Falling Back

[GuyFawcett]

Hi after playing my second gamer of FOG (Republican Romans vs Carthaginians) I have some questions.

I read a thread authored by play testers in June 2007. I understand conceptionally that minor push backs have been incorporated into the scale of cohesion break downs but what of larger retrograde such as Cannae and Marathon how could these actions be simulated?

Could well disciplined foot or skirmishers be allowed to break off by a function similar to that allowed to horse within the game during the joint action phase? As it stands currently a retrograde action by foot is simply a complete failure of a foot battle groups cohesion with no allowance for any controlled or preplanned feint. For that matter sounding retreat for an individual Battle Group before it breaks is not allowed either.

Curious to hear the development teams views on these questions.

Yours sincerely

Guy


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To expand a bit................you end up moving hundreds of bases small distances for every little benefit in the game. It leads to lots of table mess as bases get disjointed...............and it wasn't in fact common on any significant scale - Cannae being the one exception we found - buit even that given the plan seems ratehr a fall back than a push back.

As a result the payback for doing pushbacks is really marginal at best, and in fact we felt it was a net negative and therefore took the bold decision to remove them and wrap them into the factors.

Instead we consider gettting a DISR on the enemy as the evuivalent progressive reult and in fact its the coherence effect on trrops rather than being pushed back 5 yds - which is mm in reality but acutally quite a large push back.

Troops tend to rout rather then get pushed back much - its very hard to go backwards under pressure and keep coherence....take a look at any rugby scrum for a modern day experiment....it collapses when going backwards very quickly...even 1m.

Overall the prevelance of pushbacks seemed to us largely a wargaming myth, created as a game mechanism, that therefore could be replcaed by a more efficient one - the DISR, FRAG,,ROUT ladder with effects on number of dice.

Hope that helps explain the logic.

Si

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[shall]

There are a few recorded major fall backs which you would need to adda special rule for in a refight. We tried them and it didn't seem worthwhile in testing. Cannae I have refought fairly effectively without anyway with 2 layers of Gauls.

Its a possible for a vs 2.0 to have an organised fallback as a fighting manouvre but its an important one to test to death as in practice this may artificailly slow down lots of games.

Si