Green Pass Campaign: Post Battle Analysis

The Campaigns book (the other half of the rules, covering recruiting, training, supply, and other operational components of the game) includes a fast-combat resolution method. This is nice in a campaign game to avoid having to play out totally imbalanced fights. They can instead be approximated by a few dice rolls. But is also provides a good aid for designing scenarios, which would have been helpful last night.
For the battle last night, the D.E.F. forces were rated at a combined Battle Rating of 56, and the Legions of the Undying at 93 or so (depending on which units were counted as excluded from command limits). In particular, the two wyvern units were individually worth BR 30 each, suggesting that they could have even won the field single-handed (which is nearly what happened). A fair fight based on BR would probably have been to include just one wyvern unit, instead of two. (And then to not be stupid about targeting it.)

The Campaigns book also lists the consequences of victory and defeat in a full campaign game:

Time to plunder!

• Units that are destroyed or routed result in some number of deaths, but some number of mere injuries. Any destroyed unit has a 50% survival rate of lightly-wounded members, which allows two such units to be combined to reconstitute a full unit after a week (or alternately, them to be refilled from a reserve, or added to the reserve themselves). In a defeat, however, these survivors are claimed as prisoners of war.
• Routed units fare even better. Only 25% of them are lost, and the others escape to rejoin the retreating army. These lost units are prisoners if their side loses, or deserters otherwise. Allowing your army to be routed out of a losing battle is often a sensible decision. ("Every man for himself!")
• The winning side gets to claim spoils of war from each dead or captive enemy. The value of spoils is the cost of one-month's salary for each defeated soldier.  I work that out to 4905 gold for last night.
• Captives can be sold (either for ransom, or if you're more evil, into slavery) for 40 gp each. That's another 5700 gp from last night, for a total of 10,605 gp. Leaders are worth more. The rules don't specify how to determine whether a leader is really dead or just injured, so I assume you could dice for it. Maybe a powerful cleric could resurrect a dead enemy leader just to sell him back for a king's ransom!
• Or interrogate him for intelligence data. There are rules for that too, somewhere.
• Evil armies can feed dead soldiers to their carnivorous beasts to reduce supply costs. Selling them into slavery is probably more lucrative, but I just want to point out that there are five paragraphs of rules covering this option. Five!
• Gold is distributed 50% to mercenaries (and effectively lost), but the other 50% is claimed by the general. So the winning general of that battle (Warchief Khazay) should get 5302 gold.
• The winning side also gets experience from the win, equal to the wage value of defeated enemies less the value of defeated allies. In this case, 10,605 gold would amount to 10,605 experience, for a flawless victory. Half goes to the general, and the other half is divided between commanders. So the general gets 5302 exp, and the commanders get 2651 each.
• Lieutenants ordinarily get no experience, unless they detach and fight as an independent hero group (in which case they get the exact exp they'd get in a man-to-man RPG battle).
• Troops also get small amounts of experience equal to the gold they divide between them (about 10 gp in this battle). Usually this is a small amount of experience, since armies are large. In principle, after earning 100 experience, they will advance to become veterans (basically, 1st level fighters), with additional hit points and attack/saving throw bonuses.

Pulling gold teeth out of corpses on the battlefield isn't why mercenaries go to war. The real money (and experience) comes from conquering and looting a castle and its domain. Pillaging a large domain (like the sample one I generated) would yield something like 60,000 gold (and thousands of slaves, if your alignment rolls that way), plus the substantial treasury of the castle itself with potentially 100,000's of gp, and rare magical artifacts. That still gets divided rather thinly over the number of troops required to reduce a stronghold, but it definitely enriches the conquering general!

Other observations about last night's playtest of the (still pre-release beta) version of the Domains at War: Battles ruleset:

1. Laying the map the wrong way almost certainly contributed to some awkwardness of the system. The units are supposed to orient themselves with the up-down axis of the map, rather than being forced to point at 30-degree angles to it. Not only was it unfamiliar because the units were never facing a hex side, but also because they weren't really facing "forward" or "backward", making rules that involved those directions ambiguous.
2. I'm still not sure I understand the threat rules for flyers. The only definite statement I can find is that flyers can't be threatened while they move, and they can always pick their elevation. But do they threaten anything themselves? Can archers adjacent to them still fire at them from front hexes? From any adjacent hexes?
3. Hills seemed to have a minimal effect on the game, but only because of the way I used them. I think this is actually because hills are "just the elevation", and many hills are supposed to overlay with other terrain types. For example, you're allowed to make "forested hills" or "rough hills", etc, in order to gain other attributes that (for example) slow down movement -- which is more the way hills function in other game systems. Terrain in this system is more modular than others, so effects can stack to give more specific results.
4. Flyers (wyverns in this case) were very powerful, due to a combination of the high armor class of a formed unit with the flexibility of a loose unit. They could always convert their small amounts of damage into a withdrawal, making them invincible to anything but a sequence of several coordinated attacks.
5. I totally forgot about all my javelins, which probably would have done some meaningful damage during the early phases when the Undying army was throwing the lone wyvern at me. Keeping a tight formation and surrounding it with spear-chucking infantry and light cavalry might have been enough to knock it down, especially if I could coordinate two divisions and use the first to disorganize it and the second for the kill. I'm not used to playing a system with javelins!
6. I added a Green Pass map to the battle report, to show the local environs. This entire map occupies a single hex on the world map.