I'm still kicking folks, but when Spring and good weather coincide, my hobby time always suffers, especially game playing time. However, I finally managed to recognize the very obvious cause of the sudden problems I was having with Square Brigadier games on the new 5" grid.
The problems in the first two games were largely caused by congestion leading to choke points. I ended up fiddling madly with the rules to try and find a way around the issue without asking why I suddenly had so many choke points. Last week I set up the old CS Grant standard, Sawmill Village and for the first time in nearly 40 years of playing it, using various rules in various periods and scales, it didn't work either!
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| Because of the layout, even one house prevented any movement on any of the roads passing through the town but also allowed a 2 houses vs 1 house melee. |
This was especially annoying because the rules had worked well with the revived 1840's game. The rules were the same apart from muskets instead of rifles so it HAD to be something else. In all cases, I had copied the terrain from map to table as faithfully as possible..........ahhhhh-ha!.....One Hour Wargames have super simplified terrain, usually on an almost empty table. Thinking back to Blasthof Bridge, I had actually enlarged on the very scanty terrain on the table, causing bottlenecks where there had been none in the original. On the CS Grant scenarios, I had copied the maps for a 5'x7' table onto my 4'x5' table as faithfully as I could given the grid. This used to work on non-gridded tables with small figures since the unit footprints remained similar in proportion to the table. On the gridded table however, it swelled the relevant area taken up by each terrain feature. The adjacent enemy rules further increased this distortion so that the game bogged down largely into a series of house to house multi-unit multi-square firefights!
It finally occurred to me that I might have been better to have followed Thomas's example and kept the main idea behind the scenario but adjust and simplify the terrain features to match the rules and unit footprints..
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| The new town now has fewer houses but takes up the same room. This allows the road to be a separate terrain feature so you that you can't melee from house to house but have to come out on the street to try to push the other guy out of his stronghold. |
Come sun or rain, I'll be playing the scenario tomorrow with a once more restored set of traditional Square Brigadier rules.
The Neil Thomas scenarios have very scanty terrain indeed which just focuses on the major features. I prefer my battlefields to be a bit more cluttered so I just use a load of scatter terrain, which looks nice but has no impact on the game.
ReplyDeleteI agree, I deploy a lot more purely scenic bits these days, depending on area templates to mark the difference.
DeleteAre chokepoints inherently a bad thing? More like a tactical challenge to be dealt with, no?
ReplyDeleteNot a bad thing when they are intentional as part of a scenario, but if done unintentionally without changing victory conditions or at least considering the impact on them, it can turn a finely tuned, balanced, trusted, scenario into a no win one for one side. Eg I've seen impromptu scenario terrain changes or a failure to check the effect of using a different set of rules for a familiar scenario, make it physically impossible for one side to achieve victory even if unopposed!
DeleteFascinating to read about the impact of oversized terrain. Not something I would naturally watch out for.
ReplyDeleteNor me! Its a new experience due to shrinking a Old School scenario onto a small table with big squares. It was either change the rules or adapt the table to maintain the intended effect.
DeleteOver the years, I have evolved to a "less is more" model when it comes to terrain for similar reasons. I still find ways to "dress" the table, but generally speaking I find that games flow much better when play is centered on the areas between towns and woods rather than in them (unless the scenario is focused on this kind of action).
ReplyDeleteI've been slowly working my way there. :)
DeleteYes, converting scenarios to different rules and table proportions tends to be more art than science, but once you've got it right for one scenario out of a book into one rules set, other games involving the same two systems are seldom troublesome. Historical scenarios sometimes cause problems with terrain needing to be underscale to keep the same footprint. (If you "bathtub" the battle, you're on your own.)
ReplyDeletePlease you've found the solution, though.
Very true!
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