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Post by Michael Demko on Dec 4, 2017 22:42:40 GMT
That idea works very well on hills with clear, explicit contours. For continuous hills, I would have preferred using the uphill element's rear edge, and require it be uphill (closer to the crestline) of all points on the close combat opponent's front edge. I like this. I was initially confused by the rule as stated (in terms of front edges only), because if the front edges are in contact, how can one be "uphill" of the other? They are in the same place! This is what I get for studying maths, instead of learning common sense.
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Post by Michael Demko on Dec 1, 2017 15:56:07 GMT
Well, if I were to think about my actual experience with hills in the real world (though, of course, lacking real-world experience with formation fighting), I would expect that you have to line up pretty much _on_ the ridge line of a hill to get much practical benefit - and then often only facing in one direction. DBA hills are in many ways more effective defensive positions than things I have encountered in real life. That doesn't bother me too much though, since I can just file that away as "there are probably other hills on the battlefield that we don't mark, but they are not aligned in relevant ways" and "even if the rules say I can defend this hill on two sides, in practice I'm only going to be attacked on one side most of the time, so there isn't an effective unfair benefit."
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Post by Michael Demko on Nov 30, 2017 15:45:16 GMT
Hills work WAY better if holding them is only feasible from certain orientations. Very interesting, this is a subtlety that I had missed.
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Post by Michael Demko on Nov 29, 2017 18:47:28 GMT
I agree that it is unambiguous that each element only gets to interact with a single TZ per bound. You do not get to change your mind if you enter a new TZ later in the bound.
But what about over the course of several bounds? stevie's rule of "you don't get to push into a TZ unless you strictly align or make contact with the element generating it" in many cases removes the need to consider what happens when the threat persists over several bounds. But I'm not convinced this is supported by the rules (and it seems to make advancing a line toward a mess of disorganized enemies unnecessarily complex).
I generally assume that the start of a new bound entirely "resets" the state of the game. I shouldn't have to know how I got to the current on-board configuration, I should be able to make all decisions based entirely on the state of the board at the start of the bound. So if I have an element operating with respect to one TZ in bound 5, I _can_ switch to operating with respect to a different TZ in bound 6, if I start bound 6 in more than one TZ. This does give elements a bit more freedom when in several TZs than in only one TZ, but one needs to wait at least a bound to take advantage of this.
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Post by Michael Demko on Nov 22, 2017 22:08:08 GMT
As someone who is trying to get into ancients, but prefers the lower bar to entry of painting a 12 element army to painting one numbering in the 30s or 50s, I'm quite happy DBA exists as an option. It's small enough that I may even be able to coerce some gaming friends into joining up. I'm not aware of sane alternatives at this scale, despite claims that point-based systems for larger battles can "scale down".
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Post by Michael Demko on Nov 21, 2017 17:37:32 GMT
One approach I have adopted is to adapt the definition from Sam Mustafa's Aurelian rules. This is that to be uphill you need to be entirely on the hill and your enemy must be only partly on it. No crests or centre points or anything. keeps it simple. Regards Simon Hmm, that's a nice mechanic. Simple to express and works cleanly for small hills. How do you handle line-of-sight for shooting?
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Post by Michael Demko on Nov 20, 2017 19:39:01 GMT
I have been playing this as:
* Choose one 1 TZ among those you start in or enter first, ignore the others.
* If you choose to move backward, you cannot change facing or alignment. You may only move backward as a single element. This is the only way to leave the TZ. OR * You can move straight forward, but you cannot leave the chosen TZ by forward move. * You can improve your alignment by changing facing or moving laterally (for single element moves) with respect to the element generating the TZ, and you may combine this with a move forward (but not a move backward). * You may only make contact with the front edge of the chosen TZ's generating element, even if you could otherwise bring yourself into contact with another element.
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Post by Michael Demko on Nov 20, 2017 17:55:44 GMT
How do people interpret "uphill" for determining combat modifiers?
I think in practice I use a heuristic along the lines of "an element is uphill if its center point is on the hill, and is closer to the center of the hill than every part of the opposing element." - this treats many cases of elements contacting obliquely across the elevation gradient as "not uphill".
But the language of the rules here is surprisingly vague in my view.
I also find it interesting that the rules refer to a "ridge line" for blocking line-of-sight, but I don't usually see such lines in pictures of terrain from other players.
(I play DBA mostly solo, or with non-experienced players. Mostly out of shame for not having a painted army :-) Working on it.)
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Post by Michael Demko on Nov 17, 2017 20:59:44 GMT
The effect of the rule is to allow Bow to shoot from bad going, without having to move forward to the point where they can be engaged in close-combat by an enemy entirely in good going. That's what I read the intention to be, anyways. I think I would be happier if the rule were that lines drawn from both corners of the firing edge could pass through no more than 1/2BW of bad going, but who am I to quibble?
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Post by Michael Demko on Nov 15, 2017 21:30:32 GMT
Certainly the rules would be simpler if contacted elements turned immediately upon contact.
It is unfortunate that none of those familiar with the early game can find documentation of why this rule was _explicitly_and_consciously_ made more complicated.
You might be able to retain the current dynamics with instant turning - You could say that "units turn instantly upon contact to the flank or rear", but also say "a unit forced to turn in this manner may not be contacted in the same bound by another unit from the direction the turned unit originally faced".
This would eliminate the "multiple stages of conforming" mechanic of the current system, while still leaving exactly the current options in the common case where two units face one (but are not in contact): * Both units can make contact, but the defending unit does not turn. * Only the front unit makes contact, the defending unit does not turn. * Only the flank unit makes contact, the defending unit turns.
This would only be worth doing if Stevie's proposed simpler dynamics introduce some terrible imbalance that the current dynamic is protecting us from.
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Post by Michael Demko on Nov 10, 2017 15:59:20 GMT
I think this debate stems partly from taking the representation of the game too literally. When a unit is "destroyed" in DBA, it vanishes from the board. Does this mean the men in the unit literally disappear into thin air? Of course not. So then what happens to them? Some of them are dying, some of them are quite likely _still_fighting_, others are running away and being pursued by members of the unit that destroyed them. Why does this matter? Because when a unit is "destroyed" in the battle line, its opponent likely does not have the organization to execute a fine maneuver and turn on the nearest unit in the line (which itself is at least partially engaged in combat) and "hit it in the flank". A unit which is "destroyed" in DBA represents a circumstance where the opponent has achieved enough superiority that it is free to exert influence elsewhere in the battle, and many players in this forum do not want that outcome to be interpreted over-generously.
Likewise, when a "hard-flank" opportunity arises at the end of a battle line, this does not have to represent a unit literally fighting to its front while also being chewed up from the side. It represents the severe disadvantage of a unit being outnumbered 2 to 1. Likely the unit isn't equally engaged with men from both opposing units, but it is fair to assume that under different circumstances the engagement could have favored fiercer fighting with one of the units rather than the other, and that who is deepest in the thick of things is not necessarily under the control of the outnumbering force.
Again, this is not to say that a game couldn't work differently from the way DBA does, but it is to say that we've accepted a lot of abstraction in the game already to get the "feel" of battle lines striving against one another, and I don't see why we have to say that the "closing the door" mechanic is somehow special and needs to be interpreted as a literal strike to the flank.
This problem arises in hex-and-counter games (which I play a lot of), where attacks on the flank are both: generously rewarded; and far too easy to achieve in most rule systems. Many games boil down to players taking turns hitting each other on "flanks" that arise as an artifact of the hex grid system, even though in real life you would have a continuous line. Part of what I like about DBA is that most combat is front to front, with modifiers for various types of support, and part of this I think is a conscious preference in the rules for not modeling "real" flank attacks.
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Post by Michael Demko on Nov 8, 2017 22:45:54 GMT
I agree that purely from a simplicity of the rules perspective, turning to face on contact makes a lot of sense... if we assume that turning to face is the norm, rather than an exception. Coming at the rules as someone with no prior knowledge of earlier versions of the rules, as stevie advocates, I think we should question this assumption.
I look at hard flanking in DBA as an escalated version of overlapping. It represents a tactical situation where a unit engaged in close combat is especially vulnerable because it lacks friendly support to its flank, and the opponent has sufficient mobility to exploit this vulnerability. But it is an abstraction - it might represent a unit having to spread itself especially thinly in order to maintain a battle line, or an enemy force in position to pounce on soldiers disengaging from melee, rather than representing a unit being literally attacked from the side.
If units never changed facing in response to enemy contact, this would be consistent with a vision of hard flanking as an especially dangerous overlap. The exceptional rule then would not be the choice to delay turning to face, but rather the rule that units _ever_ turn to face an opponent in contact with them. The "turning to face" rule can be seen as a "hack" to deal with the case where the movement phase of a bound ends with a passive unit under attack but with no enemy to its front.
Requiring such a unit to turn ensures that all close combat rules can be expressed in terms of units in front-to-front contact, but it is a pragmatic exception to the rule that units never turn to face, rather than a real-world maneuver that the game is aiming to simulate (this is not to say that a game couldn't choose to simulate turning to face, only to say that DBA does not simulate this).
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Post by Michael Demko on Nov 1, 2017 1:34:15 GMT
I was playing a solo game last night (with cardboard pieces, because I haven't got my army painted yet), and I encountered an uncomfortable situation with a column (of 2 elements). In the 3rd paragraph of Tactical Moves, we are told And then at the end of Tactical Moves Wheeling is described only in the paragraph describing group moves in block formation
In my case, I moved the column forward close to its movement allowance, and began wheeling the front element about its front corner. Without laterally adjusting the column behind, I was no longer able to keep the first element in corner-to-corner contact with the element behind. I could have restored the corner-to-corner contact by advancing the front element by exactly the distance required to place its rear corner in line with the side edge of the elements behind, but I lacked the movement allowance to advance far enough.
This struck me as rather odd. In the instance, I decided to wheel the front element about its back corner. I later decided that this outcome was equivalent to having wheeled about the front corner, but a little further back, giving me enough movement allowance to advance and align the corners.
The more I thought about this, the less satisfied I became. If the column is longer than 2 elements (which is rare in DBA, because such a column is a death trap), once the front element has wheeled, the column can only advance in fixed increments of distance until all elements have wheeled, or it loses the corner-to-corner contact that defines it as a column.
In practice I would expect that this situation arises rarely and that players with an intuitive sense of how columns work are able to make in-person accommodations for their opponents.
But as a matter of pedantic rule-lawyering, it seems to me that the requirement that elements in a wheeling column should maintain corner-to-corner contact ought to be relaxed, perhaps to "...or at least with a rear corner of a wheeled element in contact with the front edge of the element behind in the case of a wheeling column." - or something to that effect.
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Post by Michael Demko on Oct 26, 2017 14:40:04 GMT
Thanks, this is very useful. I too live in conditions where spray-on products are not an option.
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Post by Michael Demko on Oct 26, 2017 13:04:06 GMT
I'm new to miniature painting and unsure about what lacquer/varnish to use, whether and how much to dilute it, etc. Is there a tradeoff in terms of esthetics and longevity?
How important, relatively, is the primer in protecting the paints?
I'm painting metal figures from Essex miniatures at the moment.
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