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 triplegrim wrote:

 kodos wrote:
So using the movement phase to get an advantage is WAAC
I can see now why people don't like certain games/Editions

Waac and That Guy are abused a lot as terms. I was called a waac guy for playing a completely normal MH warband at 1000gc last year, and That Guy in a 40k game where I didnt dispute a single rule but let the other chump get away with a ton of gak, especially the ghost inch in movement. They used to call players like me This Guy. Can only imagine people havent run into people on the spectrum with no socialization at the games tables, but have plenty of vocabulary about it, eager to use.

I find that when very casual players play against those who are a bit more experienced/serious then you can get a bit of a divide. The super casual/less experienced player can sometimes miss-interpret the other player playing really well as them trying to "Win at all costs" because they are playing it "seriously" as opposed to "just having fun".

What it often just boils down to is different attitudes but also just different levels of game experience and skill. Novice vs intermediate/experienced skill is always a tricky matchup because either the novice is going to lose a lot; or the more experienced has to handicap themselves (eg in a wargame take less points) or "play badly". It's different to "seal clubbing" because that is intentional and deliberate targeting of less experienced players. However in smaller social groups or such you can easily end up with so few choices that the novice is playing the experienced more and more times and it can "feel like" seal clubbing if the pro isn't handicapping or if the novice is refusing to learn etc....

IT can also reflect different attitudes; some people really do just want to push models forward; roll dice and see something cool happen without learning the ins and outs of the game at a greater level.

 triplegrim wrote:
.

Btw. What type of battlefield has fixed charges irl? Mechanisms should come from the irl situation, not just be 8 inches fixed for every unit.


.

This thread is interesting as it shows how some fallacious ideas never die, despite being debunked a thousand times... I don't really have to write again, just copy-paste...

Cyel wrote:



Ah, the old "but in real life!" fallacy, one would think it's been properly put to sleep by now.

Do you think ever regular march was done at exactly the same range every time? Always in a direction exactly like the one planned? Was every shooting attack at exactly the same range regardless of minor variations in the wind?



You can find a real life excuse to make everything in such a game random. Life is pretty random after all. But for some reason designers don't. Why? Because just sitting there watching the dice being rolled and consulting random tables is a miserable experience that hardly deserves the name "game". Thus certain things are abstracted to offer an interesting intellectual challenge instead of randomapalooza that hardly shows who is the better player and makes better moves.

Do you complain about units in HoMM 3 always going a set number of spaces? What about armies in Imperial 2030 or A Game of Thrones? What about prices of properties in Monopoly? Why doesn't Great Western Trail properly represent the mechanisms of supply and demand if Power Grid or Brass do it?

Exactly as Overread mentions this abstraction can be applied to a different level in different titles. Randomness serves many important purposes in design - for example it evens the playing field between players of varying skill or experience or muddies the perception of imbalance and hides the differences between sloppily playtested options. Randomness is certainly to stay, but to varying degrees in different titles directed at different audiences (for example families who play with kids need heavy randomness not to make the kids lose every time).

Not happy with Brass or Arkwright being decided solely by players' decisions? You can play Monopoly. A Game of Thrones or Imperial too deterministic and player-driven for your taste? You can play Risk.

If using the movement rules correctly and cunningly makes one WAAC or That Guy? Then…erm…surely everyone that’s ever won a game of WHFB ever has been WAAC or That Guy?

Because knowing your onions in the movement phase is how you go about Glorious Victory. That’s when you angle yourself right, setup traps, get on their flank or rear and generally give them a hard time by correctly stacking combat in your favour.

My favourite? My old 2,000 point Dark Elf monster army. Two characters. One a Lord on a Dragon, one a Beastmaster on Manticore. Push one up each flank, and land threatening a unit each.

Turn to face me? And it’s the old switcheroo, as they took advantage of Large Target (can draw LoS over intervening units) and Fly (can move and charge over intervening units) to hit you in the rear. Don’t turn to face, and depending what’s what, each one takes a unit in the flank, or if it looks like a tougher fight, both jump the same unit, one per flank and give it a horrendously one sided kicking.

Some might say “two flying monster am the WAAC”, but keep in mind they gobbled up all my character slots, so I had zero magic whatsoever. An inherent list weakness i offset by….cunning moves and playing to my strengths. And hoping to heck your Cannons weren’t accurate or doing an exist, because those could ruin my day quick.

Oh yeah, "fallacy", such lies. Such narcisism.

Random charge distance adds risk management to gameplay, to a risk management game, that is fun, because of risk management. None of this nonesense of so-called "modern game design" has been proven to add to actual enjoyment of game, it serves only to streamline for the sake of streamline, to dumb-down for the sole purpose of dumbing down. A disgusting practice that should have been discarded long ago if not pushed by college graduates filled with impractical ideas they have been taught by those who chose to lock themselves in ivory towers.

I'm glade random charge distance is back, it's called risk management, in a risk management game; things shouldn't be predictable, nothing is, nor should all games be. More dice, for I all care.

 triplegrim wrote:

Btw. What type of battlefield has fixed charges irl? Mechanisms should come from the irl situation, not just be 8 inches fixed for every unit.

well, the same that allows for fixed march distance
if you want IRL situation, you can but than you have to do it for everything

and random movement is not the place were such rules are added but if you want more "realism" you need more detailed terrain and weather rules and not having 1 thing in the game being random and the others not
otherwise having M+D6 charge but 2xM marching makes no sense because IRL the uneven ground would hinder both

the rule has nothing to do with reality but is there to help newer players against veterans by adding randomness so a veteran cannot run over another player if the dice are not with him

and this is something GW added to all their games one way or anther, not because of reality but to even out player skill

 lcmiracle wrote:
Oh .

Random charge distance adds risk management to gameplay, to a risk management game, that is fun, because of risk management.

Cyel wrote:


You can call it risk management or weighted decisions, but with high-variance, high-impact rolls like charge range (especially when you want a combined charge to do something) at the end of the day it's just dice arbitrarily punishing one player and rewarding the other for nothing.

And of course +1 to what Mad Doc Grotsnik and Kodos are saying.

The idea that random helps level the playing field is a false impression.

It doesn't.

Levelling the playing skill field would be a random element with a weighted element so that it had a bias to favour the weaker/less experienced/losing player in a situation.

Because there's no weighting attached its a simply neutral element to the game that is neither helping the weaker player win nor hobbling the better player.

Instead what it does is introduce a layer of risk management and random to the game which a better player will account for in their tactics. Indeed random in the right places can even be a hindrance to a newer player because they don't yet know how to judge situations to account for the random.



Eg to stick with charges. An experienced player will know that whilst they can roll 2D6 to get a charge distance and it MIGHT give them 12inches; they know that statistically that is very unlikely to happen.
So they might well not charge until they are within 6 inches because that's a value that they are more likely to get or beat and thus be able to make the charge.

The less experienced player might well declare charges from much further away and put more hope in the dice rolling well for them in a given situation. Because they've not yet learned how to play with probabilities.




Indeed I'd argue that having random makes the game harder for newbies compared to having fixed values. Fixed values give 100% known outcomes each time, every time. So you can quickly and easily learn from them.

Random means that a newbie can shoot a non-anti-tank unit at a tank and kill it on one occasion because of dice rolls on both sides going to the extremes. This might make them then use that unit as an anti-tank unit in the future and it might take many failed situations for them to realise that its not a good anti-tank unit and that they are using them incorrectly .

Bretonnians, Undead, Orks, and High and Wood Elves live on the charge.

There's no reason to change the charge as is known, except for change sake.

Editions were made to improve the game, GW. Not that you'd remember that.

Minimizing player skill disparity might not be an important consideration. Infinity is set up in a similar way, where the randomness absolutely favours the more experienced player that has most encounter success chances already mapped out, and yet it's not a feature that worsens the game. In practice, cooperation is encouraged to the point that the more experienced player will often advise a new player, treating those underlying maths as open information.

I don't agree with Overread. Randomness has been applied to games on purpose to level the playing field for quite some time. Including things like introducing random critical shot in an FPS game to make newbies win head-on encounters at least sometimes which directly affected the ratings of player experience in said game.

Whether GW does that for this reason, or just to obfuscate the fact that they can't come up with interesting player driven interplay that, for example, makes charges a good idea only sometimes, depending on other factors, is hard to determine.

I also disagree with his example of an experienced player only attempting charges with a high % of success. They will still fail sometimes and it will still feel arbitrary and random and unfair (because it is). But I think the worst thing about it is how it devastates the idea of coordinated attacks. Even with 80% chance of a successful charge if you want/need to perform a multicharge on a target, the probability of two units making it is just 2/3, for three units it's a straight coin toss whether you get what you need into combat and win or you get only some of units into combat and they get slaughtered by a superior enemy that needs to be attacked with coordination from different sides.

The result - nobody bothers with seting up interesting multicharges, bacause even with very good positioning the chances are awful. You give up on challenging positioning to encircle and just build units that can smash into each other head on, because good positioning for a multicharge will get your units killed half of the time for no fault of your own.

 Overread wrote:
Instead what it does is introduce a layer of risk management and random to the game which a better player will account for in their tactics.

Disagree when it's done to the extremes of a flat 2d6 roll. Example, Deep Strike. The old system with scatter was high skill, requiring weighing your placement options vs odds of scatter distance and directions that might make the unit useless or even DOA. Now you plonk the unit down and then you either roll a 9 or you don't.

Mostly some randomness might favor the weaker player in one off games. But most often over multiple games, especially if in a tournament format, the stronger players will usually be able to take advantage even there since they know how to play around it much better. When they are unlucky they have already prepared for it and when they are lucky they can capitalize on it better.

If the game have enough randomness that can't really be played around much then it might favor the newer players and giving them the off chance that they sometimes can get a win they shouldn't have gotten. Sometimes they will be crushed extra hard though since the more experienced players will be able to take advantage of when the dice are in their favor even better.

If the randomness is off the charts and can have too much of an impact then it doesn't really favor newer players vs experienced players but rather players who don't want to actually play but rather watch random stuff happen. What is the point of playing against someone if the game is just a bunch of random dice rolls you have no control over? Could just as well play solo then.

It is a balancing act. If you have too little randomness in the game it might lead to stand offs or making it so the better players might never lose (depending on game mechanics but the more like chess it is the more favor it is for skilled players) but if it is too much it might not be worth playing. You can have quite a lot of randomness and still have a huge skill factor as long as their are tools to mitigate the bad luck or in some way smooth out the probability curves. Warmachine did have a lot of random rolls that could have a massive impact but it was still a game that massively favored the experienced player over the new one way more than any GW game I have ever played. But there you also had a lot of tools to help you set up favorable situations.

MESBG can look quite random at times but the more you play it the more you see how to mitigate what looks like randomness and set up favorable situations. You might not have much say over who has priority or winning move/combat/duel roll offs but luckily each individual roll is usually not that impactful so you can still play around it and come out on top in the end.

Until I have all the rules and see how they interact I will try to not assume too much on how random certain things in TOW is. It might be way more random than what we think or it might have so many things to mitigate it that they could just as well have used fixed values for charges after all the buffs/spells/abilities have been accounted for.

that is the other problem, the more experienced players are, the better are those by searching ways to midgate randomness and if the faction rules are written in the usual GW style, certain armies will be better at working around them than others and those will be the armies played by veterans because the less random the game is, the better

 Overread wrote:
The idea that random helps level the playing field is a false impression.
It doesn't.

Depends on the rules, fully random 2D6 charge let players blame the dice if it does not work and not "I did not get the charge because I played wrong"

and I don't think this new, not-so-random, mechanic helps at at all, neither have you fully random stuff that infantry can charge cavalry on a lucky roll if they are not staying outside 12" but you also don't have the security as a double one can still screw you

double 1 is a gimmick, it is there in Kings of War as well and not many people like it but it adds a level of uncertainty that even the perfect plan can fail
yet TOW has that on more than one part of the game, which means more possibilities for the perfect plan to fail which is simply there for people blaming the dice (instead of themselves)

Klickor wrote:
Mostly some randomness might favor the weaker player in one off games. But most often over multiple games, especially if in a tournament format, the stronger players will usually be able to take advantage even there since they know how to play around it much better. When they are unlucky they have already prepared for it and when they are lucky they can capitalize on it better.

If the game have enough randomness that can't really be played around much then it might favor the newer players and giving them the off chance that they sometimes can get a win they shouldn't have gotten. Sometimes they will be crushed extra hard though since the more experienced players will be able to take advantage of when the dice are in their favor even better.

If the randomness is off the charts and can have too much of an impact then it doesn't really favor newer players vs experienced players but rather players who don't want to actually play but rather watch random stuff happen. What is the point of playing against someone if the game is just a bunch of random dice rolls you have no control over? Could just as well play solo then.

It is a balancing act. If you have too little randomness in the game it might lead to stand offs or making it so the better players might never lose (depending on game mechanics but the more like chess it is the more favor it is for skilled players) but if it is too much it might not be worth playing. You can have quite a lot of randomness and still have a huge skill factor as long as their are tools to mitigate the bad luck or in some way smooth out the probability curves. Warmachine did have a lot of random rolls that could have a massive impact but it was still a game that massively favored the experienced player over the new one way more than any GW game I have ever played. But there you also had a lot of tools to help you set up favorable situations.

FWIW, 2D6-pick-highest-plus-Move is really not all that random to begin with. For Move 4", the chances of success are:
5"- Auto
6"- 97%
7"- 89%
8"- 75%
9"- 56%
10"- 31%

So the difference between your absolute maximum charge range and a 75% chance of success is all of two inches. Get one inch closer than that and the odds are better than rolling a 2+ on one die. This is largely mitigable randomness, which cannot be said for any of the random mechanics where the player has no ability to improve the roll, like leadership tests or rolls to-hit.

Every once in a while you're still going to flub it- but a decent player doesn't plan their wargame strategy around the assumption that all their 2+ rolls will succeed. And if there are any mechanisms to re-roll the dice, that will certainly take the sting out of the occasional snake eyes.

Depends entirely what the random achieves.

2d6, pick highest + Movement for charge is…fine for me. Genuinely.

It not only causes me to consider how close I want to get to enemy lines, but if I’m the aggressor, what’s my plan in case I whiff the roll. So for me, it adds to the overall considerations in play.

I really don't think GW designers sully themselves by thinking about "skill".

The issue with randomness is less about stronger/weaker players - its about stopping the scenario of "this always happens".

My Elves/Skaven/all Cav army *always* getting to charge your Humans/Orcs/Skeletons is kind of dull. Especially if the charge is a major-deciding factor of who wins or loses.

Now you can say "as the Elf/Skaven/all Cav army" that its very skillful on my part that I can deploy to always ensure I get to charge and don't get charged. But the point is my opponent - due to inferior M" - has no choice. They can only hope that I can't judge a few inches. (In reality, the solution is to ditch M4" infantry units).

Its like this from Grotsnik above:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Turn to face me? And it’s the old switcheroo, as they took advantage of Large Target (can draw LoS over intervening units) and Fly (can move and charge over intervening units) to hit you in the rear. Don’t turn to face, and depending what’s what, each one takes a unit in the flank, or if it looks like a tougher fight, both jump the same unit, one per flank and give it a horrendously one sided kicking.

This isn't "WAAC" in my view - but fly monsters jumping around units is exploiting kind of awful rules, that have been awful a long time. You are getting to do something - and your opponent can't really do anything about it. Its often I think been argued that the solution should have been allowing reforms and "short charges" - possibly by a musician or something - to avoid this dancing out of charge arcs while being theoretically just meters away. But I don't think that's happening - or at least not from the rules we've seen.

In my experience, the biggest downside in fixed charge ranges is that it puts off new players. Unless they're savants as distance judgement, they'll fail charges left and right while their opponent miraculously closes every single time. It's feel-bad, and there's no real way to advise someone on how to better judge distances other than get better eyes.

With random distances and pre-measuring, an opponent can at least advise a newbie by telling them the chances of each success, and the odd fail on the part of the veteran can makes things not seem so stacked against the newcomer.

M+2D6 discard lowest for infantry does not change much and there is no real benefit from having it

M+D6+2D6 discard lowest, is on the level of 8th and means units with this rule have large advantage

so my general problem is that there is no real gain in doing it other than trying to please the fans of 8th Edition without being too much for fans of older Editions


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Shakalooloo wrote:
In my experience, the biggest downside in fixed charge ranges is that it puts off new players. Unless they're savants as distance judgement, they'll fail charges left and right while their opponent miraculously closes every single time. It's feel-bad, and there's no real way to advise someone on how to better judge distances other than get better eyes.

With random distances and pre-measuring, an opponent can at least advise a newbie by telling them the chances of each success, and the odd fail on the part of the veteran can makes things not seem so stacked against the newcomer.

why is it that the only possibility is fixed ranges and no measurements or random ranges + measurement

not like any other game has fixed ranges+measurement and it works fine

Tyel wrote:
I ".

My Elves/Skaven/all Cav army *always* getting to charge your Humans/Orcs/Skeletons is kind of dull. Especially if the charge is a major-deciding factor of who wins or loses.

.

The thing is, in a more player-driven game, factors such as use of skirmishers or fast cav or magic or terrain or scenario or special rules etc can absolutely mean that faster units *not always* get to charge - for example because they would abandon the objective or because they are cavalry and opposing infantry uses defensive positions in a forest where cavalry is crap or because they risk being stranded by enemy fleeing as a charge reaction or because a mage put a LOS blocking cloud or a patch of difficult terrain in their way etc etc. Options are infinite and infinitely more interesting than "let's roll and let the game play itself".

Cyel wrote:

Tyel wrote:
I ".

My Elves/Skaven/all Cav army *always* getting to charge your Humans/Orcs/Skeletons is kind of dull. Especially if the charge is a major-deciding factor of who wins or loses.

.

The thing is, in a more player-driven game, factors such as use of skirmishers or fast cav or magic or terrain or scenario or special rules etc can absolutely mean that faster units *not always* get to charge - for example because they would abandon the objective or because they are cavalry and opposing infantry uses defensive positions in a forest where cavalry is crap or because they risk being stranded by enemy fleeing as a charge reaction or because a mage put a LOS blocking cloud or a patch of difficult terrain in their way etc etc. Options are infinite and infinitely more interesting than "let's roll and let the game play itself".

Stop with your sound arguments of good game design.
That‘s not something most players of GW games are used to and only confuses them.

Btw, why are we still talking about random vs fixed charge ranges?
The desicion for TOW was made and we will have to live with it if we want to play by its rules.
Much more interesting is how important getting the charge will be, how this ability is accounted for in the unit‘s price and what options for counterplay there is outside of rolling better than your opponent.

More than happy with the new charge rules and premeasuring - reduces cheating.

Cyel wrote:
Options are infinite and infinitely more interesting than "let's roll and let the game play itself".

This hyperbole is silly. Rolling to hit, rolling for damage, rolling for leadership, rolling for magic, rolling for anything else in the game- those are all taken for granted, it's a dice-based wargame. But rolling for charge distance? Suddenly your player agency evaporates in a puff of smoke, helpless to influence anything occurring on the board, a mere spectator to a game that plays itself. All because one more mechanic is (somewhat) randomized too.

Even some of the options you listed, like the enemy fleeing as a charge reaction or a mage casting a spell to place a LOS blocking cloud, are player decisions that have uncertain outcomes determined by dice. Why not complain about how you have no options and the game plays itself because you have to roll for those? It's fundamentally no different from the decision of where to position your troops and the ensuing dice rolls that will determine if they successfully make it into combat or not. You have options. You don't have guarantees.

A wargame doesn't have to be purely deterministic for your choices to matter. There are some out there, but GW doesn't make them and never has. Neither is randomness automatically a good thing. It all depends on the implementation, as with anything else.

Surely it's no different from the overrunning rules after a morale break though?

the one rule I always thought WHFB needed was the ability to "move" into combat, not "charge" but "move"

as in any legal move that ended up in contact initiated combat. no charge bonuses, no charge reactions (and no march moves into it, just a normal move) - include shuffling sideways or to the rear.

point being all of a sudden standing next to the enemy is no longer 'safe', nor is sitting just out of arc, nor is sitting at silly angles. you get contacted, you fight

likewise "If I cannot conform to you, you conform to me, if thats not possible the units touch and only half of each front rank fights"

It's very cool to see some deep and respectful debate on the movement question for a change, and it's even pertinent to the thread now thanks to the news article!

I'm glad my Dumb Uneducated Opinion also spawned some talk. I'm only an 8th ed player with only two dozen games under my belt (a long time ago) so any theoryhammer from me is talking out my arse. Fast cav being able to yeet directly into back lines easily just *sounds* unbalanced, when my recollection of moving units to intercept anything other than "in your front arc" always felt clumsy/slow.

leopard wrote:
the one rule I always thought WHFB needed was the ability to "move" into combat, not "charge" but "move"

as in any legal move that ended up in contact initiated combat. no charge bonuses, no charge reactions (and no march moves into it, just a normal move) - include shuffling sideways or to the rear.

point being all of a sudden standing next to the enemy is no longer 'safe', nor is sitting just out of arc, nor is sitting at silly angles. you get contacted, you fight

likewise "If I cannot conform to you, you conform to me, if thats not possible the units touch and only half of each front rank fights"

If pike units ever become a thing, like estalia, then i'd expect such a move to be reasonable to be implemented post haste.

Not Online!!! wrote:

leopard wrote:
the one rule I always thought WHFB needed was the ability to "move" into combat, not "charge" but "move"

as in any legal move that ended up in contact initiated combat. no charge bonuses, no charge reactions (and no march moves into it, just a normal move) - include shuffling sideways or to the rear.

point being all of a sudden standing next to the enemy is no longer 'safe', nor is sitting just out of arc, nor is sitting at silly angles. you get contacted, you fight

likewise "If I cannot conform to you, you conform to me, if thats not possible the units touch and only half of each front rank fights"

If pike units ever become a thing, like estalia, then i'd expect such a move to be reasonable to be implemented post haste.

decently done pike units would be nice, not easy to move about but in effect counting the sides as "front" if charged

leopard wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

leopard wrote:
the one rule I always thought WHFB needed was the ability to "move" into combat, not "charge" but "move"

as in any legal move that ended up in contact initiated combat. no charge bonuses, no charge reactions (and no march moves into it, just a normal move) - include shuffling sideways or to the rear.

point being all of a sudden standing next to the enemy is no longer 'safe', nor is sitting just out of arc, nor is sitting at silly angles. you get contacted, you fight

likewise "If I cannot conform to you, you conform to me, if thats not possible the units touch and only half of each front rank fights"

If pike units ever become a thing, like estalia, then i'd expect such a move to be reasonable to be implemented post haste.

decently done pike units would be nice, not easy to move about but in effect counting the sides as "front" if charged

That would need to be a special 'square' formation rather than an inherent feature of pikes - attacking a pike block in the flank while they're facing forward is pretty effective otherwise.

leopard wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:

leopard wrote:
the one rule I always thought WHFB needed was the ability to "move" into combat, not "charge" but "move"

as in any legal move that ended up in contact initiated combat. no charge bonuses, no charge reactions (and no march moves into it, just a normal move) - include shuffling sideways or to the rear.

point being all of a sudden standing next to the enemy is no longer 'safe', nor is sitting just out of arc, nor is sitting at silly angles. you get contacted, you fight

likewise "If I cannot conform to you, you conform to me, if thats not possible the units touch and only half of each front rank fights"

If pike units ever become a thing, like estalia, then i'd expect such a move to be reasonable to be implemented post haste.

decently done pike units would be nice, not easy to move about but in effect counting the sides as "front" if charged

Why on earth would a pike unit treat flanks same as front? Historically, pike blocks were even MORE vulnerable to flanking attacks than other infantry, simply because it was impossible for the 16' pikes to all raise, turn, and lower - and it has to be done nearly simultaneously or pikes get dropped and people DIE - in time to threaten a flanker.

That's why most early modern battles were decided by whose cavalry won the flank battle, and restrained from pursuing fleeing cavalry so they could turn and flank the pike blocks.

there was a reason pike units got attachments of swordsman to protect the flanks or counter charge into flanks of other pike units in melee (for the big blocks, some other nations came up with the idea of using multiple small blocks instead)