Slitherine

As a newbie, I like the overall concepts of the game. There are a few things that are very confusing to my humble mind.
1) It takes time to understand impact vs. subsequent melee rounds.
2) The percentages shown can be misleading. It is the number of dice, points of advantage and troop quality (rerolls) that only bring up the initial roll of attacker wins/defender wins/draw.
3) Then the loses are calculated. I have some problems with this one. Because a unit of light foot with say 400 men gets a lucky dice rolls vs HF drilled then kill 25% of them!? The reverse roll kills perhaps 100 LF. Who are these guys, special forces?
4) Cohesion tests - That is never really shown to a newbie and people have to dig to find it.

Now, while I can appreciate many of these features, even if I don't completely understand them. It would be nice to learn more from experience. Fair enough. However, when my line disintegrates in replay, it moves so fast I can't see what each calculation occurred. If I scroll up to look, the next contact occurs and the results move back down. If there is enough contact, usually the most important part where the lines collide, it is impossible to even scroll up afterward. There were so many complex movement tests, rally test, etc. that the results are not able to be scrolled back to. I submit two things.
1) Allow the user to pause the replay to look at what happened
2) A log to review the entire turn

Mercutio wrote:As a newbie, I like the overall concepts of the game. There are a few things that are very confusing to my humble mind.
1) It takes time to understand impact vs. subsequent melee rounds.
2) The percentages shown can be misleading. It is the number of dice, points of advantage and troop quality (rerolls) that only bring up the initial roll of attacker wins/defender wins/draw.
3) Then the loses are calculated. I have some problems with this one. Because a unit of light foot with say 400 men gets a lucky dice rolls vs HF drilled then kill 25% of them!? The reverse roll kills perhaps 100 LF. Who are these guys, special forces?
4) Cohesion tests - That is never really shown to a newbie and people have to dig to find it.

Now, while I can appreciate many of these features, even if I don't completely understand them. It would be nice to learn more from experience. Fair enough. However, when my line disintegrates in replay, it moves so fast I can't see what each calculation occurred. If I scroll up to look, the next contact occurs and the results move back down. If there is enough contact, usually the most important part where the lines collide, it is impossible to even scroll up afterward. There were so many complex movement tests, rally test, etc. that the results are not able to be scrolled back to. I submit two things.
1) Allow the user to pause the replay to look at what happened
2) A log to review the entire turn

I agree. It would be nice if we could pause the action during the replay so that we can analyse the results. As it stands its impossable to keep up with the results because everything is happening so fast.

Welcome! Great to get new players!

Don't feel too bad - every battle I still learn something new about the FOG system. When I stop learning, I'll move to another game, but I don't forsee this happening for a couple of years - Slitherine have hooked me with their great system, responsive updates and expansion packs!

Your idea to add the ability to save replays is a good one. Slitherine, if you are listening, I would prioritise this forwards in your update queue. When it is easy to upload annotated replays of games, your AARs will explode and they are a wonderfully cheap marketing tool!

My imperfect answers to your questions:
1) Agreed. Print out the POA and Number of dice tables in the Help Manual and study them well!
2) Percentages shown are accurate. However, as in ancient battles, you can't guarantee success - 1 time in 100 a 99% chance will go bad. And these outliers are the ones that will stick in your memory and cause you to say "the systems not fair!"
3) Personally, I'd turn off the option that shows kill numbers. I agree they are misleading. You will learn the system better with the option enabled that shows casualties as %.
4) Critical to winning is understanding how cohesion tests work. We need a "dummy's guide" to FOG, the manual is structure that only the dedicated will wade through it! Maybe we can create one online wiki-style for contributors......

Before your features are implemented, you will have to focus on learning the features during your own turn. This is better anyway, since you can compare options side by side - e.g. what are my % chance for charging those spears compared to the impact foot, and how that % links to the POA, dice and quality (perhaps troop quality should be listed in the calculation window so all 3 factors influencing the % are shown?)

The venerable Steel Panthers had a nifty logging feature - IIRC you hit ALT-L and all combat results were written to a text file (which got recycled each time a new battle was started). It gave you the opportunity to see exactly what was happening under the hood if you thought something weird had happened. I would highly recommend this sort of feature for FoG given the number of non-TT players around (me included) and the number of different factors that affect a result.

Cheers.

thanks for the tips.

I do look over the calculations on my turn, but it is hard to determine exactly what went wrong on the replay. So what did my opponent do that was so successful? Was it luck? (my unit rolled 4 ones and his rolled 2 sixes and the loss and cohesion tests bombed?) Are there factors in the POA I didn't catch? Was it because of a leader bonus I didn't see? Even something as subtle as the order in which the attacks were made that helped trigger a breakdown of the line.

I would like a chance to halt it, perhaps back it up a bit, analyze the turn and learn from it. At the least I should be able to slow it down. It zips by so fast on my computer I can barely read most of a line before it most and another line pops up.

Regards

I haven't used it, but you can slow the animation speed through the preferences section.

I don't think slowing the animation speed slows down the information speed.

Deeter

Mercutio wrote:3) Then the loses are calculated. I have some problems with this one. Because a unit of light foot with say 400 men gets a lucky dice rolls vs HF drilled then kill 25% of them!? The reverse roll kills perhaps 100 LF. Who are these guys, special forces?
4) Cohesion tests - That is never really shown to a newbie and people have to dig to find it.

Shhh! Don't mention this one.... you'll start a riot! There have been a lot of different posts about this one. The simplest thing to understand is that the number of kills doesn't matter, it's the percentage loss that's important. You may ask "if this is the case, why does it show the numbers instead of percentage losses?", well I have no answer for that No, seriously, ignore the numbers, they really don't mean anything and don't affect the battle.

Mercutio wrote:I submit two things.
1) Allow the user to pause the replay to look at what happened
2) A log to review the entire turn

A great suggestion, which has been posted before, and I support it!