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Justin SwantonParticipant
Thanks Andrew. Just finished the return match. Boy, was it a corker!
https://wargamingwithoutdice.blogspot.com/
Justin SwantonParticipantPS, if you want to pass on Taylor’s soulless rules I’ll happily take them. ;-
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Justin SwantonParticipant“While fond of the physical object for the reasons given above, I was never fond of the rules. They seemed to me mechanistic and soulless.
What I’ve seen of Optio leaves me feeling the same.”
One man’s meat….though bear in mind you haven’t yet played Optio.
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Justin SwantonParticipantI like the review.
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Justin SwantonParticipantI’ve posted an overview of Optio on my blog for those interested. See here.
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Justin SwantonParticipantHi Mick,
If a unit rallies it’s usually for a reason extraneous to the unit itself: it pulls back to favourable terrain, or it sees nearby enemy units routing, or something like that. Optio caters for that. What I don’t like is a unit varying substantially in performance for no reason and me having to suck reasons out of my left thumb to justify the irrational randomness.
But that’s just me. 🙂
https://wargamingwithoutdice.blogspot.com/
Justin SwantonParticipantThanks Ian.
“ all attacks in Chess are 100% successful” – well, depends. What’s a successful attack in chess? A combination that leaves the attacker with a material or positional advantage: he’s now a bishop up, or has a knight on d6 or something like that. A drawn attack would be a simple exchange, and a lost attack would be a blunder. That transposes nicely into a chanceless wargame like Optio.
https://wargamingwithoutdice.blogspot.com/
Justin SwantonParticipantThanks Gamegonegood. The dots are semi-transparent. I could increase the transparency and make them even less noticeable but that doesn’t seem to be necessary.
https://wargamingwithoutdice.blogspot.com/
Justin SwantonParticipantChris Engle formalised the idea into its 3 argument format and gave it the name. It did/could use dice as the umpire weighed the strength of arguments to decide whether the proposition the arguments supported would work. and rolled a dice against the chance he allocated to success or failure. It has since broadened and sometimes lost the formal 3 argument structure entirely -for the better in my opinion as it often rewarded adherence to the structure and formal debating skill rather than any military probability. Paddy Griffith had previously organised similar structured conversation wargames. His name for them was somewhat tongue in cheek – Muggergames, because the umpire set up the scenario, forces and then left his ‘mugs’/players to discuss how and why and indeed what would happen next rather than tell them. They effectively built the game as they played it through consensus to meld their common knowledge, experience and analysis of the situation. The umpire was sometimes a ‘Plumpire’ – the ‘player umpire’ who ran the opposition forces, while the players were all on the same side, but often it was a minimal role. Paddy’s names were typical British self deprecating understatement and rather too twee to gain traction with players seeking a validation amongst a critical hobby and outside commentators who already thought wargamers a case of arrested development. Matrix gaming had a formality and rules ethos and a much more grandiose sounding name that was easier to sell. Fewer dice were used in a muggergame. There are descriptions of both in the Wargames Developments Handbook – or a more in depth description of the Matrix Game here Chris Engle has his own pages at Free Engle Matrix Games
Umpiring is good depending on who is doing the umpiring. Admiral Ugaki was a bad choice for the role.
Edit: actually, rereading the article, he wasn’t.
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Justin SwantonParticipantTo play Optio one needs the following:
1. Ruleset
2. Army specific reference sheets. These are generated from a generic template. I take care of that.
3. Unit counter base to hold counters.
4. Morale, order/disorder and shooting counters.
5. Long counters for generals and commanders.
6. General/commander orders counters. I’ll explain the orders mechanism soon. It doesn’t have actual orders but it doesn’t use dice for pips.
Thus far the options for anyone interested in trying the system out is for me to supply pdfs of all this which are printed out, counters stuck on cardboard and trimmed. It’s not actually that much – about two or three dozen morale counters, several dozen shooting counters and two dozen or so order/disorder counters, all measuring 10x10mm. A dozen, say, long counters for generals and as many general orders counters. One can make the counter bases easily enough with cardboard – I can post a short tutorial and supply a template.
As a plan B I have created a VASSAL module for online play, with 9 armies: Achaemenid Persia, Greece, Macedonia, Seleucid Empire, Carthage, Numidia, Spain, Rome and Gaul.
https://wargamingwithoutdice.blogspot.com/
Justin SwantonParticipantFor anyone interested, here is a pdf template of the hill segments. You can resize the segments as you please.
https://wargamingwithoutdice.blogspot.com/
Justin SwantonParticipantHere’s hilly terrain for one of my Optio games using customisable hill segments (the city walls are customisable too):
You can create any shaped or sized contour terrain you please.
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Justin SwantonParticipantSorry about the problem accessing the dropbox file chaps. It’s a short document so perhaps easier to just put it here in a post:
HOW DOES OPTIO WORK?
This is really brief because there are too many rulesets and people have busy lives, and those who don’t are retired and welded to their old favourite rulesets anyway.
So…ARMY ORGANISATION
COMMAND AND CONTROL
MOVEMENT
COMBAT
VICTORY CONDITIONS (this is especially short)ARMY ORGANISATION
The battlefield has a square grid, with square measuring about 10x10cm. Stands are grouped into units and one unit occupies one square. There can be one or more stands in a unit – usual number is 2 or 4.Each unit has a counter base placed behind one of the stands. On the counter base there is a morale counter on the left, an order/disorder counter in the middle and a shooting counter on the right.
Morale counter
Units have a certain number of morale intervals, depending on the unit. Morale intervals divide into firm and shaken – shaken intervals inflict a minus modifier on the unit in combat. Combat results in a unit losing morale until it routs.
Order/disorder counter
A few things severely disorder a unit, at which point the order/disorder counter is flipped over from the green to the red side. Depending on the nature of the unit, order is restored back to green quickly or more slowly.
Shooting counter
This records shooting hits. The counter is rotates as hits are received. Each time it passes through the red triangle the unit loses one morale interval. The shooting counter also has a background colour that indicates which command that unit belongs to.
COMMAND AND CONTROL
Each army has one general and several commanders. These can be represented by individual figures or long counters like this:
For a unit to be in command, it must be part of a battleline or battle column in which one of the units has a general or commander. Each general or commander has his own command indicated by the colour of the shooting counters on units – he can put only those units into command. Like this:
If a unit is not part of a battleline or battle column it is out of command and moves very slowly.
The general and commander has no command range: They must physically be part of a battleline or battle column to put the units into command. There’s more to it than that – there’s a simplified orders system for commanders for example – but that’s enough to go with for now.
MOVEMENT
Simple movement
Units can move one, two or three squares per turn. One for slow types like heavy infantry, two for light infantry, elephants and the like, and three for mounted units. Movement can be straight ahead or diagonally – a diagonal move counts as one square movement. Units may also rotate 90 degrees, but that severely disorders every class of unit. You don’t do it unless you have to.
Manoeuvres
In addition to simple movement, a unit may perform one manoeuvre per turn. There are three kinds of manoeuvre:
- Forming column from a line or line from a column,
- Rotating 180 degrees
- Splitting one unit into two or combining two units into one
A word about columns: a column may turn 90 degrees any number of times without incurring disorder and at no movement cost, and a column may move twice in a turn, as near to enemy units as the player pleases. However columns cannot charge and do very badly if charged, so they need to be used with caution.
COMBAT
Shooting
Shooting units of both players may shoot once at any time during each player’s move (so twice in a turn). There is no separate shooting phase. Turn sequence BTW is:
1. Player A moves all his units and executes charges
2. Player B does likewise
3. Units in contact with enemy units execute melee combat at the end of the turnFour shooting hits inflict the loss of one morale interval. Generally, skirmisher types inflict one shooting hit on armoured targets and 2 on unarmoured, whilst massed shooters like archers inflict 2 shooting hits on armoured targets and 3 on unarmoured targets. Shooting ranges vary from the adjacent square in front of javelineers to 4 squares for heavy artillery. The usual things like trees block line of sight.
Charging
When a unit charges another unit it moves to overlap that unit’s square and contacts it, like this:
Charge combat resolution is deterministic. Unit A scores so many hits against unit B that scores so many hits back against unit A. The number of hits a unit can inflict are indicated on a combat table that is army specific. There are a few modifiers, e.g. terrain, disorder, shaken morale, etc.
I have a master combat table with something like 20 troop types and counting. It’s on an excel spreadsheet so if I need a combat table for two specific armies I just delete the unwanted troops types and print out what’s left.
To resolve charge combat just subtract the lesser number from the greater and inflict that many morale step losses on the loser. If charge combat is a draw nothing happens. Generals or commanders can be a tie breaker by inflicting an extra combat hit. In the case of both units having a general or commander, the general with the greater combat rating inflicts the extra combat hit. If both have the same combat rating then – you guessed it – nothing happens.
Melee
Melee combat happens at the end of the turn and is like charge combat except that in the case of a draw both units lose one morale. This means that a unit with a superior morale rating – e.g. it has 5 morale intervals and its opponent has 4 – will ultimately win melee even if both units inflict the same number of hits on each other.
In melee, generals and commanders are not tie-breakers, but they can enable one shaken morale interval to be treated as firm, nullifying the minus modifier for being shaken.
VICTORY
Units are rated resolute, average or brittle. if a third of an army’s stands (not units) are routed all the brittle units immediately rout. If half the stands are routed the average units immediately rout, and if two-thirds of an army’s stands are routed the resolute units immediately rout and it’s game over.
When a unit routs, nearby enemy units may have their morale boosted by one interval. This puts them ahead in the demoralisation race, so it’s important to rout enemy units as quickly as possible.
And that, for the essentials, is it.
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Justin SwantonParticipant“There is so much here that I like. Would be excellent even for warband-based games, perhaps where groups are searching various locales for treasures.”
The system is flexible: add more dummies, give variable movement rates to different blocks, and so on. Your one constraint is the need to use a square grid to define precisely where terrain features go, but you could just indicate those features on the terrain map with numbers to indicate their distance from the edge of the board and each other – or something like that.
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Justin SwantonParticipantThat really does work well. Looks good, and keeps the squares quite nicely and able to tell where the slopes really are. I’m guessing more tiers would be way more complicated due to how the matt would skew the squares?
I tried two tiers once and it worked fine. The only limit is how far the cloth will stretch with magnetic sections to hold it down the the magnetic sheeting beneath. If you have stretchy cloth I imagine three tiers would work, or perhaps just bigger hill sections.
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Justin SwantonParticipantI’ve used Google Earth for a lot of my mapmaking – the map in the pics above is from Palma in the Majorcas.
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Justin SwantonParticipantAdmittedly the hexon hills do look pretty. Re magnetic sheeting I suppose you can just replace the stuff from time to time. It’s not expensive, just R199 in S.A. for 610 x 1000mm which equates to £8,34 in the UK though I imagine they cost more there.
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Justin SwantonParticipantHi John, sure. Sending you an email now.
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Justin SwantonParticipantHi Andrew, I’ve written to John. Which battle report were you looking for?
Re X will beat Y every time, it doesn’t work like that. Suppose that you set your superior hoplites with 3 firm and 2 shaken morale intervals against my average hoplites with 2 firm and 2 shaken. Logic dictates that you will rout me in 4 turns. But should one of your nearby units rout I will have my morale increased by 1 interval. Furthermore if I am uphill then one of my shaken intervals will be treated as firm, making me virtually equal to you. Should I have a commander or general with my unit and you don’t, I will win an otherwise drawn charge combat and you will lose a morale interval right from the start. And if one of my peltast units succeeds in getting on the flank of your hoplites, your hoplites’ firm intervals will all be treated as shaken and you will lose. If any of my missile units is within range to shoot your hoplites, they will probably lose at least one morale interval before my hoplites reach routing point.
This is what happens in the game. The circumstances keep shifting and change the dumb logic of the deterministic combat mechanism. It’s impossible to predict how a fight will go, even with small armies.
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Justin SwantonParticipantI’ve finally stumbled on this site. Nice to see Aaron and Simon here.
The avatar is from the SoA game The Saxon Shore is Burning. (the artist gave his permission ) The chap looks shifty eyed, I know, but it was that or one of these:
And yes, I suppose that is a punt for the game. Check here if you’re interested.
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