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Thread: Battle rules

  1. #11
    Site Moderator kgauck's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Midnight View Post
    I disagree with you Rowan that numbers will always over run better armed and equipped troops, throughout history you can find countless examples of just the opposite, I could give a list if you want.
    I think Rowan is right here. Smaller numbers of superior troops never defeat larger numbers unless they can do one of two things, require the larger force to only fight with a part of its troops (such as at Agincourt, where the battlefield was so narrow that the French could never put more troops before the English than what the English had fighting) or by adopting a defensive position that multiplies their effectiveness (again at Agincourt the French had to climb a hill to reach the English).

    However its possible for inferior troops to use these techniques and win as well. I think the French had a large number of elite troops at Agincourt, and overall the English did not have a qualitative advantage. They had a vastly superior position on the battlefield. Henry rolled a critical on pre-battle tactics roll.

    But feel free to present your list.

    The best work on quantifying troop quality is done by Trevor DuPuy, and every case where superior troops defeat a much larger number of inferior troops, the actual cause of the victory is better use of some other factor (generally position to prevent the enemy from using their superior numbers, which is kind of like not having them, or improving defense by using stakes, trenches, walls, hills, or woods) which are terrain factors, not troop quality factors.

    The beauty of using superior troops in bottlenecks is that superior troops maintain cohesion and morale better, and so can maintain their killing effectiveness much longer into the battle, despite facing new troops often throughout the battle, where inferior troops in a bottleneck might hold off a larger force or they just might break morale or just loose their fighting effectiveness over time, allowing attrition to whittle their numbers in the face of the enemy.

  2. #12
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    Other examples I'm thinking of (outside of Alexander's many campaigns) are Thermopylae, Salamis, and whatever that battle was that Roland fought in. Again, all of those were victories due mostly to bottlenecks. It just so happens that elite units tend to have better leaders and tend to be more mobile and agile (largely due to discipline and being fewer in number). So the much larger, poorly-trained and poorly-equipped armies are more unwieldy and have poorer unit-level commanders, so the smaller elite armies tend to outmaneuver and seize more strategic and tactical advantages. Logistically, larger armies have fewer options as well, because they must stay provisioned and travel across ground adequate for their numbers. So on a strategic level, elite units are often a good idea, particularly if you have a small population to support them.

    That brings up another little discrepancy that Ericthecleric handles in his current PBEM: there is little reason for maintenance costs to rise linearly with muster costs. Elite units, if anything, have fewer men in them, and their pay and provisioning should not cost dramatically more than lesser professional soldiers. So rather than having maintenance cost half the muster cost, ericthecleric streamlined it so that units costing 3GB or less to muster cost 1GB to maintain, and those costing 4GB or more cost 2GB. That helps some with the elite units.

  3. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by Rowan View Post
    Hiru, I like the Challenges idea for engaging PCs. Where would I find this oft-referred-to "Savage Worlds" rules set? I have never seen it.
    Go to www.peginc.com/games and you'll find the PDF for sale for super cheap, 10 bucks I think. They have a number of "settings" and toolkit books as well. The 3 fantasy toolkits are excellent purchases.

  4. #14
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    In respect to Armies with great numbers as opposed to well trained smaller armies. I agree that big armies can be ungainly and terrain can affect their potential to field all troops for the battle. Maybe each terrain could have a maxiumun number of units that can present them selves on the battle field at one time and the rest can be held in reserve until a unit has been destryed or routed. I believe that the original rules allowed for a certain amount on the field and the rest were held in reserve.

  5. #15
    Site Moderator kgauck's Avatar
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    Setting up conditions where terrain is effective for one side or another should be the result of one commander or another winning strategy or tactics rolls by a wide margin.

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    In hind sight I agree that knights should be able to charge pike-men so I would not change any of the pike-men rules. As for in my mock battles did chance play a big roll, yes and no, in my small battles with a single knight vs. different mixtures of units of equal gold value a single bad roll and that just cost the knights any chance of wining, like if the knights fail to hit with there charge, even in the smallest of scales the cheaper units can afford to botch a roll or two. With the bigger mock battles I did of 20gb armies and bigger I find there is more room for strategy but you can still lose if you just have bad luck, a little hard to say for sure being its hard to strategize against your self lol.
    I don’t want to take to much time on this but just off the top of my head here are some battles that quality prevailed over numbers. But take this into account as well, you can say that these victory’s are due only to terrain or great leadership but even bad generals understand the importance of terrain especially when you have a smaller force, so you just wont find many open field battle’s with smaller and larger forces in history.
    Every battle that Hannibal fought.
    The Romans vs. Boudica
    Battle of the bulge
    Where the Japanese defeated the Mongols
    Almost every battle Genghis Khan and his Mongols were in, during and for a short time after his death.
    The Apache wars
    The Spanish and Aztecs
    The Japanese invasion of China
    Almost all the battles of Sparta and Athens
    The British and Zulu’s
    These are just what I thought of in a min but if its an important selling point I and can buckle down and due some research and make a much larger list and what the fighting forces consisted of.
    But all of this aside I personally see the fantasy aspect of Birthright should be in the battles as well, knights in shining armor should be the champions and lords of the field, evil ogre’s and barbaric Vos Varsk riders should be terrors that no normal unit could hope to vanquish, player characters and there retinue (hero units) capable of feats on battle no normal man could hope to achieve. I hope im not letting loose to much with my imagination here but I think that’s what Birthright is about, the battles should have a healthy flare of the impossible and the battles epic in nature, I don’t think the battles resolution was ever designed to be a historical battle simulator. And I stand by my option that the higher quality units in the game need some buffing up.

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    Midnight, you're overlooking one important piece.

    If an domain is in a war, they quickly become limited by their province level in the number of troops you can muster per season. A level 3 province can only muster 3 units, they could muster three infantry/archers or they could get three goblin guard/knights/elven cavalry/etc. Along this same line of thinking, in large battles you could have five infantry on your front line, or you could have five elite infantry. Even if the elite troops aren't worth their muster cost against a greater number of lesser troops, the battle board is only five squares wide so those lesser troops will be forced to wait their turn to die.

    Also, I expect a field full of nothing but knights would do poorly. However, if they have two knights on the field and a few infantry to fill out the field, I expect the knights to be used to their full potential.

  8. #18
    Site Moderator AndrewTall's Avatar
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    One idea used in Rjurik winds (which doesn't use a standard battlemap but currently roughly follows the warcards rules otherwise) is using skills for leadership and strategy. Strategy is about being able to take advantage of terrain, figure out where the enemy will be to optimise attack etc, leadership is about then being able to make your army do what you want it to do - loosely only 1 unit per point of leadership is active at any point in a fight, while strategy adds to the 'attack rolls' during combat phases.

    Under this sort of system you can't just muster 40 units of goblin rabble (maint .25 GB) and sweep the board since the commander can only effectively control a fraction of them, and elite units like cavalry or giants are greatly valuable to a commander with poor leadership since they compensate for the commanders inability to control large numbers of troops justifying their high cost - they also of course have prestige value from an RP perspective...

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    I think thats a great Idea Andrew! It takes away the temptation of just mustering a ton of crap to win wars, the way I see either good units need to be better or some thing needs to be in place like your talking about. Im not familiar with Rjurik winds can you post in more detail how this system works or where I could look at it. Also it sounds like your strategy skill is more or less the Warcraft skill in the play-test.

  10. #20
    Site Moderator kgauck's Avatar
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    I don't have a clear idea of what is wrong with the current rules because I don't have a clear idea how other people play with the war cards. Most of D&D is where the players attempt to do something novel, and the DM tries to analogize from the rules and sets DC's picks the appropriate skill, and asks a player to roll to see if they were successful. I know of no project more novel than warfare. No two campaigns are alike, no two battles are alike, everyone involved is seeking to outwit and surprise their opponent and so they incline to novel behavior just to keep the enemy from guessing their intentions.

    So it seems to me that its only natural that battles would be full of players attempting something based on a reasonable assessment of what a unit could do, and the DM adjudicating results.

    So if players and DM's aren't getting the results they think are reasonable, I blame the players and DM's themselves.

    Now I have certainly seen ridiculous actions taken by players in which DM's seemed insensible of how ridiculous an action was and allowed it without consequences. That's not the game's fault. No one claims that RPG's are fool proof. Likewise I have seen reasonable actions proposed by players but rejected by DM's because they didn't understand the reasonableness of the plan or didn't want to totally derail their preparations. Again, that's a DM's fault, not the game's. Likewise players who fail to suggest anything useful or suggest the wildly improbable are not doing a very good job of overcoming obstacles.

    So when I hear that lots of cheap troops are supposed to be better in all regards than elite troops, I scratch my head. Many military functions are done perfectly well by cheap troops. However, moving, following directions, and being calm in combat are not among these. Andrew has mentioned a perfectly reasonable (although limited to one issue) limitation on command and control of large forces of cheap troops. High quality troops are very good at acting on their own as long as they have a general idea of what is going on. Because its not just a question of having a certain number of command points to activate units, units act on their own too. Some units might attack before you want them too. Some might run away before being subjected at an attack that would normally warrant a morale check. Units take more time than you thought (or than they should) doing things. Units may stop before you want. Units may misunderstand their instructions, may misunderstand the situation. If cavalry suddenly emerges from the woods, do the archers shoot at it? They have to decide friend or foe, and mistakes in that decision are frequent and can be quite serious. When two armies array, what do the commanders do? Asses the enemy, spread word of their plan, rally their soldiers? There isn't time to do everything one might like, so one must make choices and pay opportunity costs.

    Are there rules for these situations. Certainly, but like every other part of D&D, its done by a DM who can provide DC's and identify skills to be checked. If people are judging units only by their attack, defense, and charge ratings than I think they are not going to be able to reproduce a medieval battlefield.

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