"How to treat lopsided battles in a campaign?" Topic

Just curious, but how do you handle situation in a campaign where one player manages to attack another with a massive advantage in force? Do you play the battle anyways or just eliminate the weaker force?
The odds are it's not going to be a fun game, but if you're tracking losses, you'll need some way of determining what happened to both sides. On the other hand, you might unexpectedly get a situation like Krasny Bor or Thermopylae where a vastly outnumbered force manages to stop/heavily damage the other.

I think you've got two choices….as you suggest just eliminate the weaker force, or run a game and make sure the players know exactly what's happening and what they are up against…the objective is either to inflict maximum casualties on the attacker and/or try and withdraw. You could develop a detailed timeline for withdrawing, need to stay on table for 10 turns…and depending on your campaign rules you could always make it rain/snow/sleet, whatever might balance the game a little more…

db

When I've done this, the players have agreed before the start of the campaign how to handle this.

The best solution I've seen is to have a campaign GM decide whether the battle can turn into something interesting.

For example, if the weaker force is caught out in the open, there's no reason to play it. If, however, it's on a bridge on a thought-to-be-unfordable river, then it's become interesting.

As for losses, here's where point systems rescue you: if you're tracking (essentially) the number of points that a player is pushing around on the campaign map, then a campaign-level battle can be abstracted with loss of points rather then attaching to specific units.

The points system can be de-abstracted a bit, too. For example, in a Napoleonic game I played, the cavalry points were tracked separately from the infantry ones.

Good suggestions.

I've also seen some campaign systems (e.g. Mighty Empires) that have a pen & paper-driven way of resolving battles that you either think won't make fun tabletop games or you just don't have time to play out.

Why would the smaller force take to the field and fight ? Unless they are forced to for some reason, they should be able to at least try and avoid battle. There might be some risk involved, depending on the situation and factors like the amount of mounted on both sides. Maybe there could be a roll made on a table, showing whether the smaller force sneaks away in the night without casualties, takes some losses or is wiped out / captured.

Agreed. The last campaign i was in when contact was made you had a fight or flee option. If you withdrew, relative cavalry strength was important…

I've also seen some campaign systems (e.g. Mighty Empires) that have a pen & paper-driven way of resolving battles that you either think won't make fun tabletop games or you just don't have time to play out.

This is my preferred way to go.

Why would the smaller force take to the field and fight ?

I was assuming that the weaker force had no option to withdraw.

Doug

Which book has the Raiding Aces campaign?

Here's a link to the rules.
PDF link
LES

This isn't mine! BUG IS LOOSE!

I agree that all campaigns need a 'quick resolve' system so a really lopsided battle can be resolved off the table-top. Picking a board game from the appropriate era and borrowing it's combat rules usually works well I find. For example, if I was running an ACW game I'd adapt the combat rules from 'For the People' to fight any battle that was too uneven to be interesting.

I wouldn't *force* players to use the rules, but leave it up to the 'underdog' player. If he wanted to play out the battle (hoping for that come from behind win) I'd certainly let them.

-Will

Shark, how complex is nuts compared to Arc?

NOT MINE -- don't know what's going on.

From the campaign rules for PRIDE OF LIONS -- unfinished and untested so far. What is below covers withdrawing a weaker force; I haven't written anything yet to deal with the "speed bump" sacrifice of a small delaying force -- which is the other half of the topic.

PURSUIT OF A WITHDRAWING ENEMY

While the purpose of a campaign such as ours is to generate tabletop battles within a strategic context, it will not be the case that every encounter between opposing forces on the strategic map should result in a battle. Sometimes the sides are too uneven to produce an enjoyable battle, and sometimes one side simply doesn't want to fight yet. The rules below assume that one side has declared that it wishes to avoid battle; it will attempt to withdraw, either into a strong place (capable of withstanding an assault and requiring a siege to capture) or into another territory.

PROCEDURE:

The two forces involved must be compared in terms of their composition, with particular emphasis on the relative SPEED of their component parts. From slowest to fastest, an army may be composed of:

1. Civilians and/or heavy baggage trains;
2. Close order infantry;
3. Loose order infantry;
4. Heavy cavalry;
5. Light cavalry;
6. Flyers.

We will call the presumably-stronger force that wishes battle the PURSUER; the presumably weaker force seeking to avoid battle is WITHDRAWING.

The basic rule is very simple; a force will have a difficult time getting away from a faster enemy. Sometimes voluntarily abandoning slower elements may be necessary for the rest to escape; and sometimes slower elements are overrun and destroyed anyway.

For simplicity's sake, we assume that every unit (except the civilians and train) is equal to every other unit in abstract combat power; speed can offset a higher melee/morale die level, or vice versa. What we will compare is the total number of units in each force, but counting only the units in the PURSUER'S force that are as fast or faster than the SLOWEST unit in the WITHDRAWING force.

For example. If a withdrawing force includes civilians or a baggage train, the entire pursuing force, except for its own baggage train, will be able to catch them. On the other hand, if the WITHDRAWING force is composed entirely of light cavalry units, then we will count only the light cavalry units and flyers in the PURSUER'S force.

Match the number of withdrawing units against the number of as-fast-or-faster pursuing units. Each EXCESS pursuing unit will destroy one STAND of the slowest withdrawing unit. If the pursuer has three more units than the withdrawing force, it will entirely destroy the slowest withdrawing unit, killing (or more likely capturing) all three stands. The civilians and/or baggage train is considered, for this case, to be a standard three-stand unit. The rest of the withdrawing force will escape.

EXAMPLES: A single light cavalry unit withdraws from an enemy army that includes two light cavalry units and a flying unit. The withdrawing force is one unit; the pursuers are three. The withdrawing unit loses two of its stands and then gets away.

A beaten and retreating army is being pursued by a stronger force. The withdrawing force has five units of close order infantry, three of which have lost a stand each. It also has two cavalry units and a flyer. It has already lost its baggage train. The pursuers have 14 units, which is 6 more than the withdrawing force. The withdrawing army will lose 6 stands from the close order infantry (the slowest), which its commander may select: the six lost stands could be 2 complete units, or the 3 partial units, or any combination. (Since it is cheaper to replace lost stands than to replace an entire unit, withdrawing forces who lose stands may prefer to remove one or two stands from units, preserving a cadre.)

It is possible that there might be three or more forces of non-allied Players in a territory. In this case, match the strongest against the next-strongest (counting all units as equal); then the strongest against the third strongest, etc. If forces are allied, treat them as a single force.

If you withdrew, relative cavalry strength was important…

One of the reasons we kept track of the cavalry points separately in that Napoleonic campaign. As a side result, players tended to use their cavalry in a more historical manner on the tabletop.

Depends a bit on the orders given the smaller force – if for some reason they have "to the last man" orders, then I play it – but mostly the smaller force skeedadles away (as you can see, I mostly campaign ACW) – if the larger force has more cavalry, then we factor in some losses (as we track strength for future turns) – to be honest, I toss dice according to the relative strength in cavalry and use this to assign losses

Not much fun in playing out a game where (as in our last campaign turn) one side has 8 times as many troops as the other

I've had this happen before and we just played it out, sometimes with surprising results. If the players have anything invested in the campaign and have the time then playing unbalanced games can be great fun. The pressure is all on the bigger force. The smaller force's leader has nothing to lose.
I played one where my force was trapped by two enemy forces of equal size. On paper I was outnumbered 2:1 but we decided to fight it out. As the two enemy forces (Syracusan and Carthaginian) were commanded by a player each this immediately led to disorganization on their side. I was able to pin one of them while giving the other a bloody nose and it ended as an expensive draw with much of my army retreating in good order and being saved. If this had been a stand alone game it would probably have been rather dull but as part of a campaign it became a tense and enjoyable game (for me anyway).

Taking a micro view onto a battlefield, when I've refused flank, the flank that is "undermanned" still needs to "dance around" and delay, while I attempt to obtain a decisive result on the other flank.
Retuning to the macro view, in the campaign, the smaller army needs to perform an action, are they to be rewarded with a biased scenario (ambushing the rear baggage train/defending a river crossing) or are they to be penalised with an impossible task?
I'd go with as you get closer to the capital/ homeland (ie. you are losing the campaign, you get better scenario conditions), as this will tend to keep most players in the campaign.

We always played out the battles in three ACW campaigns my old club ran. You never knew what was going to happen.

In one campaign, one side out maneuvered the other every time on the campaign map, would have multiple attacks from two or three sides hitting them, but over and over again the tactical skill of the other side gave them table top victory.

In a W.W. II campaign, my more recent club fought out each battle using "I Ain't Been Shot, Mum" rules. It was the Welsh Guards vs. Herman Goring campaign. Again, each battle was fought out. One saw the British recon run into a counter attack by JadgPanthers. Well, Bren Carriers and Armored Cars don't last long against 88s, but they were able to chew up the supporting infantry before being crushed and driven from the board.

The next battle with the JadgPanthers was in a town, but they were short infantry, so the Germans wouldn't send them into the streets with out infantry protection and kept them out of the fight. They didn't want a PIAT team getting a rear shot on them from an alley way. The British held the town.

Each event in a campaign builds on the next in my view.

RexMcL wrote:

"On the other hand, you might unexpectedly get a situation like Krasny Bor or Thermopylae where a vastly outnumbered force manages to stop/heavily damage the other."

This depends a lot on the period or era you are playing. An 18th century wester Europe game would allow an honourable surrender,parole and an eventual ranson.

The same situation 500 years earlier, presents you an option to create an event for Heroes.

Cheers,

I guess it depends upon the period, scale, scope, and historical precedents for your game.

At the sharp end, whole small units might get wiped out by a larger, or better trained force. However, on the whole, the losses to the larger army might be minimal in nature.

It also depends upon what you want to get out of your games.

In many instances though, troops will retreat to save themselves, before they will get wiped out to the last man, if that is a possible option.

So, depending upon what you're going for, you might consider limiting the lopsided losses somewhat, to try to represent that.

Only really two options, fight it out anyway or use some sort of CRT or whatever for battles you can't be bothered to fight.

Depends on the style of campaign really. Some generate lots and lots of battles so you can't possibly hope to resolve them all each turn, others are more linear 'battle generator' types so you need to fight them out.

Tony Bath's Setting Up A Wargames Campaign had a section on lopsided battles

I've just tried to find my copy but it's not were it should be.

8(

I handled it by developing an abstract resolution procedure that worked off a few simple die rolls. This is integral to the campaign rules and I can use it to resolve either lopsided battles, or more normal battles we just don't have time to get to. So if we engender half a dozen contacts in the campaign, we choose the most interesting to resolve and then resolve the rest "abstractly."

When a small force is standing to fight a larger one, it is usually for TIME. So the way to make the game exciting is to use number of turns played as a major victory condition.

Lopsided battles can be fun too… I remember playing a fantasy-based campaign that was a hybrid of D&D 2nd edition and whatever the current Warhammer Fantasy Battle rules were. The GM wanted to have a game where the PCs had their 2nd edition "followers" actually matter… So we had 4 warriors who at 10th level had something like a 100-200 1st level fighters as followers.

My "side" was the PC's and had about a fifty spearmen and a hundred archers and crossbowmen plus some barbarian scirmishers that had to hold a bridgehead and prevent a crossing by a force of "Our scouts can't count that high, but there are five columns of about twice your size" for 100 turns so that the baggage train, camp followers, some recovered artifact of "ye gods they can't get their grubby hands on THIS", and the worn out and depleted Player Characters could escape.

enemy came in, Calvary first (as several waves of "bricks", then 10 turns later started rolling for each of the light infantry units, then 10 turns after that the heavy infantry units, then the siege engines.

my side arrayed the forces with the spearmen on the far side of the bridge in a thin line just ahead of the archers, who were to pick off approaching cav, the Zweihänder-equipped barbs ON the bridge, and a third line of spearmen behind that on the "friendly" side of the river pre-positioned to let the archers fall behind THAT when their forward-positions were overrun.

the battle was a bloodbath, forward-deployed archers versus horse cav were NOT good for the horsies, and we wiped out about 40-50% of them before the cave got bae-to-base with the archers defensive line, which was also when the first units of light infantry hit the board… so we fell back behind the bridge and let the horses "eat" the spearmen while peppering them with arrows on the retreat…

The cav guy knew he was out of the fight because the bridge was only wide enough for 8 GW horses frontage, and that was death against the archers. So it turned into Thermopylae (before any of my gaming group of jr highschoolers had ever heard of suh a thing) and it was OUR arrows that blotted out the sun… until the enemy decided to wait for siege engines to come and outdistance our archers. The line fell to a human wave assault covered by an artillery barrage of hurled rocks and thrown bolts.

it took over 200 turns, and we cost the other side five figures for every one of ours, AND our rear most line of archers fled the field intact, with no Calvary formation in ANY condition to run them down..

COMPLETELY changed the ebb and flow of the over campaign, and "Remember Bloody Bridge" was a rally cry for the rest of that campaign, and several unrelated OTHER games thereafter…

Also battletech… More often than not in campaign mode we'd have to play some lopsided fights… but they were no less fun because mechs are so hard to kill that one against four can be VERY EXPENSIVE for those four if the one is willing to go all out…

All good points of not just dismissing a lopsided game out of hand; loved reading the accounts.

-Will