Prufrock's Wargaming Blog

Prufrock's Wargaming Blog

Thursday, December 20, 2012

More Ancients playtesting

After a quiet few weeks on the wargaming front (we had a Christmas party to organise for our English school...) I set up the board for a quick playtest of the basic elements of my 'January project' rules.

I wanted to test out the interactions between the various troop types to get an idea of what the imbalances might be, and to test out a few of the tweaks I've added in.  My small table (as the name would suggest!) is not very big; so I reduced the board and units by about a third to fit them in while still keeping a good cross-section of the troops that will be used on the day. 

Here's how it looked after deployment:


I didn't use any command and control rules, and am actually now starting to think that it may be better to allow all units to move and fight automatically, and to save command points for things like extra moves, combat bonuses, changing lines and so on and so forth.  I'm not sure yet.  It would certainly take out a degree of complexity, but may reduce player involvement too much.  It's something to think about, anyway.

The movement rules worked fine, but that's not a surprise, as they are lifted more or less directly from Lost Battles.  The rules for skirmishing (ie, distance firing) seem to need a little more work.  There needs to be some incentive to get skirmishers out of the way once the heavy lads start to get into the action.  I may introduce an automatic dispersal rule in open ground to encourage players to get them out of the line reasonably early in the piece.



To give you an example, in the picture above the skirmish line looks fine, but in the one below the rate of attrition is out of sync with the rest of the board. We can see that the cavalry combat on the flank in the foreground is quite far advanced, but the heavy infantry battle in the centre has not yet begun.




Another problem is with the scythed chariots and elephants.  I need to add a bit of flavour and (in the case of the chariots particularly) realism to the way they function.

The combat system itself I am pleased with.  I used dice rather than cards for this test, but as the range of results is still the same the test was still valid.  I do still need to sort out a few aspects of it, but it seems to be a good chassis to build upon.

The same cannot be said for the morale system, unfortunately.  It definitely needs some work.  I'm currently stealing from  Neil Thomas's AMW and Phil Sabin's Lost Battles systems, but I need to put things down in writing and think through the modifiers a bit more clearly.

It might help if I could finish a game though - I ended up heading to bed halfway through this!

Anyway, it was a good test and I was able to take a lot out of it.  Perhaps it did not quite provide a breakthrough like that which the Seleucid cavalry have effected in the picture below, but there is pleasing pressure being applied that may eventually lead to a similar end...




10 comments:

  1. Keep going! It should all come together in the end. I share your frustration on something that works really well on paper (or in your head) proves not to be the case when playtesting.

    And on skirmishers, I really like the way Armati handles them - auto dispersed in open on contact - I made it a design principle for my rules that skirmishers would work in a similar way.

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  2. Thanks for the encouragement, Shaun! Funnily enough, it was Armati that made me think of dispersing the skirmishers too. We must share a common rules background ;-)

    Cheers, and hope you have a great Christmas and New year!

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  3. It certainly looks good, home rules are very difficult to write, I'm still working on my FIW rules that I started well over a year ago!!

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  4. You're not wrong, Ray; a ticklish business this rules writing...

    I think I remember reading a report of a game you played with that FIW set you've been working on, actually. The good thing is there's always next year to get them finished!

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  5. I also have some experience with Armati, and a lot more with Tactica. In both it makes sense for players to try to keep skirmishers alive after melee is joined between the big guys, because of the possibility of a lucky shot finishing off badly damaged enemies that break through. I think the difficulty with skirmishers is achieving a balance that allows them to do something like this, or degrade some enemy units prior to the main contact, while at the same time not making the firepower so effective that it destroys fresh units too easily.

    Which is in itself a different issue from massed bow power...

    Good luck, Aaron!

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    1. Thanks, Paul - I could do with some luck! Yes, I'm wanting the light infantry to be potentially useful later in the game as well, so I just need to find the right mix of penalties / incentives to get them out of there at about the right time, so that they can later get back in...

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  6. Hi aaron,

    Very interesting; I do like the look that square grids give to a battle! Also, it looks like you are allowing a couple of units in a square, I have done the same with my rules, I think it looks more realistic.

    Cheers, Simon

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for the encouragement, Simon! Yes, up to two units a square, so long as they can physically fit in.

      Cheers!

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  7. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, Aaron!

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    Replies
    1. You too, Brad! Hope 2013 is a good one for you :)

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