Warrior Ancient and Medieval Rules

i was looking through the x rules and came accross the "home terrain"
x rule. It seems to be a sort of DBA style setup where you basically
calculate your army's "aggression factor" (it's just given to you in
DBA) based on things like your scouting points, number of rash
generals, number of cautious generals, # of E troops, irreg A, etc.
the army with the lower score is then considered to be fighting at
home.

this i think is a good idea and certainly an improvement over the old
Cold + Tropical = tropical setup.

I have two thoughts related to this x-rule:

1) I don't think the old home terrain rule is without value. As I
understood it, the rule was meant to simulate armies from crummier
climates going to attack and take over places in nicer climates. (thus
tropical is always in home climate based on the published rule)

My suggestion would be to add the old home terrain rule into the x
rule and assign a value (or a number of d6 roles that might simulate
the liklihood that any one ruler was satisfied in his home climate)
toeach home terrain type. Crummy home climates like dry or cold would
have high values and thus give that army a higher liklihood of being
the attacker.

2) As far as i can see rolling up a rash general is a piece of bad
luck in the present rules only because it makes your army harder to
command. using this x rule would make it doubly bad because now you
also are likley to be fighting on your opponant's home terrain.
(according to the xrule rash generals double whatever "home terrain"
score you had)

this seems to me to put too much weight on the "personality role" for
your subgenerals. i don't have a solution, I only bring it up because
it looks like a problem.

Curious to know if any body has an thoughts about these points or
other aspects of this x rule.

J

Jonathan wrote:
<Big Snip>

We discussed this a while ago, and I believe Jon is considering or
alreay has changed the tournament rules as a result so that if 2
armies from the same climate meet neither gets the home terrain
advantage.

Having had some time to consider since then, I don't really see this
as an improvement over the basic problem of determining who has the
home terrain advantage.

The basic rule isn't bad when playing historical opponents (though not
perfect, for instance, if the 100YW English fight a Medeieval Spanish
army, the English get home field advantage, even though the Spanish
never set foot in England)

However, there are a number of problems with attempting to
historically model interactions between non-historical opponents based
simply on scouting, character of generals, or what not because often
intangibles like a good scouting doctrine or maps made a big
difference.

That said and done, the common tournament matchup is ahistorical, and
the climate system really is not a fair way of determining who gets
the home terrain advantage in such a circumstance.

Some consideration has led me to believe that fair play would dictate
that when a pair of ahistorical opponents meet, a die roll would be a
fairer arbiter of who gets the home terrain advantage than the current
system.

Have fun!
Cole