Mass Combat

[marcum uth mather]

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

[Mark_Aurel]

Cry Havoc from Malhavoc rocks.

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

[geeman]

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

[Osprey]

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

[kgauck]

----- 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

[marcum uth mather]

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.

[Osprey]

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

[ryancaveney]

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

[DanMcSorley]

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

[ryancaveney]

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