Slitherine

FOGR works well as it covers such a long time period. I have a concern that the Autobreak rules may have an impact on the earlier period . Having only taken part in one competition ( Italian Wars) My comp experience is limited but I am concerned that the larger average keils especially for the Scottish will be even more unstoppable. This may increase game time rather than speed up play.

jonphilp wrote:FOGR works well as it covers such a long time period. I have a concern that the Autobreak rules may have an impact on the earlier period . Having only taken part in one competition ( Italian Wars) My comp experience is limited but I am concerned that the larger average keils especially for the Scottish will be even more unstoppable. This may increase game time rather than speed up play.

Actually, I think it does surprisingly well given the 200-year span. Re. the Scots, you'll now have to kill nine bases of a 16-base keil/block, instead of five (six?) - almost double.

Not quite that bad. Scots lose 7 and break in RAW but 9 modified at the moment.

I have no real problem with most of the changes but Autobreak levels and Armour look likely to be where they founder for me. And I think it will all be moot anyway as most players at the club don't see the need for change so to get a game it will basically be RAW.
Artillery might be the exception but I was playing someone on Saturday who saw no reason not to shoot at mounted on 4's nor be restricted from targeting mounted in the flank zones. Unless he was just trying to wind me up

One change I would like to see is a -- poa when shooting at light troops and artillery when shooting with musket, carbine, arquebus and pistol. My reason being that these are inaccurate weapons shooting at a dispersed target. In Fog A I believe this wasn't perceived as a problem as the -2 applied to hits mitigated this. ie 4 bases of cavalry shooting at LH could get a maximum of 3 hits down to 1 for the death roll. In Fog R carbine armed cavalry could still get 3 hits (admittedly on 5,6) which would be 3 on the death roll. So from Fog A to R the chances of killing a skirmisher has gone from 1/4 to 1/2. It worse for foot at short range. As there is no points deduction for being light troops compared to battle troops and they're only half as effective in a scrap, if caught, they're an overpriced annoyance.

Rather than introducing a rule for this, I believe that this should be reflected in a reduction in points (which are currently under review) to better reflect the capabilities of light troops. However, their ability to evade is worth a lot more than people realise.

As posted elsewhere an estimate on when we might have finalised the update.

Given where we currently are I think the end of March or sometime in early April may be realistic - but no guarantees.

The ability evade for light troops is negated by the unrealistic chance of being hit by firearms. Alternatively the -2 to the death roll could be implemented when firing at light troops/artillery with firearms.

As it seems that discussion has died down, and issues look to have been sorted acceptably (please do post ASAP if you disagree) I think we can aim for finalising which proposals are going in the update by the end of February - which may mean that the end of March is a reasonable target for getting it out officially.

Except for Vespasian's concern about paying three extra points per base for superior over average, only to autobreak on the same base losses and just get to re-roll a 1.

Which in my case, invariably means exactly that - re-rolling a 1. Hey, maybe if superiors get another 1 on the re-roll, they could get one more go?

Hi,

Just to second "Ronan's" concern over the autobreak position v points, especially when looking at the early period such as the Italian wars. I would not like to run a Swiss army in this period.

Without any modifiers, 60% of failed cohesion tests will contain a 1.

Oh, I managed a lot better than that at Godendag. In fact, many of my CTs contained a pair of the buggers.

I take the decision is no change on bows short range?

DavidT wrote:Without any modifiers, 60% of failed cohesion tests will contain a 1.

The other interesting fact about re-rolling 1s is that the chance of double dropping is almost 3 times as likely if you don't re-roll.

DavidT wrote:

DavidT wrote:Without any modifiers, 60% of failed cohesion tests will contain a 1.

The other interesting fact about re-rolling 1s is that the chance of double dropping is almost 3 times as likely if you don't re-roll.

Right. 15 out of 36 possible rolls will be less than 7 (41.67%). 9 of those 15 (60%) will contain at least one 1.

By rerolling 1's, the chance of failure will drop from 41.67% to 27.08%. Or to chart it:

Failure %
Roll to Pass No Reroll Reroll 1
6 27.77 14.66
7 41.67 27.08
8 58.33 43.29
9 72.22 62.19
10 83.33 77.31

Unless of course the rules as written say that a re-roll can't give you a worse result than the initial roll...

I am concerned about how much playtesting has been done on these proposed updates. I know some games have been played but they are mainly one or two people playing them.
We need a large number of games to be played before any changes are made so that we can be certain that they work. It was for that reason I proposed that the Oxford Round of the Southern League would use the proposed changes. Given we should have about 20 players that gives 30 games played in one day. If other small competitions did the same we could have say 100 games played in a short time. We would then know if the proposed changes really work in the way we hope.

Bob

I would concur that more playtesting is generally a good thing. Though I am skeptical how much can actually happen... we are talking about an errata to an effectively out-of-print rule set, not a new product... if you schedule 6 months of playtest games, is anybody going to be left to care by the time they are all finished, analyzed, and argued over?

Playtesting and feedback may throw up some anomalies and avoid breaking what is essentially a very good ruleset. Publish the errata and let people start playing and feeding back but I doubt there will be a universal take up of all the changes.

As I said to Nik right at the start some players will accept the changes wholesale, some in part and some not at all depending on their view of what, if anything, needed changing.

Come to this late having put my name down for the Oxford competition and then found out we'll be playtesting a load of amendments I was previously unaware of. Teach me to monitor this forum more regularly!

My views on what I've read so far are that these proposals will need a hell of a lot of playtesting to iron out any issues before being properly released. Based on my previous experiences playtesting other rulesets in development you can never really play test enough, but you have to draw the line somewhere to get the end product out. Fortunately these proposals seem to be much more group led and not dictated by one person who 'owns' the rules, so looks much more positive for a sensible, playable outcome than my last experience in this area.

FoGR works very well as it is and personally I think it only needs a few tweaks, not what seems like a considerable amount of change, including to points values. If, as I understand it, new amended rules and lists are unlikely to be published there is a huge risk it may just die a death as non-competition players won't be bothered to update their rules, lists and armies to comply.

That said I can see and understand the reasoning behind all the proposals. I don't necessarily agree with them all but am more than willing to try them out. The only one that really seems a bit daft to me is the removal of the Better Armour POA. The proposals seem unnecessarily complex and will prove difficult to remember, especially in combats were different files have different armour classes. I would keep as is, to keep it simple.

The reduction in costs for mounted troops will make armies a little larger. Probably good this as generally will get closer to historical force sizes, except for the really small armies that are over scaled anyway.

Not sure about the autobreak scores appearing to be the same for Average and Superiors. Hopefully this is reflected in the new points and I've just missed it.

Likewise, I think the new Commanded Shot Marker proposal is a good idea, especially now I've found the bit where it will be attached to a mounted unit and not free roaming like a commander. This will hopefully prevent the practice of players having free roaming Commanded Shot to bulk up their break point. It may be there and I've missed it but has a base size been decided on yet?

Finally, as a player who uses Spanish a difference in points cost between light lance and heavy lance is very welcome.

Cheers
Keep up the good work and I'll post further comments after Oxford, or ealrier if I get a chance for a practice game with these proposals before then.