Philip the Lionhearted

by on December 1, 2008 at 9:40 am
Posted In: Boardgaming

…And we ended up playing the Third Crusade scenario for Onward yesterday.

After playing the small 2nd Crusade scenario twice in a row, it was almost startling to see the system back in it’s full glory. It really pointed up just how limited of a scenario 2C is. As it turned out, we both wanted different sides, and I ended up with the Crusaders again. (My Dad wanted to be on the defensive, and I wanted Richard.)

At any rate, the scenario picks up in medias res, with Richard I just arriving off the coast of Cyprus, Philip II having just arrived near Acre while the combined armies of Guy and Leopold sit and besiege Acre with Saladin encamped nearby.

Historically, Richard took Cyprus (from the Byzantines), landed at Acre, took over the siege while ill, fought off a couple minor attacks, took the city, headed south, won a deservedly famous victory at Arsuf, but was unable to take Jerusalem when Philip and Leopold left him to return to Europe; nor was he able to secure a peace that could guarantee the long-term viability of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Not wanting to disturb a winning formula, the major event of the first turn was Richard taking Cyprus. However, instead of proceeding directly to Acre, Richard then landed in the Holy Land at friendly (but neutral) Tripoli.

Richard eventually decided that the siege of Acre was well in hand, and moved north up the coast, taking Jabala as he went before stopping to assault Lattakiea. Saladin moved north, worried at the possible loss of Antioch and Edessa. In two pitched battles Richard defeated Saladin, allowing him time to take the city, and Saladin retired to get more troops and perhaps face someone a little less energetic.

Saladin came south, gathering a mighty host from various garrisons and arriving reinforcements along the way, and hit the Frankish army lead by Philip at Acre, where the siege was slowly grinding away. Philip was forced to retreat with moderate losses, ending the threat to Acre.

Fate intervened at this point, with a revolt in Hamah, which forced Saladin back north in a hurry with a minimal force. Richard would have liked to test him again with nearly equal armies, but was held up at Antioch. Saladin was, however, able to fly back south and resume control of his army fairly quickly.

Faced with an army too big to safely fight, and with Richard far away and with too small a force to face Saladin, Philip gambled: He marched around Saladin and down to Jerusalem as the rainy season started, which was defended by a small force under Taki. Too small for Philip’s combined force, however. Philip established a siege.

Richard tried to race down the coast to help, or at least do something while Saladin was distracted, but was stymied by the rains and the need to support his armored knights (3 AK + 1 army size +2 weather—soon +3—really slowed him down, even with a ‘5’ campaign rating to continue with). Saladin staged out of Jericho and attacked the Crusader army.

Saladin, however, was not up to his usual mettle, and Philip’s army stood its ground. In a second battle, things went even worse, and Saladin was forced to retreat. He had, however, accomplished his primary goal: Philip’s army was now too small to besiege Jerusalem effectively. Philip grimly determined to continue to ravage the countryside and assault the walls, to force Saladin to continue bleeding his army against him, while the other scattered factions of the Crusaders collected themselves.

And then fate intervened again. Saladin launched a third attack against Philip and again failed to dislodge him from Jerusalem. However, Saladin himself took an arrow in the eye during the battle, and died shortly thereafter. With no effective Saracen leadership left nearby, Philip was able to carry the walls of Jerusalem during the winter of 1191. This ended the game, and no doubt left Philip as the primary figure of the history books.

It was a very good game, and exciting all the way through. I considered my move to Jerusalem to be very risky, but worthwhile if I could avoid any true military disasters, as Saladin’s larger army would bleed down faster than mine, and would allow time for Richard to collect a slightly more effective force as Saladin was pretty much forced to react to the game-ending threat. Continuing after the siege had failed was a gamble I was pretty sure would backfire, as if I took the city, Philip would either have to defend outside it anyway, or let Saladin assault when the walls were still only worth ‘1’, making it easy to loose the entire army. Saladin dieing was extremely unexpected, especially as both Saladin and Philip had rolled ’11’s for the leader loss check in the previous battle.

Anyway, the next game will probably be on Tuesday, and I’ve been pressuring my Dad to try out Pursuit of Glory—we’ll see though.

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Forward to Glory! (But Not Victory)

by on November 30, 2008 at 10:25 am
Posted In: Boardgaming

Well, the annual vacation with my parents has started out well. Weather on the way down alternated between sunny and warm, and overcast and threatening. But, no actual rain, and traffic was pretty good other than along I-210.

Took care of the main tech support duties yesterday morning, helping a neighbor with her machine, and getting the wireless network up and running again here. No big projects, thank goodness.

So, yesterday afternoon, me and my Dad played the 2nd Crusade scenario from Onward, Christian Soldiers. It’s the smallest, shortest and simplest of the scenarios, and therefore a good introduction to the two-player play of the game. Since my one other play of the game was as the Saracens, and I consider the Crusaders to have the tougher lot in the scenario, I took the Crusaders this time.

I deliberately opened with the same move as my opponent’s last time had been: Move the combined armies of Jerusalem, France and Germany up from Acre to Tiberias. It’s possibly slightly cautious, but it helps keep the Saracen player worried about Damascus without possibly triggering a shattering confrontation right away, insuring that the initiative in the south stays with the Crusaders, and hopefully keeping the Mosul Turks from spending all their effort in the north.

From there, things ran quite differently. In the north, things looked pretty good for a little bit. But I was unable to roll well, generating a horrific number of ‘1’s for formation in the opening battles. Meanwhile, the Saracens rolled well; the classic tale of a western army falling for a feigned retreat and getting smashed in a counter attack played itself out all too often in this game. Still, I kept the armies largely intact into the second turn, slowing things down a bit.

Down south only saw limited maneuvering at first. But Unur of Damascus eventually headed north to help with the situation up there. As a couple more battle reduced the armies of Antioch and Edessa to a point where they weren’t much of a threat to anyone, he ended up heading south again. By this time, Baldwin and Philip VII had moved to the gates of Damascus and were besieging it, and Conrad was holding Tiberias, planning to move up to Tripoli and joining the small army there. However, he got off to a late start (last chit in the cup), and was defeated by Unur (still couldn’t roll a good formation, it was a fairly even battle otherwise).

The final turn and a half was mostly clean up for both sides. The Turks spent their time trying to claim the rest of the County of Edessa (and barely made it), Unur made a try at Jerusalem, but when he realized he had 4 chances in 36 (needed really good assault rolls), he headed to Damascus to get rid of the French army there. For once, the Crusaders stood firm, and Unur was unable to do anything. However, I had screwed things up, and the siege had ended the turn before due to the army strength going too low (largely due to desertions–the only event roll that did anything during the game). Meanwhile, Conrad and the other leaders had been busy with ravaging cities and taking Homs, Hammah and Shaizar.

So, at the end the score was 7 to 22. I had nearly gotten another 10 for Damascus, and Samosata had nearly held out (good assault roll at the end of the game), which would have given me another point, and lost the Saracens 3 for a possible 18 to 19…. I’m definitely convinced that the Crusaders have a much harder position in this one, not least because it’s much easier for the Mosul Turks to shift between the two different theaters than for the Crusaders. If I hadn’t so consistently lost battles that were winnable, it might have been very different, as Edessa and Antioch have just enough forces to be a problem for the Turks, with careful handling.

Anyway, I’m down here for a bit, and I think we’ll end up playing the Third Crusade scenario soon.

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Breakdown in the Fast Lane

by on November 24, 2008 at 11:44 am
Posted In: Life

A few days ago, I was gifted/donated a computer. It would have been thrown out otherwise, and featured a better processor than I have, so I was happy to take it.

Examination waited for the weekend. Physical work waited for Sunday, as I had to get a longer-shaft phillips as the heat sink was screwed into place, and I needed to thread through the fan blades, and on one side needed clearance for an adjacent support bar of the case.

Mostly it’s a wash. I haven’t been able to determine the type of video card it has (has an nVidia logo, but none of the various serial numbers or part numbers have turned up anything in a search). The board is direct from Intel, and should be pretty solid, but it has no SATA ports that I can observe, and only 1 GB of RAM on board (my system has two). However, my current processor is an early 2 GHz Pentium 4 (second generation, the first Socket 478 chips), and this had a late-model 3.4 GHz Pentium 4. As my motherboard is comparatively recent (bought new when I built Haruhi a couple years ago), it is capable handling the chip (which is still on the same socket).

Or, at least, its supposed to be able to take it.

The swap out of chips between the two systems went very well. The only problem was that when I tried swapping out the graphics card, to identify the new one, I got a bunch of errors. I figured it was just a problem with that, deferred it to a later date, and started testing the new chip.

It’s surprisingly good. WoW has never been great on Haruhi, and as Blizzard has been adding more flash to combats and upgrading the graphics engine, its been getting slower. After getting the boost to 2GB of RAM, the primary culprit was the aging GeForce 6200. But with the new processor, WoW was looking pretty good. I still need to try out some of the places that were really causing problems, but some initial tests in places that had lots of NPCs around (the practicing swordsmen in Shattrath have been the bane of this computer) looked really good.

For about 5 hours. Then WoW crashed.

I’ve had crashes like this one before. In fact, I had them about 3-4 times a week at one point. But WoW crashed again a few minutes later, and the system rebooted.

BSOD on reboot. Screen full of errors on boot to Safe Mode (failed). BSOD on boot to the Win2000 console straight off the CD.

At that point I knew I was in big trouble. I tried all sorts things: disconnecting the hard drives, swapping out RAM…. BIOS reported the chip was nice and cool. The original error is pretty rare. The only references I could find to it were on sites in Japanese or Czech. Other errors (it started cycling through a number of BSOD errors) were clustering around the primary buses, and made me worried that I might have actually blown my board.

One thought was that I might need a BIOS update for the board to handle the new chip. However, MSI has put all their updates under a new updating system that means you don’t have to go through the entire process of flashing the BIOS through a floppy (which is exactly what I wanted to do), and it does a nice job of auto-detecting your board and current BIOS version. But you have to be able to boot the system for that, and they don’t let you at any of the support materials for other equipment….

So, finally I swapped the chips back. Maybe Haruhi would work again. If not, I could get the other box running and transfer my data hard drive over to it.

Haruhi booted.

This was a relief, if still annoying. Checking with MSI showed that I had the latest BIOS, but my chipset drivers were old. Since that would impact the types of things going on here, I updated them, and pulled Haruhi apart for one final try.

So far, so good. Considering the amount of time it took for the original collapse, I’m only cautiously optimistic, but with any luck, I’ve got it beat. I’m a little concerned about if I ever need rebuild the install from scratch…. And the plan is to build the new machine (with the old chip) into a backup machine, and then I’ll get rid of Utena, which has been sitting in a corner in case anything bad happens to one of the main machines.

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Three Paradises For the Price of One

by on November 10, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Had the gang over for gaming yesterday. Mark, Patch and Zjonni came over for another go with Conquest of Paradise. While it had taken an entire session last time, the plan was to play the basic game the first time (as Zjonni hadn’t played it before), and start using the advanced rules assuming we managed a second game.

For the first round, I drew Raiatea, and got to watch the struggle in the main island area while getting pretty good draws for myself. Zjonni as Tonga did a very nice job of assembling a good military force, and slowly working his way west, into the preprinted islands with native defenders. However, they also have villages to start with, and he was quite willing to sacrifice units to keep them all up. Patch as Hiva had trouble finding much good land, and I put a few small stacks on the border to guarantee that any adventurism would at least be expensive.

Mark, as Samoa, had some very good exploration and was emerging as quite a power. I kept up with him for a while, and then starting falling behind. I had to continually keep reminding myself that it was because Mark was generally turning up his culture cards soon after he bought them, and I was keeping mine face down. There were a couple of turns where I thought Mark might hit the magic 23 and end the game, but his growth finally slowed down as fighting erupted. I finally ended the game by hitting 19 and then revealing 5 VPs worth of cards (three 1s, a 0, and one that was worth 2 to me).

I don’t think they’ll let me do that again.

After lunch, we started a second round with most of the advanced rules in play. I drew Samoa this time, with Mark opposite me as Tonga. To a large extent, the game was dominated by the fact that Mark drew New Zealand early and laid the free second tile down. He managed his little empire quite well, and built up faster than I did, pushing me off Samoa late in the game, which also helped seal his victory.

That went quickly and we still had a fair amount of time left, and so proceeded to a third game. I drew Samoa again, with Patch opposite me on Tonga, Zjonni out on the edge as Hiva (for the second time in row) and Mark on Raiatea. This game had some of the most lopsided chit and tile draws of all three games. Zjonni found the bulk of the 1-knot open ocean chits, and did not encounter much land until the north edge of the board, where I was expanding.

Tonga (Patch this time) once again found New Zealand early. It is interesting that in the two games where we’ve used the second-tile rule, it has appeared near its historical location. I found a decent number of small islands, and had some trouble juggling between colonizing them, building up a military and keeping in the card race.

Part of the plan was to work my way into the western areas, and develop a route into the back area past the traditionally well-defended Tonga. By the time I was getting in range, Patch had Tonga and each of the hexes of New Zealand defended by stacks that were about as big my entire possible force. Considering that Mark was also trying to find a way to break this up, he was pretty determined to stay on the defensive, and kept us from risking anything big until the end of the game. I came in second, but my position was coming apart as I just couldn’t manage the resources I needed in that area, and Zjonni was starting to eat into my undefended north.

There was some around the table talk about balance and other issues (including speculation on how good my poker face is—not something I was going to answer at the time…). It seems like the tile draws should be reasonably even in the long run, but today the west side of the board was consistently doing better geographically. When your entire area is poor it’s hard to afford the ability to take much away from anyone else, and the east side can get really isolated.

Personally, I’m wondering if the two-tile New Zealand rule is too powerful as not only do you get a four-spot island, you then guarantee access to a three-spot island. It seems like it would be a great focus for conflict, but both times today it appeared in the south-west corner behind Tonga, which really limited the possibilities.

The current plan is for a day of two concurrent games of Commands & Colors: Ancients. This will take a bit of juggling, as we’ll only have Mark’s set available, but with a little creative scenario picking it should work out. If Jason is available (giving us five), we’ll try a five-player Soldier Kings.

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Combat in Onward, Christian Soldiers

by on October 31, 2008 at 1:15 pm
Posted In: Design and Effect

Crossposted from the Design and Effect blog on GameSquad.

I haven’t read nearly as much on medieval warfare as I might like, but what I do know is that for all the protestations of martial valor, and the romanticism of defeating your foe in combat, major battles were viewed as entirely too chancy things to trust the fate of your army and kingdom to.

With the considerable problems with communication, supply and training, this is an entirely understandable position. Instead, medieval warfare was largely a positional one, with control of key points being the objective.

With all this in mind, it makes sense that the combat system in Onward, Christian Soldiers is designed to be chaotic and unpredictable, with the idea of encouraging play that rewards sieges and other positional play. Even though it is acknowledged that players will remain more aggressive than their historical counterparts.

What gains my respect, is that even though they are chaotic, they are not random. Several factors go into the resolution. This means the system is a little cumbersome, but with practice it flows well, and it ensures the tension runs high whenever a battle is joined. Heck, the tension runs high whenever you think about a battle.

There’s good mechanics dealing with getting to a battle too, but we’re concentrating on the breakdown of what happens once battle is joined:

Step 1: What are the Odds?
Naturally, a larger army holds a distinct advantage over a smaller force, but instead of a conventional CRT system (a subject I should go into in another post), where the relative strength alone is the prime determiner of the possible results, this just generates a modifier for the final result.

An important note for those used to CRT wargames is that the odds calculation is rounded off instead of down. So, while normally 14 to 5 would be 2:1, in this game it is 3:1. While this is more appropriate as you’re just trying to gauge that the army is ‘about’ three times as large, and it keeps an odd hole from showing up in the modifiers, it does slow the process down because any edge case isn’t easy to resolve mentally. Aid cards are provided with a table for all the likely force strengths.

The odds themselves translate directly into the modifier—so 3:1 is a +3 modifier, 2:1 against is a –2, and so on—except that 1:1 is +0 (naturally), and 1.5:1 is +1.

Step 2: Formations
This is the real meat of what makes the system different, and why going into a good-odds battle can still put your heart in your throat—and why it can be good to seek a battle as the weaker army.

Reflecting the clash of different styles of combat that marked the Crusades, and the fact that even the best leaders did things in battle, that to our eyes, make little sense, Onward uses the idea of each side adopting a ‘formation’ for the battle (which has been seen before), but takes control out of the player’s hands by turning it into a die roll. The results of this roll depend on the leader rating, and side (Crusader or Muslim).

Also, the passage of time, and the fact that the Muslims adjusted to Crusader tactics is accounted for, as the Muslims get a different table in each Crusade, with better results each time.

The possible Crusader formations are Impetuous Charge, the vainglorious attack, possibly in the face of all military common sense, that was seen all too often from commanders just arrived in the Middle East; Defend in place (obvious), Flank attack (also obvious); and Frontal Charge, which is the well-timed charge most classically seen from Richard at Arsuf. A 1-rating leader has a 5/6 chance of IC (a ‘6’ being D), with the odds of an IC going down with each rating, and the normal competent 4-rating with one chance in 6 of IC, 2/6 of D, 1/6 of F and 2/6 FC. Richard the Lionheart (the only 5-rating leader in the game) replaces the chance of an IC with FC.

The Muslim formations are Defensive, Cautious (line up for battle and and look for an opportunity), Flank attack, and feign retreat and Encicle. In the First Crusade, a 1-rating leader has a 5/6 chance to go D and 1/6 C; by the Third Crusade it is even odds of either. A 4-rating leader has equal chances of C, F, and E in the First Crusade, and this only shifts slightly to a 1/6 of C, 2/6 of F, and 3/6 of E.

So… what does all this mean? What do the formations do against each other? As you might guess, FC and E are the formations that the Crusaders and Muslims respectively want to see come up. The Crusaders have a definite military edge in the fact that the Frontal Charge trumps everything else, and will always generate a positive modifier for the Crusaders, a mere +2 against E, and a +8 against a Muslim who is being Defensive. The Impetuous Charge is iffy, it can generate a positive modifier against D, but is a -5 against F and -8 against E (which sounds exactly like several of the worse defeats we read about in the Crusades).

Note that the worst Crusader formation (IC) does well against the worst Muslim formation (D), meaning that in the First Crusade a 1-rating Crusader leader can ride roughshod over 1-rating Muslim leader, as there are only three chances in 36 of not seeing IC vs D.

Step 3: Other Modifiers
There are a few minor modifiers that can show up, like defending in a town, some random cards that can be played, etc.

And then there’s armored knights. Due to the nature of the difficulties in employing knights in battle in the Crusades, and the devastating effect they could have when they did get to hit the enemy, knights are a separate factor of the army while everything else is just generic strength points. There’s a lot of restrictions on them: only certain formation results get to use them, they can’t be used in/against a town… etc. However, when the Crusader does get to use them, they generate a +1 shift per point. (This would generate a +8 in the First Crusade if the leaders of all four Crusader factions happened to be fighting together at this point—more likely it’ll generate a +2 or so.)

Step 4: Results
So, there’s all these numbers that add and subtract from the final result, inducing a fair amount of chaos into the system as it is hard to determine the end result without actually starting the combat. Now what?

The last bit is to roll 2d6, add the final modifier and consult a CRT table. As ever, dice don’t reduce the tension level. Combat results range from -10 to +24, with the results being #/# where the two numbers represent what the attacker and defender respectively take in casualties as a percentage of their army strength. The two extreme “blow out” results are 70/0 and 0/70, the two middle results (+7 and +8) are 15/15 and 20/20, and most of the time you can assume casualties will be between 5 and 25 percent of the army.

A nice brake on the system to keep a large army from taking excessive casualties against a small force is that if the odds are 3:1 or greater (or 1:2 or less), then the larger army figures its casualties as a percentage of the size of the smaller army.

And then there’s one last source of chaos. There are four results that say “X (#)”. These are Unpredictable Results, and you roll again (1d6 this time) add the modifier in the parentheses (from -2 to +2), and look for the entry marked with that number in its own column. As the six # entries are equivalent to -3, 0, +6, +9, +14 and +20, it can really shift where the results land. While the modifiers tend to constrain the results to what would be expected, so far in practice it has turned certain victories into costly ones and close battles into costly defeats.

Aftermath:
After all that, if one side took twice as many casualties as the other, it must retreat. Otherwise, either (or both) sides may choose to retreat, or both may stay of the field, and probably will go at it again soon (possibly after reinforcements arrive).

Summary:
I’ve found Onward, Christian Soldiers to have one of the best battle resolution systems I’ve seen. It is a little clunkier and unwieldy than I would strictly like to see, but I think it is well worth the time put into it. The results seem to mesh well with what I know of combat in the Crusades, and the formations give you a feel for the flow of the battle, creating more of a narrative, or feeling of ‘being there’. And finally, it achieves the design goal of being a horribly unpredictable thing, despite being influenced by several factors that the players do have complete control over. Battles will always be more common with wargamers than with leaders who had their own lives and fortunes at stake, but you understand why they were to be avoided.

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