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Re: FoG:R Update - Better Armour PoA

Posted: Sat Dec 10, 2016 8:21 pm
by ravenflight
donm2 wrote:I would prefer an improved saving throw where a looser has better armour. Armour is not an offensive weapon, it doesn't kill anyone.
Ok, here's the problem as I see it:

Case 1:
You have a line of 4 FA Gendarmes fighting 3 bases of enemy FA Gendarmes and 1 base of Armoured horse. The 4 bases of Gendarmes lose, but neither the horse nor the base fighting the horse inflict any hits.

Do the gendarmes get a + for fighting enemy when they have better armour?

Case 2:
HA cuirassiers on a straight up fight vs A Cuirassiers. Pathetic rolls mean that the HA cuirassiers take 1 hit and deal none. They get a + to saving throws so CANNOT take a casualty. Their armour automatically saves them so effectively that hit never happened. Why are they doing a cohesion test?

Re: FoG:R Update - Better Armour PoA

Posted: Sat Dec 10, 2016 11:44 pm
by Jhykronos
OK, how is this for a first draft suggestion for basing it off quality rerolls:

Melee Table: Delete POA for better armor.

P.35

Section "Battle Group Quality Rerolls":

Replace the bullet list and the first paragraph after with the following:

Quality Re-roll Scores
------------ 1,2,3
Elite 1,2
Superior 1
Average None
Poor 6
------------ 5,6

If a commander is fighting in the front rank of the battle group, shift up one row for impact and melee combat dice only.
If a stand that is not Shot, Heavy Weapons, Elephants, or War Wagons is in combat with enemy that has a higher armor rating, shift down one row for melee combat dice only.

Re: FoG:R Update - Better Armour PoA

Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2016 2:04 am
by ravenflight
Jhykronos wrote:OK, how is this for a first draft suggestion for basing it off quality rerolls:

Melee Table: Delete POA for better armor.

P.35

Section "Battle Group Quality Rerolls":

Replace the bullet list and the first paragraph after with the following:

Quality Re-roll Scores
------------ 1,2,3
Elite 1,2
Superior 1
Average None
Poor 6
------------ 5,6

If a commander is fighting in the front rank of the battle group, shift up one row for impact and melee combat dice only.
If a stand that is not Shot, Heavy Weapons, Elephants, or War Wagons is in combat with enemy that has a higher armor rating, shift down one row for melee combat dice only.
I could get on board that.

It means superior armoured Ladsknechts are evens against elite unarmoured Swiss. Similarly Louis XIV are evens against League of Augsburg, which is probably not accurate, but one could argue League should be poor. Not suggesting that we change LoA, just my way of rationalising it.

Re: FoG:R Update - Better Armour PoA

Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2016 2:19 am
by ravenflight
Jhykronos wrote:OK, how is this for a first draft suggestion for basing it off quality rerolls:
Ok, Devil's advocate time (and I'm only putting this in for completeness... I think you're onto something Jhykronos):

Example 1:
Heavily Armoured Superior Samurai vs Armoured Average Bow armed Ashigaru.

Under the old system:
POA + for spear + for armour, so double advantage for the Samurai vs double disadvantage for the Ashigaru.

Under Jhykronos's system:
The Samurai are now elite (because of better armour), so hit on a 4,5,6 and re-roll 1's & 2's. Ashigaru hit on a 5 & 6, no rerolls.

Example 2:
HA Cuirassiers vs Armoured Sword armored Polish Hussars - both are superior.

Under the old system:
Curiassiers are double advantaged vs the Hussar double disadvantage.

Under Jhykronos's system:
Curiassiers are now advangaged and elite, the Hussars are disadvantaged and Superior.

I'm wondering how much difference it makes? I'm not good at the maths for this.

Also, we'd have to firm up the ONLY advantage is to effectively increase your effective quality. If you start giving the option to the player to decrease soemone's quality, I don't think that would be a good thing (IMHO)

Re: FoG:R Update - Better Armour PoA

Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2016 5:34 pm
by nikgaukroger
Jhykronos wrote:OK, how is this for a first draft suggestion for basing it off quality rerolls:

Melee Table: Delete POA for better armor.

P.35

Section "Battle Group Quality Rerolls":

Replace the bullet list and the first paragraph after with the following:

Quality Re-roll Scores
------------ 1,2,3
Elite 1,2
Superior 1
Average None
Poor 6
------------ 5,6

If a commander is fighting in the front rank of the battle group, shift up one row for impact and melee combat dice only.
If a stand that is not Shot, Heavy Weapons, Elephants, or War Wagons is in combat with enemy that has a higher armor rating, shift down one row for melee combat dice only.

My initial impression is that this could be a good idea and is not too complicated.

I'd ask that people have a good think about it and look for possible issues.

Checking out some important interactions to see what the effect would be (like the examples above) would be useful :)

Re: FoG:R Update - Better Armour PoA

Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2016 5:41 pm
by nikgaukroger
ravenflight wrote:
Jhykronos wrote:OK, how is this for a first draft suggestion for basing it off quality rerolls:
Ok, Devil's advocate time (and I'm only putting this in for completeness... I think you're onto something Jhykronos):

Example 1:
Heavily Armoured Superior Samurai vs Armoured Average Bow armed Ashigaru.

Under the old system:
POA + for spear + for armour, so double advantage for the Samurai vs double disadvantage for the Ashigaru.

Under Jhykronos's system:
The Samurai are now elite (because of better armour), so hit on a 4,5,6 and re-roll 1's & 2's. Ashigaru hit on a 5 & 6, no rerolls.
Think you may have not quite got this right.

Under this suggestion the samurai will get a + PoA for Spear and the ashigaru have no PoAs. So samurai net +1 PoA, however, as the ashigaru are " a stand that is not Shot, Heavy Weapons, Elephants, or War Wagons is in combat with enemy that has a higher armor rating, shift down one row for melee combat dice only." so count as Poor.

So, samurai hit of 4, 5, 6 and reroll 1's and the ashigaru hit on 5, 6 and reroll 6's.

The suggestion is that instead of Better Armour giving you a + PoA Worse Armour drops your quality for melee rerolls - better armour means you take less hits.

Re: FoG:R Update - Better Armour PoA

Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2016 6:04 pm
by nikgaukroger
Jhykronos wrote:OK, how is this for a first draft suggestion for basing it off quality rerolls:

Melee Table: Delete POA for better armor.

P.35

Section "Battle Group Quality Rerolls":

Replace the bullet list and the first paragraph after with the following:

Quality Re-roll Scores
------------ 1,2,3
Elite 1,2
Superior 1
Average None
Poor 6
------------ 5,6

If a commander is fighting in the front rank of the battle group, shift up one row for impact and melee combat dice only.
If a stand that is not Shot, Heavy Weapons, Elephants, or War Wagons is in combat with enemy that has a higher armor rating, shift down one row for melee combat dice only.

Depending on how Commanded Shot go the last line may need to include Protected Horse, Determined Horse and Cavaliers in those who do not shift down if faced by better armour (and for keeping melee calculations reasonably simple it may be worth adding Protected Pikemen to that).

Re: FoG:R Update - Better Armour PoA

Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2016 8:04 pm
by ravenflight
nikgaukroger wrote:
ravenflight wrote:
Jhykronos wrote:OK, how is this for a first draft suggestion for basing it off quality rerolls:
Ok, Devil's advocate time (and I'm only putting this in for completeness... I think you're onto something Jhykronos):

Example 1:
Heavily Armoured Superior Samurai vs Armoured Average Bow armed Ashigaru.

Under the old system:
POA + for spear + for armour, so double advantage for the Samurai vs double disadvantage for the Ashigaru.

Under Jhykronos's system:
The Samurai are now elite (because of better armour), so hit on a 4,5,6 and re-roll 1's & 2's. Ashigaru hit on a 5 & 6, no rerolls.
Think you may have not quite got this right.

Under this suggestion the samurai will get a + PoA for Spear and the ashigaru have no PoAs. So samurai net +1 PoA, however, as the ashigaru are " a stand that is not Shot, Heavy Weapons, Elephants, or War Wagons is in combat with enemy that has a higher armor rating, shift down one row for melee combat dice only." so count as Poor.

So, samurai hit of 4, 5, 6 and reroll 1's and the ashigaru hit on 5, 6 and reroll 6's.

The suggestion is that instead of Better Armour giving you a + PoA Worse Armour drops your quality for melee rerolls - better armour means you take less hits.
Yup, got it backwards. I think I'd prefer it the way I mistakenly read it however. Just from a preference that nobody likes their little toys to perform worse, but probably don't mind their opponents to perform better.

Re: FoG:R Update - Better Armour PoA

Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2016 9:32 pm
by hazelbark
ravenflight wrote: Ok, here's the problem as I see it:

Case 1:
You have a line of 4 FA Gendarmes fighting 3 bases of enemy FA Gendarmes and 1 base of Armoured horse. The 4 bases of Gendarmes lose, but neither the horse nor the base fighting the horse inflict any hits.

Do the gendarmes get a + for fighting enemy when they have better armour?

Case 2:
HA cuirassiers on a straight up fight vs A Cuirassiers. Pathetic rolls mean that the HA cuirassiers take 1 hit and deal none. They get a + to saving throws so CANNOT take a casualty. Their armour automatically saves them so effectively that hit never happened. Why are they doing a cohesion test?
Case 1: This is not that different form artillery firing but not actually causing hits for CT tests.
Case 2: They are doing a cohesion test because the rules say they do.

Things are not significant objections. It is a philosophy change which may be significant.

Re: FoG:R Update - Better Armour PoA

Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2016 11:04 pm
by ravenflight
hazelbark wrote: Case 1: This is not that different form artillery firing but not actually causing hits for CT tests.
Oh, it's pretty significantly different IMHO.

By putting lesser armoured troops into the combat you INCREASE the survivability of the enemy. In this scenario, the player with the lesser armoured troops would be smarter to NOT attack, as by attacking you effectively increase the armour of your opponent.

And at what point does it become relevant? What if the horse was only in overlap?

Re: FoG:R Update - Better Armour PoA

Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2016 9:30 am
by nikgaukroger
Just for the moment could I ask that we concentrate on the re-rolls idea as I think that at present it appears to be the most attractive suggestion, providing (hopefully) the desired c. half PoA.

Re: FoG:R Update - Better Armour PoA

Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2016 2:55 pm
by kevinj
Maths time! I thought I'd work out the effect of this suggestion relative to the current position. In all the examples I've looked at 4 dice v 4 dice. Although I've compared Heavy Armour to Armour the calculations work for any better armour case.

So, first up looking at the case where there are no other POAs involved, here are the average number of hits (including rerolls where applicable) for a 4 dice each combat:

Image

In this instance the better armoured troops are the same but those with worse armour are better. This difference equates to a level in grading, e.g. Superior Armoured troops and Average Heavily armoured both score 2 hits.

Next up is the situation where the better armoured troops have another POA in the current system:

Image

In this instance both inflict less hits, the HA because they're only hitting on 4s and the others because their re-rolls are worse. The overall effect is dependent on grade, looking at the relative number of hits:
Superiors are better off, in the current system the Armoured troops inflict 49.5% as many hits as Superior Heavily Armoured. In the proposed system they inflict 56.7% as many.
However, Average troops are marginally worse off, with Armoured inflicting 49.5% as many hits as HA, currently but only 43.9% in the proposed system.
Poor troops really suffer. They inflict 40.5% currently but only 26.1% in the proposed system.

Finally, we have the case where the Lesser armoured troops have a +POA of their own:

Image

In this case, which is evens in the current system, the lesser armoured troops are better off. They're losing out on the re-rolls but the better armoured troops are now hitting on 5s.

For me, there are 2 major concerns with adopting this system:
1) It would not make sense to adopt it for mounted combat only. Since that is the area that has been identified as being currently an issue, do we want to introduce a system that then impacts the foot interactions which seem generally satisfactory?
2) Although this does provide a good solution if all else is equal (with better armour having exactly the same effect as a higher grade, which is generally regarded as half a POA), the effects where other POAs are included don't seem to be sensible. Poor and Average troops would be worse off than currently if there's another POA against them and combats that are currently even become potentially very swingy.

Re: FoG:R Update - Better Armour PoA

Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2016 9:48 pm
by ravenflight
Thanks Kevin, can you do me a favour? Can you do the same for my proposed change, being increases the wuality of the better armoured rather than decreases the quality of the lesser armoured?

On a different (similar) note, do we want to incorporate Nik's idea of only counting if steady? I had the thought of armour dropping one level if not steady.

Thoughts?

Re: FoG:R Update - Better Armour PoA

Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2016 11:24 pm
by kevinj
I'll give that a go tomorrow.

Re: FoG:R Update - Better Armour PoA

Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2016 9:49 am
by nikgaukroger
kevinj wrote:Maths time! I thought I'd work out the effect of this suggestion relative to the current position. In all the examples I've looked at 4 dice v 4 dice. Although I've compared Heavy Armour to Armour the calculations work for any better armour case.

Thanks for the work on this - very useful :)

I think that I'd be right if I said that Case 1 is, essentially, the most important of the 3 cases as it reflects the most likely in period and in region case of armour benefits - i.e. melee weapons are the same. Case 3 would cover things like Reiters against Gendarmes where the latter have better armour.

Re: FoG:R Update - Better Armour PoA

Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2016 2:40 pm
by kevinj
I've now done the calculations on Ravenflight's suggestion and added them. For reference:

Lighter - is the suggestion that the troops with lighter armour reroll at one grade lower (the original calculations)
Higher + is the suggestion that the troops with heavier armour reroll at one grade higher. Once again I've only done calculations for Superior, Average and Poor as these are most common. With this option, Elites with a general could actually reroll some hits!

Anyway, here's Case 1 showing both options:

Image

In this instance both sides end up inflicting 1/3 more hits than the Lighter - option.

Here's Case 2:

Image

In this instance the Superiors both inflict the same amount of extra hits. Average and Poor troops with lighter armour seem to benefit more from this, which isn't a bad thing if we're looking for them to be more viable.

Here's Case 3:

Image

Again, there appear to be slightly greater benefits for Average/Poor troops here. The general impression that I'm getting though is that in most cases both sides would inflict more hits with this method so combat would on the whole be more bloody.

Re: FoG:R Update - Better Armour PoA

Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2016 8:02 pm
by ravenflight
Thanks Kevin

Re: FoG:R Update - Better Armour PoA

Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2016 7:51 am
by nikgaukroger
In discussions "in another place" we have concluded that we are unhappy about a solution such as the rerolls idea above that would need to be applied to infantry as well as cavalry (to avoid over complication) as it seems that the view is that infantry armour is just fine and that if any changes are needed it should only be mounted.

Therefore, with the aim of looking for something simple, we would ask that you think about the idea that mounted troops would need 2 steps of armour better to claim the Better Armour PoA as a simple mechanism.

Re: FoG:R Update - Better Armour PoA

Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2016 7:56 am
by Three
The easiest answer is to leave things as they are. I really don't see this as an issue.

Re: FoG:R Update - Better Armour PoA

Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2016 9:24 am
by ravenflight
nikgaukroger wrote:In discussions "in another place" we have concluded that we are unhappy about a solution such as the rerolls idea above that would need to be applied to infantry as well as cavalry (to avoid over complication) as it seems that the view is that infantry armour is just fine and that if any changes are needed it should only be mounted.

Therefore, with the aim of looking for something simple, we would ask that you think about the idea that mounted troops would need 2 steps of armour better to claim the Better Armour PoA as a simple mechanism.
If you were to do that, I would suggest that we also do the 'steady' thing as well, as otherwise there seems little point in some of the armour combinations. Two steps of armour really going to screw Gendarmes, who really need all the help they can get.