MeG

So here's the thing - I play way more board games than figures games, and that generally means more strategic in scope.
If you're playing lets say Parthia in a board game, you might be good but you'll not be as numerous. Just across the border there will be many Romans, not an exactly and carefully matched even fight, so to win you may actually need to outfight double your number. On top of that there may be other enemies nibbling at you, and so more forces are needed to keep them at bay.

Figures games in general just don't get this.

I suppose what I'm getting at is that equal fights - well they really didn't happen very often. Indeed the generals involved wanted to make sure that didn't happen.
And yet every game of MEG (or ADLG, or FOG before them) start with the principle of equal points and a 'fair fight'.
As a gaming construct it's grudgingly alright if not a bit dull and old, but it's really got nothing at all to with the historical position - and isn't that part of what we should be trying to get to in our games?

The problem of course then becomes with scenarios - balance. Who wants to play with 33% less points than the other bloke?
I wonder out loud here if there's a clever way we can get some of this historical flavour, so often lost with even points battles, and keep that but not equally have massively lopsided battles that are no fun for the poorer side

Maybe there isn't and it is purely a case of my needing to play more scenarios, but the whole idea of even fights - rinse and repeat - is losing its appeal for me.

Start a campaign?

Note that scenarios can be unbalanced in points yet sill potentially balanced in terms of who is likely to win; depending on factors such as terrain, setup limitations, delayed arrivals, victory conditions, etc. I played one recently in which one side had 50% extra points, but I suspect the odds were still against them.

Wow this forum is frustrating if it times out it loses your reply. What a sack of..

In short my reply was that I think it's a problem of ancient gaming specifically, made worse by the competition scene which reinforces the idea that MEG and others are played this way - I mean just go to Britcon, you'll find several hundred people all playing meeting engagements all weekend - probably more than actually ever occurred in human history if all added together.
It boils it down to matching weapons and rolling the best dice ultimately, which feels to me a bit lacking in soul.
Conversely, go watch the fantasy players or SAGA, or Napoleonic, or WWIII - they'll be playing scenarios.

Yes, campaigns and so on probably the way to do it but it puts all the work on me to organise, which is a bit of a ballache.

Agreed, some rulesets, especially non-ancients. include some form of scenarios up front. It may be a bit harder for ancients - the balance of a scenario might be greatly affected by e.g. one of the armies being  all skirmishing horse archers vs. the other all heavy foot, but it would be nice if there was something to help...

I have both of the Charles S. Grant scenario books, which are useful but still suffer a bit from trying to be period and ruleset agnostic - some additional work is required to get them out of the book and onto the table.

I am (slowly) working on a (solo) campaign to help by generating the scenarios for me. The idea is not to make it too complicated and hence hard to organise. Put some commanders on the map, each with their own attached set of units. Have some semi-random system to decide what their objectives are and how they move. Then when they come close together, some semi-random system for deciding what sort of battle should be fought, which forces make it onto the table with how much delay, etc.

I get your point but remember also that we usually meet at tournaments or some "quick" friendly games . being balanced at least in terms of "points" is , I thinck, important .

Now playing a campaign or a specific scénario is something else that can be engineered easely but as a scenario . You could also try the FOG rule and things like that to have thing more lively .

We played a 1813 Napoleonc campaign and none of the battles were "balanced" but always fun . It was the first part of the campaign with the allied having more and better cavalry and the french having a lot more infantry albeit some very green regiments so ...very unbalanced !

So yes why not a campaign !

I would also add that when we are talking about 'equal' armies, we are actually talking about equal points. The number of bases or figures can be quite different.

While not disputing the value of scenarios or campaigns to give more diverse games, I don't think the point-based games give carbon copy games either. As a Swiss player I fight every game outnumbered and at a disadvantage😁

Furthermore, given the scale of MeG battles (large), I am not sure scenarios such as capture the cross-roads or fighting withdrawal are that relevant. As a generalisation, most large ancient battles appear to have been fought as 'set piece' engagements by mutual agreement even if the reason for seeking battle could vary. Yes I know there are exceptions, such as Lake Trasimene, but they appear to be in the minority. Even Carrhae could be fought as a normal battle.

I would probably argue that campaigns are more relevant to MeG as a way of providing differing contexts for battles in terms of battlefields and opposing forces. If players want challenging and interesting scenario-based table-top ancient games, maybe smaller scale games such as Infamy, Infamy would be a better option?

I find refighting historical battles is a way of creating scenarios where the points are not exactly equal but still create an opportunity to have a very interesting battle.  That said, there is a limit on how different the points can be before the battle loses interest.

Terrain, fortifications, command structures (i.e. not enough generals/cards) or outscouting can help offset a points difference.  Just needs a bit (or a lot) of lateral thinking.

There are plenty of other forms of ancient gaming such as skirmish gaming. MeG is not the answer for everything.

Richard

>I don't think the point-based games give carbon copy games either.

I agree with this too. One of the charms of the ancients period for me is the wide variety of troop types and armies of fundamentally different composition and tactical style.

>Furthermore, given the scale of MeG battles (large), I am not sure scenarios such as capture the cross-roads or fighting withdrawal are that relevant. As a generalisation, most large ancient battles appear to have been fought as 'set piece' engagements by mutual agreement

I don't entirely agree with this though. Commanders were often forced to fight when they didn't really want to. And even when both sides were keen to fight it didn't necessarily mean that both sides had roughly equal chances - commanders didn't necessarily know accurately the numbers and composition of the enemy force, and they didn't have nice tables of equipment and troop quality and lists of factors to consult to determine what the matchups looked like ;) The unreliability of ancient sources when it comes to numbers of troops makes it even harder for us to judge retrospectively what the odds where. For many battles we have almost no idea of the forces involved.

Even amongst battles we know a fair bit about, many have specific, unusual characteristics that might suggest a scenario rather than free-form equal points battle. Much of Carrhae was the Roman attempt at withdrawal. Adrianople could be a flank march...but without limitations placed on the players it is unlikely to look much like the actual battle. Tigranocerta, Cynoscephalae, Manzikert, etc. Even Hastings looks rather like one of the classic "strong defensive position" scenarios from the scenarios books :)

I'm not averse to equal points battles (and I have taken part ion tournaments, I'm not averse to them either!), but there is room for something more in the hobby.

I knew I might get a discussion out of my comment.😊 I hope I didn't come across as condescending.

I agree that sometimes generals were forced to fight in unpropitious circumstances but fight they generally did. This might have meant they fought outnumbered or in unsuitable terrain, which I think is partly what you are saying. However, I believe this is a background context for the tabletop game that could be provided by a campaign system.

Battles that might not class as an open field battles such as Carrhae, Teutoberger Wald and Lake Traimene are not common when large battles are considered, although I concede they did occur. They require a bit more consideration to be recreated. In fact, there is an article in the latest Slingshot magazine that discusses refighting Cannae and the challenge of making an enjoyable game out of an apparently one-sided engagement. This relates to Richard's point about not making the games so one-sided that they are no longer interesting.

All that said, I certainly understand if you find equal-points, battlefield engagements repetitive. As you mentioned, playing scenarios, either historical or 'what if', is one solution. Personally, I find enough variety from the many different opponents I can face across the thousands of years covered by MeG. (I also don't get to play that frequently.) Scenarios are definitely important in other periods that do not have the same variety of armies such as WW2 or Napoleonics.

Cheers.

I didn't take it as condescending, this sort of thing always presents an interesting discussion :)

I'm also saying that even "open field" battles may not have started neatly deployed in dual battle lines. We don't even seem to be able to agree on how deployment of armies actually worked in practice - c.f. the very different processes in DBMM vs. FoG/MeG. My suspicion is that different commanders at different times did things differently; with a few random factors and human screw ups thrown in for good measure. There might be scope for some more variety here in our games, even within the context of equal points battles.

Oh, also...stuuk, any strategic, ancient board games you would recommend? I have been staring at the components of my copy of Imperium Romanum II recently, it does look impressive, but I also remember that it took a lot of effort to set up a game and it was always somewhat disappointing in the play.

Shrub - actually, there aren't that many good ancient board games.
The good ones are almost all battle systems (GBOH, commands and colours etc) - in other words, what MeG does but different (and flatter!) and MUCH more widely played, certainly the latter.
Siege of Jerusalem (AH) was massive, beautiful and very different. And also very hard to find. Same for siege of Alesia. Same system.
TTS! (To The Strongest) is really not a figures game either, being as it is played on a square hex grid with figures.


The Roman civil wars - Columbia's Julius Caesar is good and strategic in scope and scale.
Imperium Romanum was excellent as an almost living history book, but it wasn't much of a game (some of the scenarios even start with a note that you cant really win for example).
Pax Romana (GMT) was good but too fiddly. The idea was there though. If you're prepaped to slog through the randomness (and there is much!) then it's very interesting.

More recently, GMT did time of Crisis which was the latter AD period with a ton of emperors.
it was in reality more of a multi player pile on with a Roman theme. And deck building. I didn't like it, but others do.

KHAN! is not really ancients but it's a strategic scale treatment of the Mongols (S&T)
and Julian Triumph before the storm is similar treatment of the end of the Roman empire. Both decent games definitely up there if you want strategic scale gaming.

Vae Victis did Alea iacta est and Bellum Gallicum - one was civil wars (columbia's effort was better) and the other was Gallic Wars which wasn't bad but had a hit and miss kind of combat system.

Basically though there's only the S&T guys, and Richard Berg (now deceased) who were really doing mainstream ancients games with the odd scattering of stuff from other people.

Thanks - one or two there that sound like I should go check them out!

I come from board games - rather than wargames played on a board.  And concur that there is not a lot out there that models the ancient world in a geopolitical sense or its military campaigns, save for the sort of tactical games (already mentioned) that replicate what MeG is already doing (such as Commands & Colors: Ancients, and my favouite, Milito - a card game that began life as the FoG card game). 

Aside from those, any games set in the ancient world tend to be about wholly different aspects, such as trading (or pyramid-robbing!) and they are all abstracted to a very, very great extent.  There is certainly nothing that could be used as a sort of campaign from which individual MeG battles could be extracted and fought.

At the "high level of abstraction, but worth playing or checking out as games" point, we do have the following:
Mare Nostrum Empires*
Antike II
Civilisation
Through The Ages
- and a host of other "civilisation-themed" games which are fun/interesting to play; of which my favourite is probably Age of Civilizations, a short 30-minute card game.

* I've asterisked Mare Nostrum as it perhaps gets closest, with players raising armies and seeking to control key resource centres.  I suppose that it could be used as a base for a MeG campaign - but it would require more work than it is worth.

The game that came closest to being ideal is probably Warfrog's Empires of the Ancient World - even to the extent that it had battle sequences played out with cards that reminded me of the DBA troop interactions.  Sadly it was 80% of a good game, and 20% definitely not; published in relatively small quantity, and long, long out of print.

What we really need is a board game that acts much like the Total War series does on the PC - where the game is played at two levels; an overarching strategy and economics game, generating "tabletop" battles when forces clash.  Total War's tabletop battles are clearly figure wargames in the digital age (so much so that one TV company used it as the basis for a couple of series of battle games where members of the public took over as the C-in-C and sub-generals); what we're missing** is a board game that replicates the other level.  Possibly because the PC game does it all so well.

** there was such a game - Shogun; aka Samurai Swords, aka Ikusa.  It was printed by Hasbro in large volumes from the mid-80s onwards, but has been out of print for 8 years or so.  The original Total War PC game clearly owes a very great deal to it.  Now THAT might well be worth seeking out as the basis for a Samurai-themed campaign.

I have always liked GMT's Ancient World series.  Series...well, it only has two games: Rise of the Roman Republic and Carthage.  Each turn is a year and is played in an interactive style - One player moves a stack, then the other player moves a stack and so on until everyone has moved.  Each hex is a little over ten miles across and each strength point is roughly 500 men.  It has leaders, different troop types (cavalry, elephants, etc...)  Different nationalities. I've played it a couple of times with an opponent and several times solitaire.  I think it would make an excellent basis for generating MeG battles. 

Well do both is the simple answer.

The bottom line is without a points system you can't do the equalise gives for events so we need them.  But Mortem et Gloriam is primarily a historical re-enactment system.

Personally my favourite games are refights and campaigns. Refights are rarely equal. Indeed out Two Simon Show gives some great insights into the games.  And interestingly so far the points difference has proved a good predictor of outcomes over several games.

Campaigns have you do the real work of a general to try to 'win the PBS' for real.  I am running a 6 player comp here and it really brings home that:
1) many battles occurred when both sides thought hey had the advantage.  They didn't have a points system and rule books.  Scouting errors and guesstimates of quality regularly read to both sides thinking they have the upper hand.
2) battles where armies are forced to fight by being caught by a skilled enemy
3) battles where you had to fight against the odds as it was the only way
4) battle where you fight to block or buy time

It is true to say that there were more stand up battles in the ancients period than any other period.  Butt he campaign so far has given us: a) unequal fights, b) rearguards, c) armies caught in march column, d) attempts to win in desperation, e) break outs from besieged cities, f) contesting of river crossing.  ll very interesting stuff.

Si

Oh yeah, GMT's Ancient World - it was a good system. Also Richard Berg. Probably that is the closest to operational scale in wargame terms.
It also tended to be 'my big army marches up to yours and one of us will win the game'
Not quite that bad, but that is almost the exact problem with operational ancients games - they tend to devolve into a load of sieging (bit dull really) and then one or two scraps.

Really you need a bit more zoomed-out to the strategic scale to get away from that. It's kind of unavoidable with ancients.
Maybe I'll build something :)


"The bottom line is without a points system you can't do the equalise gives for events so we need them.  "
Don't disagree Simon, I just wonder is there a way to get a quick game still but have some variability and not completely unbalance the game.
Random scenario type generator which still gives 'round about even' games.
It wouldn't have to be perfect since any point system is only worth its salt until the first few dice start to be rolled, and then all kinds of stuff can happen.

I've been thinking along the lines of "scenario templates". i.e. not a fully specified scenario with terrain, victory conditions etc. all explicitly defined. Ideally players would define their army composition before knowing what scenario is in effect.

Something along the lines of (obviously I am not claiming perfect balance on the basis of literally seconds of thought!) :

Hasty Attack : Player A has marched early to surprise the opposition before properly deployed. Player A has 20% fewer points, but may deploy everything nicely lined up. Player B rushed out of the camp in response, and may only deploy 50% of their forces initially, the remaining units arrive delayed in groups of two or three.

Tactical Defensive : Player A gets 20% more points than Player B; Player B gets to place one extra terrain piece. anywhere on the table, which can be moved (perhaps a reduced distance?) but not removed by the opponent; an indecisive game counts as a win for Player B.

Successful Ambush: Player A gets 100% more points than Player B and must deploy in column all facing forward along or just to either side of a road/track in a (fairly restricted) mid-section of the table; Player B gets to place two extra terrain pieces anywhere on the table, which can be moved but not removed by the opponent, and can deploy anywhere except within the mid-section; Player A wins if Player B's army is broken, or Player A exits at least 50% of their force via on of the road exits.

Unsuccessful Ambush...tweak the above...points differential is reduced...A gets to deploy some proportion of forces as flank guards which are are assumed to have detected the ambushers before the main column enters the trap...adjust deployments areas...

Quote from: Simon Meg-Meister on September 07, 2020, 02:59:21 PM
Butt he campaign so far has given us: a) unequal fights, b) rearguards, c) armies caught in march column, d) attempts to win in desperation, e) break outs from besieged cities, f) contesting of river crossing.  ll very interesting stuff.

And I am waiting with interest for the write up :)

I think your idea here is a good one. However, I think it would best be optional rather than a core rule.

Quote from: ShrubMiK on September 07, 2020, 05:12:57 PM

Quote from: Simon Meg-Meister on September 07, 2020, 02:59:21 PM
Butt he campaign so far has given us: a) unequal fights, b) rearguards, c) armies caught in march column, d) attempts to win in desperation, e) break outs from besieged cities, f) contesting of river crossing.  ll very interesting stuff.

And I am waiting with interest for the write up :)

It's going into one the magazines in a few months time.

S