Slitherine

One of the wonderful things about DBM is the paper, scissors, rock nature of the troop interactions. This means that there is no one killer army, troop type, or strategy (although, to be fair, there are many bad ones). As a result, there is a flourishing international tournament scene in which a wide variety of army types are viable and one can see army choice trends over time.

From the battle reports I have read on this list--admittedly a small sample size--it appears that shooting troops in AoW have a significant advantage over non-shooters. Does AoW have a paper, scissors, rock nature? If not, what makes it a good, balanced tournament game?

Marc

It has exactly the same dynamics running in a different way - but its a bit less of a certainty in small local areas. So you need a good overall plan across the battlefield more than a small local bit where you can win out with high odds across 2-4 base widths. But overall yes there are armies that are trouble for each other so there is no dominant force - I have 14 favourite armies at the moment.....depending on my mood.

Also no BGs in AOW are broken automatically due to other parts of a "command" going down. So you actually need to force half of the enemy BGs down the cohesion ladder to get them to broken and get a complete victory. So you cannot break a command on 1/3rd of anything, and by the same measure you cannot make anything indestructable. And you can't destroy and entire army by killing 2 bases (which I have seen done twice). There is a feel of gritting it out across the battlefield to get the big wins.

All BGs need to be handled with care in our experience - whether horde at the back or elite Knights. There is no way you can sacrifice weak BGs nor is there an extreme risk to using high value ones. This - in testing - seems to result in very historical behaviour where people use their good tgoops and try to protect weaker parts of their armies. Poeple use their skirmishers but do not treat them as disposables. If the good stuff goes down the rest then is very vulnerable.

The lists are being carefully done so there is no filler army.

Also move speed and game speed are quite quick so troops at the back of the table are not at all safe!

Hope that helps give a flavour.

Cheers

Simon

babyshark wrote:From the battle reports I have read on this list--admittedly a small sample size--it appears that shooting troops in AoW have a significant advantage over non-shooters. Does AoW have a paper, scissors, rock nature? If not, what makes it a good, balanced tournament game?

Shooting troops are a good way of evening out a bad situation but are not the answer to everything. I was able to defeat shooting light horse with a mix of non shooting medium foot and shooting light foot. The medium foot were key as they gave me something to protect my otherwise very vulnerable light foot.

Against Don's Abbasid army we broke (well virtually wiped out) all his shooting cavalry and were undone by his lancers.

There is a similar scisors paper stone effect but it is a bit more subtle most of the time. That said protected impact foot swordsmen really don't like fighting armoured lancere swordsmen. Not nice at all.

Hammy

shall wrote:The lists are being carefully done so there is no filler army.

Also move speed and game speed are quite quick so troops at the back of the table are not at all safe!

That is interesting to see, and seems to address one of the more glaring issues in DBM: gaming the design of commands to create disposable strike troops.

Marc

hammy wrote:There is a similar scisors paper stone effect but it is a bit more subtle most of the time. That said protected impact foot swordsmen really don't like fighting armoured lancere swordsmen. Not nice at all.

Is this basically Kn into Ax or Wb in DBM terms?

Marc

Not as messy as DBM for the foot but they are still at quite a disadvantage and are likely to be routed (I think).

babyshark wrote:

hammy wrote:There is a similar scisors paper stone effect but it is a bit more subtle most of the time. That said protected impact foot swordsmen really don't like fighting armoured lancere swordsmen. Not nice at all.

Is this basically Kn into Ax or Wb in DBM terms?

Marc

More like Kn into Wb(O) but otherwise yes.

If the impact foot are not heavy foot then it is even worse for the foot.

In short there are bad matchups and things have their weaknesses much lik DBM

babyshark wrote:
From the battle reports I have read on this list--admittedly a small sample size--it appears that shooting troops in AoW have a significant advantage over non-shooters. Marc

One other thing to bear in mind is that DBM is not "the real world". 10 years of playing it can make you forget that cavalry did shoot, inflict casualties, and disturb the cohesion of foot in the real world and then skirmish away after tempting them into an unwise charge....and a non-shooting pedestrian army needed a somewhat better plan to deal with this than advance in a line and wait for the edge of the table to win them the battle!!

The inability to do this was one of the main initial whinges about DBM - at least for the first few years until everyone either gave up playing because of it - or put up with it !

madaxeman wrote:

babyshark wrote:
From the battle reports I have read on this list--admittedly a small sample size--it appears that shooting troops in AoW have a significant advantage over non-shooters. Marc

One other thing to bear in mind is that DBM is not "the real world". 10 years of playing it can make you forget that cavalry did shoot, inflict casualties

I'd add that it is also a reaction to discovering that Mongol cavalry and Parthian light horse can shoot and don't have to charge into combat to force an outcome. Hence the reason why people are commenting on it.

Everything else being equal, shooting cavalry are disadvantaged slightly at impact compared to lance or javelin cavalry, which balances out their ability to inflict damage at a distance. In a prolonged melee it will boil down to armour, training in secondary weapons (sword or mace), numbers and morale.

Neil

neilhammond wrote:

madaxeman wrote:

babyshark wrote:
From the battle reports I have read on this list--admittedly a small sample size--it appears that shooting troops in AoW have a significant advantage over non-shooters. Marc

One other thing to bear in mind is that DBM is not "the real world". 10 years of playing it can make you forget that cavalry did shoot, inflict casualties

I'd add that it is also a reaction to discovering that Mongol cavalry and Parthian light horse can shoot and don't have to charge into combat to force an outcome. Hence the reason why people are commenting on it.

Everything else being equal, shooting cavalry are disadvantaged slightly at impact compared to lance or javelin cavalry, which balances out their ability to inflict damage at a distance. In a prolonged melee it will boil down to armour, training in secondary weapons (sword or mace), numbers and morale.

Neil

Since Horsearchers & Light Foot can now be shot by Artillery & Bows, what penalties do Bows/Arty suffer for shooting at skirmishers?


Cheers,
Jer

Since Horsearchers & Light Foot can now be shot by Artillery & Bows, what penalties do Bows/Arty suffer for shooting at skirmishers?

All of this is factored into the POA system. Skirmishers in are harder to hurt than poorly armoured non skirmishers. Moutned troops are more vulnerable to missiles than similarly armoured foot etc.

Suffice to say that skirmishing behaviour is taken into account in the vulnerability of light foot to missiles. This is not like the silliness that occured in some older rulesets (WRG 7th) for example where LI archers were 2 factors worse off for being unshielded but got the 2 factors back if they were skirmishing. This was fine till you realised that slingers weren' unshielded so didn't get the +2 but if they skirmished they did get the -2 which meant that LI slingers were massively better (once in range) against other shooters than LI archers. I also seem to remember some cheese with units that were half slingers and half archers that then didn't skirmish but didn't count unshielded either...

Hope that helps a bit without copying in huge sections of the rules.

Hammy