Medieval mayhem with B.O.B.

This post was meant to be the next step in my ECW campaign but sadly...we now have house guests. (I know, right). Guests who expect the spare bedroom to be turned over to them for sleeping in, of all things, and guests who insist on eating their meals at the dining room table...otherwise known at Broom Towers as gaming platform B.

Anywhoo...while they were all off getting cold and thoroughly miserable at the beach I resolved to spend the five minutes they weren’t sucking at the teat of my largesse to test out some recent tinkering with my home brew WOTR rules and more importantly my “absent opponent”. 

One of my nobles with his household troops in a large company.

For the majority of my gaming life I’ve played solo battles using the “do the best thing for both sides” approach but in the last year I’ve noticed a bit of “favourite unit bias” creeping in. You know the one - where a bad combat result wasn’t quite what you thought was reasonable for your newly painted / best looking / most highly ranked chaps and the temptation to ignore or change the outcome insidiously creeps into your mind. In January I started using a basic Absent Opponent to control the manoeuvrings of the “other side” but in truth I wasn’t sure I’d got it quite right and so I continued to explore how other people had approached the problem. 

Weeks spent on the internet looking at AI algorithms and slick card systems made me realise that I didn’t want to spend every turn consulting a rabbit warren like decision tree nor did I want to construct an elaborate set of action cards for the enemy to draw from. 

Having settled on what I didn’t want, I created B.O.B. 

B.O.B. is, (as you’d quite rightly expect from me) a highly contrived acronym standing for my Battlefield Orders and Behaviour system. 

Having had a hand in creating my own nemesis as it were I’ve become tempted to go the rest of the way and dress up a potato, or perhaps a melon, in homemade (but period specific) military attire so that I can position it opposite me during a game - giving BOB a physical presence. The Current Mrs Broom rolled her eyes and sighed in approval when I mentioned the idea, so I suspect the concept has merit!*

I probably ought to mention as well that my home brew WOTR rules have undergone a massive transformation since they were last played in January, chiefly through the theft of a unit activation mechanism from Mr Cordery’s excellent Clash of Empires rules, discovered entirely by chance while researching project x.

In case anybody’s mildly interested in how B.O.B works I’ve sketched it out for you below.

Battlefield Orders and Behaviour - BOB

The absent opponents posture or “stance” may be defined as aggressive or defensive, and may differ across the width of the AO’s command. A single card drawn (from a deck of twelve) at the start of a game will determine the AO’s initial stance. The card is divided into three to reflect the two flanks and the centre of the battlefield and has icons showing which sections must adopt which posture.

 

A B.O.B. card also indicating a flank attack will be made.

Reading from left to right, (from the human players perspective) the areas include any unit in the 4 hexes on either flank or 5 hexes in the centre of a standard C&C battlefield. If a unit moves from one zone to another during the game, in its next activation it adopts whatever posture is indicated for the zone it now occupies.

 

Red triangles indicate an aggressive posture and blue squares a defensive one.

 

Activation

 

The AO’s units will behave according to their type within the confines of an aggressive or defensive posture such that:

 

Aggressive

 

o Aggressive - Missile units should firstly - try to shoot at targets, but if none are in range they should move in order to bring the closest one into range.

 

o Aggressive - Foot units should always try to move to melee the closest visible enemy. If none are in range they should move towards an objective (WOTR – units containing enemy leaders).

 

o Aggressive – Mounted knights (in WOTR) should ride straight at the closest enemy leaders position in order to engage in melee. They may ride straight through hexes of opposing levy leaving a disorder marker on them in the process but may not engage in combat. Other mounted unit types may only move towards opponents of equal or lesser quality (retinue or levy) with a view to engaging in melee – albeit without a charge combat bonus.

 

Defensive

 

o Defensive - Missile units should move towards the nearest cover (including adhoc defences and in hexes behind foot units) and if in cover already, fire or make ready. Units that have made ready must fire at a target as soon as it becomes visible or moves into range.

 

o Defensive - Foot units move in order to be adjacent to another friendly unit and may defend themselves in combat only.

 

o Defensive - Mounted knights should move to where the defence is weakest and dismount to be treated as foot (WOTR - replace mounted with a men at arms stand).

 

Changing posture

 

o Two melee losses, two combat induced retreats, two failed activations or the loss of a leader in a battlefield sector (in one turn) causes an involuntary move from aggressive to a defensive posture there.

 

o Two defensive melee wins, all units activating in a battlefield sector (in one turn) or no enemy attacks or advances in the sector causes a shift from a defensive to an offensive posture. 

 

o Posture change occurs in the admin phase at the end of the turn. A card is taken from the pack (as an aide memoire) to replace the original and reflect the current posture stances across the battlefield.

The new game rules include fire arcs, zones of control, unit facing, ammo supply for archers, disorder due to terrain or combat, large units, class, and a bespoke set of combat dice in the manner of C&C (should they ever arrive from America).

The game in question never came to a conclusion since my soaked and sand encrusted “guests” returned bearing fish and chips sometime around turn 5. Though I was forced to surrender gaming platform B...the chips were pretty decent compensation. 

For what it’s worth my game tactics were to sit on the ridge line and lob arrows at his advancing units. His flanking force would arrive when a cumulative dice score (added to at the end of every turn) exceeded or equalled 21 and they would appear on the indicated flank, 3 hexes closer to my board edge than his most advanced unit. His crossbowmen had managed to get into the lee of the ridge without loss and their advanced position meant that when his flanking force arrived on turn 4 they came on behind my lines. Ouch. 

Bobs flanking unit came on behind my lines...ouch!

On my left I sent a group of men at arms into the woods where his archers had just arrived. Disordered by the terrain and the run downhill they never managed a crippling blow despite their expected combat superiority. 

Rumble in the jungle? Nah...more like lots of asthmatic wheezing as my men at arms legged it across the valley then clanked around in the undergrowth.

A quick view of the “at start” battlefield.

The tipping point came when the units forced to retire under my archery fire bunched up and were forced to flee through each other causing mass panic and unit disintegration. 

With numerous disordered markers accrued whilst retiring under archery fire, the units set off a cascade off disintegration when forced to flee through each other.

On their way to put the boot in...my Billmen set off after BOB’s fleeing long spears.

This happened just as his flanking force and the fish and chips arrived - so I’ll never know how things might have turned out.

Conclusion 

Overall I was very pleased with the new rules and how BOB worked. I couldn’t guarantee his behaviour in advance, but he didn’t do anything strange either. I only had one moment of “mmm, never thought of that” in which I decided that any unit with 3 disorder tokens has become so combat ineffective it should be removed as a loss, so I think I might actually print this lot out and use them again. It occurs to me that with a little added period flavour the mechanisms might work for the ECW as well.

If you’ve just worked your way through this lot then go and have a stiff drink. You’ve deserved it.

Ooh hold on. Before you go I thought I’d share this interesting fact with you. It’s something I came across when researching the Martini Henry for project x (I’m going to have to think of a better name than that soon). I’ll quote directly from my source - Mr Haythorthwaite’s seminal Colonial Wars Source Book...

“A bullet did not fly upon a level trajectory, but was affected by gravity during its flight, and the arcing trajectory which had to be used varied according to rifle, projectile and range. To hit a target at 700 yds, for example, firing over even ground, a Martini-Henry bullet had to describe an arc of which the highest point was more than TWENTY FEET above ground level.”

Cripes!