Thoughts on first reading
Posted: Fri Mar 02, 2007 12:17 pm
Firstly an apology. This will not be as comprehensive as I'd like because I need to set off for Leeds shortly! My entire knowledge of AOW has come in the last week since I wrote to Bruce asking about this thing he was organising.
So, waffle over, what do I think?
Firstly it is obvious that those who have been involved to date have put an enormous amount of work to get AOW to where it is now.
On receiving the rules themselves I thought "there's an awful lot here". The 100 page document is intimidating and will only get bigger once the diagrams are added. On reading it through I was able to quickly grasp the main concepts (laying them out in a special section helps!) but it did strike me that it was only after reading a significant way through that I was able to see how they might be applied in a game context. After a while I felt that there is a relatively straightforward game in there. Maybe it would be possible to structure the rules to allow a reader to have the important rules (those that detail the essence of what happens in each phase of each turn) in a section at the front and the more complex stuff in later sections which deal with the less common bits. As an example, for movement I would regard distances, manoeuvre and the effect of terrain as essential and how to evade around terrain/friends, bisecting angles of multiple chargers and so on as detailed explanation of how to deal with specific circumstances. If this could be indexed so that players could readily find the section that related to their query then we really would have moved into the 21st century!
As to the game concepts I can see influences from a variety of previous rulesets but combined in what appears to me to be a very clever way.
1) The way that troops are defined will allow for a greater level of granularity between troop types and an end to a lot of the debates caused by shoehorning some of the less obvious ones into a set of predefined categories that are more easily grasped for some than others. I particularly like the idea of concentrating on function rather than the minutiae of equipment. Conversely, this flexibility makes trying to put an army list together very much more complicated. I hope to have a spreadsheet set up to sort this out very soon!
2) I think that the concept of BGs will eliminate a lot of the messing about that has developed in DBM, fiddling around to achieve advantageous matchups on an element by element basis all down the line. I am particularly happy with the line about not using rules mechanisms to prevent your troops being contacted.
3) The separation of all shooting from combat is something I know a lot of people missed in DBM. Maybe the idea of integrating the two was a concept too far. I also like the idea of the separate impact/melee phases. The example quoted in the rules (Gauls/Romans) really encourages me to think that these rules will resolve a number of areas where previous compromises/simplifications were never entirely satisfactory. The change of emphasis from killing to lowering cohesion is a great step forward here.
On the whole I think that these rules have great potential and I'm really looking forward to getting some games in.
Kevin Johnson 2/3/07
So, waffle over, what do I think?
Firstly it is obvious that those who have been involved to date have put an enormous amount of work to get AOW to where it is now.
On receiving the rules themselves I thought "there's an awful lot here". The 100 page document is intimidating and will only get bigger once the diagrams are added. On reading it through I was able to quickly grasp the main concepts (laying them out in a special section helps!) but it did strike me that it was only after reading a significant way through that I was able to see how they might be applied in a game context. After a while I felt that there is a relatively straightforward game in there. Maybe it would be possible to structure the rules to allow a reader to have the important rules (those that detail the essence of what happens in each phase of each turn) in a section at the front and the more complex stuff in later sections which deal with the less common bits. As an example, for movement I would regard distances, manoeuvre and the effect of terrain as essential and how to evade around terrain/friends, bisecting angles of multiple chargers and so on as detailed explanation of how to deal with specific circumstances. If this could be indexed so that players could readily find the section that related to their query then we really would have moved into the 21st century!
As to the game concepts I can see influences from a variety of previous rulesets but combined in what appears to me to be a very clever way.
1) The way that troops are defined will allow for a greater level of granularity between troop types and an end to a lot of the debates caused by shoehorning some of the less obvious ones into a set of predefined categories that are more easily grasped for some than others. I particularly like the idea of concentrating on function rather than the minutiae of equipment. Conversely, this flexibility makes trying to put an army list together very much more complicated. I hope to have a spreadsheet set up to sort this out very soon!
2) I think that the concept of BGs will eliminate a lot of the messing about that has developed in DBM, fiddling around to achieve advantageous matchups on an element by element basis all down the line. I am particularly happy with the line about not using rules mechanisms to prevent your troops being contacted.
3) The separation of all shooting from combat is something I know a lot of people missed in DBM. Maybe the idea of integrating the two was a concept too far. I also like the idea of the separate impact/melee phases. The example quoted in the rules (Gauls/Romans) really encourages me to think that these rules will resolve a number of areas where previous compromises/simplifications were never entirely satisfactory. The change of emphasis from killing to lowering cohesion is a great step forward here.
On the whole I think that these rules have great potential and I'm really looking forward to getting some games in.
Kevin Johnson 2/3/07
