"an idea re. victory conditions..." Topic

I`ll run this past you if I may?
In my ancient rules, moving on from determining the size of forces available to each general in the army lists; this may then determine the type of action that it can be and the required victory conditions for it…? Any thoughts ?

I can see how it could work. Shifting to horse & musket, if Side A gets a full field army with emperor, and side B gets a couple of hundred militia with a committee of volunteer Colonels, the battle options can only be delaying action, raid on supplies and last stand. But if both sides bring full field armies, you get an option of open field battle, but certainly not last stand.

If that's the right idea, it's workable. Divide the armies by size and do a matrix.

That sounds super awesome, I'd love to see something like that.

That is a pretty common approach in scenario generator type systems, so yes, tried and tested.

Nice to know it works Martin, but which rules do this?

The first time I came across it was in the scenario generator for Squad leader published in the AHGC General back in the 1970s, mission type and posture related to force ratios.

It is also in the WW2 single battalion campaign system published by TAC Publications, force aggression determines force size which in term determines the available mission types.

In a more refined form it is in the scenario generation system in Command Decison 4, iirc (it is a long, long time since I've played it), 2nd Ed WH40K.

One Hour Wargames turns it around and sets the force size by mission type (and then the armies are generated within those parameters.)

This is something I was trying out when exploring the idea of making a game with no point list or set forces, but gave up when it came always came back to needing to identify the "value" of a unit before hand anyway. I guess thats a different topic, but yeah, I think that can work fine provided the theme would allow.

Thanks for your responses gents…

I`ll be trying to knit my army lists, and rules together in to some reasonable shape in the next week or so.

I do a lot of force dependent victory conditions for my published games.

An easy approach, if you can break forces into "roughly equivalent" units is each side's VP equal their units of survivors plus their units killed. Objective based VP are awarded on top of this.

So If you bring ten units to cross my border(for whatever scenario drive reason) and I choose to bring six (likewise) to repel you, your starting VP are 9 and mine are 6. But you can only earn a total of 6, where I could earn more.

The objective part could be done in two ways: (1) the crosser only counts survivors that exit the board from the other side or (2) there is a bonus, say 4 points for either side based on whether the crosser did or didn't get half their troops across the board.

Both these approaches have different break points, but both direct the players to consider something other than pure attrition when deploying forces.

Those are just singular examples, but the basis of survivors plus kills gives you a pretty robust framework from which to devise victory conditions.

Yeah, did this years ago. No disparity, straight up battle, some disparity and the lesser side gets better terrain and so forth.

It'll work.

All falls apart though when you get into the extremes when you realize that that "Victory" conditions are not as easily determined as you think. Further that "Victory" to one side or the other may be different things and the two sides may come away from an action equally convinced that they have won, or for that matter-- lost.

But for most battles up and down the line it's just fine.

That`s so right Otto,

If it is a difference of one unit being in good morale or routed, it can be a close decision and perhaps a little harsh.

Moving the goal-posts slightly perhaps, I`ve tried to give Barbarians a chance of "winning" on their own terms with an heroic death rule – but it`s still not easy.

Many a time though gamers can play exceedingly well too (despite having the odds stacked against them) and think that a moral victory is theirs at least.

I`ll try and work something out that will determine the orders and vp`s of subordinate generals with detached, independent commands and leaving a main army`s mission to the player`s choice.