"Tweaking the totals" Topic

Obviously, a great deal of the pleasure of wargaming lies in commanding armies on the tabletop. I would not be alone, however, in writing that I gain just as much enjoyment from planning and organising my forces before they ever face the enemy.

I'll be referencing Ancient warfare and the Hail Caesar rules specifically, but the points raised apply to most periods and (I suspect) most rule sets.

Before a game begins there are choices to be made: which units to include, and how they are organised. Do I add more bow-armed skirmishers and drop a Medium Infantry unit? Do I divide my army into three divisions or four? Do I spread my raw troops or concentrate them in one, lame, division? These decisions all have ramifications once dice are rolling.

I think having some grasp of points totals is important. In a meeting engagement, a degree of parity is usually desirable; in an assault scenario, perhaps the defenders should be stronger. Being able to add or subtract units to reach something workable helps avoid the dreaded "walk-over" — something no one enjoys. Points can be anathema to non-tournament players but I feel knowledge allows you to plan more interesting games.

Command abilities are another useful lever. Personally, I like fielding Roman armies with merely average commanders leading superb troops. It often produces more interesting and less predictable games.

Finally, there are "Special Abilities". Hail Caesar includes several pages of optional rules that enhance or restrict specific units and troop types. Are your Celts "Fanatics" (+1 to Morale rolls until Shaken)? These cost points too, and I like the idea of a limited "Special Abilities budget", from which each player selects what — and to whom — within an agreed cap.

I should note that HC has no official points system but there is a players' generated system that works well.

I can already hear the counter-argument: that historical commanders had little freedom to tweak forces — you took what you were given. That's true, but I would emphasise both syllables in "war-game".

I'd be interested in responses to some or all of the above, particularly how this plays out in your periods and your preferred rule sets.

In an attack/defence scenario it is usually reckoned that the attacker should outnumber the defenders by 3:1.

MajorB – very much depends on time period and available defences. Besides, it's 3:1 to ensure a successful attack – not much of a game for the defender.
Plus it's really just a finger in the air, not a scientifically proven fact.

Seem to find convention games even where I am on the history side the attacker that forces are about equal to me.

I enjoy setting up and planning a game as much as playing it.

"I enjoy setting up and planning a game as much as playing it."

If you mean scenario creating; that's a 'given'.
Do you do much in the tweaking of armies as outlined above?

MajorB, I thnk you'll find the 3:1 bit is for moderns--that is, post-1900. And even there. it was 2:1 for an even fight and 3:1 to ensure the attacker wouldn't be trounced. But life was very different before everyone took up firing from a prone position.

I will probably go to my grave having played more points games than anything else, and second place would be historical fixed rosters. But given a choice, both sides would make a secret draw from a deck of OOB's. If both sides draw the median OOB, the game is closest to balance. But uncertainty played too big a part in too many historical battles for me to be altogether satisfied with a game in which I KNOW my opponent has nothing in the woods/the village/behind the hill because his force is 750 points and 18 pounds and I've accounted for all of it.

I enjoy curating my collection and writing the scenarios as much as playing, sometimes more.

I would not be alone, however, in writing that I gain just as much enjoyment from planning and organising my forces before they ever face the enemy.

You are not alone.

" uncertainty played too big a part in too many historical battles for me to be altogether satisfied with a game in which I KNOW my opponent has nothing "

I understand what you're saying RP. Hidden deployment suits certain periods (but not all).

I also deal with absolute certainty by often having reserves that arrive on a random die roll (& sometimes not at all). I would also argue that spies, deserters etc meant a general had a rough idea of his opponent's strength more often than not.

I refer you to Sun Tzu: "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."

I like researching and designing historical scenarios (which I guess counts as 'organising'). I hope the players enjoy planning what they are going to do once they get their briefings.

I'm less keen on points type stuff.

After an Historicon, about 30 years ago (mid-1990s)I had a call from a reporter I had met at the con. We had about an hour discussion about what the hobby is about. She concluded with a very insightful comment. "It seems to me you folks spend as much time and get as much enjoyment out of Getting Ready to play wargames as you do actually playing them."

Thanks fellow wargamers, there's some interesting angles already.

On the 3:1 rule, I tend to agree it's more a planning heuristic than a hard law, and very period-dependent. As several have said, it's about guaranteeing success, which IS NOT always desirable in a game context. For tabletop purposes I'm more interested in "will both sides have meaningful decisions to make for most of the game?" than in replicating doctrinal ratios.

I'm pleased (and reassured!) to see how many people enjoy the getting ready side of the hobby as much as the game itself. Curating collections, researching OOBs and scenario design are all very much part of what I was getting at when I mentioned planning and organisation.

And yes, points systems can feel artificial — I'm not advocating strict tournament balance — but I do think understanding relative values helps avoid accidental mismatches. Even if you never play a strict points game, the knowledge is useful when building scenarios.

Plenty of food for thought alread. I'd be very interested to see how this looks in other periods and rule sets.

The Black powder rule sets (HC included) have some general guidelines for 'Brigade' formations but generally allow you to tailor you forces to taste. This allows player to build forces to fit their playing style. Points can give rough guidelines to be used for 'balance' as well.

This gives the old vanilla 'meeting engagement' a lot of variability and pregame choices.

I certainly get as much, if not more, enjoyment from preparing for games as I do from actually playing them.

Designing scenarios, historical or fictional. Choosing teh armies to fight those scenarios, even historical scenarios often do not have precise troop rosters so choices must be made. Building terrain, collecting and painting figures. Also the hobby in its own right of reading and researching.

Points can be a useful tool for ensuring a balanced game, but they are not perfcect. Still they can lead to interesting choices and teh challenge of using them in a way that maximizes cost effectiveness.

There is a Two Hour Wargames set whose name escapes me now, with somewhat random lists. Ancient and Medieval armies each had a core force of units, then you rolled what else you got from a weighted table, until you reached the selected points total. Clearly you had to have a wider selection of units than you would normally use, and you'd have to ignore rolls that exceeded your figure count, but still an interesting idea.

Ochoin's right about the virtues of various selection mechanisms varying with period and level. Most things wargame-related do, after all. But let me toss another few ideas into the mix.

1. Points systems are probably more useful for the scenario designer than for the players. They're a good check on relative strengths, and--especially for MajorB and his cohorts in moderns--a way to ensure an attacking army has adequate strength, but isn't overwhelming.

2. Points systems grow more troublesome as they grow more precise. Go through some detailed WW2 rules set, and you won't find a single one-digit number for an AT battery, for instance, but a two or possibly three-digit number for scores if not hundreds of WW2 AT batteries, modified by propulsion system caliber, barrel length, available ammunition, armor if any, crew training and possibly morale or nationality. We can't really be that precise about relative value, and it tends to reduce players to shoppers looking for blue light specials: conversation shifts from tactics to whether line heavy dragoons should be two points a figure or 2.5.

3. The great advantages of points are that anyone with 500 points of Western Desert British can play in a game of that size, and that if a player's One True Love is the Guard Cossacks, he can put them on the table every time his Russian Napoleonics take the field. But see bargain hunting above. Point-prone rules systems also tend to be ones with frequent revisions of rules and points, probably for good reasons. On my semi-cynical days, I've been know to suggest that the interval between new FOW or 40K editions is driven by how fast the players can locate all the ambiguities in the rules and all the bargains in the associated points.

(On my full-bore cynical days, I have other explanations.)

Good points (pun intended), RP — especially the distinction between using points and obsessing over them.

I agree entirely with your first point: for me, points systems are primarily a scenario designer's tool, not something players should necessarily be optimising over to give them an edge. I'm much more interested in using them as a rough check on relative strength — "are we in the right ballpark?" — than as a mechanism for list-building competitions.

Your second point gets to the heart of my own unease with over-precise systems. Once point values start implying a level of accuracy we simply can't justify, the conversation does indeed drift away from tactics and into accountancy. That's very much NOT what I'm advocating. In my own games, points are deliberately coarse-grained — good enough to prevent accidental mismatches, not fine enough to reward bargain hunting.

Where I still see value (and I think this overlaps with your third point) is in accessibility and flexibility. Knowing that forces are roughly equivalent lets players focus on command decisions, friction, and manoeuvre — and yes, it also means people get to field the troops they care about without unbalancing the game before it starts.My beloved French Napoleonic Guard never got a game until I worked this out.

I suppose my position would be: points are most useful when they are imprecise, understood as approximate and kept firmly in the background. Once they become the primary object of play rather than a quiet scaffold supporting scenario design, they've probably outstayed their welcome.

@ Captain Beefheart:

I think you're exactly right.

One of the strengths of the Black Powder family — Hail Caesar included — is that it gives opportunity rather than prescription at the brigade/divisional level. That freedom is clearly deliberate and it's what allows players to shape forces that reflect both historical flavour and personal play style.

As you say, even a "vanilla" meeting engagement becomes much more when those pre-game choices exist. To my mind, choice & the thinking that goes into it, is what makes gaming interesting.

Good points, Ochoin.

I think, from the other side, there's much merit in the "One Hour Wargame" approach, or something Charles Grant did in "Programmed Wargame Scenarios" which I think has wider applicability--a range of possible armies for any given scenario, but taken from a relatively limited list intended to provide a balanced game, so that if I build ten (OHR) or 16 (Grant) units per side, I know I have all the units I'll need for any scenario without being sure what my opponent will field. If nothing else, it gives me a stopping point in army-building.

These same issues are identical to what we fantasy gamers face. We have to create the forces, the battlefields, balancing it all into a fun game for all participants.

I usually base my fantasy battles on conflicts based on my RPG game sessions. I have nations and races conflicting with one another over limited, common resources. I usually do not just throw armies at one another without some believable basis for the conflict. I give my players a reason to believe their forces are justified in doing battle against the enemy forces -- each side has reasons for going to war, beyond simple bloodlust.

My fantasy games are pseudo-medieval. I find that castle defenses are a force multiplier of around 5x, not 2x, not even 3x. Fantasy is also challenging because magic spells are tantamount to artillery weapons. Balancing fantasy games can be very challenging. That challenge, however, makes it fun!

I also authored rules for Army Men games which are pseudo-historical and employ modern weapons. I wrote up something like 26 scenarios for my Army Men rules, from 1998-2007. That was a lot of fun.

Both my fantasy rules system, and my Army Men rules, employ points systems. In practice, I find both systems to be approximations, neither are terribly accurate for achieving balanced scenarios, but they come close. I always enjoy hearing my players, on both sides, simultaneously complaining it was impossible for their side to win. That makes me laugh with joy -- it demonstrates that my scenarios were, in fact, as balanced as possible. Cheers!

That's a great post, Sgt Slag. I'm glad you chimed in, because I didn't think fantasy would be different in kind at all.

Once you strip away the labels, fantasy and historical gamers are wrestling with the same questions: force generation, balance versus asymmetry, terrain as a force multiplier, and ensuring both sides have meaningful decisions to make. Magic functioning as artillery is really no different, conceptually, from introducing gunpowder, rockets, or air support into a historical period — it just changes the variables. NB I've just started gaming with 'Dragon Rampant' & I'm trying to use the magic as supporting artillery in a Horse & Musket game.

I particularly like your point about why battles are fought. Giving forces a believable rationale — resources, territory, survival — makes a scenario far more engaging than simply lining up two armies because, "it's Tuesday night". In that sense, good fantasy scenario design is arguably closer to good history than many so-called "generic" historical games.

Your comment about points being approximations mirrors my own experience. They're never exact, but they help keep things within a playable envelope. And I laughed at your final observation — if both sides are convinced they're doomed, you've probably done something right!

Thanks for broadening the discussion — it reinforces the idea that the pleasures (and problems) of pre-game planning are universal across the hobby.

A good discussion with much light and no heat.

very much depends on time period and available defences.

Defences are a force multiplier hence the need to outnumber the defender. Look at the size of medieval castle garrisons.

Besides, it's 3:1 to ensure a successful attack – not much of a game for the defender.

If 3:1 ensured the success of an attack then I'm surprised that so many historical battles ended the way they did. I've played games where defenders are outnumbered 3:1 and it still gives a good game for the defender.

Plus it's really just a finger in the air, not a scientifically proven fact.

That's why I said "usually reckoned"

The pitting together of an army for a pickup or tournament type game I regard as a minor chore – something that needs to be done to have a game, but not particularly enjoyable in itself.

Turning a historical OOB into a gameable army list is more fun, but it's not often I get the opportunity to design a historical scenario (that actually gets played).

"Turning a historical OOB into a gameable army list is more fun"

One of the reasons I admire Charles Grant & his "Wargaming in History" series.