Quote from: Kiero;649210Ideally I'd like something that gets down to the unit level, like in a wargame (maybe I need a wargame?), so for example we might have one PC in charge of the heavy infantry, another leading the foot skirmishers and two others still leading the wings of cavalry. With each able to pursue their own foes in the context of the wider battle.

You're looking for the expanded D@W stuff that's available now for Kickstarter backers. Domains at War: Battles is a fast-playing wargame that gets down to the unit level (by default 120 foot, 60 mounted, or 30 giants make up one unit, but it's easily scaled for smaller or larger battles).

It uses the same hit-points-and-armor-class system as the Free Starter Edition (and the same extrapolation of the ACKS/retroclone rules for combat at the one-on-one scale), but adds tactical mechanics that make battles play out like you'd expect from reading accounts of ancient or medieval engagements. It's advantageous for foot troops to form shield walls, which can repel cavalry charges until missile fire (or a tornado conjured with control weather) creates a breach that the cavalry can break through and then start rolling up the enemy line. In playtests it's been used to do everything from Hannibal's elephants vs. Roman legions to adventurers and mercenaries vs. the denizens of B1: The Lost City.

The ways it engages individual PCs are:
- emphasis on the importance of individual commanders
- easy scaling in to resolve duels between heroes and then zooming out to see how that affects the battle at large

When I played an earlier version against Alex this fall, my side lost because we were too focused on using our PCs as leaders; each of us stuck with our units to get the PC's command-and-control benefits, meaning that his high-level wizard riding an undead black dragon could fry us one by one. Afterwards Alex pointed out that in a dungeon we would automatically have mobbed this guy; part of the strategy is switching between thinking of your guy as a leader of men, and thinking of him as part of a bad-ass adventuring party.

In the Gary Con "Battle of Zidium" game, the Auran general was killed in an individual duel by a barbarian archer with poisoned arrows, which was played out on the ACKS scale. The resulting hit to the Auran forces' morale caused many units to waver and some to rout, causing what had seemed like a certain victory to become hotly contested.

Speaking of stuff that's just in the Kickstarter, Domains at War: Campaigns has lots of rules support on strategic maneuvering. Armies on the march are thinking about maintaining their own line of supply and cutting the enemy's; using scouts to gain intelligence on the enemy force and outriders to foil the enemy's attempts to do the same; and trying to catch the opposing army unaware so that the battle can be fought as an ambush or envelopment. When I was looking for a 3E mass combat system I don't remember any that focused on this level; are there others out there that cover this?

Quote from: Tavis;649223You're looking for the expanded D@W stuff that's available now for Kickstarter backers. Domains at War: Battles is a fast-playing wargame that gets down to the unit level (by default 120 foot, 60 mounted, or 30 giants make up one unit, but it's easily scaled for smaller or larger battles).

It uses the same hit-points-and-armor-class system as the Free Starter Edition (and the same extrapolation of the ACKS/retroclone rules for combat at the one-on-one scale), but adds tactical mechanics that make battles play out like you'd expect from reading accounts of ancient or medieval engagements. It's advantageous for foot troops to form shield walls, which can repel cavalry charges until missile fire (or a tornado conjured with control weather) creates a breach that the cavalry can break through and then start rolling up the enemy line. In playtests it's been used to do everything from Hannibal's elephants vs. Roman legions to adventurers and mercenaries vs. the denizens of B1: The Lost City.

The ways it engages individual PCs are:
- emphasis on the importance of individual commanders
- easy scaling in to resolve duels between heroes and then zooming out to see how that affects the battle at large

When I played an earlier version against Alex this fall, my side lost because we were too focused on using our PCs as leaders; each of us stuck with our units to get the PC's command-and-control benefits, meaning that his high-level wizard riding an undead black dragon could fry us one by one. Afterwards Alex pointed out that in a dungeon we would automatically have mobbed this guy; part of the strategy is switching between thinking of your guy as a leader of men, and thinking of him as part of a bad-ass adventuring party.

In the Gary Con "Battle of Zidium" game, the Auran general was killed in an individual duel by a barbarian archer with poisoned arrows, which was played out on the ACKS scale. The resulting hit to the Auran forces' morale caused many units to waver and some to rout, causing what had seemed like a certain victory to become hotly contested.

Speaking of stuff that's just in the Kickstarter, Domains at War: Campaigns has lots of rules support on strategic maneuvering. Armies on the march are thinking about maintaining their own line of supply and cutting the enemy's; using scouts to gain intelligence on the enemy force and outriders to foil the enemy's attempts to do the same; and trying to catch the opposing army unaware so that the battle can be fought as an ambush or envelopment. When I was looking for a 3E mass combat system I don't remember any that focused on this level; are there others out there that cover this?

That sounds perfect for what I'm intending.

How easy is it to aggregate units together; for example if I've got 6000 heavy infantry in a phalanx, do I need to treat them as 50 units of 120 men, or is there some way of turning them into a single unit?

Or would I be better off treating it all as 1:10 scale, and assuming my units represent ten times as many, so five units of 1200 men? And thus cavalry would be units of 600.

How is artillery handled? I'm looking at the Hellenistic era, and they had all sorts of stuff (especially during sieges).

The Epic Battles section (chapter 6 of D@W:Battles) handles engagements where you might have 6,000 of a single kind of troop. If the total army size is 12,000 or more, you'd use brigade scale, where each unit is 1,920 infantry or 960 cavalry; each hex represents 240'; each combat round is 40 seconds; and unit hit points and damage are multiplied by 4. (The normal, or "company", scale divides each of these by 4).

This is what we used for Battles of Zidium. The changes in scale generally doesn't change the play of the game except for visualizing it as a more sweepint battlefield. The exception is how it interacts with the ACKS scale of heroes. Units fighting each other had 4x hit points, but did 4x damage to each other; the difference was that spells and heroic assaults did regular 1x damage, because a smaller percentage of each brigade-scale unit would be caught in the area of effect of a fireball. Likewise the expanded time scale meant we played four ACKS rounds of the duel between the general and the barbarian in between each D@W round. Since the general had great saves vs. poison this made their struggle a long-running counterpoint to the larger battle, and the players I talked to afterward agreed that this switching of focus from the heroic to the epic made the whole battle more immersive.

There's lots of support for artillery. In the Starter or Campaign setting, each artillery unit has a battle rating (as well as a price in gold pieces and information on how many crew it requires, for integration with RPG campaigns). Battles has detailed info on the minimum and maximum range of different artillery, the effects of firing it against characters vs. units, etc. Alex has a designer's note on sieges with an impressive formula you could use to assign statistics to any kind of Archimedean war machinery not already covered.

Quote from: Tavis;649243The Epic Battles section (chapter 6 of D@W:Battles) handles engagements where you might have 6,000 of a single kind of troop. If the total army size is 12,000 or more, you'd use brigade scale, where each unit is 1,920 infantry or 960 cavalry; each hex represents 240'; each combat round is 40 seconds; and unit hit points and damage are multiplied by 4. (The normal, or "company", scale divides each of these by 4).

This is what we used for Battles of Zidium. The changes in scale generally doesn't change the play of the game except for visualizing it as a more sweepint battlefield. The exception is how it interacts with the ACKS scale of heroes. Units fighting each other had 4x hit points, but did 4x damage to each other; the difference was that spells and heroic assaults did regular 1x damage, because a smaller percentage of each brigade-scale unit would be caught in the area of effect of a fireball. Likewise the expanded time scale meant we played four ACKS rounds of the duel between the general and the barbarian in between each D@W round. Since the general had great saves vs. poison this made their struggle a long-running counterpoint to the larger battle, and the players I talked to afterward agreed that this switching of focus from the heroic to the epic made the whole battle more immersive.

There's lots of support for artillery. In the Starter or Campaign setting, each artillery unit has a battle rating (as well as a price in gold pieces and information on how many crew it requires, for integration with RPG campaigns). Battles has detailed info on the minimum and maximum range of different artillery, the effects of firing it against characters vs. units, etc. Alex has a designer's note on sieges with an impressive formula you could use to assign statistics to any kind of Archimedean war machinery not already covered.

This is sounding better and better. Is there any way of distinguishing between the same sort of unit, but with differing equipment? For example heavy infantry who are spearmen, others who are pikemen, others still using swords/axes? Obviously the first two are more effective at warding off cavalry than the third.

It might be useful that ACKs is a D&D-ish game, given a possible system for this idea is Saga Edition (Star Wars), so some of the D&D-isms will translate easily.

Yeah, a unit's abilities depend on its equipment as well as its training. For example, units of formed foot need spears or polearms to form a phalanx, and mounted units with lances deal an extra point of damage while charging. Unusual situations can be extrapolated from the roleplaying level using the behind-the-scenes math Alex is laying out in the designer's notes. If you wanted to give flaming oil to each member of a unit, you could price it out using the ACKS rules and then do the same kind of calculations about how many enemies might be caught in the volley that went into the fireball damage. Or you could just decide that this was more or less like a burning hands spell, whose effects are already calculated.

At RPG.net someone is using D@W in their 4E game, and I agree it'd work well with Saga also.

I used Battlesystem a few times, as well as War Machine. Nowadays I roll an adjusted d12 to decide the outcome if the PCs can't or won't play a part in the battle.

If the PCs can affect the outcome then I use a quick but crude method. First I work out what the opposing forces are and where they are. The leaders of the opposing sides choose if/where/when the fighting begins, based on a surprise/initiative roll. Factors like terrain, facing, formation, morale, etc are tallied and if one side has a clear advantage the dice rolls (see below) get a bonus.

Then I break out a hundred of those tiny d6s and roll one for each attacker. A natural 6 is a hit. A defender can take as many hits as he has dice. Add +1 for the number of hit dice of the attacker (treat pluses as the next higher die: 1+1 is treated as 2HD).

Battles tend to be bloody and quick. I usually rule that a percentage can be recovered by the side that holds the field when the battle is over.

Swords & Spells is the only system I'm aware of that really models the D&D probabilities on a large scale and allows you to actually play out the battle like a wargame, but it has its own set of problems.

These days, I'm likely to use Field of Glory for mass combat, even though it's completely separated from D&D probabilities and rules and has nothing that allows integration of PCs into the battle.  (Although I think such things are pretty easy to house-rule.)  Another possibility is Hordes of the Things.

I'm also keeping a watchful eye on the OSRIC War & Battle supplement's development.

Quote from: Philotomy Jurament;649628Swords & Spells is the only system I'm aware of that really models the D&D probabilities on a large scale and allows you to actually play out the battle like a wargame, but it has its own set of problems.

Not for long...see the discussion of ACKS: Domains at War above.

Quote from: Philotomy Jurament;649628These days, I'm likely to use Field of Glory for mass combat...

I like Field of Glory, but as its own thing. I want something that feels like an extension of the game I'm already playing.

Quote from: Philotomy Jurament;649628I'm also keeping a watchful eye on the OSRIC War & Battle supplement's development.

Interesting. I hadn't heard of this, but I'll give it a look. EDIT: some quick googling hasn't turned up anything; do you have a link to someplace I can find out more?

I used the rules from Divine Right to handle mass combat.

I have not actually got to use mass combat in one of my games yet, but it has always sort of been on my to do list. I have TLG's Fields of Battle but haven't really read it yet, as it stand I would probably use Two Hour Wargames Rally Round the King . I really have just started war-gaming though so I really can't make an educated statement on this subject.

I have always wanted to do an OD&D campaign that makes full use the various combat systems in Chainmail, eventually having the PC's establish their own domains and begin leading armies from time to time. Alas I doubt if I will ever get such an idea off the ground.

Quote from: Bobloblah;650473Not for long...see the discussion of ACKS: Domains at War above.

Oh, there's also Delta's Book of War, but I haven't played it, so I don't have a feel for how successfully it models D&D combat on a larger scale.  But I know that keeping close to that model was one of its design goals.

QuoteInteresting. I hadn't heard of this, but I'll give it a look. EDIT: some quick googling hasn't turned up anything; do you have a link to someplace I can find out more?

Well, it's not finished, and it's not on a schedule (it'll be ready when it's ready), but here's the main thread about it:
http://www.knights-n-knaves.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=5832

Also:
http://www.knights-n-knaves.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=11262
http://www.knights-n-knaves.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=10328

Quote from: Philotomy Jurament;650532Oh, there's also Delta's Book of War, but I haven't played it, so I don't have a feel for how successfully it models D&D combat on a larger scale.  But I know that keeping close to that model was one of its design goals.

I used Book of War for a session of mass combat in my White Sandbox campaign and had a great time. Although my experience was with a playtest version of the rules and may no longer be accurate, my sense was that it fills a different niche than Domains at War. The default unit sizes are smaller (10 foot troops instead of 120 per unit) - although you could scale either ruleset up or down, I'd reach for Book of War if I wanted to do more of a skirmish where player character actions are resolved largely on the roleplaying scale, and Domains at War: Battles if the players wanted their characters to be commanders with rules that reflected their ability to inspire the larger units within their zone of control.

Book of War also defaults to OD&D for the stuff covered in Domains at War: Campaigns or the first section described in that War & Battle thread: "guidelines for playing at the strategic level of the game, such as managing garrisons, levying war taxes, recruiting and organising soldiers, training and equipping recruits, acquiring horses, feeding and paying an army, spying on the enemy, assassinations, diplomacy, building fortifications, and so on." Thinking in the terms required to figure out how many troops the Gynarch could field in that session definitely deepened my understanding of the White Sandbox setting and the OD&D rules, but even as a seasoned scrutinizer of The First Fantasy Campaign I'm glad to have Campaigns to guide questions like "how many soldiers will respond to a call to arms in a kingdom spanning twenty six-mile hexes?"