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    Senior Member marcum uth mather's Avatar
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    does anyone have a system they like for mass combat? the war card suck as tatics are out the window entierley. i was thinking that the use uf fiqures with extra states might help.. let me elaberate. lets say you have a unite of pike men. lets say your average pike man is a 1st level fighter. lets also say he is wering chain mail. so i role a 8 for hit points and a 15 dor defence. now lets say ther is 200 of them. so take 200x8 gives you 1600. so now you have a unit of pikemen when a nother unit of infrantry to take damedge you devide thewre number by 4, giquring they all cant hit at once. now they face a unit with the same states. they rolle a group to hit of 17, higth enough to hit. i divide the unit by 4 and get 50. they rolle a 6 for damdge. 6x50 is 300. so 300 hit point are gone frome the groupe or 300/8 rounded down is 250 men dead from the other group. this is just a thought and i am still trying to work out the kinks so any input is welcome

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    Jan E. Juvstad.

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    Site Moderator geeman's Avatar
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    At 05:21 PM 8/28/2003 +0200, marcum uth mather wrote:



    >does anyone have a system they like for mass combat? the war card suck as

    >tatics are out the window entierley.



    I wrote up a system of mass combat to replace the warcard system that uses

    "chits" in place of cards, as well as stats that are based on the equipment

    spent on the units, their training and experience. Combat resolution was

    done by rolling simple attack dice which determined hits. In playtesting

    it I found it worked surprisingly well. It`s rather a long document,

    however, and part of a much larger work, but if folks are interested in

    seeing it I can edit it into a single document.



    At present, however, there are several basic changes I want to make to

    it. The draft has tables for most types of weapons and armor in D&D 3e and

    extrapolates their stats into units of 100 soldiers, and I`d like to

    streamline that. I also want to revise the section on mounts and monstrous

    units... but I`m afraid most of that revision is on the back burner for the

    time being. The system is at least better than warcards even without the

    revisions....



    As a matter of fact, I`ve been thinking that the best way to do mass combat

    is to turn companies of soldiers into a sort of template system. That is,

    you take one soldier and then apply bonuses, HD, BAB, etc. to his stats (as

    well as increase his size) by noting the number of soldiers in a unit. The

    numbers would mimic the EL system in some ways. It would look kind of like

    this:



    # BAB HD Damage Size

    4 +1 x1 +1 2x3

    9 +2 x2 +2 3x3

    16 +3 x3 +3 4x4

    25 +4 x4 +4 5x5



    Etc.



    That way combat could be conducted using the standard D&D combat

    system. Things like equipment, training, etc. would still need to be

    addressed, but it would be a lot easier than dropping into an entirely

    different combat resolution system.



    Gary

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    Senior Member Osprey's Avatar
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    I posted in the Playtest section a month or two back that I had developed a battlesystem off of the existing BRCS war card system, but using miniatures, varied terrain, and more units (12 per army on the board at once). I've playtested it twice now (and revised it once in between), and found it works fairly well. I don't have a website, but would be happy to email it (a Word attachment) to you.

    Osprey

    osprey424@yahoo.com

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    Site Moderator kgauck's Avatar
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    ----- Original Message -----

    From: "marcum uth mather" <brnetboard@BIRTHRIGHT.NET>

    Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2003 10:21 AM





    > does anyone have a system they like for mass combat? the war

    > card suck as tatics are out the window entierley.



    Eh? Why can`t you use tactics? I use the warcards exclusivly, and I have

    no problem implimenting any medieval tactic.



    Kenneth Gauck

    kgauck@mchsi.com

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    Senior Member marcum uth mather's Avatar
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    what do you mean you have no problem? the units are very one dimensinal, as in formations they can use. also the battle map use of seiges is whay to simplistic.

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    Senior Member Osprey's Avatar
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    Eh? Why can`t you use tactics? I use the warcards exclusivly, and I have
    no problem implimenting any medieval tactic.
    How about the fact that archers always have a range of 1 space, meaning they can never be protected by infantry. How does this simulate realistic medieval battlefields? Medieval archers (esp. longbowmen) fired in massed arcs, right over the heads of their defenders. For example, English foot knights protected the longbowmen from charging knights at the battle of Crecy (1412?).

    How do the war cards allow that if only 1 unit may occupy a given space on the 3x5 field?

    What about the realistically devestating effects of flanking and surrounding units?

    Why is artillery more deadly (in damage AND accuracy)against infantry than a unit of longbowmen, with twice the range to boot? Because they cost more GB to muster?

    How can mobile units like scouts and cavalry take advantage of their high mobility in such a small area?

    Only 5 units at a time? Even medieval commanders had better abilities of unit coordination than that.

    These were the major issues I was dealing with when trying to revise the war card rules.

    Osprey

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    On Fri, 29 Aug 2003, Osprey wrote:



    > These were the major issues I was dealing with when trying to revise

    > the war card rules.



    I agree completely. The first change to make IMO is to go for a much

    bigger map (I use hex grids, at least 20x30); then multiply all ranges and

    movement factors by three, and have attacks affecting entire squares on

    the old map have a one-hex blast radius, and without stacking things go

    swimmingly. You can also get into lots more interesting detail with the

    terrain this way.





    Ryan Caveney

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    On Thu, 28 Aug 2003, Mark_Aurel wrote:

    > Cry Havoc from Malhavoc rocks.

    >

    > http://www.montecook.com/mpress_Havoc.html



    And, since it`s about to be a long weekend and I expect to get some work

    done on this, I`ll throw out that I`m the one that has taken on revising

    the BRCS war combat system chapter, and I`ll be basing it on this. War

    card type bodies (units of 200 men, etc) will remain as administrative

    units for mustering, upkeep, provincial movement, etc, but the battle

    system written for Cry Havoc uses units of X men, on a square grid like

    regular D&D, where each square is 50` by 50`, and X is going to be 10, 20,

    or 50, depending on how many men you have to deal with on a side.



    I`m going to be generating a whole lot of stats for all the basic war card

    units using the Cry Havoc format; that will be the lion`s share of the

    work, I`m betting, though it`s fairly repetetive so I`ll be able to

    automate a lot of it.



    The best part of this in my mind is that, given a bunch of pregenerated

    stats like we`ll have, you don`t really need to learn more than a couple

    new rules to run a big battle. It operates using mostly the 3e tactical

    rules that people already know. There`s a bit of scaling up and a couple

    statistical tricks, but it`s pretty transparent.



    --

    Daniel McSorley

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    On Thu, 28 Aug 2003, marcum uth mather wrote:



    > lets say your average pike man is a 1st level fighter. lets also say

    > he is wering chain mail. so i role a 8 for hit points and a 15 dor

    > defence. now lets say ther is 200 of them. so take 200x8 gives you

    > 1600. so now you have a unit of pikemen when a nother unit of

    > infrantry to take damedge you devide thewre number by 4, giquring they

    > all cant hit at once. now they face a unit with the same states. they

    > rolle a group to hit of 17, higth enough to hit. i divide the unit by

    > 4 and get 50. they rolle a 6 for damdge. 6x50 is 300. so 300 hit point

    > are gone frome the groupe or 300/8 rounded down is 250 men dead from

    > the other group.



    This is not a bad plan at all; in fact, it`s pretty much the way the old

    AD&D BattleSystem mass combat rules work, and it`s pretty much the way

    lots of computer wargames do it. If you can find BattleSystem on ebay or

    suchlike (I`ve seen it quite recently), I`d recommend it -- I think you`d

    like the way it works, and it already handles spells, monsters, magic

    items and such.



    A couple of caveats: when you roll for damage, remember that d8 x 200 is a

    vastly differently-shaped probability distribution than 200d8. Rather

    than rolling one die and multiplying by the number of men, saying that

    such a large group *always* rolls the average works much better. If you

    want some turn-to-turn variation, I`d suggest something like a bell-shaped

    curve to pick a percentage difference from the mean, say 2 x (4d6-14) to

    generate a number from -20 to +20, but clustered sharply around 0.

    Attacks should probably be simultaneous.



    Also, remember this rule: large units essentially *never* die to the last

    man. At some point, once they`ve watched enough of their buddies fall,

    the survivors will just turn and run for it. One fairly simple way to

    model this is to make units take a "morale save" at the end of every turn,

    modified by their training and what portion of their number they`ve lost.



    Third, if unit sizes are very different, not only can only the front rank

    attack, but also only so much of the front rank of a big unit can actually

    get close to the front rank of a small unit.





    Ryan Caveney

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