Proposals summary for playtesting

[nikgaukroger]

This link should (hopefully) take you to a document that has all the proposed changes.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rjk3wklbaqm2e ... .docx?dl=0

Obviously this is nowhere near a final document, there will be much work needed to get it into a suitable format with the relevant rules references, etc. That will all be done when we have decided on what the official update will contain. The purpose of this document is just to get everything in one place to make to easier for people to find for playtesting. Equally nothing is finalised yet.

[tjelsworth]

Nick,

That is great thanks. We will use this at our Southern League ECW event.

Tom

[marty]

Interesting read.

I particularly like the changes to commanded shot and dragoons but am worried the game will be slower thanks to the changes to break points. Still I suppose that is why play-testing is needed.

Could be a real boom time for my Cossacks thanks to the changes to cavalry, in spite of the reduction to bow range. I'm a little perplexed as to why sling needed to get worse. Who was achieving anything much with sling before? It doesn't need to change just because bow does (after all bow has a long range as well). Oh and of course Inca should have sling on its warriors!

Martin

[Jhykronos]

This link should (hopefully) take you to a document that has all the proposed changes.

OK, so maybe I missed you changing your mind on the subject, but:

Remove +4 points cost for Swedish brigades.

Very interesting.

Also, under the troops re-classified as horse:

Duty and Glory
Late Polish and Lithuanian Pancerni

Just the lance-armed ones, or the earlier Carbine/Pistol types as well?

[nikgaukroger]

Duty and Glory
Late Polish and Lithuanian Pancerni

Just the lance-armed ones, or the earlier Carbine/Pistol types as well?

Probably just the lance ones - will check and tidy it up if necessary when finalising.

[benjones1211]

We have been playing the new amendment list, one is bows have a 3" short range, one question that came up is when mtd fire bows at 4" how many shoot, is it 1 per 2 for Cav and 1 per 3 for LH or something else.

Then what do mtd Bw* do at 4"

[benjones1211]

The play test went well at Oxford, I put out a questionnaire covering most of the changes, two guys insisted on taking it home (Ray, Stephen), I have collated the other answers and with theirs we will have 18, so hopefully they will get back to me ASAP so I can post the results.

[madaxeman]

I guess this is as good a place as any to put comments from Oxford:

- Overall - yes, I liked the changes. They made some troop types more viable, and would make different (currently less popular) lists, and different selections in more popular lists viable, without making the gameplay feel a-historical or difficult. Keeping the overall feel "right" but changing the basis for what is an optimized list composition is exactly what is needed to freshen up FoGR right now, and this does it.

- Dragoons. Certainly made them behave like, erm, Dragoons (rather than surrogate LH) which was GREAT! This did however mean they felt like they were struggling to find a role on most of the battlefields I played on, and as a result may need a bit of a compensatory boost in some way to make them worth actually taking. With Horse no longer the default artillery target, and Dragoons now restricted to hiding in terrain they did also seem to become an artillery magnet - in 3-packs so suffering a test each hit, and also deployed somewhere obvious to aim artillery at. Perhaps if they could count cover/protection from artillery and other shooting - and maybe even get a + in melee when in terrain it would be tempting to take a chance on them sticking around in terrain to try and hold up proper troops? They are still rolling not many dice and are in small unit sizes, so it would still be a choice as to hang on or bug out?

- Commanded Shot - a bit complicated to remember (especially as the printed list had something different to the page on this forum!) but once I got the hang of it it seemed to make sense. Having a whole cavalry formation benefit without the clunky extra bases and "are you adjacent to the shot" thing was much cleaner. It does make Commanded Shot better value with Determined Horse and Cavaliers though as more combat dice can benefit from the upgrade. Is that costed up right?

- Armour - GREAT! Makes Unarmoured horse viable, and makes the whole evolution towards fast-charging shallow formations of unarmoured horse over the timeline of this period appear to make sense all of a sudden. Points costs may need looking at though as I seemed to get an awful lot of Superior Cavaliers in my 800 points (5 units)

- Break Points - can't say I really noticed much, but all my games finished well within the 2.5 hour timeframe anyway. If anything it encouraged me to charge home with Superiors against Average, as the "6 dice at Impact with re-rolls and a second go at them in the same turn in melee" now seems a much surer way to polish off a damaged enemy than just shooting at it with 3-4 dice and hoping to nick the last base that way.

[benjones1211]

Ok got Ray's Just Stephen Stead to reply, despite promising to do it yesterday.

Next question, I have a large table to put into the forum, I know if I just cut and paste all the formatting is lost, I have seen others manage to do it, so whats the secret???

[RonanTheLibrarian]

- Break Points - can't say I really noticed much, but all my games finished well within the 2.5 hour timeframe anyway. If anything it encouraged me to charge home with Superiors against Average, as the "6 dice at Impact with re-rolls and a second go at them in the same turn in melee" now seems a much surer way to polish off a damaged enemy than just shooting at it with 3-4 dice and hoping to nick the last base that way.

I actually found this rule change extremely frustrating - failure to rout enemy units at 50% down reduced a minor/medium win into a draw, a draw/minor loss into a medium loss, and a big win into a medium one. It cost me at least 6 attrition points per game, all against armies 25% larger than mine to start with - and just to make it worse, in none of the three games did any of my average units benefit from the rule (all three that routed - 1 per game - did so at full strength from CT failures). Sorry, but average troops shouldn't be able to take the same losses as superiors and still keep fighting as if nothing had happened. Maybe we should look at an automatic step down in morale for average units that reach 50% if we really want them staying on the table for that extra 1 base loss? And superiors should really get more than just a re-roll on a 1 for the extra points they cost - especially for those of us prone to throwing 2s and 3s!!!

[kevinj]

If you want to put a table (e.g. from Excel) into a post you need to convert it into an image and add it that way. I use the Windows snipping tool to capture the table as an image and save it as a JPG. Then I upload the image to Photobucket (you can create a free account) and use the Copy function there to capture the address which I paste into the Img tags in a post. Hammy posted a full guide to inserting images in the Ancients forum, you can see it at: http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtop ... =47&t=4600

[benjones1211]

Well here it is the results of the survey 18 respondants. Sorry about the table first time getting this done.



List here rule changes you feel so strongly about they would make you want to stop playing FOG-R
Better Armour and Battle Group Auto Break
Better Armour
Bow Short Range

Any other Comments:
Dragoons seem pretty useless under the rule change
Some of these changes are driven by competition play yet appear to slow down & complicate play
where I would have thought the opposite was the aim.
I am yet committed on the question about the reduction of points for cavalry and will take a view on this after Campaign at MK. I suspect that cavalry are now a little too cheap.

Commanded Shot
A BG with a Commanded Shot marker counts and or all of its bases as Protected.
Should be:-
A BG with a Commanded Shot marker counts all of its bases as Protected.
- which mounted can get them is to be detailed for each list so that they can only be bought for the type of troops that had them historically.
This has not been done

Number of Commanded Shot Markers in Lists
The following numbers of BGs can be upgraded with a Commanded Shot marker:
……
Early TYW Swedish 2-6
In combination with the “allowed troop types” this may cause the unintended consequence of changing the minimums of these troop types in the army list. As far as I can remember, Nick was suggesting that Carbine armed types like Karbinryttare should not be allowed to have Commanded Shot as they did not historically.
I suggest that the minimum be reduced to 0 for Early TYW Swedish.

[nikgaukroger]

Many thanks for using the proposals live in a competition and for the survey completion and quick feedback.

Any further feedback will be very much appreciated.

Additional thanks to those who organised the survey.

I'll not post any immediate thoughts on the feedback so far to give me some time to have a ponder about it.

[nikgaukroger]

We have been playing the new amendment list, one is bows have a 3" short range, one question that came up is when mtd fire bows at 4" how many shoot, is it 1 per 2 for Cav and 1 per 3 for LH or something else.

Then what do mtd Bw* do at 4"

Thought we'd clarified that intention was that the range change was to be applied to mounted and foot Bow and Bow* with there being no long range for mounted.

Apologies if that was missed.

[DavidT]

- Commanded Shot - It does make Commanded Shot better value with Determined Horse and Cavaliers though as more combat dice can benefit from the upgrade. Is that costed up right?

Originally there had been a points difference, however, when the proposal was to add an extra dice for commanded shot, the benefit was similar for both DH and horse, so the points cost was made the same. With the current proposals it may be worth introducing a different points cost now between CS with DH/Cavaliers and CS with Horse - a slight reduction in points for the latter would be appropriate.

[DavidT]

Number of Commanded Shot Markers in Lists
The following numbers of BGs can be upgraded with a Commanded Shot marker:
……
Early TYW Swedish 2-6
In combination with the “allowed troop types” this may cause the unintended consequence of changing the minimums of these troop types in the army list. As far as I can remember, Nick was suggesting that Carbine armed types like Karbinryttare should not be allowed to have Commanded Shot as they did not historically.
I suggest that the minimum be reduced to 0 for Early TYW Swedish.

I realise that this is a comment from one of the players and not the poster.

As I posted before, Baudissin's Regiment, which was a Karbinryttare unit in the Swedish army, was deployed with CS at Breitenfeld. While it is possible that the unit may have been retrained to fight as impact pistol, there is nothing to confirm or deny this and the Swedes were still recruiting Karbinryttare in 1632 specifically because they were Karbinryttare which would not make sense if you intended to retrain them all.

The Early 30YW Swedes used CS in all their major documented battles, so they should be compulsory. As CS appeared to deploy with Karbinryttare, the issue noted above should not arise. However, as the Swedes did not deploy CS with all their mounted, the minimum could possibly be reduced to 1.

[madaxeman]

- Dragoons. Certainly made them behave like, erm, Dragoons (rather than surrogate LH) which was GREAT! This did however mean they felt like they were struggling to find a role on most of the battlefields I played on, and as a result may need a bit of a compensatory boost in some way to make them worth actually taking. With Horse no longer the default artillery target, and Dragoons now restricted to hiding in terrain they did also seem to become an artillery magnet - in 3-packs so suffering a test each hit, and also deployed somewhere obvious to aim artillery at. Perhaps if they could count cover/protection from artillery and other shooting - and maybe even get a + in melee when in terrain it would be tempting to take a chance on them sticking around in terrain to try and hold up proper troops? They are still rolling not many dice and are in small unit sizes, so it would still be a choice as to hang on or bug out?

Thinking about this more, maybe they need to move 4" not 3" ? With the revisions it was hard/impossible for them to outrun MF in terrain - which made them very vulnerable to being overrun. If they have a chance to skulk away... maybe that's better than a better chance of fighting and hanging on for a bit?

[RonanTheLibrarian]

A further comment on dragoons in ECW games - generally agreeing with madaxeman above: I am not sure why other people take dragoons, being non-battle troops they could as he says, become an irrelevance, especially with no other light troops in the ECW with whom they can co-operate or "spar". For me, they are there primarily to at least counter, if not overwhelm (what with my dice? yeah, right!), an opponent's dragoons; a secondary role is to "do an Okey" and shoot enemy horse in the flank as they charge home (I say "secondary", I would like it to be another primary role, but since opponents can always see them - and hence don't charge home - this seldom happens).

Can dragoons be used in conjunction with ambush markers? Never seen this on the table, but it might - for example - be a way of replicating Okey's actions at Naseby, by sowing doubt into an opponent's mind whilst actually deploying them elsewhere?

[benjones1211]

Yes they can. If you have more than one piece of terrain that could hide dragoons, Plantation, Enclosed Fields, Woods, Village, Gully (May not be exclusive list) you could put ambush markers in up to three spots and mark down which one really has the dragoons.

With respect to the madaxmans comments, Dragoons approached by nastier infantry need to use the ability to turn and move at an early point. Its not impossible to get away from MF in terrain, the odds are the same as Cavalry evading Horse in the open, if you throw down and/or he throws up your nailed in the backside otherwise you are usually OK.

In my Scots Royalist army I actually took Moss Troopers rather than Dragoons, as they can slow down mtd better and get closer w/o risk. That doesn't mean I will not use dragoons in my TYW French army I have used 2 x 2 Dragoons for a long time, they always acted on one flank as a flank guard, didn't stray too much from helpful P&S (preferably close enough to count them as rear support) and just there to put off other dragoons trying to turn the flank. I will still use them in this way but will be a little more careful about when they bug out and retire on the P&S.

[LEmpereur]

Here Our Questions and Comments:

Battle Group Autobreak:
This game is nice to play because it is play in 2 and ½ hours… why this change that will make game longer?
And why this advantage given to cavalry? The first advantage of this list of modification!
Why the Light troops don’t follow the same rules as the Battle troops?
A 4 LH BG autobreak at 2 and a cav BG (except poor) at 3… We don’t understand this difference!

Troop Points Costs:
Why this change for cavalry cost? For example, a sup. arm. Dt horse cost was 18 and will be 14 pts ~25% off!

So more cavalry on the table add to average 4 cav BG that autobreak at 3… is it the death of infantry armies? Good bye Our Iroquois, benin, aztec,… armies!

Better Armour and Quality Re-rolls:
This modification will complicate the combat phases!

Why this new rules about armour ?

The 4 average armoured cavalry BG will appreciate against sup foot BG!

Commanded Shot:
Simpler and better look on table!

Dragoons:
We agree the tactical move reduce to 3MU, but not when they are within 6MU of light troops.
Cavalry will kill the dragoons easily !

And We really don’t like : “This includes evade, rout and pursue moves.“?
The dragoons guard their horses to escape faster in case of danger, don’t they?

Captured Artillery:
Simpler and coherent!

Artillery:
“Add Artillery to the - PoA when nearest rank of target is “Any mounted troops”. (i.e. will normally need 5+ to hit mounted)”
One more for cavalry!

Light Artillery:
Coherent

Shooting Ranges:

Why not, but Why ?

And the winner is.... Cavalry!