"Archery in Lion-Dragon Rampant" Topic

For those who play LR or DR regularly, what has been your impression of Archery units in the game?

My brief experience feels like archery is very powerful. My poor foot sometimes struggle to attack them as they get pinned.

Only the heavy foot with their higher armor seem to be able to weather the storm.

Thanks

I think archery is well balanced in the game, my games often have crossbows which hit hard but only shoot on a 7, its amazing how often players will fluff that roll when a juicy unit of knights is right in front of them, but if it comes off it can really do some damage.

In a recent game my crossbow unit just stood there failing every activation roll while the battle went on all around them, not good!.

Same story here. Several missed activations in a row make them substantially less powerful.

What a strange way to reduce the effectiveness of missile fire! Very "gamey". I wouldn't put up with it. "This stinks!" would be my reaction. Dice shouldn't kill tactics, only outcome. Let the crossbows shoot ferpetesakes; a gamer can screw up his own rolls badly enough just trying. I should know! But to not even get to try in the first place just turns the game into a total chance fest. Why bother.

I've also found archery very powerful, but I have to issue one important caveat – we don't play with activation rolls. There's two reasons for this: first, and most important, we are using LR to play Dux Britanniarum scenarios, which involve a lot of variable entry times and marching to and fro across the table in raids, so playing with random single unit activations would throw off the balance of the game to an extreme degree. We tried, and it just resulted in people rushing high activation/movement units around while the rest foundered – no fun and missed the point. Second, I just plain don't like them. ;)

Now, we replace the random factor of the activations in two ways; first, we use single unit "activation" by card flip (i.e. red a Briton unit can act, black a Saxon), and seond we use random movement distances (usually 3d6").

However, none of this addresses the fact that archers can shoot every turn, while in the rules they would miss about half their turns (7+ activation for archers, 6+ for skirmishers, which btw always seemed odd that the dedicated archer units would be less reliable). Hitting on a 5-6, they can easily 2 hits on a lightly armored unit and 1 hit on a heavily armored unit, thus causing those crucial courage checks.

We are playing in the Dark Ages with my own tweaks of stats for "Shieldwall" Rampant, and while everything else works great I haven't quite figured this one out. I allowed shieldwall to count versus missiles, but may actually bump that to +2 armor vs missiles, and may increase overall armor vs. missiles by +1 if you have a shield and aren't flanked. This should tone things down for historical reasons, and is any easy fix.

Cheers,

Christopher

It goes both ways. I have two units of "elite" archers that can quickly decimate (figuratively speaking) an opponents unit. I've also had the units fail activation on three consecutive tries,and watch the enemy march right past me. Since they only have an "armor" of two,they quickly fade away if shot at or in combat.
I do find the 6 figure units in LR fragile, as mine at least seem to fall to half strength quickly.
Could be I'm just a lousy player

quickly decimate (figuratively speaking)

An archer unit that inflicts more than 1 casualty on an opposing 12 figure unit has more than decimated it (actually speaking)

Correct, as decimation is only 10% casualties, from the Latin word for "tenth." Just goes to show how even old Latin words can get corrupted by modern usage.

Jim

I think when we played we housed ruled that all units were able to roll for activation.

So this might have lead to more shooting than the base game allows.

All single "unit" activation systems for medieval/dark age battles have problems (be it by dice roll card flip or whatever). Armies did not have much sub-unit articulation and fought in battle lines which advanced as a group (generally following a standard). Of course "warbands" or "retinues" around a tribal or feudal leader are possible but them breaking out of the battle line represents the exception not the rule.

Lion Rampart has some odd mechanics. You have roll to wake up a a unit. The rolls are weighted depending on what you want to do – Knights like to charge but not move; archers to shoot but not charge (crossbows being slower are harder to get to "activate"). Sounds OK and does have some command control aspects but in practice produces odd results (Knights get left behind in the rear since they don't like to move). Sometimes "units" just sit do to bad rolls.

Some form of general activation from a leader would be essential to moving toward a simulation. Also someway for the player to improve the chances of activating a critical unit would help.

TomT

I am using The Pikeman's Lament leadership rules. With the +1 of the officer, it improves the chances to activate units inside the 12" command radius.

LR is a skirmish game, Thomas, so battle lines are irrelevant.

The idea is that in the confusion of the brief, chaotic skirmishes involving often widely dispersed 'units' in varied terrain that this game represents, there are countless factors that could interfere with clear communication of orders, and therefore the natural inclinations of the various troop types predominate over higher command functions.

Spot on, Henry. I wonder if the problem is that we are asking to a skirmish ruleset to function like a battle ruleset. It won't work.

Catenwolde – why not just play Dux Britanniarum in the first place, since it should like you're having to house rule LR pretty severely to get a game you like?

It actually does pay to stay in some sort of supported line of battle in LR, as otherwise enemy units are free to gang up and attack an isolated unit in waves, while with support they effectively have to charge the nearest unit. We introduced flank charges (-1 armor is a big deal!) to make the effect even more pronounced.

Oops, you posted while I was posting …

It's just a question of personal preference. I love the DB campaign and scenario generation system, but the tabletop rules never clicked with me. The main points were the card system and the somewhat clunky (to me) fatigue/combat rules. It's not a bad system – LR just worked better as a basic engine for us – especially since I am usually playing with people who don't really know the period or the the rules that well, so "simpler is better" …

We've got them worked out pretty well now, so games click along at the rate of several per week, and we are also using them for my son's Roman collection. I prefer to think of the combat/courage system (which is very malleable) being the heart of LR, rather than the activation system.

Cheers,

Christopher

Actually Lion R is a unit based game not skirmish. Skrimish would imply man to man combat -which is not the Lion R model. (For instance even when you have reduced figure count – less men – a unit keeps rolling 12d6 etc.)

Even in small scale Dark Age battles, battle lines and shield walls formed up. Because Lion R has no flanking rules it appears not to matter but this is not real world. Even with only 40-50 men you would still form up into battle lines to control your force and protect your flanks.

If you have units you need battlelines.

TomT

I've reexamined my copy of Lion Rampant from the cover bearing a painting of feudal knights and feudal infantry in combat and the words 'Medieval Wargaming Rules' to the back cover, and I can find no reference to the Dark Ages.

There's nothing mutually exclusive about unit-based games and skirmish games. Many skirmish rule sets organise figures into 'units', whether they be genuine military groupings, such as squads (e.g. Bolt Action), or merely a convenient, purely ludic aid to fast and easy play (e.g. Law of the Gun).

For some LR troop types there's the option to form 'schiltron', but despite the abstract way the rules represent it on the tabletop we're meant to assume that it's an all-round defensive formation. There is, of course, nothing to prevent players from arranging their figures more realistically when in this formation. However players choose to depict it, it has no flanks or rear.

It's the stated design goals of the author, and not the particular mechanisms employed in a rule set, that determine the focus of a game, and as Dan Mersey makes abundantly clear throughout the text of LR, including the numerous scenarios, it's intended for playing small, dynamic actions of the 'outpost warfare' type: raids, convoy escort, scouting missions and so on, and categorically not field battles. The figure-to-man ration is one-to-one, and the time-span represented by a game is brief: no more than thirty minutes. Short of the author emblazoning on the front cover in big, red letters 'THIS IS NOT A MASS BATTLES GAME', I don't see how he could make any clearer his intent to create what, in plain English, he repeatedly and unambiguously tells you Lion Rampant is.

Thomas, it's pretty clear that the base scale is 1-1. I do know some people are using it as a battle system, fair enough. But that's not what it is intended for.

If you don't like the abstraction of activations, then don't ever play the BKC or Warmaster series'. I personally like it as it adds character to the various types, Knights are easy to order to charge, not so easy to order to march around. Similarly, the crossbow activation does mean they shoot slower than archers, but not predictably so.

It's a set of rules with some nice nuances, easy to play without markers etc, and it does what it says on the tin.

There was a Dark Ages variant article in Wargames Illustrated, I believe.

Not quite clear in what sense LR is 'medieval' beyond having medieval figures on the table; the author is perfectly clear and honest about this – it's a medieval-based fantasy which owes a lot to Hollywood.

Yes, to be truly reflective of the period additional touches wouldn't go amiss, such as rules to represent the centrality of the social hierarchy in command and control functions.