Warrior Ancient and Medieval Rules

[Tim Grimmett]

The purpose of this post is to spark a discussion regarding assigning a degree of difficulty bonus or handicap to tournament play in order to encourage players to use a wide list of army choices.

The concept is fairly straightforward: If an army scores in the top 1/3 in a qualifying tournament it receives +1; middle third a 0; bottom third a
-1.

If an army has a cumulative positive number--going back to when FHE
finished finished publishing lists in April 2005--then the players end score is multiplied by .9; a zero is multiplied by 1.0; a negative number is modified by 1.1. Armies that have not been played in X years receive a 1.1 modifiers.

The .9 and 1.1 are placeholders; they could be adjusted. The timeframe could be a rolling three to five years.

Tim

[Todd Kaeser]

While I agree that there are definate advantages to using say Seleucid, Japanese, Medieval Spanish, Mongols, 100 Year's War, or Alex Imperial vs. Romano-British or New Kingdom Egyptian I say there is more in the player than in the army. Certain armies lend themselves to being more well rounded vs. the majority of opponents and they are widely used.

However, I do believe the player has more to do with success than the army used. Take Dave Markowitz or Derek Downs or a few of the other top players and I am more concerned playing against them with Alex Imperial or Khmer, yet give the army to another player and these armies possess enough weaknesses to be exploited. Seleucid in the hands of an inexperienced opponent is full of morale and table space problems to be exploited. So much of tournament gaming is the matchup. Derek, being a good player, was able to overcome the Japanese matchup at least once to hold on to win the NICT, while there were also a few matchup problems elsewhere that ended up 1-1 to leave the door open for him.

Yes they have won with "top" armies, but they are nonetheless dangerous with a mid tier army.

I think the system you have thrown out there is interesting, and I would be curious to see the ramifications of a "degree of difficulty" type modifier attached to certain armies. Would people take a "lesser" army in order to gain the modifier bonus, or at least not incur it's wrath and go mid tier? I don't know.

Some thoughts,

Todd Kaeser

[Kelly Wilkinson]

Tim,

This is a neat idea. The only thing is, I like to play armies that are lower tier and usually do pretty good with them(I seem to be Scott McDonald's bridesmaid on more than one occasion in the open) ie: Arab Empire, Camillan Romans, Romano British, just to name a few. The thing is, would this system take into account frequency of play? For instance, let's say Derek decided to play Early Lybians in the Nict and takes 3rd place with them three years running. Does this mean that Early Lybians are now a 1st tier list? How do you think we should go about determining success for players of this caliber who can take this sort of army and do well? Todd has a very good point, but I still think this is a very good idea. What do you think would make this work, Tim?

Kelly