Mass Combat

[AK_Aramis 1,002]

Several issues

• Damage and Strength: Appear to be per cohort, but rules imply per army
• Panic appears to be per army, while morale appears to be per cohort.
• Almost all actions on the list include movement

 

If strength and damage are tracked per cohort, how big is a cohort?

This all feels very rushed and very unfinished.

Within the adventure, the mismatches to the rules seem even more problematic.

[nameless ronin 706]

Haven’t tried this part of the beta yet, but the rules had me scratching my head too.

[AK_Aramis 1,002]

Am at that point in the adventure where it's essential.

[Magnus Grendel 11,673]

On 10/29/2017 at 6:21 AM, AK_Aramis said:

Several issues

• Damage and Strength: Appear to be per cohort, but rules imply per army
• Panic appears to be per army, while morale appears to be per cohort.
• Almost all actions on the list include movement

 

If strength and damage are tracked per cohort, how big is a cohort?

This all feels very rushed and very unfinished.

Within the adventure, the mismatches to the rules seem even more problematic.

Strength and Discipline are per army.

Every leader has a cohort, their attacks and actions all cause attrition and panic feeding into a communal 'pool' of damage to the enemy army (or removing it from your communal pool of damage).

It only matters which enemy cohort you're attacking if:

• You're trying to meet the 'capture a position' objective (which requires assaults against that specific cohort to do 8 casualties)
• You're trying to wipe out a cohort (which requires you to do casualties equal to 1/4 of the army's strength in assaults against that specific cohort) 
• One cohort is noticeably easier to hit/harder to hit than the rest of the army (e.g. in A Ronin's Path, the Nezumi aren't in a fortified position on the wall, so the Shadowlander's best approach is butchering them if everyone else is up top)

 

Yes, all the mass combat actions except Rally are "...and movement" actions. This does make the water opportunities:

Quote

Reduce the TN of that leader’s next check for a Movement action by 1 per  spent this way.

and

Quote

That leader’s cohort cannot perform Movement actions until the beginning of your next turn. 

Really, really powerful.

At the same time, Rally is probably one of the most useful options for a 'spare' or especially beleaguered cohort, because it's your 'assist' action -with the added bonus of removing panic at the same time. If you've got 4 or so cohorts, there's a real value (when assaulting a fortified position) in having one or two leader's cohorts assisting the cohort of the best commander.

Also remember that initiative is only a matter between the two commanders - they roll off, then alternating picking individual cohorts. 

E.g. in the Ronin's path battle, I would recommend Old Prickly and Teeth-Taker (both of whom are pretty poor commanders, with a maximum ring score of 3 and only 1-2 martial ranks) are best off assisting and providing extra skill dice to the rank 4 Dark Moto and Maho-Tsukai. 

 

The battle in the beta adventure is a bit confused. Tonomatsu's army abilities are different to the generic samurai army ones, Kazanagan no Oni's army is half the strength of a normal shadowlands horde (their normal main strength), the wall is a fortification massively outside the power scale of the normal rules (meaning you need a basically un-achievable 6 bonus successes to do any casualties with an assault, whilst one assault which fails to do this hands the Grind Them Down objective to the samurai)

The rules for mass combat are okay, but I feel like they're poorly done in this specific case.

Edited October 30, 2017 by Magnus Grendel