Working on Mass Combat System

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Post by OgreBattle »

How long is a round of mass combat expected to take, and how many rounds is any particular battle expected to take?

Will movement be on a grid, or is it more abstracted
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Post by virgil »

The entire battle is expected to last about an hour; specific time-spans per round and number of rounds hadn't been firmly settled on.

Movement and positioning is essentially not present. Your army has five detachments; three flanks (East, West, Air), Core, and Rear Guard. Each detachment fights their mirror (core vs core, East vs East, etc), and the closest thing to positioning is a set of landmarks that give bonuses if occupied by a particular detachment, or terrain that the battle is happening over.
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Post by DrPraetor »

erik wrote:
DrPraetor wrote:Before you work out the mass-combat system proper any further, figure out (if you haven't?) how exactly our heroes are going to exert their command traits.
That seems ass-backwards. You can't figure out exactly how heroes fit in until you have the basics down. You have to know what the moving parts are before you decide how heroes can meddle with them.

Heroes affecting it is an add-on.
My understanding - Virgil or Frank can correct me - was that, in fact, this was intended as a mass-combat game to literally add-on to D&D or something similar.

So Heroes gathering a host of tiny men is the starting point?

If I'm mistaken in that, then yes, my suggestion would be anti-productive.
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Post by Username17 »

DrPraetor wrote:Been thinking about this, reading the 40K comment thread, the discussion of Primarchs gave me some thoughts.

Before you work out the mass-combat system proper any further, figure out (if you haven't?) how exactly our heroes are going to exert their command traits.

As a related question - not answered well in 40K - what paradigm(s) is this game meant to include (Aggressive > Adaptive > Defensive > Aggressive = 3 Paradigms??)? If I'm Leonidas, then troops under my command have the discipline to hold a pike square (which is the Greek paradigm) - and this beats the Persians because their paradigm (more undisciplined tribal levies than you) is aggressive? If I'm Genghis Khan, I've got horse archers who don't retreat (this is Adaptive?)
There's two things that heroes do. The biggest thing in terms of time is that there is a "Heroics Phase" in which the characters do little D&D vignettes using the normal RPG rules. This lets the players do Dynasty Warriors stuff, challenge the enemy champion, or use their weirder abilities to influence the tide of battle in ways too complicated for the abstracted battle system to handle.

The other thing they do is that your hero can be "leading" one of the flanks. This lets your command check modify the Combat Value of your detachment. Obviously, given CV numbers we are not talking about "roll three better on the d20, get +3 to CV" but something more nuanced than that. The goal here is to have a very much better Warlord grant a relative +6 or so, allowing them to defeat armies twice their strength on the basis of simple tactical brilliance and inspiration.

Undisciplined armies, or armies that are unled or whose nominal leaders lack the command skills necessary to handle detachments of the size they have to work with, will default to tactics based on the dominant units in their detachments. So if your opponent is a big pile of warriors and berserkers with no great leader on the other side, you can indeed just shield wall over and over again to punch above your army strength.

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Post by Judging__Eagle »

I know that you're already going with a multiplier of 1.25; but what if you went with one of 1.1?

While a tiny amount of well-led individuals can wreck orders of magnitude larger enemy forces without casualties; I find that "tiny men" with their terrible ability at survival tend to not need to be outnumbered by that much in order to crumple and die.

Unless you're going for a really mobile wargame where armies outnumbered 10, or 100, to 1 can take on the larger forces; even being outnumbered by 10% more enemies is daunting odds for the smaller force for straight attrition style battles.

Have you considered using any elements from Sonshi (e.g. army/unit and duo/trio breakdowns; how to handle actual extended marches (only 10% arrive first), not fantasy extended marches (everyone is on time!); military espionage/counter-espionage; morale/military law/issuing commands)?

Also, have you thought about using elements from Warmaster in order to simplify things, and/or allow the narrative of fielding thousands of tiny men at once? I'd potentially suggest 40k Epic/Armaggedon, but I'm not familiar with it the way I am with Warmaster. If I was going to run a "tiny men" tabletop wargame with thousands of people per side; Warmaster is the closest thing that remotely delivers.
Last edited by Judging__Eagle on Wed Jan 06, 2016 4:41 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Username17 »

Judging__Eagle wrote:I know that you're already going with a multiplier of 1.25; but what if you went with one of 1.1?
Right now I'm actually playing with a multiplier of 1.189207 because it's really easy for people to work with. Every doubling of the army is worth +4.

Remember that Attrition reduces both sides' Army Totals. So all things being equal, any bulge in army totals at all is going to translate to a larger bonus on later turns than on earlier turns. The next piece of mathhammering is actually setting Attrition rates low enough that the battle isn't over in two turns.
Have you considered using any elements from Sonshi (e.g. army/unit and duo/trio breakdowns; how to handle actual extended marches (only 10% arrive first), not fantasy extended marches (everyone is on time!); military espionage/counter-espionage; morale/military law/issuing commands)?

Also, have you thought about using elements from Warmaster in order to simplify things, and/or allow the narrative of fielding thousands of tiny men at once? I'd potentially suggest 40k Epic/Armaggedon, but I'm not familiar with it the way I am with Warmaster. If I was going to run a "tiny men" tabletop wargame with thousands of people per side; Warmaster is the closest thing that remotely delivers.
Warmaster is an X:1 conversion system. Like all X:1 conversion systems, it is capable of handling mass battles where the number of troops is around X times the players' span of control and breaks down severely for battles substantially smaller or larger than that. As such, Warmaster really has very little to offer.

I've done some looking at Kings of War, which is like Hordes of the Things but with Warhammer Fantasy minis. Seems like a cool game, but like Warmaster or Warhammer, seems to have relatively little to offer this project.

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Post by Judging__Eagle »

Good point about Warmasters minimum. and maximum, army thresholds.

What wargames are similar to this sort of project? Are there any?
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Post by Blicero »

Judging__Eagle wrote: What wargames are similar to this sort of project? Are there any?
me! wrote: Also, are there existing systems that you are looking at for mechanical inspiration, or is this mostly from designed from first principles with the intent of avoiding the issues of previous attempts at mass combat?
Frank wrote: As far as design inspiration, I'm mostly looking at strategic wargames. Crusader Kings 2 is obviously a big inspiration, but so too are the old hexes and chit table breakers like Empires at Arms and World in Flames and Noun preposition Noun. I'm certainly looking at RPG systems and table top wargames like Warhammer and BATTLESYSTEM, but mostly to simply shake my head and sigh about how they don't really do what I want them to do. The key insight is that any X:1 unit conversion merely allows you to play out battles that are X times the size of the battles that the regular RPG system handles. So if you make a Warhammer Fantasy Battle character six times simpler, you can handle fights that are six times the size. If you make one BATTLESYSTEM "stand" be 20 D&D characters, then you can handle fights that are 20 times the size. But if you want to have different battles to have orders of magnitude different numbers of soldiers (which given even a cursory reading of any epic fantasy book at all, you do), that's not really an option.
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Post by Username17 »

Judging__Eagle wrote:Good point about Warmasters minimum. and maximum, army thresholds.

What wargames are similar to this sort of project? Are there any?
As far as RPGs go, this is closest to what the 3rd edition L5R mass battle system would be if it had been completed. The L5R Mass Battle "game" asks your DM for asspulls to determine what your tactics do and crucially doesn't actually do anything with the battle advantage. You add various modifiers and determine who has the better battle result... and... that's it. The DM is just supposed to tell a story based on who had how much of an advantage on which turns of the battle, and the battle actually ends whenever the DM feels like it I guess. Point is: the 3rd edition L5R Mass Battle rules don't exist in a finished form. But the sketch of them kinda looks like what I'm going for.

The core mechanic is pretty much what the computer does if you turn on "Quick Fight" in Master of Orion or Heroes of Might and Magic. Obviously, with more tactical choices than the zero offered in those systems. But the comparison of aggregate troop strength is pretty similar.

As far as table top wargames, this looks more like Empires at Arms than a table top miniatures game.

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Post by Username17 »

To give a little more background on the L5R thing, in L5R mass battles you have a thing called "Battle Opportunities." These are kinda like the Heroic Phases I'm talking about, except that instead of going back to the regular RPG rules, they are more like quick time events or skill challenges or something. Each round you generate a Battle Opportunity by rolling on a chart, and then the Battle Opportunity gives you a skill check you have to make to get a bonus (or penalty if you fail). You're allowed to decline to attempt Battle Opportunities, but if you decline two in a row you are required to accept the third one no matter how inappropriate it is. There are twenty four listed Battle Opportunities, but each chart gives out 6 or less possible Battle Opportunities and the DM is supposed to roll on the most appropriate chart based on the type of battle and how engaged the player character is (there are eleven tables to roll on, that is not a joke) or just swap things around if he thinks there's a cooler one or something (because it's 3rd edition L5R and the DM is constantly reminded that they can change rules at their whim like it was 2nd edition AD&D or something).

This seems unnecessarily fiddly. Seems like having the players simply choose what they are attempting to do and then go into the regular RPG rules to do your things would be a lot less page flipping and more satisfying.

The next thing that the L5R "rules" do (and why I have to put finger quotes on the word "rules") is that in addition to the player making a Battle roll to determine what Battle Opportunities they do or do not get (subject to one of the adjoining charts if your DM decides to no ignore it) is that the entire team makes a Tide of Battle roll to determine which side is winning. And um... that's it. The battle just goes on until the DM is sick of it and declares it finished, and having the tide of battle be in your favor or not on any round doesn't have any effect on the final resolution in any game mechanical way. The final resolution of the battle is 100% ass pull. There's even a step in the mass battle called "Resolution" where you'd think the final accounting of who wins the battle and why is, but the rules text there just sort of fails to mention anything along those lines and skips to the part where it reminds you that you get to keep Glory points you earned (not that I can imagine anything else for you to do with them. Burn them to keep warm?).

Obviously, the minigame needs means by which it can end. The most obvious means is for Attrition to equal detachment morale. But some tactics should also have an "enemy detachment collapses" result if their margin of victory is high enough (with sufficiently lopsided troops, such as Rangers versus Berserkers, it could be possible for both sides to collapse the other detachment).

Crusader Kings 2 is where the detachments, combined unit strengths, leader mods, and tactics come from. So this is very much a conversion of Crusader Kings 2 combat to table top. Now, there are a number of things that I'm not doing.

The first thing is that every flank goes through a skirmish phase and a melee phase. That's kind of a waste of time. Here I'm just letting people pick Skirmish Tactics if they have a lot of Light Infantry and Cavalry and Melee Tactics if they have a lot of Heavy Infantry and Warriors. It covers it being useful to have skirmishers and for skirmish stuff to happen without actually requiring you to have two phases with different rules. That's important for a tabletop game (utterly irrelevant for a computer game where all the numbers are crunched for you, but that's not what I'm making).

The next big departure is the tactics themselves. Crusader Kings 2 has a shit tonne of tactics. And some of them are straight better or worse than others. You don't get a choice as to what tactics your generals pull out, and sometimes they just do explicitly stupid shit like "Confused Orders." And there are randomizers involved that are based on commander traits. So if you want to game the system, never put a lisping commander in charge of archers and craven leaders can be put in charge of pikemen but not swordsmen.

The focus of the game is different, since the players actual roleplay as the leaders during the periods between the battles, so they should expect to be able to choose tactics. There are still orc hordes and shit, who can jolly well use randomized shitty tactics, but the players are going to want to pick the tactics for their detachments. And that means no "timid advance" or "inspired defense" to be explicitly worse or better than the normal choices.

Reserves is a thing that I would like to implement. I am not sure how to do it. The thing I'm leaning towards is having the reserves give a bonus on the turn they are committed. Another possibility is to have Attrition be limited (or partially caused by) by how big your detachment is, which could create situations where it was desirable to feed troops into the meat grinder piecemeal rather than all at once. It's complicated. The historical armies that were most like this three detachment thing (Hannibal, Shaka, Napoleon) also made heavy use of reserve troops. So it seems like it should be a thing. But obviously it's competing with simply putting all the troops into the detachments at the beginning, and it is going to by definition make the battles more complicated and take longer.

Unbreakable units is another thing that's difficult to implement. Your golems and skeletons very importantly have no morale at all. But how to make that interact with a core mechanic where whole detachments break is not at all obvious. I don't really have a good answer here. I mean, clearly at the end of the battle there are no Risen troopers to be rallied. They are either still standing or they've been redeadified during the battle. But how to implement that without making the entire army unbreakable or something isn't at all obvious to me.

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Post by Omegonthesane »

Are you assuming widespread use of unbreakable troops that are also capable of self-coordination?

If you want to justify a unit of skeletons fleeing - the skeletons didn't break, the living (or Dark Minded) necromancer commanding them broke and ordered them to retreat... which would work for NPCs, or for subcommanders, but does have issues if a PC is commanding a unit of skeletons.
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Post by virgil »

FrankTrollman wrote:Unbreakable units is another thing that's difficult to implement. Your golems and skeletons very importantly have no morale at all. But how to make that interact with a core mechanic where whole detachments break is not at all obvious. I don't really have a good answer here. I mean, clearly at the end of the battle there are no Risen troopers to be rallied. They are either still standing or they've been redeadified during the battle. But how to implement that without making the entire army unbreakable or something isn't at all obvious to me.
The first idea that springs to mind is to include casualty calculations with the attrition each round, so that unbreakable units still get taken out each round. Since only the breakables are leaving due to attrition, you're going to lose them faster than the unbreakable units, and eventually the battle will whittle down to just skeletons and you can then start doing only casualty calculations.
Omegonthesane wrote:Are you assuming widespread use of unbreakable troops that are also capable of self-coordination?
If they lose their commanders, chances are they would end up like the Persian horde and self-default to some mediocre tactic indicating their mindless rampage.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

I think that the Reserve is probably best instituted as an insurance policy. You implement some situations that are very bad if you don't have a reserve to respond to them, and then let people decide whether it's better to risk those situations or to pile everybody on. Crusader Kings does this where when a flank collapses, their opponents pile onto another flank for super-outnumbering (and possible outflank bonus?), and saying that the reserve could tag in for any collapsed flank might be worthwhile.

You could also have a 'flank march' mechanic where you send a pile of troops on an indirect approach, losing their contribution for the first few rounds, then having them show up and fight at a big outflank bonus; but the bonus only applies if there's no reserve to meet them.

There are also probably going to be times when a reserve isn't optional, because the battlefield simply isn't wide enough to allow deployment at full frontage.
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Post by Blicero »

Are you going to try to model the difficulty pre-modern commanders had communicating desired tactics and strategies to their troops? You could include having runners that allow leaders to update the behavior of soldier blocs or whatever; magic is also obviously something that works here. Or are you going to do the Total War thing where, up to the point of breaking, commanders have more or less total control over their army's actions?
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Post by name_here »

The fast answer to unbreakable troops is that they give an outsize detachment morale bonus, and if the detachment breaks despite that they all die; the living troops retreat and the mindless ones are disordered and hacked to pieces.
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Post by mlangsdorf »

FrankTrollman wrote: The focus of the game is different, since the players actual roleplay as the leaders during the periods between the battles, so they should expect to be able to choose tactics. There are still orc hordes and shit, who can jolly well use randomized shitty tactics, but the players are going to want to pick the tactics for their detachments. And that means no "timid advance" or "inspired defense" to be explicitly worse or better than the normal choices.
That's fine if the PCs are all commanders of their detachments, bu sometimes for political reasons you're going to have Sir Weasely the Unreliable in charge of the left flank and he might decide to go fort up on that hill over there, even if it means leaving a gap between his detachment and the main body.

Alternately, two obvious things to do during a Heroic Phase would be to assassinate enemy leaders or prevent enemy assassins from taking out your skilled detachment leaders. Depending on how you want to handle that, there might be space for subpar tactics when Lieutenant Green takes over for Captain Grizzled.

Finally, your troop composition might dictate tactics to some extent. While you might want to do a cautious advance, the fact that your front line is made up of frenzied berserkers and they're going to charge no matter means you're going to perform an all-out charge.

Since you have to write up some subpar tactical options for Team NPC, you may as well include them for Team PC along with notes as to why you would or wouldn't want to use them.

Though as I think about it, one way to reflect that some tactics are superior or inferior would be to give extra troop bonuses when you use the tactics appropriately for the troop type. So performing a Determined Defense with Dwarven Defenders is noticeably better than performing it with human pikewall, and probing attacks with a block of sword-and-buckler work okay but it's a subpar tactic for frenzied berserkers. It still might be worthwhile to perform a probing attack (which is Adaptive) if you know that your opponent (being a bunch of dwarven defenders) are likely to use Determined Defense (which is Defensive, obviously) since the berserkers' preferred All-Out Assault (which is Aggressive) will just get them wiped out.
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Post by Username17 »

Virgil wrote:The first idea that springs to mind is to include casualty calculations with the attrition each round, so that unbreakable units still get taken out each round. Since only the breakables are leaving due to attrition, you're going to lose them faster than the unbreakable units, and eventually the battle will whittle down to just skeletons and you can then start doing only casualty calculations.
Doing casualty calculations each turn would be the obvious way to do it, and that's certainly how Crusader Kings handles things. It's one more piece of number crunching is all.

However, if your morale dropped relative to your own army and your toughness dropped relative your opponent's forces, that could handle things. A high morale value would be bad, as it would indicate how much strength your unit lost after it hit 100% battle fatigue. Tireless creatures in such a model would simply have no morale number at all, and they would contribute nothing to fear and fatigue attrition and only contribute hit points that your opponent would have to cut down.

Such a model could also support reserves. As putting fresh troops in later in the battle would give you Shock and Hold but wouldn't have accumulated any attrition.

Things I don't like about this idea:
  • Extra complication. Nuff said.
  • Counterintuitive Numbers. When all the other numbers are "bigger is better" it would be weird to have one that was better when it was smaller.
There are things that could be done about that. Like maybe make the number be Encumbrance instead of Morale. Dominions of course has Encumbrance and Morale. I'm just really reluctant to add more equations, stats, and calculations if I can at all avoid it. Such things slow down table top gaming something awful.

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Post by name_here »

CK2 modders handled this exact issue in the Warhammer mod by giving undead a gigantic morale value; a primarily-undead flank dies before it routs. They also only get shitty tactics because they're mindless undead and can't handle anything more complicated than walking towards the enemy and flailing at them.

The way it works under the hood in CK2, a flank has a morale total, loses morale when it takes casualties, and routs at 20% of the total. Then there's a pursue phase where most of the deaths happen. For math by hand, that should probably just be when it hits zero and simplify the casualties.
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Post by Username17 »

The issue is that unlike in the Crusader Kings Warhammer mod, D&D armies are rather unlikely to have entire flanks worth of undead. In an RPG, people are going to get the kind of eclectic armies that Warhammer deprecates. That is to say, that there will be 3-5 player characters and that they are all going to be recruiting whatever they can get their hands on. Some will be based on their classes, but others will be generated by previous adventures or levied from whatever lands the players have conquered.

It makes simple solutions like "give all mindless units 100 morale points" have some weird results. Because what's actually going to happen is that it's going to be a mix of risen soldiers with goblin ashigaru and lizardfolk heavy infantry and shit.

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Post by Grek »

Assign each Tactic a Morale Minimum which an individual unit must meet on an individual basis in order to participate in a given tactic. Add Attrition to the Morale Minimum for each tactic. Unbreakable units can always participate in any tactic, regardless of morale. Reserves do not consider Attrition on their first Tactic when entering battle.
TacticActionTargetTypeMorale Minimum
HarassFlankFlankAdaptive2
FeintFlankPatrolDefensive5
ScreenFlankFlankAdaptive5
RaidFlankHoldAggressive8
Race to FeatureFlankFlankAdaptive10
ShieldwallHoldFlankDefensive5
RegroupHoldShock or FlankAdaptive5
Steady AdvanceHoldHoldAdaptive5
PressHoldShock or HoldAggressive10
AmbushHoldPatrolDefensive8
Hold LineHoldShockDefensive10
StormShockShock or HoldAggressive15
Seize FeatureShockFlankAdaptive10
PursueShockAggressive5
Take GroundShockHoldAggressive8
SlaughterShockShock or HoldAggressive10
Orderly Retreat---0
Route-Shock--

Suppose we're leading 200 Ashigaru, 200 Archers and 100 Light Cavalry into battle. If we elect to group them all up, the combined detachhment starts the battle with +28, +24, +26, +27. The Ashigaru and Archers have a morale of 10, so they can be ordered to do anything short of storming the enemy castle - at least to start out with. The Light Cavalry have a morale of 20 and will do anything you order. So we order a Raid on the enemy village, a Morale Minimum 10 action which our detachment's high Flank value would be very good for. But suppose they suffer attrition during the raid and their Morale drops by 3 each. (Ignore the lost units for now.) Suddenly the Ashigaru and Archers are unwilling to participate in any more raiding. The Cavalry are still fine, but 100 Light Cavalry alone have +26, +15, +23, +23 as their statline, which is dangerously low in several places.

A better plan would have been to keep 100 each of the Ashigaru and Archers in reserve. By cycling out the low morale units as they suffer attrition, we can keep going with +27, +22, +25, +26 for as long as the Cavalry's Morale lasts, AND have a +22 +20 +20 +22 to reinforce with if things ever get dicey and we're facing a route. Which, incidentally, is what happens if any unit's morale goes below 0: Its only available "tactic" is to route, and routing lets the enemy make a free shock roll to inflict extra casualties without even having to devote a unit to pursuit. Which they can also do, for even more casualties.
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Post by Username17 »

Grek wrote:Suppose we're leading 200 Ashigaru, 200 Archers and 100 Light Cavalry into battle. If we elect to group them all up, the combined detachhment starts the battle with +28, +24, +26, +27. The Ashigaru and Archers have a morale of 10, so they can be ordered to do anything short of storming the enemy castle - at least to start out with. The Light Cavalry have a morale of 20 and will do anything you order. So we order a Raid on the enemy village, a Morale Minimum 10 action which our detachment's high Flank value would be very good for. But suppose they suffer attrition during the raid and their Morale drops by 3 each. (Ignore the lost units for now.) Suddenly the Ashigaru and Archers are unwilling to participate in any more raiding. The Cavalry are still fine, but 100 Light Cavalry alone have +26, +15, +23, +23 as their statline, which is dangerously low in several places.
I like the simulation/immersion of that, but I can't imagine that actually getting done at the table. A computer could handle it easily, but having multiple troop types with different attrition values on different groups of the same troop types which dynamically will or will not add in to the total depending on secondary information just seems like something that is definitely going to be fucked up every single time by people at an actual table top game.

One of the reasons that I desperately want to keep attrition as an aggregate number is that I do not think that people are going to be able to quickly or accurately recalculate army totals based on how many Lizard Archers are injured or whatever.

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Post by virgil »

It is a good seed of an idea, having morale benchmarks for certain tactics. Either % of the starting (which reserves or regroup can reset) or minimum value in relation to the opposition.
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Post by Grek »

You could do it on a wholesale basis, I suppose. If any unit in the detachment does not meet the morale minimum for a tactic, the detachment as a whole cannot use that tactic. That means each detachment has a de facto "Morale Class" which determines what tactics it will have available based on the most cowardly unit present, and that you never field high morale units in the same detachment as low morale if you aren't confident the low morale won't rout.

Morale Classes would be
2: Darters
5: Animals
8: Slingers, Archers
10: Ashigaru, Miners, Warriors
20: Guards, Light Infantry, Pikeneers, Light Cavalry, Archer Cavalry, Great Birds
30: Heavy Infantry, Ranger, Ghoul, Lycanthrope
40: Elite Infantry, Heavy Cavalry, Ogres
50: Elite Cavalry, Giants, War Mages, Engineers, Vampires
100+: Demons, Officers, Champions, Dragon Riders
X: Cannon, Risen

It also means that if you have 300 Elite Spartans, they become massively weaker as a detachment if you add a single lesser warrior. Which is accurate according to the movies, but probably undesirable in a game.
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Post by Lokathor »

FrankTrollman wrote:One of the reasons that I desperately want to keep attrition as an aggregate number is that I do not think that people are going to be able to quickly or accurately recalculate army totals based on how many Lizard Archers are injured or whatever.
Perhaps a "by hand" rule and then a webpage people can open up to do the "precise rules" if they have the time? Like how DnD has BAB/Saves charts, but if you have the time you can figure the fractional totals if you want.
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Post by Grek »

Agreed. Its 2015, people would not balk at the suggestion that you use an app/webpage for the optional "Advanced Morale" rules.
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