but it’s good historical discussion anyways.

Spike




Cheers

[petedalby]

Table sizes is one. If we played on 5 feet by 3 feet tables this might well be a non issue

I think this is an excellent point Graham - and one that could address some of the valid concerns raised by Tim. And requires no rules changes.

So which competition organiser is willing to give this a try?