Fading Smolensk

by on March 21, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Back on Feburary 15th, Mark came over for some FtF gaming.

This turned out to be a bad idea as we both came down sick that day. I woke up wondering if I had more than my usual morning sore throat, and progressively figured out that yes, I had come down with something (and Mark mentioned I was looking pretty bad by the time lunch was over). Mark was feeling a headache and some other symptoms that only got worse as the day went on.

So it was a good thing that we were trying a relatively short game; namely the Smolensk scenario from GMT’s Fading Glory. This has been on Mark’s ‘to try’ list for a little bit, and presumably won’t be the last time we see it.

It’s a collection of four scenarios from Victory Point Game’s Napoleonic 20 series, which is meant to do Napoleonic battles with about 20 counters per side in a very quick playing format. So, its a simple system with no stacking other than leaders, and five turns per day (including the night turn). I had the French, which start with about two units on the board, and while a fair number of other units come on during the first day, just about as many Russian units arrive too.

But, the French are arriving much closer to Smolensk than the Russians, and as the day wore on, I was able to push him out of the near side. One of the neat bits is that both sides are rated for current morale, and you can spend morale to do certain things. There’s also cards for random events during the battle (a different, small, deck per scenario), and an early one cost the Russians some morale (after starting lower), so I could ‘push’ more effectively than Mark.

The scenario ended… I think around the end of the third day? Russian morale collapsed, and forced a general retreat. I had taken one infantry, and most of my cavalry to construct a foot bridge (via special rule), and crossed to the east, threatening Lubina, and effectively forking the Russians. Meanwhile, I got across at Smolensk, and got pushed back again (my best non-Guards unit breaking, and not coming back), before crossing a second time, and knocking around a few Russian units, teetering between keeping the Russians from having a good line to being overextended.

Its a clean system, and the GMT presentation is very nice. We would have done more, but Mark headed back early as he was getting progressively worse, and we both spent the next week to two weeks sick and recovering. -.-;

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Crucible of War

by on March 17, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

The French and Indian War gets enough attention that I wasn’t sure I was in need of a book just on that part of the Seven Years War.

Boy, was I wrong.

Narratively, the focus is around events over several hundreds of miles of indifferently-settled tracts of North America, and the personalities surrounding that. Just as a history of the main campaigns of the French and Indian War, this book has a lot to recommend it. Anderson also goes deep into the forces that shaped all of this. For example, he spends a fair amount of time looking at the differences between British regulars, and provincial (largely New England) soldiers. Commanding officers generally distrusted the provincials, finding them to be horribly insubordinate. Americans tended towards a world view of contracts, and saw military service as such (including a term of service, after which the contract was void), instead of pure subordination to authority. Moreover, the poor, underemployed, class that British soldiers generally came from did not really exist in the North America; there wasn’t enough population to have spare workforce lying around.

In addition, there is a very welcome focus on Indian relations. One of the overall focuses is how the Iroquois Confederacy managed to undermine its own position (largely while trying to strengthen it), and the shift of circumstances broke their ability to hold the Ohio watershed free of Europeans. There’s some very good looks at the internal politics of the major colonial states, and just how dysfunctional they could be (to the point that I’m wondering where to find good books on Colonial Pennsylvania and Virginia).

And, it’s largely aimed at showing how all the effort put into winning a war in North America caused the dissolution of the empire that existed before the war. The war tested the United Kingdom’s abilities to the utmost, and brought a lot of attention to a part of the world that had been somewhat allowed to drift along. The pressures of the war got the various colonies working together for the first time, and also came with a greater realization of how much there was to administer. The book continues on directly with Pontiac’s War, and the economic downturn that came after the peace. It effectively finishes up with the Declaratory Act, and shows how the Sugar Act was a finely-crafted bill meant to stimulate the New England economy at the same time it raised revenue.

There’s a lot of things going on in this book, and they’re all handled well, and at reasonable length. I don’t know that he entirely succeeds in his prime goal of showing just how the act of gaining a large chunk of North America from France led Great Britain to lose that part it had started with, but the through lines are there, and it is all well handled.

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93 Tavronitis Bridge

by on March 14, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: ASL

When I asked Tracey what he might like to do next, he mentioned an upcoming date at Pegasus Bridge, and asked for something with gliders. My thoughts immediately went to the first few scenarios of Annual ’89, which were reprinted in For King and Country. They’ve long been on my general ‘to play’ list, so arranging for the first one was no problem, and Tracey took the assaulting Germans.

The eponymous bridge stretches across the board 8 river, which here is a dry Level -1 valley. The British (actually New Zealanders) sets up within three hex rows of the bridge, but the Germans win after 5.5 turns if there is no Good Order British Infantry (not MMC…) within two hexrows of the bridge. They get five elite squads, with two LMGs and three foxholes to defend the bridge, and given the record (even of the revised scenario), we used the German balance that says I can only set up one MMC in the valley. So, I concentrated my defense around the one large building (R9), with a squad+LMG up on the O8 promontory, and the other LMG squad down in R7, while another two were in/near the the building. The last squad was Deployed and guarded the other end of the bridge. I was a little nervous leaving them out there with no support, but hoped they could tie up more than a squad for long enough to be critical in this short scenario.

The Germans get ten elite squads, with 3xLMG and 2xlight mortars, which all come in by glider on turn one. The initial wind is coming from the northwest (the board ID # corner), so the gliders have the entire central stretch of the riverbed to land in (assuming no initial wind changes). Tracey landed in two groups, with six gliders landing to the north, and the remaining four to the south, hard up against the cliffs that surround the hexrow Y road.

The Brits have nothing on board that can provide Light AA fire against the gliders as they come down, but an SSR gives them two 4FP AA attacks from other nearby AA, which did nothing for me. No one in the northern group had any obstacles on their approach, and came down fine. The southern group had potential problems: W4 had an obstacle in the form of the level 0 river bank five hexes before the landing hex, and landed safely. Z4 only had three streambed hexes behind it, and there was a building on the stream bank, to add another level of obstacle, but only undershot the ILH by two, landing safely in the middle of the streambed (probably a heck of a downdraft). AA5 had a similar building problem, but four clear hexes between that and the ILH, and also landed two hexes short. BB5 was like W4: four clear hexes, and the Level 0 stream bank in the fifth. It rolled double-6 to land two hexes long, in Z6, which… really should mean the glider smashes into the base of the three-level cliff (it’d just be coming in way too low), but instead wrecked from landing in the blind hex of building AA6.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this was about the worst possible thing that could have happened, since the wrecked glider was carrying a squad and his 9-2.

However, I didn’t have any great shots at the downed gliders, and everyone else was able to disembark without trouble.


Situation, German Turn 1, landing in gliders. North is to the left, orchards are olive groves.
↓ Read the rest of this entry…

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The Celts: Origins, Myths and Inventions

by on March 10, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

This has been on my to-read/to-get list long enough that I don’t remember just how it got there. Certainly in the period when I was looking a lot more at early Europe.

It isn’t quite the book I’d been expecting, which would more be a history of the ancient Celts. This is instead a treatise trying to get at what was (is?) an ancient Celt. To that end, he spends a fair amount of time going over what the ancient authors said about Celts, and the history of the idea of the idea of the Celts from the Seventeenth Century on.

For someone studying the Iron Age in Western and Central Europe, this book may well be a must-get simply because he has a very good catalog of Ancient and Classical authors in historical order, to show what Greeks and Romans thought/knew about the Celts and how that changed over time. He also has a good summary of the history of Modern thought on the Ancient Celts.

That last doesn’t quite say ‘and here’s where it all went wrong’, but that is some of the intent. Collis dates to the wave of scholarship that discounted the ‘fall’ of Late Antiquity, and those sentiments do lead him to have some very pertinent questions about pre-Roman Europe, and the traditional maps showing La Tene ‘Celts’ invading and conquering large portions of Europe. He doesn’t, naturally, have any hard and fast answers on what the proper reconstruction should be, but he does also provide a summary of the types of finds in various regions, and has some things to say about chronology. It was a bit dense for me, with my minimal background, but its yet another good catalog of data in one place in this book.

And really, despite his discussions of certain topics throughout the book, that’s what the primary purpose is: reference. Ancient authors on the Celts, modern authors on the Celts, archaeological finds of the… possibly not Celt, but identified with them La Tene and Halstatt cultures, are all nicely cataloged in here, and that’s why someone studying the subject should have this book. It will save a lot of hunting.

And La Tene and Halstatt are the core of the trouble. Archaeologists see the same types of goods in two places and start assuming they must share the same ‘culture’ (and the drift in the use of that word in archaeology is where things start to go wrong), despite differences in other goods, and differences in the evolution of patterns (types of burials, etc). The pre-WWII habit of equating culture -> people -> ethnicity was roundly dropped in the 40s to 50s in ancient Germanic studies, and Collis sees a need to do the same thing for the contemporary Celtic studies.

So, it’s a well-constructed book, and important in many ways, but it was hitting a little above my specialty level. Other people with casual interest will find it rough going, but anyone diving at all deeper should have it just for the compendiums even if they disagree with the arguments.

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National Trade

by on March 6, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the second in a series of reviews looking at the evolution of Europa Universalis IV. See the previous review here:
Europa Universalis IV: A Fantastic Point of View

After taking a look at the New World in Conquest of Paradise, the EU IV team next decided to enhance the new trade system, and provide more gameplay options as opposed to the pure… ‘set up’ focus of CoP. The second expansion, Wealth of Nations, was announced in January 2014, and was released on May 29th, along with patch 1.6, which featured a new launcher to manage DLC and mods the same way on all systems.

Religion

Religion got two upgrades: Chrisianity and Islam each got a third at-start branch (Coptic and Ibadi, each with one nation of that religion) as part of the free patch, along with Sikhism appearing around 1500 in India.

Reformed (Lutheran) Christianity and Hiduism also got enhancements with the expansion. PDS felt that many players in Western Europe were sticking with Catholicism or Protestantism, and just clearing out the second wave of Reformed Christianity, so they got an extra mechanic on top of the regular religion bonus (and as the Dutch were the primary Reformed power, as well as a trading powerhouse, they figured it was appropriate for the expansion). Reformed countries produce fervor, and can then spend their fervor points on trade, war, or stability bonuses. All of this is on a per-month basis, and generally activating a bonus will drain points faster than they come in, but its easy to turn them on and off, and once a Reformed state gets going with high prestige, they can maintain one while occasionally turning on a second bonus.

With the expansion, Hindu states have no native religion bonus at all. Instead, each ruler, after he takes the throne, can pick one of six gods to follow, each of which has its own religion bonus. This makes a Hindu state nicely flexible, as it can concentrate on what looks to be needed for the next couple decades depending on which god is chosen.

Rivals

A new diplomatic concept in base EU IV is that of rivals. Each country can declare up to three other countries as rivals, which will give you permanently poor relations, but you get more prestige for fighting rivals, demanding their territory is easier, and other rivals of the country will be friendlier to you.

Rivals must be approximately the same power as each other, so decisively beating a country can remove it as a valid rival, and doing so several times certainly will. They also have to be relatively close, though as the power of the nation goes up, so does the distance of allowable rivals.

Patch 1.6 added power projection to this to give countries a better reason for declaring rivals. Power projection ranges from 0-100, and increases military morale and trade power in proportion; at 25 it also enables an extra military leader without military power upkeep, and at 50 or above grants one extra monarch power point each month in all three categories. Just having all three rivals will tend to make power projection float at about 30, while declaring wars, taking provinces, and other means of proving that your country is superior will temporarily push it up, while the opposite will push it down.

The concept of rivals was a good step forward for the diplomatic system (especially as the AI was made aware of ‘historical’ rivalries, and tends to emulate them, bending the game in traditional power-politics directions without hard-scripting), and the addition of power projection nicely turned it into something that can’t just be ignored. The bonuses aren’t game-breaking, but they are a nice combination of handy boosts.

National Policy

Idea groups also got a boost in this patch. Every pair of idea groups not in the same category has an associated policy now. For instance, offensive ideas and expansion ideas unlock the ‘pioneer policy’, which causes you to automatically discover every province adjacent to one of your colonies, allowing for much faster or easier discovery of the interior of a continent.

The first catch is that this only becomes available after every idea in both idea groups are purchased. The second, and bigger, catch is that enacting a policy costs one monarch point per month from a particular category. Most of them provide a general, reasonably powerful modifier, unlike the more situational bonus mentioned above.

This makes them very much a late-game enhancement. It will take a while just to have a policy available, and of course taking the bonus will slow down development in other ways. But once idea slots are filling up, one of the bigger needs for monarch points is winding down, and policies become more attractive.

Trade Practices

As a ‘trade’ expansion, its bigger features do center around that. The biggest feature is trade companies. As a non-Asian (and non-African) country, you can start one of these in any coastal trade node region in Asia (or Africa) that you have provinces in. Generally, there are penalties to such provinces so that you won’t get much tax or manpower from them, and forming a trade company guarantees this, but increases trade power (which is the main thing you do get). If you can dominate trade in the node, you even get an extra merchant. At the same time, trade companies increase goods production for all the native-controlled provinces, making the node more valuable overall.

Note that despite the somewhat independent status of the operations of such companies in history, these are not independent states like the colonial nations. These act purely as as a modifier on the node and your territories in it, leaving all wars and trade patrols under your control.

The other interesting option opened up in the expansion is to use privateers. Slightly oddly (in that it makes sense from a game perspective), this doesn’t involve hiring civilian ships, but is another separate mission for light ships. It’s the opposite of the protect trade mission, in fact. Instead of giving you trade power, privateers give trade power to a ‘pirate’ faction (at an increased power rate), effectively taking market share, and money, away from other countries. This makes it something to do when you can’t get any traction of your own, or maybe when someone is making a killing in a node that you can’t get anything out of (possibly by being downstream of you).

Conclusion

As a patch, 1.6 included a number of definite improvements to the UI, and other features that made it a nice incremental step forward.

As an expansion, Wealth of Nations is much more limited. The little additions to two religions were nice, but it feels odd that just two should get this treatment. This would change in the future, and now it feels odd that you have to get a number of unrelated expansions to get enhanced mechanics for everything. Given that they didn’t know where it would end up, it’s understandable, but still annoying.

Trade companies are the biggest expansion feature, and an interesting counterpart to the colonial nations in the free part of 1.5. I don’t think I can recommend this expansion to any but a completist, but the features are nice when playing in Europe with an interest in going East. A final nice note, is that the AI does a good job using all of these features.

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