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Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 1:20 pm
by guthroth
kevinj wrote:The simplest solution is to count LF or LH BG as worth less when calculating the army total.
The problem with this it it allows you to regard lights as somewhat expendable, at least the current position means that you have to take care of all of your army and there is no incentive to keep your better troops out of the battle.
Err, I thought that was how armies fought ?
The idea would make attacking the enemies light tropps less the focus of the action and force players to actually engage the core of an army rather than nibble it to death by killing unarmoured poor javelin throwers.
The idea also doesn't make them 'worthless' just worth less.
Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 1:53 pm
by kevinj
I think we both agree that we'd like to see games decided by the core or main battle troops, rather than over-focussing on skirmishers.
Personally I think FOG achieves this more successfully than other rules I've played, although there is (in my opinion) a minor issue that some very cheap LF BGs (e.g. 4 poor JLS @ 8 pts) can be used to bulk armies up while playing no part in the game.
Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 2:53 pm
by hammy
I remember a similar suggestion that inferior psiloi in DBM should not count towards the army break point because they were only 1 point each and were hard to kill so were great 'filler'. Then someone pointed out that an Early Libyan army could have an auxiliary commander in chief who was an element a couple of inferior psiloi sub generals and 366 inferior psiloi who could all die and it wouldn't affect the army in any way. All you had to do was to keep the CinC safe and you couldn't lose. With hundreds of bases on the table you would be able to swarm anything.
While I agree that masses of small BGs of poor quality lights do make armies harder to beat they also mean that should you actually pin them down and beat them up the owner suffers for their choice.
Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 2:54 pm
by hammy
hammy wrote:I remember a similar suggestion that inferior psiloi in DBM should not count towards the army break point because they were only 1 point each and were hard to kill so were great 'filler'. Then someone pointed out that an Early Libyan army could have an auxiliary commander in chief who counted as an element a couple of inferior psiloi sub generals and 366 inferior psiloi who all didn't count so they could all die and it wouldn't affect the army in any way. All you had to do was to keep the CinC safe and you couldn't lose. With hundreds of bases on the table you would be able to swarm anything.
While I agree that masses of small BGs of poor quality lights do make armies harder to beat they also mean that should you actually pin them down and beat them up the owner suffers for their choice.
Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 3:18 pm
by guthroth
hammy wrote:
While I agree that masses of small BGs of poor quality lights do make armies harder to beat they also mean that should you actually pin them down and beat them up the owner suffers for their choice.
Yes they should. But if the rules are supposed to be equitable to all troops and throughout history, how does an army with masses of HF and few cavalry (Vikings and Greeks to name but two) deal with those who max out on extremely poor skirmishers ?
Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 3:43 pm
by babyshark
guthroth wrote:hammy wrote:
While I agree that masses of small BGs of poor quality lights do make armies harder to beat they also mean that should you actually pin them down and beat them up the owner suffers for their choice.
Yes they should. But if the rules are supposed to be equitable to all troops and throughout history, how does an army with masses of HF and few cavalry (Vikings and Greeks to name but two) deal with those who max out on extremely poor skirmishers ?
There are several ways, among which is the "push the skirmishers off the back of the table" method. Slow, to be sure, and no guarantee of a victory. At the same time, the poor skirmishers are similarly puzzled to be much of a threat to the HF army.
Marc
Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 5:18 pm
by ShrubMiK
Note that if you "max out on poor skirmishers", it doesn't make much difference if they are only counted as 1/2 a BG equivalent. The opponent would still need to break half of them to cause an army break. Unless other changes to the rules are made.
I'm not a great subscriber to the idea that rubbish filler BGs give a player much, if any, of an advantage. Even the 8 points spent on a BG of 4 (assuming the list allows this) poor LF javelinmen could perhaps be more usefully spent elsewhere, especially if it really is intended as pure filler and therefore hidden away where it cannot get into trouble but also cannot contribute anything to the battle. In the case of Rom Doms, those points could be the difference between a 4 strong BG of protected average auxilia and either making it armoured or superior. The fact that you have one filler BG increasing your army break point is not much consolation when one of your "serious" BGs is broken as a direct result of not quite having the tools it needed to get the job done!
I think any way that overall army break points are handled by simple rules is going to cause some odd situations. In DBMM they've tweaked the "morale equivalent" values of elements into something much more complex than DBM and people are still arguing about it. IMO, the whole idea of a neat army break point is a horrible over-simplification, but I can't offer any better suggestions without going back to extremely complicated and time-consuming morale tests as in early WRG rules, which even then didn't always achieve results that seemed realistic.
One way of avoiding army break point "issues" is to play with larger armies, so that it is less likely that either army will break in the time available to play the game. Then the players agree between themselves when time runs out who they think has won and by how much. I realise this is not to the taste of all players
Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2010 10:53 pm
by spikemesq
kevinj wrote:The simplest solution is to count LF or LH BG as worth less when calculating the army total.
The problem with this it it allows you to regard lights as somewhat expendable, at least the current position means that you have to take care of all of your army and there is no incentive to keep your better troops out of the battle.
Yeah, this would return to the mechanics of DBM, which is not appealing.
I wonder if an army break system that accounted for points-values would not be better. Basically assign a number of VP based on the total points (e.g., 800 pt army has 80 VP) and allocate them to the BGs when designing an Order of March. So no BG could have less than 1 VP (or 5VP?), but cheapo BGs would have less effect on the overall army strength.
Spike
Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2010 4:50 am
by Ghaznavid
Of course the whole discussion is only valid while using the current tournament scoring system. I think it would be much easier to revamp that then to fiddle with the rules. In fact the rules include a system for determining victory and defeat on page 118 that is notable less dependent on the AP totals then the currently used tournament scoring system.
Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2010 10:12 am
by kevinj
I wonder if an army break system that accounted for points-values would not be better. Basically assign a number of VP based on the total points (e.g., 800 pt army has 80 VP) and allocate them to the BGs when designing an Order of March. So no BG could have less than 1 VP (or 5VP?), but cheapo BGs would have less effect on the overall army strength.
Unfortunately this goes down the same road of making certain BGs relatively expendable, whereas the current situation is that you have to respect all of your BGs.
the rules include a system for determining victory and defeat on page 118 that is notable less dependent on the AP totals then the currently used tournament scoring system
I'm not sure of the point you're making here. Both the system on P118 and the tournament scoring system (or at least, the only one I'm familiar with) are based on Attrition Point losses inflicted and suffered.
Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2010 10:33 am
by rbodleyscott
kevinj wrote:the rules include a system for determining victory and defeat on page 118 that is notable less dependent on the AP totals then the currently used tournament scoring system
I'm not sure of the point you're making here. Both the system on P118 and the tournament scoring system (or at least, the only one I'm familiar with) are based on Attrition Point losses inflicted and suffered.
But it is not dependent on the total number of BGs in the opposing armies.
Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2010 11:02 am
by kevinj
But it is not dependent on the total number of BGs in the opposing armies.
That's a good point. I think that a scoring system based on that method would be simpler, would reduce the incentive to increase the BG count and would make swarm armies less appealing. My concern would be whether it could be made sufficiently granular to produce results for a tournament without the need to develop a cumbersome tiebreak system.
Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2010 3:36 pm
by spikemesq
kevinj wrote:I wonder if an army break system that accounted for points-values would not be better. Basically assign a number of VP based on the total points (e.g., 800 pt army has 80 VP) and allocate them to the BGs when designing an Order of March. So no BG could have less than 1 VP (or 5VP?), but cheapo BGs would have less effect on the overall army strength.
Unfortunately this goes down the same road of making certain BGs relatively expendable, whereas the current situation is that you have to respect all of your BGs.
I agree that the VP idea would make trash BGs relatively expendable. OTOH, it would penalize the cheerleader BGs (I am looking at you Byz Javelinmen 4 bases of LF/Poor/UnProt/Drilled/Jav for 8 AP) that bolster an army of expensive troops. Converting cheerleaders to expendables may just replace one problem with another, though.
The VP idea also would not address Swarm armies with numerous BGs of roughly equal value because the VP would be spread evenly across them.
Oh well, I guess a VP system sucks.
Spike
Posted: Thu Feb 11, 2010 3:37 pm
by philqw78
spikemesq wrote:Oh well, I guess a VP system sucks.
Spike
Being competetive sucks. Unless you win.
Posted: Sun Feb 21, 2010 9:56 pm
by irondog068
For what is worth, a 4 stand BG of LH I find useful in both my Late Republic Roman and Swiss. Even if all they do is have good cavalry try and chase them off the board.
as for LF I find a 4 stand of average skirmishers pretty useless unless they are superior. The one time I do not find them useless is handgunners. I max out my number of handgunners with my Swiss army. Snice being shot at by gunpowder/artillery causes a check My Swiss pike always will find a unit to smack into that have dropped a level.
Good times, Good times. For the Swiss I mean.
Dave
Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 8:11 am
by philqw78
irondog068 wrote: I max out my number of handgunners with my Swiss army. Snice being shot at by gunpowder/artillery causes a check My Swiss pike always will find a unit to smack into that have dropped a level.
Dave
Its very difficult to cause a test with just firearms, especially v's foot. Hit with one in 3, then need to do 1 hit per three enemy bases. Normally this would take 12 bases of handugunners to get a test.
Posted: Thu Feb 25, 2010 2:11 am
by irondog068
You do not need to hit, just be shot at by the strange noisemaking weapons to cause a test. Plus I have A LOT of gunners.
Posted: Thu Feb 25, 2010 3:58 am
by gozerius
You are misreading the chart.
BGs test when they take 2 hits from arty, or 1 hit per 3 bases from all shooting.
Then if arty or firearms were shooting at them they suffer a -1 to their CT, whether the arty or firearms actually scored any hits.
Skirmishers
Posted: Thu Feb 25, 2010 7:04 am
by benos
on the vp issue. Wab largely plays with vps equal to the value of the unit. It has a couple of issues. First doesn.t help if you reduce the unit to 3 models left you get no points unless they break. The cheap skirmishers still appear as they give a deployment advantage. And everyone hates nomads as thier rules mean you can't get them into melee. So that isn't perfect either. Also it takees longer to work out vps at the end of the game as thry often have odd numbers to add up
Ben
Posted: Thu Feb 25, 2010 7:15 am
by philqw78
irondog068 wrote:You do not need to hit, just be shot at by the strange noisemaking weapons to cause a test. Plus I have A LOT of gunners.
Yes you do. Your missunderstanding is why you have a LOT of gunners, and no-one else does. They are generally pooh due to the short range.