Slitherine

The generic size of BGs in FoG and RoR worked fairly well given the large numbers involved in ancients battles, generally. However the numbers involved in Medieval battles was, again generally, much smaller and the current default size of BGs does not really suit this period.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this apparant discrepancy is resolved in the historic battles that will come with SoA. Will the numerical size of BGs be reduced to reflect reality or will that aspect be ignored so that a 'one size fits all' philosophy carries forward to each suceeding army pack?

I suspect that it will be the latter approach because that will greater facilitate the ability to generate non-historic, cross army-pack battles. While I have no interest in playing these science finction encounters, I can understand the attraction of embarking on such a 'what-if' scenario once in a while but not to the detriment of at least some nod towards historical reality. Already, the DAG within a single Army book allows battles that are historically impossible; moving that situation futher on towards 'lets pretend' is not really somewhere that I want to go. When will we be seeing Elves and dwarves?

I really hope that FoG will try to adhere to history as well as being a superb game - which, of course, it is.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to actually use the date ranges. The new game dialog could offer various base parameter options (radio buttons) like

Thematic game = The players armies must have overlapping ranges. For SP games, the A.I can only use armies that fall in the date range of the player's army. Also the armies must come come from a "theme pool", similiar to the thematic tournament lists in the TT companion books. (in order to avoid having Romans fight Japanese, even if the data ranges overlap)
Historical data range = The players armies must have overlapping ranges. For SP games, the A.I can only use armies that fall in the date range of the player's army
Anachronistic data range = Any army, from any continent or era.

jimcrowley wrote:The generic size of BGs in FoG and RoR worked fairly well given the large numbers involved in ancients battles, generally. However the numbers involved in Medieval battles was, again generally, much smaller and the current default size of BGs does not really suit this period.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this apparant discrepancy is resolved in the historic battles that will come with SoA. Will the numerical size of BGs be reduced to reflect reality or will that aspect be ignored so that a 'one size fits all' philosophy carries forward to each suceeding army pack?

I suspect that it will be the latter approach because that will greater facilitate the ability to generate non-historic, cross army-pack battles. While I have no interest in playing these science finction encounters, I can understand the attraction of embarking on such a 'what-if' scenario once in a while but not to the detriment of at least some nod towards historical reality. Already, the DAG within a single Army book allows battles that are historically impossible; moving that situation futher on towards 'lets pretend' is not really somewhere that I want to go. When will we be seeing Elves and dwarves?

I really hope that FoG will try to adhere to history as well as being a superb game - which, of course, it is.

The number of men making up each individual unit is largely inconsequential. To be perfectly honest, it's not part of the table top rules and honestly speaking - to get the 'idea' game play out of the PC version - should be pretty much ignored here as well. The number of men in the units are there just for flavor - nothing more. The only thing that matters ultimately in the game is the % number which is universal irrelevant of the time/era/army book/leader. I understand the reasoning why Slitherine elected to have the 1500, 1000, 500 man numbers included in the game (flavor), but with posts complaining about casualty numbers as well as the above, it makes me wonder if their inclusion is causing more problems with people wrapping their head around the system then would be included if they weren't a part of the game at all.

Just my two thoughts.

I had thought that as FoG moved ahead in time to more effective units the cost would reflect that for the sake of playing different eras against each other. Therefore RoR would allow for the purchase of more units then SoA for the same amount of army points since the RoR units would probably be less effective. Not the case but then could you have an accurate reflection without an overhaul of the dice system etc.

Well, if unitsize/casulties are meaningless, why were they including in the first place. For a TT game, you're absolutely right. Bookkeeping manpower is far to cumbersome and complicated for a TT game. But we're talking about a PC, were numbercrunching is implicit to the system.
Loss counts are so important to Slitherine, that our loss and kill numbers are part of our players profile. So why not include realistic numbers to give a sense of realism.

Also, I like to compare my kill/casualties over various instances of the same battle. I simply want to answer the question if my win was a phyrric one or not...

At first the unit sizes really bugged me, as I would have much preferred the unit sizes to have been more like 500/300/200 or something similar rather than the 1500/1000/500 they are now, because it would have been much easier to represent historical formations of legions etc. However, having said that I currently ignore the unit numbers as actual men and instead prefer to rationalise them as coheshion blocks being lost bit by bloody bit. I know this may sound like a cop-out but for me at least it stops me from fixating that my Mid-Republican Roman Legions are vastly overstrength compared to their historical counterparts. I did make a scenario that totally filled a 50 x 30 map that had the unit sizes as 300/150/100 for a Mid-Republican Roman vs Carthaginian bash, it was glorious to look at and play etc. but a lot of hard work to do, so ultimately I thought not worth the effort to carry on with into other battles.

The thing is I guess, is that no matter how high or low the game designers set the unit sizes it won't please everyone and as said before it does distract from the game somewhat when people (like myself) worry too much about actual numbers of men in the units.

Long version

I was originally a bit put off by the number of "men" in a BG when first playing but agree that if you change perception to not view it in this way but along the lines of cohesion then it doesn't matter one bit.

I suppose where people like to have the numbers of men etc is if they are using FOG to fight an external campaign battle etc or they are looking at the results of a battle in terms of numbers of men killed etc. However as the game doesn't model pursuit/recovery of fallen, routed etc. these numbers are meaningless on their own unless you construct your own process, in which case you might as well make up some historically relevant basis for integrating the battle into a campaign anyway.

Short version

Agree - doesn't matter one bit!

Switching the display to % fixed the issue for me

We could change the scale by army or army book but it could lead to a lot of confusion when fighting armies out of period? I think using the % numbers is probably the safest way round it for now.

If the problem is the men per unit you can have 2 armies in the list, one the historical army (smaller numbers of soldiers) and other with the standar 1.500-500 soldiers units. You can do it for all armies for example in RoR armies smaller number are interesting to simulate tactical battles.

PD: for example with the actual army sizes you can find battles like this more like a napoleonic battles standars

iainmcneil wrote:We could change the scale by army or army book but it could lead to a lot of confusion when fighting armies out of period? I think using the % numbers is probably the safest way round it for now.

On the whole it would have been better if the PC game had omitted the number of men altogether and taken the hand waving approach used in the TT rules. So far in my experience the number of men issue has generated more questions/comments on these forums than just about anything else. The problem is that with the numbers actually displayed and settable in the scenario editor, it is perfectly natural to assume that they mean something in the game whereas they actually have no meaning what so ever for game play. While it might be difficult now to remove them at this point, in the long term it might well improve playability and make it easier for new players coming to the game.

Chris

I really like them - much prefer to the % even though I know they mean nothing

iainmcneil wrote:I really like them - much prefer to the % even though I know they mean nothing

The problem in general is that new comers to the game do not know they are meaningless and hence they cause more confusion than whatever they add to the game. If there was some way to make it perfectly clear that they were totally irrelevant, then maybe it would be fine to leave them in. Alternatively have the number of men set the same for all BGs by default. Right now their primary effect seems to be to confuse players and to make it harder for them to understand and accept how the combat system works.

If someone told me that FoG PC was a game where 500 men with only a sling can beat 1500 Roman legionaries in metal armour with their pila and swords and shields a significant percentage of the time, I think I would be strongly inclined to go looking for a realistic game like the Total War series rather than bothering with such a silly fantasy game. I can easily see a reviewer describing FoG PC that way after a playing a few games if they have paid attention to the numbers of men.

Chris

For me, the numbers are about adding a sense of scale. Without them we have:

'an unkown number of HF attacked an unknown number of MF over an unknown distance and over a unknown time and caused 22% casualties'

A bit sterile, I think. You need to have at least one factor which has actual numbers attatched to it to give some relationship to real events. Having said that, if they cannot be made to be meaningful then I agree with batesmotel.

I totally agree that the numbers do give a sense of scale, but the problem being is that the scale chosen is a little too monumental for some people (myself included) and that causes some issues with regards to how people perceive the game. This sense of overscaling really does come to the fore the later into the period we go, such as Scutarii's example of a 500 pt army of Medieval Highlanders vs Anglo-Irish being a battle between 70,000 and 53,000 men respectively, this being an impossible number of men for these armies to muster (7,000 vs 5,300 would be closer the mark), and this also being a modest sized DAG battle.

Whilst some of the battles were very large, this was the exception rather than the rule and there were in the period the rules cover far more smaller battles than bigger ones, so it is understandable that some people may see this as confusing or unrealistic. In the TT rules there is a troop scale but it is set much lower than the amounts given by the PC version and even this was open for interpretation depending upon the sub-period or size of battle you wished to portray. I do think that the numbers in each unit should be made universal throughout all the armies used for the sake of simplicity but a lower number would seem to make more sense or else we are looking at Roman legions being represent by 3 units each and a pike phalanx of one unit or to put it another way, Alexanders pike phalanxes at the battle of Guagamela being represented by only 10 pike units (15,000 men).

My own 600 pt Mid Roman army is worth over 60,000 men almost as big as the Cannae army which was huge, even by Roman standards.The TT rules and lists were never designed to cover such large armies and in fact neither do the PC lists, its just that it appears to be so, because of the overscaling of the units with the numbers of men they portray. For anyone wishing to recreate Cannae or any such large battle it is easy to make a scenario in the scenario editor and adjust unit numbers to suit, as many have already done, but it seems that most people are equally happy to play non-historical points based games were they simply represent a smaller force from the army of their choice.

Its sort of like playing Napoleonics and depiicting armies large enough for the battle of Leipzig whilst playing with Spanish in the Peninsular War.

I agree with SRW about sizes, but you could just drop that last 0, so instead of seeing 1000 knights, see 100 which is more reasonable.

On another note, I finally loaded the beta up and see there are no scenarios just DAG lists. Is this true?

Deeter

iainmcneil wrote:We could change the scale by army or army book but it could lead to a lot of confusion when fighting armies out of period? I think using the % numbers is probably the safest way round it for now.

In my opinion this is the best answer. Make the numbers of men accurate for each book/expansion. While some may want to play armies from differing periods (books), and I may even try that myself, I don't think the game should be made "fit" this one aspect, especially since its really just a bonus usage anyway. Further, if a different time period is protrayed with avergaes of differing numbers of men, then those fighting these battles should be prepared for the 1500 pike unit fighting the 300 longbow unit.

If you took a 6,000 man medieval army back in your time machine and they faced a 60,000 man Carthagenian army, well that's what they get. I could suspend belief better in that circumstance than seeing the new expansion stick with the 500, 1000, 1500 structure just because it works when fighting armies of differing eras.

Anyway, my two cents.

Scar wrote:

iainmcneil wrote:We could change the scale by army or army book but it could lead to a lot of confusion when fighting armies out of period? I think using the % numbers is probably the safest way round it for now.

In my opinion this is the best answer. Make the numbers of men accurate for each book/expansion. While some may want to play armies from differing periods (books), and I may even try that myself, I don't think the game should be made "fit" this one aspect, especially since its really just a bonus usage anyway. Further, if a different time period is protrayed with avergaes of differing numbers of men, then those fighting these battles should be prepared for the 1500 pike unit fighting the 300 longbow unit.

If you took a 6,000 man medieval army back in your time machine and they faced a 60,000 man Carthagenian army, well that's what they get. I could suspend belief better in that circumstance than seeing the new expansion stick with the 500, 1000, 1500 structure just because it works when fighting armies of differing eras.

Anyway, my two cents.

Fully agree with Scar. Either that or scrap the numbers altogether.