Slitherine

......state of the troops; it is their communal ability to remain strong as a cohesive unit. In these rules troops will gradually have their effectiveness reduced through being DISRUPTED, WAVERING to ultimately being BROKEN and of little further value in the battle. This is a cohesion ladder .....

So how will you keep track of the cohesion ladder? Heh? Don't tell me I will need markers all over!!!!

And hurry up and finish would ya?

Ian Buttridge

As the game has units made up of elements I think it should be easy to have the positioning of the elements within the unit as a method of doing this wouldn't you?

A la WRG 7th if you like.

I'm not sure that any reference to 7th edition is a good idea.

I and lots of others just dropped out of ancients for a few years because they were absolutely rubbish

taking anything from them is a bad thing

regards

Jez

nikgaukroger wrote:As the game has units made up of elements I think it should be easy to have the positioning of the elements within the unit as a method of doing this wouldn't you?

A la WRG 7th if you like.

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I don't know 7th but I can see something like this working - stagering figures slightly for the first step and puting them corner to corner checkerboard fasion for the second step.

I think to say that none of the mechanisms from WRG 7th could not be useful is an over simplification. Rules sets generally work or don't work because of the way the various mechanisms they employ mesh and operate together. The individual mechanisms may be fine but the whole could be awful.

I don't see that a simple visiual clue mechanim like offsetting elements to represent disorder, etc. would be a bad thing and wouldn't work.

Just thinking I didn't acknowledge a point made by Jez. If these rules look too much like WRG 7th they will be a turn off for a lot of people who didn't like 7th and those that did like it will be playing Warrior anyway so probably aren't a target audience.

The problem with the proposed way of showing troop state is that it's the same as 7th, which evrybody ignored because it's just not clear enough.

Is that unit disordered or just bumped out of line? In 7th players went to counters which are unambiguous - I'll watch the warrior players using them at a comp tomorrow.

You can have the playing peices showing troop state, say with standard 4-element units, removing one to show disorder, 2 for wavering. And allow the return of elements when order is restored. Or something.

7th had lots of good ideas but suffered from critical play-balance issues, and lack of purpose-built lists to show the unit sizes intended and the way tiny things could lead to a catastophic effect meant play was slow and (understandibly) cautious.

No wonder DBA was so enthusiastically adopted.

David B

I agree 7th had a lot of issues that were never really resolved, which is why 6th hung around all the way through it and through the other side.

regards
Paul

WRG Seventh had to use counters for some of the reasons mentioned above, mainly our toys get moved. They may get moved quickly or over a piece of terrain and look disjointed, so counters were better. I would not like a game using counters, they detract from the visual effect. Even when used they often got left behind and forgotten during the more exciting parts of the game. Hopefully AoW will have exciting parts . 7th did recommend command elements. IMHO AoW should make them compulsory. These command elements can then be used to show the state of the Battle Groups.
From what I know of the rules, very little really, the cohesion ladder needs something visible so that both players can tell what is happening. This may not have been true in history, but the game needs to be fair and it is a game.
Each element within a BG has at least 2 figures or a model with crew. It may take us as gamers a little more effort to paint up a command element for each BG but the visual effect would be better, even if we had to paint a number of different command elements to be used, not at the same time, with each unit.
So a complete command element represents its BG being at the top of the cohesion ladder. A BG with no unit standard on its command element base represents the first step down the ladder. A BG with casualties on its command element base and no standard represents the second step down. A unit with no command element visible is at the bottom of the ladder. This would mean replacing the command element as it moved up and down the ladder. IMO no bad thing. It would also mean, probably painting up some more elements for the unit, but we would get the chance to model the cohesion within a unit and it would be easily recogniseable.

phil

I've seen counters handled in an unobtrusive manner by using 1" long green or brown pipecleaner segments. They blend in with the bases well enough that they aren't painfully obvious, and stick well enough between the legs of the troops that they don't get left behind accidentally (although I've seen games where not all "accidents" were accidental). You don't need a fancy chart for different colors to represent different situations, just the presence of one or more to indicate the decline in status. It beats trying to turn various elements around or staggering them in some fashion, then trying to wheel and move the whole mess without changng the arrangement.