Slitherine

I think using some non Historical gamers as gunea pigs is a good idae, our club has a failry large contingent of Warhammer players who may be tempted. Although it will be hard.

madaxeman wrote: Because of this I would suspect you could organise a basic/advanced division by having a basic set which does things like restrict units to single moves by wheeling only and allows no turns or formation changes, no intercept charges, only one or two causes/reasons for CMTs (the explain the concept), less causes - and modifiers - for cohesion tests, and maybe less cohesion states (?) even. This woudl allow you to stick figures on the table and shove them around and see them fight very easily, as well as creating a natural "hmm, but I'd like to do this too...." progression to the more advanced rules further down each page. It then also makes it easier for individual clubs and groups of friends to pick and choose their own advanced rules for in-house use... which I am sure if an anathema to some, but is a fact of life as well, so if there is some sort of structure implicit in the rules it would no doubt help.

Cutting down on the formation changing/CMT-related rules in the basic set would be my preference for lightening the basic rules - I'm not sure there is much combat simplification to do as thats fundamental and pretty easy, but maybe there is something there too (shooting into combats perhaps, contacting not in a charge phase maybe?) ?

tim

I would agree with Tim on many of those specific suggestions to simplify initial games without sacrificing any of the flavour of the full set. I would suggest allowing a full set of moves, though, but simplifying the CMT system. e.g. Troops are either manouverable (drilled, skirmishers or Cav/L Ch in a skirmishing line) or unmanouverable (everything else). A move is only simple if it is straight forward (full or part) and may contain a single wheel if the move ends outside 6" of enemy. Everything else is complex. Unmanouverable test for complex. That's it. (apart from simplified special testing criteria). Even a beginner should get to play with light troops, and I'd firmly suggest allowing the full range of troop types, as the army lists, if clearly written (and maybe supported by photocopyable army game sheets?) would enable varied setups without beginners having to hold too much in their heads during initial games.

Melees between multiple units on one or both sides can be a bit of a brain bender - is there some clever way of limiting these realistically? I suppose you could restrict group size/deployment width and only allow single BG to BG combats, but that could result in small units having a disproportionate delaying effect, among other things...

Any other ideas for streamlining things out there?

Adrian

Whoops! Forgot to mention that a 180 turn would be a simple move for lights, LH & skirmishing Cav /L Ch

Adrian

provding some counters to mark cohesion, and the if it dropped the bound before.

It would help experienced players as well.