Crash Test Dummies

 

Painting progress has been very slow for the past few weeks but on the positive side I felt that sufficient progress had been made on reworking the Aegaeon naval rules to venture a game test with Gareth at our usual Tuesday evening session.

The first big outing with the original Aegaeon rules at the Society of Ancients Convention last year had been met with interest but also a number of recommendations.  Chief among these was that the movement system allow for more variety of action, particularly through diagonal movement. This had been avoided in the original rules in order to keep down the possible circumstances under which engagements could take place and hence keep down the complexity of the combat results.  Consequently, changing the movement mechanics could not be done in isolation but entailed working through the combat mechanism again.

After several abortive ideas had been kicked around, it finally dawned on me that handling movement through a quota of move points - with different costs for changes of facing or formation as well as for orthogonal and diagonal movement - would also provide a built in timer for determining the priority of any combats.  Simply track how many move points had been spent at the point of contact.

Armed with this idea a few different ways of costing different actions and allocating move points to fast and normal squadrons were tried out. I soon settled on giving fast squadrons a single extra point as this allowed them to do sufficiently more than normal squadrons without giving the latter too much of a disadvantage.

More time was spent working out how to assess where contact would occur and where squadrons on different trajectories might slip past each other - this needs to be clear as under the rules movement is simultaneous - but eventually I had a set of illustrated examples that I thought provided guidance for all possibilities.  Time to test things out again.

To prepare for the trial I reworked the squadron record cards to make them simpler and clearer to use.  The photograph below shows the old version at the top, with lots of graphics giving information about the quality of helmsmen, crew and hulls together with a total count of the marines carried by the squadron and codes for the different moves possible.  The latter only applied to the old move system, so had to be discarded.  I have also decided to change the boarding mechanics, so only need to track marines on each ship via the individual ship boxes, so out goes the overall marines counts.  As for the quality codings, these may be useful to track in a campaign but for battle purposes are amalgamated into the Agility rating and whether the squadron is rated as Fast or Normal.  With these removed, the new version at the bottom of the photograph becomes possible.

The 'Move' box is for entering a code from a chart that shows possible combinations of manoeuvre and movement.  The three letters next to 'Action' allow one to be circled to set how the squadron will act if contact is made with the enemy - Attack, Defend or Evade.  

For the test, a simple game with each side having six Fast squadrons was set up.  All the ships were trieres.  None had extra marines.  The only variations were in agility ratings and squadron strength.  The Persian subjects - a mix of Egyptians and Tyrians - had two squadrons with a rating of 7 (the highest), two with 6 and two with 5 while their Ionian opponents - Chians, Samians and Lesbians - had one 7, one 5 and four 6s. Both sides had 3 squadrons with 12 ships, 3 with 10.  Gareth took the Persian subjects while I took the Ionians seeking to escape becoming Persian subjects again.

Initial deployment, Persians on the right, Ionians on the left.  All squadrons are in column. The gap between the fleets is 6 squares, so discretely marked that they don't show up in the picture. As the maximum distance a squadron can move each turn is 2 squares, no combat can occur in the first turn.

The first move.  The Ionians and the Egyptians all move straight forwards to the fullest extent allowed.  The Tyrian squadrons swing off to the left.  What is their intention?

Turn 2.  The Tyrians continue to move around the island, well out of the action.  The Ionians move their left hand double column to meet the the right hand Egyptian double column head on, close to the shore.  The Ionian's middle column moved across towards the Egyptian's second column but this hung back so no contact took place.  The remaining Ionian column swung around, looking for opportunity to join the fight with the Egyptians at an advantage but still able to turn to face the Tyrians as and when they started to move across from behind the island.

Ionian and Egyptian squadrons meet head on at full speed.  This does not mean that the ships ram each other head to head, which would be a recipe for mutual destruction.  Instead, the combat mechanics try to capture the skill of crews and helmsmen trying to position themselves to get an attack in at an angle favourable to them and disadvantageous to the enemy.  It was found in this case that both squadrons were of equal strength and equal agility, so each rolled the same number of dice without any modifiers.  

The result was 2-0 to the Ionians.  Both sides had chosen to make ramming attempts and needed 5+ to succeed.

The difference of 2 allowed the Ionian squadron to occupy the square being contested while the Egyptian squadron fell back in disorder into the same square as the squadron behind.  A wreckage marker was placed to reflect the broken ships - once a square collects 3 or more wreckage markers, movement through it is slowed as ships have to take care to avoid collisions.  In the next turn, the Egyptian squadrons will also have their move allowance reduced as they do not have as much room to manoeuvre as normal and will be at a disadvantage in combat because of the crowding if both remain in the square.  In this picture you can just see two dots marking the corners of the square the Egyptians are in.  One lesson from the test was that these markings are too subtle, making it hard to judge where squadrons should be.

In the next turn, the Egyptians pulled back the squadron that lost in the first engagement, leaving a one on one clash which ended in a score draw, both sides losing a couple of ships, remaining locked in engagement and becoming disordered. 

In the centre was a series of engagements with clash 3 being dependent on the outcome of clash 2.  The Ionians rolled very badly and lost clash 2.

The result was that the Egyptians push back the Ionians in disorder and occupied the square being contested before the Ionian squadron moving into the Egyptian flank could make contact, so clash 3 did not happen.  Several issues for further consideration were raised by this episode.  The Ionian squadron was in line but while it did not appear to have an open flank at the point of contact, the way this is defined in the rules at the moment it could not claim this, so fought at a disadvantage.  None of the examples of squadrons having to pull back after combat met the conditions arising here either.

Two bad outcomes for the Ionians were offset by a spectacular result in clash 4, which the Ionians won 5-1.

As ship smote ship on one side of the table, on the other the Tyrians were still manoeuvring elegantly around the island while the unengaged Ionians were weighing up whether to wait to intercept the Tyrians or pile into the main fight.

They split the difference, sending one squadron into the main fight while the other went towards the Tyrians.  After all movement was worked out, two pairs of squadrons were going head to head in column in the middle while on the left the Ionians had managed to get a second squadron into the flank of the Egyptian column as the other Egyptian squadron moved up between the engaged squadrons and the coast but did not have the points to turn in and join the fight as well.

The engagement continuing from the last turn was dealt with first but ended in a draw, both sides losing a ship.  This was very bad for the Egyptians as their squadron could not turn to face the flank attack and they lost that clash badly, being driven back close to shore.  

The two pairs of clashes in the centre had ended in draws with all squadrons losing ships and becoming disordered.  On the left, the perilous position of two Egyptian squadrons against the coast is clear.  Would they break and run for shore like some of the Ottoman ships at Lepanto?  The morale rules had not considered this!

The full position at the end of turn 4.  The squadron furthest to the left is now an Ionian squadron that had made a lunge for the Tyrians but had not judged their possible move well and missed its mark.  This leaves both Tyrian squadrons closer to the engagements in the centre.  They are well placed to swing those fights to their advantage and quite possibly offset the probable loss of the two Egyptian squadrons sandwiched between the Ionians and the shore.

We ended the test at the end of turn 4 to have some time to discuss how we had found the rules before heading to our respective homes.  Gareth, who had not tried out the original rules, found it exciting despite having trouble with the reference charts intended to show how the squadrons could move.  By the end he was getting the hang of the possibilities.  I had been expecting that more problems would show up with the movement mechanism but was pleased to find that it worked - including the follow through into the sequencing of combat.  Clearly the reference charts for movement were confusing and cumbersome, so further thought is needed to bring clarity to setting the directions.  My main concern now is with the combat mechanism.  Admittedly the set up for the test excluded a lot of the possible conditions it was designed to cover, but within the limited range that did come up in the test, the mechanism as it now stands left several question marks and didn't seem to have the range of outcomes that felt right.  Still, the test has served its purpose both by flagging up issues and prompting some thoughts on how to tackle them.  Getting that done and running some more tests run will be the main task for the coming week.  Painting can continue to play second fiddle for a while longer.