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February 29, 2008

Field of Glory AAR [Updated]

Once in a great while a set of rules becomes the "hot property" of the moment. A while back Warmachine came along and captured the hearts and minds of many disaffected Warhammer players in providing a deeper game. Then there's Flames of War which became the first set of historical rules to received a lot of people who used to play only scifi and fantasy. Now we have Field of Glory [FOG] who's trying to be the "gateway" game for Ancients.

FOG is published by Osprey books who's known to put out attractive and concise books on military history subjects. The first thing one would notice about FoG is its physical quality: It comes in a nicely printed hardback book, with nice thick quality pages and full color treatment (in fact it's better quality paper than their Osprey books). There are pages full of illustrations cribbed from their books, pictures of miniatures (somewhat uneven in quality), and some VERY nice full color diagrams which explains the various rules situations. If you are the type that gets seduced by eye candy in rules, FoG can't be beat.

Among miniature periods Ancient is kinda unique (or notorious) in that it's often thought of as A) tournament minded (in that players will min/max their armies in order to win, therefore end up with very unhistorical tactics in order to exploit the rules), B) Ahistorical matchup (Aztecs vs Mongols could be typical ancient matchups in a tournament). Rules set often falls into the "tournament mindset" (most of the mainstream rules such as WRG, DBx, and to a lesser extend WAB and rules like Tactica, Armati). By tournament mindset I mean that rules are often written to prevent rule lawyering, and to ensure that any conceivable matchups can be handled by the rules (i.e in real life an English longbow have probably never encountered a Meso -American obsidian blade, but there must be a forum post somewhere clarifying what the interaction will be).

FoG attempts to be tournament friendly and yet be "historically accurate". It claims to achieve that by eliminating "cheese" and to provide rules that encourages historical behavior of the troops. It also claimed to be more "playable" and easier to understand than its predecessors (the DBx family, since the author Richard Bodley Scott was a co-author of DBx. It all sounded like lofty goals, and combined with eye candy, I decided to bite (I actually joined the Playtest Team.

DESCRIPTION OF THE RULES
My first impression upon reading through the rules is that they try to be "more historical" than WRG/DBx, and yet is trying to make sure that the rules doesn't become a tool of the rules lawyers. Whether it's tournament rules lawyering free or not will take time (those guys need time to find all the cheese), but the rules seems to reward historical bahavior of the troops.

The was touted to be "simple" and "newbie friendly". On that front I think it's less successful. If the author wants to compare favorably with rules like Flames of War in drawing in people who have never played historicals before, then I think he did not do a good job. While easy to read for anyone who has to decipher Barkerese, if you are used to a more "conversational" style of rules like GW or FoW, its pages of DRM will likely cause some confusion.

MECHANICS
It's a IGO-UGO system, with a traditional move, shoot, melee setup. SOme of the exceptions to that:
1) Some of the phases are simultaneous, mainly the shooting phase (both players shoot during both player's bound), and the Joint Action Phase (where both side gets to handle routers, rally, and move commanders).
2) There's an IMPACT phase. In this phase the acting player declares all charges, and carries them out. Any melee resulting from the charge is resolved then and there, before shooting or other melee (more on this later).
3) There's a Interception Charge, where none phasing player may preempt a charge if the a charging unit is charging into a "Zone of Influence" of a unit capable of interception. This gives some thought for the player to think about holding a reserve and things like covering one's flank.

IMPACT VS MELEE
The rules try to emphasize the difference between a charge combat (i.e. where great benefit are given to troops types like impact foot (Romans, Gauls) and knights), and melee combat (if both side survives a charge, then qualities such as staying power, overlap, weight of numbers begin to matter more). It's a good model to strive for and one gets a distinct flavor thinking about the difference between the 2 styles of combat. In our first playthrough though I found that combat is very attritional, in that usually there are no quick kill/routs, and one have to work on lowering the morale of the enemy through multiple turns (one has to get an enemy from steady to disrupted, then if they fail cohesion check again they go to Fragmented, then the last stage is broken/rout).

In my mind the charge type of combat should have a possibility of having the loser of a charge gets carried away by the victorious charger, and if both side made that, then it goes into a slow grudge match of attritional warfare. Instead although mathematically targets are more likely to lose cohesion check if they paint more stuff, we found that you get similar results (just with a different batch of modifiers). Ideally the charge combat should be much more dicey (no pun intended) affair then a grindout melee.

Combat is a clever combination of "list of modifiers a la WRG", and the WAB's handful of dice approach. Basically both side goes down the charge to figure out what their Point of Adventage count is (then that result will modify what kinda of "to hit" on handful of dice will be). For example if no one has an advantage we both need 4's on a D6 to score a hit. If I have one up on POA then I need 4's to hit you, but you need a 5's or more to hit me.

Quality of the troops are expressed as re rolls. So if you are superior in quality, you get to re-roll any 1's on a D6. I think it's a simple way to handle different troop quality.

MISSILE FIRE
Rolling for missile hit is the same process as that of melee (A good thing). Shooting is definitely de-emphasized. One need to inflict at least 1 hit for every 3 figures in the target in order to cause a cohesion check. Thus one need large body of shooters with lots of dice in order to even get a chance to do some damage. Not sure if this is realistic (at least when it comes to medieval time when missiles plays a larger role IMO), but for the Ancient period is probably spot on.

CONCLUSION
There are many positives about the rules
+ Awesome physical presentation.
+ Easier to read than the competition (WRG, DBx, Warrior).
+ Clear and concise on the most part.
+ Award historical tactics.
+ Simplified army list/army building encourages historical armies, not min/max super troops.
+ A clever bland of "list of DRM" and "Bucket of dice" systems of combat
+ Distinction between impact and melee combat
+ Likely to generate interest in reviving the ancient scene whether you like the rules or not.

Some negatives:
- Still NOT an "easy" set of rules
- Not really newbie friendly as advertised
- Need lots of troops to have a quality game ("Lots" defined as DBM/WRG sized)
- There are still some geometry involved (though probably less abusive than DBx).
- Game time could be long (could just be us learning the rules, will certain revise upon further playing).

Some neutral observations:
* One of the rule's stated goal is to have rules written to discourage rule lawyering and cheese. Jury is still out on that one.
* In effective missiles might unrealistically penalize "shooty" armies like the English HYW or Mongols. (no prove, will play with my Mongols to see how it works).

Posted by msoong at February 29, 2008 01:02 AM

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