Seconded. So good!
What Juan said. I don’t play a lot of Napoleonics games. NT is very difficult to learn from the rulebook; once you’ve figured it out it’s not that hard to teach. But you do have to play it (at least) a couple times to get your head around how it works. It doesn’t have to be a super long game, though (should take less than 3 hours, certainly once you and your opponent know the rules).
It is all about developing your position, setting up attacks that can break through; or outflanking. You can use your cavalry for harassing the enemy’s flanks, or for brutal frontal charges. You have to appear weak where you are strong, and vice-versa. You learn the value of having fresh troops in reserve!
The situation is interesting. At the beginning the Allies are on the attack, and have to take objectives to win. But at some point Napoleon can bring in his reserves, and then he is on the attack, and has to take objectives to win. But of course you can also win by running down your opponent’s morale. You usually have to lose some battles before you can engineer a breakthrough of your opponent’s line (at least in my experience, but maybe I’m just terrible at it). But you can’t spend too much of your morale on those preparatory assaults or your opponent will just be able to win enough easy battles to wear you down.
Well, ok, but the one element that isn’t determined, from your point of view, is what troops the enemy has in a given position. You generally don’t know if an attack is going to succeed or fail when you make it (especially in the early game), so although there’s no random element, it doesn’t seem that deterministic when you’re actually playing it.
Yeah and no. Because you do realize that the outcome is going to be pre-determined. I played it with a friend of mine who was/is a big Napoleonics nut - we had Kevin Zucker’s 1809 laid out on his apartment floor in college, played Napoleon at Leipzig to completion, etc. But when we played Napoleon’s Triumph and went back and de-briefed after the games were over, we realized how much of the game was predetermined by the way we had set up, and immediately lost interest in playing further. It just seemed pointless. We discussed playing just the setup and then discussing who would have won based on that, but ultimately shelved it. I think that game series was my biggest disappointment from concept to creation that I’ve ever experienced in 40+ years of wargaming. Just my take, but it’s a pretty strong one.
I’m gonna have to go ahead and assume we want different things out of wargames. I even like Combat Commander! I am not ashamed!
I really wish Schilling would have sunk his money into MMP instead of that mmo game. Hardly any of the ASL modules are available for order at the moment. Basically you can get the new version of Yanks, and whatever that Korean War module is.
It will be awesome if the day ever comes where we can have affordable, quality, print-on-demand capabilities for boardgame production. Hell, I’d skip on the affordable if you just have the ability to order it at any point.
Tempted to get the A Victory Awaits game though.
Hey, at least you didn’t say Advanced Tobruk System. :)
Edit: :( even 2 of the 3 asl starter kits are out of stock. I wonder if they could make a deal like whatever the consim people are doing with gmt.
Well, Combat Commander is like 12 years old now. I guess it is still a baby next to ASL though.
That was a quite interesting read, @Brooski. That totally sounds like Kriegspiel with fancy boards and pieces. Checking the pics on boardgame geek, I see there’s just one board… which makes the whole exercise a bit pointless to me.
Also read through this AAR
http://www.simmonsgames.com/strategy/AusterlitzGame.html
that was a very peculiar final situation.
Strongly agree with this. I have never been in combat (thankfully), but every account I have read indicates a high degree of uncertainty , particularly at the operational and lower scales, because you can never tell how people are going to react to other people trying to kill them. I have never read any account where the combatants were absolutely certain of the outcome. Sure they might believe they will win, and they will, but for example did any US commander expect the kind of resistance and casualties they encountered at Tarawa? They won, for sure, but the full outcome was unexpected. For me one of the great strengths of wargames is the random element of combat results. Take that away, or make it very predictable and you have lost something.
Currently Matrix/Slitherine have a sale for the Easter holiday. 30% off with HAPPYEASTER coupon.
Trying to figure out if TOAW 4 is a worthwhile change from version 3. @Brooski what was your thought on Desert War?
Just dropping by to say Desert War is one of the few games to not be coverd by that sale.
Glorious mess. But a mess.
Oooh, Rule the Waves 2 1900-1950. There will be a discount on RTW 2 for anyone that bought the original through NWS.
Another game that looks to be interesting:
I’ve been reading Robert Massie’s Castles of Steel, which pairs superbly with Steam and Iron, on that note.
Steam and Iron, being a relatively quick-playing game, is great for playing out counterfactuals. Admiral Cradock caught a lot of flak from Churchill after losing (and, for that matter, dying) at Coronel for leaving the outdated battleship Canopus behind. Reading the account of the battle, comparing the fleets, and considering Canopus’ armament, I didn’t think it would make that much of a difference, so I fired up the scenario editor, moved Canopus up to Cradock’s fleet, and gave it a go.
Turns out it doesn’t make a very big difference. I played through the battle three times; the addition of Canopus (and even the armored cruiser Defence, which was never actually dispatched to the South Atlantic) means that Cradock can do as well as not losing, but I don’t think he can actually win.
While I was in a doomed-squadrons kind of mood, I played the Falkland Islands scenario. There, since I knew that von Spee lost it all anyway, I decided to gamble, charging into Port Stanley with a line of cruisers and light cruisers. Torpedoes sank one British battlecruiser and damaged another, while I lost Scharnhorst and the light cruiser Nürnberg and managed to escape with three heavily-damaged ships. Gneisenau could only make 14 knots at the end, and the other two light cruisers Dresden and Leipzig were proper wrecked. I still count it as a win.
I’m definitely looking forward to RTW2, I have to say.
Speak of the devil, I saw a mint copy of Phalanx’s Age of Napoleon posted yesterday for sale for less than $30 in my local boardgame trading group. No one is wanting it and I’m glad I asked you guys by chance!
Also, relevant shop:
Gah, been meaning to buy the original RTW. Perfect time to do so, it seems.
I do disagree, not with your statement, which is obviously true, but with deterministic combat in a block wargame with no knowledge of enemy forces involving no uncertainty of outcome.
The main difference is that rolling a die generates variable outcomes every single time, while deterministic combat against an unknown force generates variable results the first time, since the second time (if nothing has changed in between) there would be no unknowns.
In terms of realism on simulating combat, I think something like what Napoleon’s Triumph does is probably closer to a more thruthful representation of the battlefield. Once the soft qualities (training, morale, resilience) of the troops involved have been tested, expecting similar outcomes in similar circumstances makes sense.
I’ve always seen chance in CRTs as a way to aknowledge fine grain stuff that is beyond the scope of simulation and/or as a way to create fog of war (although a weird fog of war that always resets). I would defend that in a system like Napoleon’s Triumph that uncertainty is still there even if there’s no chance. Now, the fine grain deviation that random combat creates is certainly lost, there’s certainly an element of chance that could make an impossible attack suddenly possible that is not there in NT and probably would make sense at that scale. I offer a good looking, and probably not too unbalanced, fix: take an old deck of cards (french deck, if possible) and have players draw one card per combat at the very end of the combat resolution (when no more choices are possible and everybody is commited). If any player draws a higher card, add one to their combat strength. A shift of one point of strenght is probably the highest you should go in that system anyways. As added chrome, if attacking with guards (special 3 point infantry) draw 2 cards and select the higher one (not too umbalanced because the guards will likely be reduced and stop being guards anyway).
Also, @Brooski, I don’t know how many games you guys played, but even with the same setup (if unknown to the players that it is the exact same setup on both sides, that is, keeping the FoW) you wont have the same result in NT (I don’t know about Marengo). There’s a limit on the number of orders you can give per turn, so the determinism of the combat does not resolve theater wide, but only in those chokepoints the players choose to resolve combat in by trying to advance. Thus, given the same setup but different player choices (and since you don’t know the enemy disposition, there’s no optimal choice to start with) you will get wildly different outcomes.
So guys, both Rule the Waves and Steam and Iron look great, so I’ve a question because I only wanna buy one. Which one offers more fun, interesting higher-level decisions? I’m guessing Rule the Waves, but I wanna be sure before I shell out moneys for it. Thanks!
Rule the Waves is the very highest level of decision-making: you design your fleet and decide where to station it around the world, and those decisions play directly into your success in the inevitable wars. Turns are one month long.
Steam and Iron Complete has campaigns, but they’re smaller-scale. You’re a theater commander in WW1, and you get (approximately) the forces the real-world commander got. Turns are one week, and you have more direct control over when your forces sortie and what they do. I did an AAR of the Steam and Iron Baltic Sea campaign at Bay12, to give you a sense for what that’s like. Alas, I have not yet done a Rule the Waves jobber, so I can’t give you a direct comparison, but it sounds like you do indeed want Rule the Waves.