"Randomizing the Army" Topic

Writing in Slingshot magazine, Richard Taylor makes the case for dicing to determine which of your army units are available for a particular battle.

This would provide a better reflection of reality, in that the vagaries of campaigning meant that not all of a general's units would be available for every battle (perhaps being detached for garrison or special duties), and also requires players to think on their feet and make the best of a situation not entirely of their own choosing.

What do you think?

Not for every game but I'm in favour. Ditto with dicing for the ability of your generals & even on unit morale.

If a game is about winning & nothing else, randomisation is a bugbear. If the game is about fun & maybe re-creating a little history, randomisation adds the necessary spice.

As above, not for every game, but I don't have a problem with it. I also like the idea of having, say, two infantry units, and then drawing six index cards from a pile of 12 or so, and each index card tells you what your next addition unit is.

I like it and often use a "seeing the elephant" rule whereby green units can be world beaters or complete crap first time they take a moral check.

I play for the story, not the win, so some random spice adds a little fun.

Back in the 80s a game called Hoplite Warfare and it's sequel Hellenistic Warfare had you rolling D100s to determine what you got on the army lists.
You better have all the choices!

It would certainly work generating random AWI units from my hordes.

I like it!

I've added a similar mechanism to campaigns. It's a fun idea, but needs to be done carefully. Overrandomization of the force pool feels very "gamey" and can be downright frustrating if Lady Luck turns her magic wand into a switch to spank you, and many random results lay waste to suspension of disbelief. For instance, most people would accept a very high chance of JEB Stewart missing an entire battle or A.P Hill arriving late, but Longstreet or Jackson should be in position and ready to jump off on time even if you told them to march the long way around the moon.

I once invented an alternative idea for a sort-of-campaign using Full Thrust: each player used the points system to build his fleet, then each scenario had a smaller cap of points which could be brought to that battle, and scenario objectives and conditions to make the choices interesting. This forced players to design a whole "space navy" capable of multiple roles but then pick and choose ships for each mission from the smorgasbord of the fleet array (whatever is left of it at each juncture). The scenarios were typical naval scenarios – conduct or stop an orbital landing, escort or intercept a convoy, conduct or stop a raid, etc. Not a "campaign" as much as a bunch of linked scenarios, but a neat way to focus the "fleet design" goals of the players on strategic and tactical context, and invoke the admiral's aerie without resorting to the agonies of tracking a map campaign.

This concept could be applied to any points-based army building system. Just invent a bunch of scenarios which force the players to choose only a limited portion of their whole army for each one, and then live with the results of previous scenarios in each subsequent scenario. It's a way to force players to conserve elite units and play for strategic goals without having a whole map campaign to track.

- Ix

I like it for campaigns – not every unit will be available for a particular battle – but I don't like it for one-off games. I brought all my toys, and you tell me I can't use these units?

If it was done right I wouldn't mind it, but done wrong and you end up with unbalanced non-historical armies.

I think it would be interesting, especially for some periods and theaters.

As suggest above though, I'd probably prefer a core force, with additions, and subtractions from that for various reasons.

Letting attrition affect the next battle possibly, and not being sure replacements would be coming in time to make up for losses could make for more realistic games.

As above, I have also done this sort of thing from time to time, and some rules eg One Hour Wargames, make random army generation a core mechanic as part of the system. The parameters are such that you don't end up with silly combinations.

I like the mechanism in KISS Rommel where units are put on cards, and you draw four or five at random to make your force up. So you can use your newly painted Pz IV, you can choose one of the cards directly.

Yes it may be "unbalanced" but so is war. Points handicap systems are available if it bugs you.

Two Hour Wargames does this in Rally Round the King. Half your army is fixed, the other half you roll for. Armies ar relatively small so it's a practical proposition.

Rolling for the composition of your armies has been an integral part of all the rules in the Polemos series. You play with what you are given rather than tailoring a specific force for the situation/opponent.

The system is designed so that average rolls will give you a typical army, but as every wargamer knows, the dice can play tricks on you. It is how you cope with using what you have rather than what you have chosen that gives you a much more satisfying challenge than the usual 'my 1000 pts vs your 1000 pts.

Most of the time when our scenarios do this, we also start with hidden unit types/composition. Usually this means the game begins with surrogates (playing cards, nicely painted blocks of wood) on the table, or real units which get changed out (based on playing cards off the table or under/near the units) upon visual contact or identifying event (if you're conducting defilade fire with large projectiles, you reveal that its a catapult or artillery unit).

One time a player surreptitiously brought an additional unit for such a game and when my guys came over the ridge with guns a blazin', she removed the unit on the board, revealed a joker (which meant a false unit) reached into a hidden part of her shoe box, placed some nicely painted figures on the board, flicked the front one with her finger so it fell over and said, "Due to your overwhelming show of force, my cows automatically fail morale and surrender."

Force composition and number are not the only things you can randomize. I have a nice scenario that randomizes affiliation at the start.

It's a poor general that doesn't know the mettle of his troops. Randomizing armies is not necessary if you set up the game or scenario properly

Mike B

@mbsparta: I guess it really depends on the historical period and the scale of the battle. You are correct in what you say, buy many generals were not also the supreme political leader.

A good example is Marlborough, he served a multi-national coalition and pretty much had to take the troops he was given at the end of the day.

This can happen in a campaign game. No special rule needed. This is why I avoid point games. Just design a scenario. If that is what you want out of a battle then set it up that way. You can still give both sides an equal chance to win by adjusting the victory conditions.

A friend of mine and I do this for our English Civil War games. We each currently have about a dozen units available but like to play games with 8 or 9 units each. (We use Victory without Quarter rules.) We have a playing card for each available unit, mix them well, and draw 7 at random. We get to look at our draw and then select 1 (usually) or 2 of the remaining cards to fill out our force. This gives us the ability to partially address some perceived shortcoming in our randomly drawn forces.

Granted, it is not completely random, given our relatively small pool of available units compared to the size of the draw but it does serve to give an interesting mix of units and can create games where opposing forces are very different even though each army's pool of available units are pretty similar. One side could end up with an infantry heavy force with a bit of artillery against a foe composed largely of horse and commanded shotte whose artillery failed to show up.

Randomizing the forces can create an interesting encounter from what would otherwise be a straight up clash between near equal forces. It is sort of a scenario substitute. It helps to keep our game fresh by preventing us from fielding the same units every game. We also use the unit cards as part of unit deployment to add to the fog of war by adding a couple "dummy" unit cards and deploying unit cards face down.

We are currently doing a campaign where units that are destroyed or routed off the board are not available for the next game at all. When they do come back, they are rated as "green". Surviving units have a chance to improve in quality. This adds to the randomizing procedure by introducing variability in unit quality in addition to the variability in unit types that the card draw produces.

So, overall, I feel that randomizing opposing forces to some degree can add a lot of enjoyment to a game. I recommend giving it a try, particularly for periods where there are a good variety of unit types and/or qualities.