Fantastic Frontiers: Morale and Seaboxes

For a game that focuses on high-level decisions (resource management), instead of tactical decisions (who attacks what), it's important to have a fast combat system. Wargames have fast combat, usually based off a single dice roll, and so they can include lots of resource management. Computer games can have pretty complicated combinations of dice rolling, but as long as they hide it in the CPU, it's all instantaneous. Early RPGs also used pretty fast and abstract systems (before the days of miniatures and grids), at least compared to today, and could easily fit a dozen battles into a single session. Obviously this is the kind of effect we're going for, in a hex crawl board game.

But it's also important to emulate the feel of what would happen with a detailed miniature or man-to-man system. A group of knights in plate mail should feel different (and actually play different) than a group of footmen, or archers, or elven pegasus-riders. The trick is to get the feel of a more complicated system without the time expense. That requires some kind of "fast combat" system that's more akin to the single dice roll of a wargame, as opposed to the "moving dozens of little figures" feel of a miniatures system.

Fast, of course, is a relative concept. I don't mind if battles take 10 minutes or so. But it's important that they scale sensibly. That is, if it takes 5 minutes to fight a battle with twenty combatants on each side, I don't want it to take 50 minutes for a battle with 200 combatants on each side. I'd say that an upper bound of around 10 minutes for a complicated battle is my limit. Scaling needs to be much less than linear. This is the opposite of most tactical battle systems, which scale worse than linearly (doubling your armies more than doubles the time it takes).

The simplest option would be to just given each unit a combat factor, and then calculate odds and roll the result off an odds table. That would probably take only a couple minutes. But it's not very interesting, and it doesn't capture the different feel of having different types of armies. The strategy of the game reduces to "get the most factors on the board for the least money".

I'm shooting for a game that defaults to the age of discovery (say, 1450 to 1650), a time when heavy breastplate armor overlapped with primitive cannons. That's not quite medieval any more, but not quite Napoleonic either. There are a few concepts I think need to be included in any good simulation of early modern warfare:

• Matchlocks and crossbows
• Field cannons
• Melee weapons and armor
• A discipline/morale system

The last of the four elements is the most important one to me, so it's where I start. Discipline and morale are the reason that 500 conquistadors can hold their ground against 10,000 tribal warriors. Any simple combat-factor system can't capture that dynamic. The really important question isn't so much how large the sides are, but who actually shows up at the point of contact between the opposing lines. That's a question of concentration of force.

To imagine how this might work, I'll talk a little about sea boxes in World in Flames. Sea boxes are an abstraction in naval combat that represents how likely it is that a given ship will arrive in a particular battle (that is, "find" the battle). Ships with more mobility get to occupy a higher box, and a search roll determines whether they're included. This is a roll-low system, and everything under the sea box value arrives to fight.

The "4-box" means a 4-in-10 chance of being included in the battle.

Once the battle begins, the casualties are mostly deterministic, with some adjustments for which side is more surprised. But mostly, it's a matter of figuring out what ships arrive at the point of contact and participate. That's exactly the idea I want!

Imagine that instead of having box numbers representing search capability, for ships wandering around on an empty ocean, we have boxes that represent morale and military discipline. A high "box" represents lots of morale, and the unit will bravely assault in the front lines. A low "box" indicates that the unit is cowering in the rear. With a 2d6 roll-low morale check, that would amount to giving each unit a morale "box" value between 1 (never participates) and 12 (always participates), with a bell curve of possibilities. This morale value could reflect both intrinsic properties (like training) and also situational ones (like weather or supply level).

This post is running a bit long, so next time I'll give an example of how this concept might work in practice. This approach to combat will be a little more complicated than WiF's system, since it will need to include not just melee engagements, but also the opening volleys of guns and artillery that can themselves adjust morale modifiers (nothing saps morale like seeing a row of musket barrels aimed at you!)