Idea to give Barbarians a chance.

[Strategos69]

Regarding Spanish troops, I would recommend you to take a look at Quesada's "Armas de la Antigua Iberia"
http://www.hislibris.com/armas-de-la-an ... sada-sanz/
I don't know if there is any incoming translation. Basicaly the author states that Ancient Spanish armies fought as Romans (a battle line, throwing a volley of phalarica/soliferra before engaging in close combat). I don't know about those quotes of Livy, but the key point would be if they relied only in that as it is said for Samnites and Gauls or not.

[Strategos69]

So the "rejected" options are:

break offs
new cathegory for roman and spanish infantry


The proposed options are:

tie breaker POA
give a depth POA
give a negative modifier for enemies loosing against this troops.

I wonder if it is possible to provide a modifier only for these troops without making a distinction with Roman and Spanish infantry. Even the possible wording of the extra PoA for depth or tie breaker seem to me like a special rule for a couple of armies. I guess the simplest way is to treat differently what behaved differently.

[shadowdragon]

You missunderstand me. I was proposing not a nerfing of the drilled impetous troops, just an adjustment of POAS against undrilled IMpact foot (that could be done by a new cathegory).

But you are right in saying that that would not make impact foot any better against other armies (based on cav and shooting) but I was talking from a historical point of view. I allwas try to play historical oponents and I dont give a damn about tournament play. MAybe thats is my sin.

I wasn't specifically referring only to your posts, but thanks for the clarification. I also don't play tournaments, but I do play only with....er, I mean, play solitaire. But I'll leave your sins between you and your god.

One problem fo the undrilled, impact, MF/HF is that they can't use their superiority in numbers through rear support / deeper ranks and manoeuvrability is simply out of the question. There's an AAR of someone trying to wheel the wing of an Ancient Spanish army on the forum that is an interesting read.

So for historical match-ups (my interest too), we do have the option of increasing the proportion of superior troops for the barbarians and limiting the numbers for Late Republican / Early Imperial Romans. If the barbarians are indeed fierce that's a reasonable choice and one that can be made regardless of what's in the published list since we're not discussing tournament play.

I'd say it's worth a try to have superior Gauls or Germans versus average (Sw) legionaires and with a -2 CT for losing to the Gauls / Germans. See how it goes and if not then we have to consider other options.

I did a calculation for 8 superior undrilled impact bases (72 pts) versus 8 average Roman bases (80 pts) - the results for the impact phase were:

Romans – 17% change of being fragmented and 28% change of being disrupted.
Barbarians – 6% and 15% respectively
Draw – 33%

Is that reasonable? And, if not, what would be?

[Ranimiro]

Guess the ;p was missinterpreted.

[ethan]

Maybe borrow from FoG:R and give overlaps of Heavy Weapons and Impact Foot a ++ automatically. This would help out the bigger barbarian armies more than the smaller Romans.

[shadowdragon]

Guess the ;p was missinterpreted.

Either that or you missed the irony.

Yes! Death to the archer avatar!

[Ranimiro]

Maybe borrow from FoG:R and give overlaps of Heavy Weapons and Impact Foot a ++ automatically. This would help out the bigger barbarian armies more than the smaller Romans.

Ah. missed that one, maybe from a newer version of the beta. It can help indeed.

[madaxeman]

"Barbarians" tend to be best off at impact, and also are often in big units - which should have an advantage due to greater staying power.

With only 1 round of impact they dont get many chances to disrupt the enemy when they are at their best, and when it comes to staying power in the real world a lot of the "big unit" benefit is often lost as they usually break from CHTs - partly as they are hard to provide rear support for because;

a/ of the sheer numbers required to provide support,
b/ unit sizes in these armies are often not helpful - lots of 8-12's (@7 points each) makes it a bit of waste to allocate any of your precious units just to give rear support,
c/ undrilled units find it harder to do the sort of precise maneuvering which is often required to provide rear support - especially after the charging unit conforms, and also to do so without unduly risking being burst through

Progressive CHT failure beats them long before attrition has a chance to level the playing field.

I'd suspect any rebalancing (exluding points/lists based tweaks) needs to look either at addressing rear support / burst through by routers (to allow base-loss attrition to level the playing field a little) or changing the number/importance of impact vs melee rounds

[madaxeman]

"Barbarians" tend to be best off at impact, and also are often in big units - which should have an advantage due to greater staying power.

With only 1 round of impact they dont get many chances to disrupt the enemy when they are at their best, and when it comes to staying power in the real world a lot of the "big unit" benefit is often lost as they usually break from CHTs - partly as they are hard to provide rear support for because;

a/ of the sheer numbers required to provide support,
b/ unit sizes in these armies are often not helpful - lots of 8-12's (@7 points each) makes it a bit of waste to allocate any of your precious units just to give rear support,
c/ undrilled units find it harder to do the sort of precise maneuvering which is often required to provide rear support - especially after the charging unit conforms, and also to do so without unduly risking being burst through

Progressive CHT failure beats them long before attrition has a chance to level the playing field.

I'd suspect any rebalancing that changes Barbarians (exluding points/lists based tweaks) needs to look either at addressing rear support / burst through by routers (to allow base-loss attrition to level the playing field a little) or changing the number/importance of impact vs melee rounds

.

Of course, tweaks could also be made to their opponents capabilities or resilience to achieve the same effects....

[rbodleyscott]

Maybe borrow from FoG:R and give overlaps of Heavy Weapons and Impact Foot a ++ automatically. This would help out the bigger barbarian armies more than the smaller Romans.

Ah. missed that one, maybe from a newer version of the beta. It can help indeed.

Except that in FOGR overlapping files only get 1 dice. 2 dice on ++ might (would probably) be excessive.

However, giving them an automatic net 0 POA (minimum) would be possible.

[philqw78]

Except that in FOGR overlapping files only get 1 dice. 2 dice on ++ might (would probably) be excessive.

However, giving them an automatic net 0 POA (minimum) would be possible.

Bring back the LF overlaps

[grahambriggs]

Spanish don't have that much in common with the massed warband that we have been debating,

True, at least as long as you ignore the bits in (IIRC) Livy where the Spanish are described as hard/fierce charging troops that cause the legiones real problems.

Ancient authors always depict any roman enemy as "Fierce charging". ;p It doesn´t count.

So the "rejected" options are:

break offs
new cathegory for roman and spanish infantry


The proposed options are:


tie breaker POA

give a depth POA

give a negative modifier for enemies loosing against this troops.

I think you are mistaking the purpose of this section of the forum. It's to suggest things that might be improved in 2.0, and at a stretch to propose a mechanism that might fix the issue. So we can propose, but it's then up to the authors to make changes or not. We don't get a vote.

So far we know from RBS that the break off idea has been rejected as unhistorical. And that they are considering the negative modifier approach. A number of other possibilities exist, of which your list is a selection. Of course, there is also the option of 'no change'

[Ranimiro]

I was making a resumed list of the proposals for this subject. I don´t pretend to be telling the authors what to do.

[hazelbark]

Another possibly idea. When impact foot fight impact foot. Have them fight in every impact and melee phase.

problaby would accelerate too much. But gives superior barbarians a real chance against romans then.

Not sure i like the idea, but fwiw...

[Ranimiro]

I fact i think there is an alternative wich doesn`t involve specifically Impact troops. It hast to do with support.

viewtopic.php?t=19210

Indirectly and by a totally different mechanism it can help average barbarians, as they usually have larger armies than superior drilled impact foot.

If any of this proposals gets to a new version of the game we just have to be carefull not to accumulate benefits for one troops kind. Not at least without a price adjustment.

[shall]

First thanks for all therse thoughts and I shall start to get back in again now we have a vehcile for version 2.

Our sense so far is that the issue is NOT Romans. They feel just right to me - possibly for the first time. So we are very keen not to detract from that sensation.

The issue is to make the barbarians more effective - and this is true frankly - against Hoplites, Pikes and anything else for that matter. Hence the "romanised" part of the agrument seems a bit of a side issue.

• The CMT alteration makes a difference to the initial fight. An most seem to like this in some form. -2 for Impact Foot, -1 for dilled Impact foot as mentioned.
  
  Another thought I had was to affect the death roll e.g. put a new -1 on the death roll when fighting lancers and impact ft instead of the -1 on CTs . . historical rationale ...more than average death in such a crucnch. Game logic - gives 4 romans a higher chance of ending up a base down - even if winning the impact.
  
  Next bit is about giving barbarians more staying power, and we have some thoughts on allowing non-fighting 3rd ranks to count as rear support which would make it much easier to create a +1 on the CT of the barbarians without needing spare BGs to do so (assuming you are 3 or 4 deep).

My sense is that some well teted version of these will create the new balance without losing the feel of Romans at all.

Si

[VMadeira]

Some thoughts on this topic:

- As for the extra -1 on cohesion test when losing to undrilled impact foot or on death rolls, I would ask, what is the basis to makes the impact foot charge more deadly, than an Elephant charge ? or a Schythed chariot charge ? or Knights charge? Also i don't really see why the undrilled impact foot charge, should be more effective than the drilled one. Would this special bonus to undrilled impact foot, increase their cost? Or should we reduce the cost of drilled impact foot?

- Remember that these kind of changes affect interaction with other type of troops (that are correct at the moment), not just with the romans.

- In DBM the same debate appeared and from one moment to the other, thanks to a badly thinked revision of rules concerning .... barbarians, suddenly tornament tables were filled with hordes of almost unstoppable "warbands O". Don't make the same mistake again.

To avoid the above I would clearly go for removing the ssw POA.

[nikgaukroger]

First thanks for all therse thoughts and I shall start to get back in again now we have a vehcile for version 2.

Our sense so far is that the issue is NOT Romans. They feel just right to me - possibly for the first time. So we are very keen not to detract from that sensation.

The issue is to make the barbarians more effective - and this is true frankly - against Hoplites, Pikes and anything else for that matter. Hence the "romanised" part of the agrument seems a bit of a side issue.

• The CMT alteration makes a difference to the initial fight. An most seem to like this in some form. -2 for Impact Foot, -1 for dilled Impact foot as mentioned.
  
  Another thought I had was to affect the death roll e.g. put a new -1 on the death roll when fighting lancers and impact ft instead of the -1 on CTs . . historical rationale ...more than average death in such a crucnch. Game logic - gives 4 romans a higher chance of ending up a base down - even if winning the impact.
  
  Next bit is about giving barbarians more staying power, and we have some thoughts on allowing non-fighting 3rd ranks to count as rear support which would make it much easier to create a +1 on the CT of the barbarians without needing spare BGs to do so (assuming you are 3 or 4 deep).

My sense is that some well teted version of these will create the new balance without losing the feel of Romans at all.

Si

I would agree that in FoG Romans generally feel like Romans - in that they are bloody tough and can fight their way through most things, often even after an initial set back. In an awful lot of the game they work out really well. What it is not is the Skilled Swordsmen capability which, pretty much apart from fighting against western foot barbarians, is just not a factor and, in fact, is a point wasted as it has no effect. Given that, for a number of reasons, the western foot barbarians are pretty much not seen on the table we currently have a game where the Romans feel like Romans and that this would not change if they did not have the SSw capability.

One possibly interesting question on the capability would be to see if there are any contemporary statements that the Romans were better swordsmen then equivalent troops. I have just been reading some of Fernando Quesada Sanz's papers on the fighting style of Spanish, Roman and (possibly) Carthaginian troops and relative skill in swordsmanship is not something he mentions.

This is not, of course, to say that any other changes that may affect the interaction are not good ideas, however, I feel that any that may be introduced as an alternative to, and a way of avoiding, changes to giving Romans the SSw capability could well be rather misguided and at worst could lead to the sorts of rules shenanigans that have blighted DBMM

[Blathergut]

Next bit is about giving barbarians more staying power, and we have some thoughts on allowing non-fighting 3rd ranks to count as rear support which would make it much easier to create a +1 on the CT of the barbarians without needing spare BGs to do so (assuming you are 3 or 4 deep).[/list]
Si

This is a good idea and easy to implement. Gives them a reason for large BGs. How about a +1CMT for each 3rd or 4th rank!!??!!

[shall]

Could do. Another one is to allow non-fighting 3rd ranks to count towards rear support. So a 12 3 deep has rear support +1 on its own.

Si