MGuy wrote:That was my solution to the problems he had.
Just ignoring for now how a solution must
actually solve the problem in order to actually be a solution: That wasn't a problem presented in the OP nor was it a problem presented in the post you quoted upon entry. While it is incidentally true that the post you quoted scales too poorly to possibly be used as a solution, the problem it was responding to isn't actually one of the problems I was referring to in my post. In fact, that answer was given to an objection that I went on record as calling
"weird bullshit," so
not only have you failed to point to an actual solution
at all,
not only has your failure of a non-solution
not been a response to any of the problems I actually claimed you had failed to specify a solution for,
your non-solution was a response to a problem I specifically claimed was a non-issue nearly a week ago.
Which you apparently didn't find satisfactory for whatever reason.
Specifically for this reason:
So okay, let's assume the enemy army and at least a rough idea of its ladder size and what players need to do affect it (i.e. nine rungs, you need X troop power to shift up by one the rung you start on come day of the battle) are determined in advance and available to players either by fiat or as the result of some reconnaissance. That still means that it makes no difference whether players recruit the fire giants or the orc hordes, except in that one or the other is going to be worth more troop points. There is a lot of value in being able to say something like "warg cavalry will be effective in the initial charge and in chasing down routing enemies to prevent them from regrouping and rejoining the battle, but they're much less effective in a potentially decisive melee. Ogre heavy infantry are more vulnerable to missile attacks during early skirmishes, pretty effective during the charge, and also pretty effective during the melee. Hobgoblin infantry are disciplined, which makes them less vulnerable to breaking up to flee or hunt down skirmishers during those early missile attacks and by far the best option in the melee, but they're not very good during the shock phase and might be crushed outright when the armies first meet if the enemy is bringing lots of cavalry and monsters."
You know, that reason that I brought up several weeks before you even mentioned the possibility. The one that I responded to your post with by quoting it to you again, in order to highlight how your alleged solution didn't actually solve anything, and therefore is not actually a solution, and how I had already explained why that proposal wouldn't actually solve the problem before you even brought it up. The one where, after your proposal turned out to not actually be a solution, your defense was that you didn't feel the need to actually solve my problem just because you had quoted my post and claimed you could solve my problem. And then I told you that hadn't presented any solutions for the actual problem, but had instead provided a failed attempt at one, and then claimed that you had solved it, and then when I pointed out that your proposal was a failure, you responded by abdicating responsibility for actually solving my problem despite having quoted me and claimed to be able to solve it.
You remember when you claimed I was quoting sentence fragments in order to avoid answering your question?
If you read the
complete paragraph that you are quoting a single sentence from, it is
very obvious that my point is that your proposed solutions are
non-functional and that your only defense of your non-functional solutions is to claim they were never intended to actually solve my problem at all. Semantic bitching about how
technically using a certain definition
any attempted solution still counts as "a solution" is dishonesty, because my actual point is very clear: You quoted my post, you claimed you could meet my challenge, you failed to meet that challenge, and when I illustrated your failure, your response was to pretend that you had never tried.
The "allies trigger events" proposal is
also something I'd refuted before you even brought it up:
How do you expect this "panzer strike" to show up in actual play? As a bunch of fire giants that show up to help in a specific combat? That can work when it's fire giants, but what about when you've recruited a few thousand elf archers instead of twelve really big, beefy fire giants? If you model that as just putting a dozen elf archers on the table, that means that having elf archer backup is basically irrelevant because a dozen level 0 doods means nothing to a fight between level 10 heroes and villains. They're crit-fishing to begin with, barely deal double digit damage on a crit (if we're being generous and assuming they get a +1 or +2 to damage from a feat or something, bog standard level 0 3.X archers get 1d8 and that's it, averaging 9 damage on a crit - nothing with ten hit dice cares about that), and they're so fragile that a standard fireball that guys with 5th level spells only barely care about expending can clear out most or all of them (depending on formation) with the expenditure of a single standard action. To have a functional mass combat system, there should be an amount of elf archers (or orc berserkers or hobgoblin infantry or whatever) that you can put on the field that will counterbalance the enemy having a couple dozen fire giants, even though that number is going to be massive. In order to actually reflect one side having a small number of mid-level troops and the other having 2+ orders of magnitude more level 0 mooks in skirmish combat, you need to actually give that one side 2+ orders of magnitude more level 0 mooks in that skirmish combat. If recruiting a dozen fire giants gets you one fire giant ally, recruiting 1200 elf archers needs to get you one hundred elf archer allies, and then oh, shit, our skirmish combat is broken again.
I mean, damn, I was pretty harsh on Zaranthan for not thinking the "allies as events" thing through, but at least he was putting forward a
new idea, even if it fell apart immediately upon inspection. He can read and comprehend paragraphs, which is more than you can say.
I don't believe he can check all the marks on it without inevitably making a war game.
Hey, remember how I hashed out exactly how the system would work in principle?
At that point recruiting allies isn't a matter of making a list in descending order of who gets you the most points and getting as far down that list as you can before the battle starts, but rather a question of real decisions to be made based on the unknown factors of how strong the enemy is in different phases of the combat. You could exchange those phases for some other RPS sort of relationship between different units, although the thing I like about the phase approach is its simplicity in resolution. You don't have to give your cavalry a bonus based on the number of archers and monsters in the enemy force while also giving their infantry a bonus based on the number of your cavalry. Instead, each ball of troops just has a different value for each phase and you add those together to get the army's power in that phase. A horde of a thousand orcs might be worth 5 points in skirmish, 8 points in shock, 10 in melee, and 6 in routing/regrouping, and then it's easy to just add that to however many points your elves and centaurs are worth in those same phases and bam, army power complete.
Remember how that's nothing like Warhammer at all? Have you noticed how the problem you're whining about has already been solved in principle and literally the only thing left to do is to attach exact numbers and actions to it? In fact,
I can prototype it right now:
Archers: 2/0.5/1
Infantry: 0.5/1/2
Cavalry: 1/2/0.5
Numbers correspond to the force power of a single soldier in skirmish/shock/melee phases. You can put any amount of any type of soldier into each of your left flank, right flank, and center. One side's left flank fights an enemy's right, or if the right has broken the center, or if the center has broken the left. Same with the right flank attacking the enemy's left to start. The center fights the center by default, but if the enemy's center has broken, the center may choose which enemy flank to fight. During each phase, compare the total power for each formation to whichever formation it is fighting (i.e. by default, your left flank to the enemy's right, your center to their center, and your right to their left). You deal casualties to the enemy equal to 10% of your skirmish power, 30% of your shock power, or 20% of your melee power, depending on which phase you're in. In addition to inflicting casualties, whichever side wins the melee causes the enemy formation to rout. If there are any enemy formations left, a second melee phase ensues between remaining formations.
When two formations fight against one, the formation which is furthest away from the outnumbered formation gets a 20% flanking bonus. For example, if REDFOR's left flank has broken and BLUFOR is attacking with both their center and right flank, BLUFOR's right gets a 20% flanking bonus. However, if REDFOR's left flank has broken
but BLUFOR's center has also broken, neither side gets a bonus, because although BLUFOR's right flank is one step over from REDFOR center's usual target (BLUFOR center), there is only one formation fighting one formation, and thus no flanking bonus.
Likewise, when
three formations are picking on one lonely enemy formation, the formation of the three that is furthest away gets a 30% encirclement bonus, and the second furthest gets a 20% flanking bonus. For example, if REDFOR's right flank and center have broken, then only their left flank remains. If BLUFOR's center attacks, they get a 20% flanking bonus for being one step away from REDFOR's right flank, and if BLUFOR's right flank attacks, they get a 30% encirclement bonus for being two steps away. If the one formation fighting against three is the center, then the encircling side may choose which flank gets the flanking bonus and which flank gets the encircling bonus. For example, if REDFOR has only their center left, BLUFOR can choose to give the 30% encircling bonus to either their right flank or left flank, and give the 20% flanking bonus to the other.
Player characters can take exactly one action in each phase because this is a prototype and we'll figure the rest out later. In skirmish phase, they can defeat an enemy patrol which is a perfectly ordinary skirmish combat, in shock phase they can break an enemy front line which is a skirmish combat where the goal is to kill enemies faster than the back ranks can replenish them in order to create a gap, and in the melee phase the goal is to kill an enemy champion/commander, in which the goal is to kill a specific tough guy. Succeeding at any of these imposes a -25% penalty on the enemy formation's power for that phase. PCs are under no obligation to actually take an action in any phase, and can let a single phase or even the entire battle play out without them.
And that is it. That is a functioning prototype of the system. It's missing a bunch of units and you probably want more than just one option for PC actions per phase, it's probably wise to allow phases other than melee to go on for longer than one turn so you can have things like a good skirmish army trying to kite their enemy to death, and no effort at all has been made to balance the numbers (in particular, the infantry/cavalry/archer yomi is flawed in that the most dangerous unit, cavalry, is countered by the second most dangerous unit, infantry - normally you'd want the counter unit to the unit with the best payoff to pay for it by having the weakest payoff) but adding some extra options or unit types or switching the numbers around will not magically turn it into a war game. Fuck all the way off.