Red Rationalist
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Alright, I am genuinely sorry for that. I should have made the modification clear.
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Army of Liberty: a Fantasy Revolutionary Warfare Quest
- Thread starter Photomajig
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You left out who's going to pin down the Harquebusiers.
Pretty sure instead of taking the time to shield the initial approach with the western woods, extend the line and get that gap opening, Clotaire VII went and just threw everyone straight into the massed musketry and artillery.
Also, once the king went down, there was no effective command, so you had your infighting aristocrats running wild.
Red Rationalist
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Considering we just want a road block there, I'm thinking the 1st Cuirassiers. With cavalry units suffering a -40 to attacks in the relevant tiles, they would take little in the way of damage while freeing the way for a proper charge. Short version, I sort of want to play a game of musical chairs with the cavalry, as this is the quickest way out of melee for them.
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Huh. I think we actually have enough movement on the 4th to wrap around and charge through that Woods tile, right? Could flank the Nymphs/the 52nd and completely surround the 88th so they surrender instead of routing - though the 4th would probably get demolished by a swarm of attacks immediately afterwards. Interesting thought. Weird thought.
Seeing it in action I think cav might have a little too much freedom of maneuver, yeah. Might need like, a mini-version of engagement for bypassing units in this way. Moving between two tiles enemy-adjacent costs an extra MP or something like that? Cav should be good for frontal shock charges and great at flanking when they can find an opportunity to flank, but being able to circumnavigate the front of the army feels like a little too much flexibility.
Seeing it in action I think cav might have a little too much freedom of maneuver, yeah. Might need like, a mini-version of engagement for bypassing units in this way. Moving between two tiles enemy-adjacent costs an extra MP or something like that? Cav should be good for frontal shock charges and great at flanking when they can find an opportunity to flank, but being able to circumnavigate the front of the army feels like a little too much flexibility.
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Probably facerolled his cuirassiers directly into the enemy center instead of shifting right and flanking their artillery. Even if they punched through the line they'd end up getting encircled in the town and there go all his silver bullets.
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...forgive me for suggesting such a horrible thing, but it almost seems like you should be able to do "attacks of opportunity" against a cavalry so bold as to literally ride up along your line.
Red Rationalist
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Well, this is also the exact situation where cavalry thrives. A loose, disorganized line without screening forces or an organized response where we can use all their moves for charge because we don't fear a strong response. I saw the problem more in a high degree of certainty about being able to exploit the gap and the aggressive early cavalry play (whole other story if they played defensive) and a very small map. If your screen dies, you will have a terrible time.
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Natruska is talking about moving the 4th northwest while the 52nd is still kind of Engaged with the 1st, and at that point they're on the flank and into the enemy rear. It's very different than what you're describing.
Didn't attend the rule discussion but it looks like movement and melee attacks are, frankly, too good, in addition to no longer having the mind games uncertainty of who might be on ready fire or braced.
Infantry are twice as fast, cavalry can cross most of the map in a single turn, and a unit that starts within two hexes of the enemy can drop them directly into a woodchipper.
I think if they attack into flanks, a cavalry unit like those cuirassiers could ping-pong charges into three enemies in a single turn? Or even charge one regiment twice.
In other words, this version of the rules is Springtime for Arne.
Infantry are twice as fast, cavalry can cross most of the map in a single turn, and a unit that starts within two hexes of the enemy can drop them directly into a woodchipper.
I think if they attack into flanks, a cavalry unit like those cuirassiers could ping-pong charges into three enemies in a single turn? Or even charge one regiment twice.
In other words, this version of the rules is Springtime for Arne.
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Side note, we have just enough movement for the 2nd Cuir. to move W/NW, then end up charging the 2nd Nymph Guard via the northwestern end of the woods, and flanking them.
Red Rationalist
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I mean, I would generally caution against over-extrapolating from the map. This one is really, really small (just 8 movement from deployment zone to deployment zone) mostly open terrain and the enemy failed to properly block a choke point on turn 2. I don't think the cavalry flanking here is all that representive of general army interactions.
Red Rationalist
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Alright, basic outline on how to proceed: We can actually concentrate a shocking number of charges on the 2nd nymphs and the unit would actually take quite a bit of damage due to the the butcher trait. Hmm, is shock worth it with them? Running some rough numbers for cavalry charge in the flank, 7th Elves plus 3rd Hobs charging. Hmmm, average damage from that is 23.04, meaning 1 regular check and 1 check at tripple disadvantage in addition to that. Counting the morale checks before that: 1 disadv. from being charged in the flank, 1 from being meleed in the flank, 2 from being charged.
Adding this up we have: 4 regular checks, 1 at disadvantage and 1 from being meleed. To be blunt, the 2nd is a guarantueed rout just from allocating leftover units on the eastern flank, I am not even going to calculate this. And with that rout, the enemy is basically dead from momentum.
Adding this up we have: 4 regular checks, 1 at disadvantage and 1 from being meleed. To be blunt, the 2nd is a guarantueed rout just from allocating leftover units on the eastern flank, I am not even going to calculate this. And with that rout, the enemy is basically dead from momentum.
Even with the small map, I do tentatively agree that melee seems a bit strong right now. Shooting should be a viable option, right now it feels like you would only shoot when you cannot charge efficiently. I also do miss the Ready Fire/Brace mind games.
However I think the doubled infantry speed is generally good, makes things less tedious. But cavalry maneuverability could maybe be tuned down.
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Well not really, it still applies here because the 4th would be making at least two tile-moves (possibly 3 but not necessary) totally adjacent to the 52nd. And it's not like the tiles being 100m actually means that there's 100 meters of space between those units. The equivalent Napoleonic units would have a footprint of about 100 meters. Riding across the front like that probably means cavalrymen passing within a stone's throw of infantrymen.
I'm not sure those factors really help all that much. The total size of the map doesn't seem that important. The actual area that the bulk of the fighting takes place in is always going to be small, and cavalry will always be able to wrap around the flanks unless ready-charged because it only takes ~an action of movement. The terrain of this map is pretty open but I don't think it should be mandatory to anchor both flanks on forests/swamps to avoid cavalry hitting your rear. The real generals didn't have to do that every time.
Like, I think I'm...largely fine with our initial flanking maneuver destroying their artillery? Yeah, we positioned ourselves well to flank, they left a gap and didn't have any cavalry to screen, and things worked out great for us. It's the idea of essentially infinite cavalry flanking now that the two armies are joined- that's the thing that worries me. Such things weren't really done in the real world because maneuvering in proximity to the enemy is hard. A big ball of cavalry is unwieldy, hard to turn, and will be smashed to pieces if hit in its flank while trying to do something clever.
Plus, like, you don't gain much from attacking the enemy's rear if you just run into their reserves or they form a square or something, but that sort of thing can't really be modeled.
Red Rationalist
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Hmm, might be an issue with too much information more than with the cavalry itself. But I am open to experimenting with the idea of hiding enemy ready orders to force us to play more conservatively.
Ehh, the map size matters insofar as we were able to go from skirmish to charge into the enemy line with no intermediate turn for regrouping. And the enemy made the pretty bad mistake of leaving a gap, which would be fatal.
Personally, I think it's an issue with units being able to swing around to much. Maybe we should put a movement cost on changing your facing more than a set amount? Right now you can rotate every unit a tad to easy, which also enables cavalry to pull off very strong exploitation attacks.
I agree. Us pulling off the flanking maneuver is not a problem: we shifted our entire force East to do it and exploited the fact that the enemy mishandled their cavalry. However, it's just the fact that cavalry can move freely in tight spaces around enemy infantry or charge a unit and immediately disengage safely that feels odd to me. Opportunity attacks or extra movement cost from moving next to enemies would go a long way to help this.
Red Rationalist
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Basic outline of a plan I'm going to put up:
-[] 1st Elv. Cuir.: 2*Charge [E,NE,E], Brace
-[] 2nd Elv Cuir.: 2* Charge 2nd Nymph Guard [3*NW,NE, SE], Melee
-[] 4th Elv Cuir: 1* Charge [2 NW, W, SE], 2*Melee 52nd
-[] 7th Elv Musk.: Go AFTER 2nd Elv Cuir, 3* Charge [2*NE, 2E] 2nd Nymph Guard
-[] 1st Hob Musk: 3*REST
-[] 2nd Hob Musk.: 2*Charge [3*NW] 1st Nymph Guard, Melee 88th Elv.
-[] 3rd Hob Musk.: Go AFTER 2nd Elv Cuir, 3* Charge [3*NE, E, NE] 2nd Nymph Guard
-[] 4th Hob Musk.: 2* Charge [2 NW,NE] 1st Nymph Guard, Melee 1st Nymph Guard
-[] Wolf Guard: 1*Charge [W, 2*NW], 2* Melee 88th Elv
-[] Roy Sieg. Art.: Fire at 1st Nymph Guard, Brace
-[] HQ: Resupply Roy. Sie. Art.
Almost guarantueed to rout: 2nd Nymph Guard, 88th Elv, 52nd Hum. This should be nearly certain to guarantuee our victory, with only a couple of stragglers staying on the map (Halflings are around somewhere, 17th Elv. Harq. and potentially the nymphs). Honestly, this should be good enough to force a general surrender, with the token resistance being mopped up next turn.
-[] 1st Elv. Cuir.: 2*Charge [E,NE,E], Brace
-[] 2nd Elv Cuir.: 2* Charge 2nd Nymph Guard [3*NW,NE, SE], Melee
-[] 4th Elv Cuir: 1* Charge [2 NW, W, SE], 2*Melee 52nd
-[] 7th Elv Musk.: Go AFTER 2nd Elv Cuir, 3* Charge [2*NE, 2E] 2nd Nymph Guard
-[] 1st Hob Musk: 3*REST
-[] 2nd Hob Musk.: 2*Charge [3*NW] 1st Nymph Guard, Melee 88th Elv.
-[] 3rd Hob Musk.: Go AFTER 2nd Elv Cuir, 3* Charge [3*NE, E, NE] 2nd Nymph Guard
-[] 4th Hob Musk.: 2* Charge [2 NW,NE] 1st Nymph Guard, Melee 1st Nymph Guard
-[] Wolf Guard: 1*Charge [W, 2*NW], 2* Melee 88th Elv
-[] Roy Sieg. Art.: Fire at 1st Nymph Guard, Brace
-[] HQ: Resupply Roy. Sie. Art.
Almost guarantueed to rout: 2nd Nymph Guard, 88th Elv, 52nd Hum. This should be nearly certain to guarantuee our victory, with only a couple of stragglers staying on the map (Halflings are around somewhere, 17th Elv. Harq. and potentially the nymphs). Honestly, this should be good enough to force a general surrender, with the token resistance being mopped up next turn.
Even Daurstein was 21 hexes on its longest axis. The map is small, but equally cuirassiers also lose half of their speed; they would be equally effective on a larger map once they got in range.
As shown by the Halflings here, even successfully intercepting a cavalry charge won't necessarily stop it from getting through, and if they do get caught in a melee they don't have to disengage, they can move away and charge again.
Leaving a gap is an error but considering that the harquebusier charge took a cuirassier regiment out of action I can't say that in particular was a mistake, simply that no other units could screen.
Even beyond the potentially ridiculous flanking hussar ping-pong multiattack... I get the feeling part of the reason for the move to turn based was to cut down on the mind games and will-they-won't-they planning, but considering how devastating melee combat is now I wonder if the scheming to try and block units with more than a dozen MP per turn from doing as they please would end up taking up just as much time.
Between the buffed movement, flank attacks, and the ability to make multiple charges and melee attacks per turn, it feels like battles will end up revolving around the cavalry. If they get around you in force it's all over, so major efforts have to go into making sure they can't. Cavalry were important, but this is a bit much.
It does make for much faster battles though.
Ready actions on the other hand are cumbersome enough that I'm not sure how it'd work. You can't move into position on your turn and then ready an interception. Hiding them wouldn't do anything; if a unit doesn't act, the question isn't if they're readied, it's what they're readied for.
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I do agree regarding the effectiveness of ranged. Increasing the killiness of firearms would help a bit (still inaccurate, but deadly when they hit), but I think other changes are needed to encourage firefights more too. I suppose the Fire cost could be dropped to 1 AP to be in line with melee, but I'm not sure about that.
This is definitely something I'll have to do something about in revisions after the battle. I think restricting Facing changes is a good idea. Limiting how much you can turn as part of your Move seems good to me. I'll also probably remove the ability to change Facing through Attacks (limiting it to Charges and Moves). Especially melee-engaged Units shouldn't be able to spin around like they're pod-racing.
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Oh, that's a neat idea. I like that. So if it was, for a (pretty severe) example, "cavalry spend one MP to change facing", that kind of wrap around and hit the rear maneuver would cost an additional 2-3 MP. Enough to burn an additional action for the slower/heavier cav at least. And disengaging would also cost ~2 MP more in general, meaning that cavalry can't really avoid retaliation for their charges.
I like that, yeah. That plus going up against armies that have more cavalry/reserves might be enough to make the rear charge maneuver a lot less practical (you're only getting 1 or 2 attacks and then being obliterated by the enemy response) without punishing frontal charges as much but, hmm. I am starting to think that cavalry might just be too fast and the move would be to chop down their base movement.
Like, yeah, we haven't even really seen cavalry's full potential yet. We're pulling these moves with 4-Move heavy cavalry, hussars have 7. In a sense that's just maintaining the previous ratio between inf move and cav move (3v7-9 vs 6v12-21) but I think we're seeing that it's really the total number of tiles you can cover that counts, not the ratio.
Red Rationalist
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Well, considering we got 3 cavalry units and they had one at that point with straight-up gap, I would absolutely call this a mistake. The exchange rate was seemingly equal, but it prevented them from screening; thus effectivly exchanging 2 cavalry unit at all their artillery for routing 2 cavalry. We wouldn't have been able to pull this off if the other harq. unit screened instead of staying in position for the wolf guard to charge them.
The Halflings got run over the way, they didn't actually intercept our charge. To be honest, that one was more the result of charging to the endpoint, which in turn was enabled by the lack of counterplay. I would say the army just mostly did a bad job iterating on their position.
Well, my basic point is the lack of an intermediate turn between the skirmish. Sure, cuirassiers are comparatively slower but the rapid movement was more the result of us fully charging into the rear. Which did pay off thanks to a lack of remaining screens (2 cavalry routed on the same turn), something that wouldn't be the case on a larger map.
I'm also a bit wary about reducing their movement speed to much in general, they still need to be fast in order for us to get use out of them. There are lesson to be learned here, but I also think we should think of this as the result of a fatal mistake rather than the typical battle. The other side also lacked infantry to fully cover and was just not able to respond, so the basic army balance was a bit screwy for this case in the first place.
That would make sense. Muskets did not take that much to reload, after all.
I would also consider allowing 1 AP Ready Actions, like before. Unless it causes a large amount of problems with turn resolution. The problem with the 3 AP Ready Action is that we can always know who has done a Ready Action, which exacerbates the cavalry problem since we can know when it is safe to zoom around with no risk for Ready Fire or Ready Charge.
The current system also does not allow for a careful advance (Move + Brace + Ready Fire) and creates some weird edge cases (artillery cannot Set Up + Ready Fire on their own turn but they can Ready Set Up and Ready Fire so that they only set up on the enemy turn).
So the enemy HQ should be 2 NW of the current position of the 88th Elv. I feel like raiding or capturing a HQ should have some affect on momentum, and having any units surrender should also have an affect.
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I agree that cavalry will be the axis all battles will revolve around like artillery was before the rules change, though I don't think this battle was a good demonstration of that.
The Ivernians had a perfect position to negate our cavalry and certainly could have at least forced us to lose the bonus objective if they hadn't played very badly.
I believe what this shows most of all is that just because a unit has bonus for something doesn't mean that they need to do that.
Overextending the line to get glade guards into the forests was a stupid idea. Having the glade guards cover the west just outside the village would have allowed them to take advantage of the choke point and the GG would still be elite regiments.
But I also didnt realise that either so i should look further myself too
Also thinking about it, how would ready action, melee, melee, brace turn out? Probably the charge lands after the first melee? But readying triple melee would still be more damage - an incredible punishment if the enemy charge doesn't rout, you retaliate with a total of 6 melee attacks.
Even better would be ready Charge, Melee, Melee tho, you deal the same damage as the attacker and the attacker may have charged from longer away and get less attacks as a result.
Tbh if this actually works charges are super dangerous, countercharge as the meta defense you are back again!
Tbh if you are ivernia what you do here is present a gap in your formations and have your humans behind it ready charging the cavalry going in.
If ivernia had everyone do ready charge, attack, attack would they be winning now? They don't lose damage, deal a lot more damage and their GG would be helping the fight
The Ivernians had a perfect position to negate our cavalry and certainly could have at least forced us to lose the bonus objective if they hadn't played very badly.
I believe what this shows most of all is that just because a unit has bonus for something doesn't mean that they need to do that.
Overextending the line to get glade guards into the forests was a stupid idea. Having the glade guards cover the west just outside the village would have allowed them to take advantage of the choke point and the GG would still be elite regiments.
But I also didnt realise that either so i should look further myself too
Also thinking about it, how would ready action, melee, melee, brace turn out? Probably the charge lands after the first melee? But readying triple melee would still be more damage - an incredible punishment if the enemy charge doesn't rout, you retaliate with a total of 6 melee attacks.
Even better would be ready Charge, Melee, Melee tho, you deal the same damage as the attacker and the attacker may have charged from longer away and get less attacks as a result.
Tbh if this actually works charges are super dangerous, countercharge as the meta defense you are back again!
Tbh if you are ivernia what you do here is present a gap in your formations and have your humans behind it ready charging the cavalry going in.
If ivernia had everyone do ready charge, attack, attack would they be winning now? They don't lose damage, deal a lot more damage and their GG would be helping the fight
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I am inclined to agree, yeah. I did want to simplify turn resolution and discourage excessive conditionalizing with the inefficient nature of full-AP Ready Actions, but I think in the end it might be better to return to partial-AP ones. I'll think about what kind of restrictions that will have for revisions.
Simultaneous resolution has its advantages, for sure, like with not knowing enemy Orders in advance at all unlike here.
In this case, the Ready Action would presumably trigger when the enemy becomes adjacent, but for sanity's sake I'd say the Morale Check from being Charged still takes place first. Then we apply both the attackers Charge and the triggered Attack simultaneously, which is also how a Braced Counter-Attack works.
If the attacker has more Attacks lined up, they also get resolved simultaneously with the defenders'. So you could totally see one or even both breaking from Casualty-triggered Morale Checks before they have time to execute all their planned attacks.
Ending with a Brace there may not work, by the way, as you can't Brace while engaged in melee and would thus need to be sure that the enemy is Routed or otherwise unengaged by your third action. Triple Attack as a Readied Action is pretty brutal, though. I suppose fear of that would be one reason to engage in more ranged softening before committing to the charge, so that you'll hopefully break them before they can use all of those Attacks.