Slitherine

With regards to quality status in the lists, my main beef is that too many troops are listed as superior when more average would have allowed for finer distinctions. For example, how do you reflect that French knights were regarded as better than their contemporaries when virtually all knights are listed as superior? Anyway, too late now.

Julian[/quote]

I agree 100%

Not to forget that KN also have 2 melee dice instead of 1 . The only argument in favor I had was : they train from childhood ..good what about veterans, what about warrior people ...

Tuning will always be difficult

So training from childhood allows a group of 3 soldiers to co-operate and throw two giant dice simultaneously instead of one eh?

It's a game mechanic, reflecting the authors' intention that knights should behave differently to the traditional cavalry. The most important effects being that they are encouraged by cost to form less deep, and are very strong initially but are affected worse by base losses.

Don't get too hung up on real world rationalisations. Otherwise you have to start asking if the 3rd and 4th rank of pikes put rubber pads on their weapon tips so they can only assist their front ranks by distracting the enemy, not roll extra dice and get kills of their own.

jlopez wrote: I tend to agree that a core of the Company would justify elite status as they were tough bastards. They pretty much waltzed through modern day Turkey to the gates of Cilicia where other European armies struggled through with great difficulty.

Julian

Solves the problem of elites - we can rename them as 'tough bastards' !!!! Tough bastards add one to any death roll.

Currently you can field the almughavars either as OfSp (which results in correct interactions against mounted), or as IF (which results in correct interactions against the rest), but since you're forced to choose, you'll always get one of those interactions wrong: as always IF they are too weak against mounted, while as always OfSp they can cancel enemy foot Sw POA, which is not realistic either.

Therefore it would be more accurate to add a comment in the list notes saying something like "MF almughavar bases will use OfSp POAs when fighting in close combat in open or uneven terrain against mounted troops, but will be considered IF in any other circumstances". This would result into right interactions at any time without allowing players to decide POAs for their almughavar BGs at will (which would be great for my Catalan Company army, but doesn't look fair )

Since the cost of IF/Sw and OfSp is the same, this shouldn't be a problem...

And following the proposal about thureoporoi being able to be fielded as euzonoi, I would now eliminate almughavar skirmisher BGs and replace them by giving the chance to deploy part of the almughavar MF BGs as LF, Jav, LSp with same armour and quality as the original BG. This is based on the fact that there were no specialised skirmishers, rather standard almughavar units that deployed in looser formation when required.

Rather clase them as Heavy Foot, as they seemed to stand out in the open in most of there fights. So Heavy Foot, Superior, Impact, Swordsman, Protected. Will still be on evens with knights at impact but no -1 cohesion test. Will be down at melee though due to armor. I would think that they should be classified as protected though, as I have not heard of them suffering in particular from Turkish Horse archery.....

But then again I'm not so much a believer in medium foot for many classifications.

Ian