pantherboy obviously cheatsXiggy wrote:The Americans also broke the Japanese code, so they knew they were coming, just not where they were. The randomness of midway, was that the armeicans found the Japanese first, if it had been the other way, history would have been much different. There is tons of randomness in history. The Iron Brigade in the American Civil war, routed after only being under fire for a short time late in the war after being rock solid in early battles.
If this game was so random, then why is it that pantherboy has not lost a battle since Beta? He seems to beat everyone, bad dice or no. I think we tend to look at key moments in a battle where we get a chain route of 3 or 4 units, or 2 or 3 mounted break off and end up behind your line. If we looked at all the combat results in a game, you would be surprised how even they are.
No seriously, obviously there's a skill involved here, and maybe I'm just too inexperienced to see what works and what doesn't. Hell, I've only been playing for a couple of months.
My problem is that there are relatively few units on the board (35-45 for normal armies, and 60-70 for horde/shooter) so bad luck in a single round affects a large percentage of your army. You can literally lose the game in one bad round of combat, since the ripple-effect can make a comeback extremely hard.
I can live with all this since the game is just plain fun, even with the odd results, I just think that there's room for improvement.
Couple of games ago I had my line of pikes (about 10 units) engage an enemy line of off. spears (a few more than mine, call it 12) and even though the POAs were on my side, I had 3 consecutive turns of combat where I won a total of 1(!) combat. No other modifiers, everyone was Protected, straight melee combat.
Same game had one of my cats charge a LF who evaded, got caught due to terrain, and beat the cats into disrupted status....
Needless to say, I lost that game *g*
Now, I don't mind that this *can* happen. There should be a level of odd things happening, otherwise there'd be no thrill.
My peeve is that it happens way too often, since the D6 system leaves little ground for a bell-curve of results.
Lars
PS: Just in case anyone should misunderstand my sense of humor (wouldn't be a first *g*), the pantherboy reference was very much tongue-in-cheek.