What is your opinion of the WADBAG Manoeuvre ratings?

As the “Army List Corrections” is at last nearing completion, I have been thinking about another project.
Inspired by David Constable’s terrain type thread, I came up with this.

What is your opinion of the WADBAG Manoeuvre ratings?
For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of “Manoeuvre Ratings”, it is an idea developed by David Schlanger and David Kuijt of the WADBAG team (the “Wastington Area De Bellis Antiquitatis Gamers”).
Here is a link to the original discussion:-
www.fanaticus.org/discussion/showthread.php?t=17115

To paraphrase a quote from the WADBAG team:-
“Sometimes the DBA Aggression factor works well. The Ancient Spanish rarely if ever invaded an enemy, and were well known for conducting wars of ambush and surprise where the invaders were forced to fight on battlefields chosen by the Spanish.

Other times it works very poorly. The Mongol Conquest army invaded everyone -- aggression 4. But in history, they were rarely (if ever) forced to fight on a battlefield of the enemy's choosing. Virtually every battle they fought during their massive expansion period was on a field previously scouted and chosen by their army, and often they led the enemy to that battlefield with a series of stratagems and feinted flights, sometimes over days, before turning and fighting on the ground they had chosen weeks or months earlier.

The English army during the Hundred Years War is another example. Most of their battles were fought in France -- they were invading. But in reality at Crecy, Agincourt, Poitiers and a dozen less famous battles, the French ended up fighting on terrain that the English chose! Using the DBA aggression ratings (M.French 1, HYW English 3) creates a completely unhistorical result, with the French deciding on the terrain.”

Obviously things will have to be different in DBA 3.0 than they were in DBA 2.2.
The terrain placement rules are different for one thing.

I was thinking of something fairly simple along these lines:-

Each army has two factors; an ‘aggression’ factor and an additional ‘tactical’ or ‘manoeuvre’ factor, similar to WADBAG.  
        1) Players roll for aggression as they do now to determine in which region the battle will be fought.
          (This shouldn’t really be needed if fighting an historical opponent, as history tells us who was the invader,

            but it will be necessary for unhistorical opponents)
        2) Players then roll a second ‘tactical/manoeuvre’ dice, the higher score determining who will be the ‘defender’.
          (With all the usual terrain placement rules just as they are now; the ‘defender’ choosing and laying the terrain and

           moving first, the ‘attacker’ deciding on the deployment zones and moving second)

Most mounted armies would have a high ‘tactical/manoeuvre’ factor, as would most auxiliary/psiloi armies, so that they get to decide on the amount and the size of the terrain they will fight over, although the ‘attacker’ still gets to choose their direction of approach on the day of battle (limited by any roads of course).
Other armies, such as Hannibal’s, HYW English, and so on, would also have a high ‘tactical/manoeuvre’ factor.

I still think that some sort of random terrain selection will be needed, where the defender decides on how many terrain pieces to use but not what each terrain piece will be, otherwise defenders could simply choose the same terrain over-and-over again on each and every battlefield.

I am of course open to other suggestions……



Some potentially useful player aids can be found here, including the latest FAQ and the Quick Reference Sheets from the Society of Ancients:-
fanaticus-dba.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Reference_sheets_and_epitomes