Warrior Ancient and Medieval Rules

[Historian]

Historicon Lessons learned

On Replace in combat: When Unit A replaces Unit B in combat, Unit B is entirely pulled out of that combat. So if unit B, with a 3 elements in contact, has Unit A, with an element frontage of 1, charge through it to “Replace in combat”, then the new combat is just between Unit A and the enemy. B is totally pulled out. Which means any overlap advantage that the enemy was going to enjoy is now negated.

On Counters and retirements: Contrary to “the way we have always done it”, when you counter or retire, no ELEMENT of the countering unit may end closer to any enemy. Our understanding was that this was a unit to unit measure. Many counters before have wound up just straightening up a line in anticipation of contact, where the closest point was at the points of two units, and the counter just moved the other points to the same distance, so the units were now exactly parallel. No longer is this valid, unless the unit is only one element wide.

On Detachments: When a detachment is absorbed by the parent, the parent acquires the fatigue of the detachment if the detachments fatigue is higher, and visa-versa. Unlike the two previous lessons, this one is not an subject to interpretation but just overlooked by me. But it is a little odd that a detachment of 6 LI with 14 fatigue caused its parent of 24 HI to go from zero to nearly exhausted.

On Shields and 2HCW: A shielded unit, armed with only 2HCW is charged in the shielded flank, and fails attempts to counter and face, will remain shielded on subsequent bounds, providing nothing causes it to be able to hit back with those 2HCW’s.

On Shieldwall vs. Barbarian Foot Rules: Rich Kroupa and I did a slightly less than scientific experiment on which is better, placing a unit in Shieldwall, or set up to optimize for the Barbarian Foot rules. Rich good heartedly set one of his horde’s to run 4 ranks deep and charge impetuous, while the rest of his “coast to board edge” hordes were placed in shieldwall watched on. Because of our large units, there was a lot of straddling of bodies which largely took die rolls out of the picture. But the evidence is clear. Shieldwall has the clear advantage. The unit set up for the barbarian foot rules was destroyed after its initial romp, while the engaged units in Shieldwall not only remained mostly untired, and undisordered, and also either recoiled, or destroyed, most of their opponents. The only Shieldwall unit under duress was because it was facing the maximum brunt from my army. And that Shieldwall spent the entire game engaged, in a disordered condition, and survived.

This “test” subjected Rich to a needless roll of 3 extra waver checks, two by unsupported ‘C’s. But the Karma gods smiled on and all were passed.

Possible rules to be revisited:
The above mentioned detachment rule.
Evaders choice: When a unit evades, it must either go “Away from the charge, or straight to its own rear.” This sometimes can be abused. In one incident, the skirmisher was charged directly from behind , and then opted to go straight to its own rear, thus heading straight into the charge. The reason was the evader was going to be caught and broken, and was avoiding downstream waver checks. (I also guess it could be argued that when caught, the evader could be shielded and fight back.)

Thought to amend this rule: “When the evade move is complete, all evading elements must be further away from the charger as when they started.”

If the Evade rule is being opened, I would also advocate that evaders could also opt to evade directly their front. After all, you can run away faster if you are running in the direction you are already facing. And the “…all evading elements must be further away from the charge…” amendment should keep it from being abused.

Just my 2 cents.

[scott holder]

I'll have complete results posted sometime this week as well as my ruminations on the tourney.

The scoring system is designed for one thing and one thing only: to encourage engagement and attack. It's been close to 20 years now but most of us who've been around that long were "shaped" by the point the godawful point system used prior to this one and the philisophical underpinnings behind it: a "big" win was if you could kill 151 points (counting shaken as half, etc) of your opponent and lose nothing. It made games unbearable.

I was stuck with that system for a couple of years until I came back from the "world" championships in Derby England. They had a different scoring system that had it's own quirks but was clearly far better than what we had. Then I stumbled onto an article about strength of schedule. A year of tinkering with the formula along with some help from my wife who actually developed the final product, presto! You don't fight an aggressive game with an eye toward either winning big (or losing big), you suffer. Period.

Now that that screed is over, I'll see about getting results posted in a new thread.

scott

[Ewan McNay]

Right: Derby you could score up to 1250 per game: 0-600 for kills, 0-600 for margin over opponent, +50 if you looted their camp (this was under 7th, naturally).

So not fighting was a massively losing option, even more so than under the current Scott system. I liked it, frankly: simple, generally rewarded not losing troops almost as much as killing the other guy. A score of ~4000 over 4 games was usually required to win, so you could afford one high loss or small win if your other three games were max wins; but then of course it was also primarily a team comp anyway, teams of 3 and a field of a couple hundred.

No-one seems to believe me but I have no beef here - I should have fought more against the Swiss, period. The odd glitch about inequality of Thursday points and Saturday points is a separate Q and one that might be worth considering, but not really germane.

[scott holder]

Heh heh, I believe you have no beef. Everybody knows how the system plays and all systems have their quirks.

Some more history: I didn't simply cram the Derby system down everybody's throats 20 years ago because, and this is key, at that time, it would have been considered too radical for our playing culture. Thus, the 0-5 point system (ignore Strength of Schedule for a moment) struck the right balance between the two.

One thing I did find was a tendency, repeat, tendency, for players in the lead in late rounds figuring they were far enough ahead to revert to the "bad old days" and play each other "not to lose" and thus, we were back to dicking around for what I considered to be minor draws on one side or the other determining a winner. Strength of Schedule puts pressure on people to keep playing to win.

At some point, probably before I moved out here in 1996, I tried melding the Derby System with a Strength of Schedule overlay. Didn't have any luck with it at the time but that was so long ago, I don't remember what I tried.

scott