fogman wrote: pike and shot is no better when it comes to gamey tactics. and just watch for morale tests that can cripple your big units; and since they're so few of them, the effect of a bad die is magnified. besides the dice routine can easily be tweaked. remember that Fog(U) was supposed to be easily modified as opposed to the FoG (RB) code that cannot be accessed with the departure of the original developer.
I don't know what it is about Pike and Shot. I quite like playing it, but it doesn't really grab me in the way that FOG did. Maybe it is just the period covered by the game. I have always been more interested in the medieval period than anything else. I never feel that I get particularly bad dice in Pike and Shot, but I feel that trying to play historically usually dooms you to defeat. In my previous example of what often happens if I deploy in a chequerboard fashion, I don't actually blame my opponent for deploying in an extended line to maximise shooting opportunities. In fact, the whole tactical imperative in this period was to find ways exactly of doing that, but the end result is that my 17thC army ends up being shot to pieces by an army using 18th or early 19thC tactics. Somehow the game needs to be designed so that there are advantages for trying to replicate historical behaviours.
no offence but englishmen always find longbows are underpowered in games...
Well, if knights were the "tanks" on the medieval battlefield then longbowmen were the "machine gunners" for about 150 years (when the English were about, at any rate). It would be an interesting statistic to compare the casualties caused by archer fire in FOG battles at the moment with what might happen if archer fire was made more historically accurate (but the supply of ammunition was limited).
first, 'battles' are a schematic way for medieval chroniclers to make sense of the chaos of combat; it is as much a literary device as it is a description of a reality that many of them were cognizant only through hearsay. It is well know in military historiography that what appears to be well defined phases and formations in battle accounts are simply an attempt by the writer to fit many overlapping events (many of which he is ignorant of) into a narrative driven by preconceptions and political propaganda. Second, let's suppose the two armies coalesced into two big masses flinging at each other. In gaming terms, that's two multi-hex units melee-ing one another. Who wants to play a game with two big units? This is why NO games tried to implement that or ever will.
Interesting. I can accept that point although I think sometimes the "battles" characterisation is still appropriate, but on other occasions I agree that things were a lot more chaotic e.g. Bosworth Field when contingents came from all directions.
No, we don't want to end up with just one big unit on each side, but are there ways to move closer to a more accurate depiction of what actually happened on the battlefield? I think both Pike and Shot and Sengoku Jidai are trying to get to grips with this, particularly the "loss of control" during the heat of battle where commanders are not actually deciding what their "units" do after they have made a successful breakthrough.
I can envisage a situation where individual "units" would not rout once they had joined a melee unless their whole "battle" or army had routed. It is difficult to explain it in a post like this but it would involve units at the front of a melee in contact with the enemy being topped back up to 100% after every turn, with the units behind them suffering the losses as casualties mounted. This is what happened in real battles, I believe. Men in the front ranks died and they were replaced by men from contingents behind them. So, with this idea, "units" would, in effect, cease to be "individual units" once they were in melee, but would become part of a larger entity. Calculations for loss of morale ("disruption" and "fragmentation") would be based on all the units in the melee, not on individual units, so when the critical point was reached the whole of one side would start to rout. Whether something like this is programmable, I don't know, but it is certainly worth thinking about, I would say.
my take on skirmishers is that they should be abstracted since their role is primarily pre and post battle. easy fix, don't play with them. problem solved.
FOG gets skirmishers hopelessly wrong. John Tiller's Renaissance game has the best method that I have come across so far. skirmishers could be deployed from larger formations of soldiers when required and they were also able to re-join their larger formations when their skirmishing was done. FOG2 should copy that.
hey maybe FOG2 will be the greatest thing ever, I'm certainly hoping for that to be true because we all win but there's one thing it won't have: miniatures and that alone will never make FoG obsolete. Someone remarked that pike and shot looks like table top. No it doesn't. In table top, the painted miniatures are the focus and the terrain is abstracted and basic. In pike and shot on the other hand the terrain is glorious and overwhelms the units that are mere digital polygons. It may look more realistic but it is not table top. FoG wins there with its beautiful units and bland terrain.
Some of the miniature artwork in FOG is superb, some of it is a bit dodgy. Some figures look much bigger than others, some units have all three figures adopting the same ridiculous posture, and there are some Anglo-Saxons that seem to be dressed in very fetching pink outfits!
