Warrior Ancient and Medieval Rules

[Tim Grimmett]

I notice a drift in the discussion toward preset terrain, which could also morph to pre-set with players +/- one terrain piece.

We routinely use 480p rear zones here in the DC area; my casual observance is this helps a great deal and makes close order foot armies more viable.

What about limiting the number of units allowed to 16?

[Mark Stone]

[Terry Dix]

[joncleaves]

Being against pre-set is one thing - but what about an alternate plan to reduce set up and improve the look of our terrain?

[Mark Stone]

[Frank Gilson]

I'm all for reducing setup time. I lean against preset terrain. Here are some explanations.

Our terrain setup method is fun and an additional point of strategy on top of army selection and list building. It's also interactive, my opponent and I 'fight' over the types and locations of terrain pieces. It doesn't take much of the setup time, really, and any reasonable pre-set terrain process that permits some modification would take almost as long.

As Mark Stone mentions, most of the 'delay' in setup is command placement. People run armies that they haven't fully thought out the deployment of. I see players picking up and replacing units several times during deployment. People still get commands a little mixed sometimes. Decisions about command and unit placement are complicated by those for force and flank marchers. If we all expend more forethought, before arriving at a game, we can solve a lot of these issues for ourselves and setup faster. So, require players to arrive with army lists pre-printed out on sheets of paper with a couple of pages of notes about how to set up commands and whether to force or flank march. That will at least require us to give it some thought.

I'd be willing to run on smaller tables (or with deeper deployment zones.) Do we move back to fewer points? 1500? I'm not sure.

Frank

[Adrian Williams]

We always use preset terrain here in Australia.

It is one thing to manipulate your choice of troops it is another to manipulate the earth itself by sitting around devising and creating the "perfect" terrain piece.

Adrian

[Terry Dix]

Scott, some ideas for standards of terrain.
1. Require that terrain be made of a rigid material and be flocked.
2. Terrain should be of an irregular nature for hills, forest, dunes, marshes, all water features. By this I mean that no straight lines of more than 120 paces.
3. All hills must be atleast 1" in height. Steep hills should be 2".
4. Forests, and orchards must have trees, brush must have bushes.
5. Built up areas must have buildings.
All these can be done such that they can be transported in a drawer in a tool box. This will stop the folding of felt to make your pefectly square hill-forest-marsh-etc. fit, and it will bring our standard of presentation up.

[Ewan McNay]

Hey, at least we have some life on the board . [That's actually a serious comment - we seemed to have a lot more action on the old email list, fwiw]

Deeper deployment zones I have little problem with; would much (much) rather see that than compress tables beyond the current 'norm.' 1500 vs 1600 seems like an annoyance to folks who've bought and built armies around 1600, which is significant and may be a killer, but on the other hand as an *alternate* format on occasion - a la the mini - no big deal.

We could take a leaf from the (UK, at least) DBM folks, and have pre-printed sheets with a diagram of the table, marked into sectors; makes diagramming force and flank marchers very fast.

Certainly requiring that any terrain you want, you bring, doesn't seem too onerous. On the other hand, I think that the ability of e.g. felt to vary in effective size is a _good_ thing, so would not want to remove such possibilities. {Jon: 'getting away with' a piece of terrain?? I'm not sure that even makes sense. Practically, do you _want_ to mandate that I create and bring e.g. 20 different woods, 20 different marshes, 20 different gullies, etc in a range of sizes, because of the risk that the gap between other features might be 299p rather than the 300 I built my wood at??}

Did the change in standard comp format to allow commands to be structured after seeing terrain make a difference on timing? I like Todd's plan for the teams, to have all units listed and use highlighters to delineate commands; should take about 5 secs total.

UK comps have used the 'terrain bag' approach, which avoids Adrian's worry about personally-crafted earth-sculptures: you ask the ump for a bag, specify light/medium/heavy, and you get a choice of (say) 7 pieces from which you must make your selections. That seems to be a point between preset and homemade-crap that might work. Scott's general pool suggestion is a variant on that (and I would be fine with that, too).

Scott, I'm guessing you have data on % of games ending in a 5-x, a 4-3 or 3-3, and a lower score. Does this vary in current mini versus open versus NICT? I'll be very interested to see what happens to this, as well as to army mix, in the compressed mini.

[Finally, on one of Frank's points; I guess that the number of folks who turn up to tournaments without ever even seeing their army on the table is not trivial. I'll be doing so for the mini, in fact. So Some level of slight uncertainty in the first game of the day is perhaps understandable - 5 min, perhaps. But that's not what we're all discussing, I suspect.]

[Ewan McNay]

JON - note that the 'fifth horseman' folder is apparently locked/limited-access. I note this only because you stated you'd post a follow-up on recruitment etc. over there, which I'm guessing is your recent post, and it's not accessible.

Either that, or you finally decided my opinions weren't needed

[Todd Kaeser]

Just an FYI - I started a topic on the Painting/Modeling section on Terrain ideas. Maybe if we share some knowledge we'll be able to produce better looking terrain.

Todd K

[joncleaves]

First, I don't know what's up with the Fifth Horseman topic or why someone cannot reply to it - so we'll continue to use this one thread for this subject until Scott and I can sort it out.
Here's what I said there:

"1. I am the author of Warrior Battles and it is delayed solely due to my schedule. I want to write it very badly, but have only recently returned to it after a long hiatus due to other things having a higher priority at the time. It isn't because of lack of interest - it is one of my top one or two design goals. It isn't because I don't think it will work - I am VERY excited about where I think this will eventually take us and the kind of game it will be.

2. That said, Warrior Battles will not be a replacement for Warrior, nor will it do the things for a player that Warrior does. WB will be faster, simpler and use less figures, but will also not permit the level of resolution that Warrior does. It *will* use the same principles that Warrior does so that the player transitioning between them will see some familiar things. But it will not be Fast Warrior or Warrior Lite.

3. That said, the issues that confront Warrior recruiting still confront Warrior recruiting no matter the publication of WB: games are too long for any game, simple or otherwise, set up is a mess, terrain looks horrid. WB will not solve these for Warrior.

So, while we would like to see most WB players eventually adding Warrior to the list of games they play, Warrior still needs work to encourage new players to enter the Warrior fold."

Now on to other subjects:

- No, Ewan, I don't expect someone to bring 20 versions of each piece of terrain. But that's because I personally don't like the idea of using 14.3 to not only generally get what one wants but also to have it with laser-like precision. 14.3 is there to help players get reasonable terrain in a pick up game with no umpire necessary and to simulate to a small degree the idea that a general tries - from a strategy standpoint - to get on the terrain he wants to assist in his tactical fight. But, it is misused when someone folds over a piece of felt to get exactly the precise dimensions of terrain down to the millimeter. It turns me off, and it turns off potential recruits. It is not the intent of 14.3 to do so - the player should have a few fixed pieces with him (or at his local game store) and generally gets what he wants as he rolls the dice. To have a player reshape what is already a crappy-looking piece of terrain - or worse, to not even have in his possession a piece of terrain and have to make me sit while he goes looking to borrow it from someone else in the room. Awful.

As far as life on this forum goes, I for one like both the recent increase in activity on subjects of substance and how much improved this is over the old yahoo group. Without structure, the old group encouraged babbling about whatever - and that's cool if the group wants to go do that somewhere - but not something we can get involved with as a business with precious little time resources.

I like the UK comp terrain bag idea a lot.

The ability to determine command structure after terrain was in TOG as well.. and pretty much had to be as that is how it was historically.

[Mark Stone]

[joncleaves]

14.3 is not a rule. The book says it is not a rule. There is nothing in the Warrior rulebook that dictates terrain setup. 14.3 is one way. Pre-set is another. A mixture is another. No terrain is another...etc.

The NICT uses 14.3 because Scott says so as Warrior captain for NASAMW. And Scott has been choosing to use 14.3 straight from the book because the majority of the 30 that get qualified ask him to year after year. I think it is time to let that go. If these 30 guys are the great Warrior players they think they are, other formats should be no issue to generalship. Arguments to the contrary - such as the idea of a tactical style that NEEDS 4 (or more!!??!) hours to win - support the possibility that certain folks are *only* good at 1600/4 hours/certain armies. I am sure you are not making that argument...

Even if I bought the idea of tactical styles needing 4 + hours, why do those people get to have their way every year? Especially when players who might have joined us have walked because of the game length and we could show some flexibility on this issue, mixing it up from year to year so that they felt theie "style" might get catered to one year.

There is no support to the notion that 1600 can't come to a result in less than four hours. I argue that it might be if both players are slow to move, but supporting slow play isn't on my personal list of things to do, esp. if it hampers recruiting.

I mean, look at who is arguing for it and who is not... I am not aware of a single new player, or potential new player who walked away, who *wants* a four hour game. Its a vocal minority. Surely an important one, but not the only group who has our ear.

[Ewan McNay]