The real reason for my loss was victory conditions that, in hindsight, didn't make any sense. Rome outnumbered Carthage two to one at the beginning and by four to one at the end and yet I was declared the loser . In fact I had more units at the end than Carthage did at the beginning. I think the problem was in trying to give both sides a chance of success on the table whereas as part of a campaign, with the forces as they were, the Carthaginians actually shouldn't have had very much chance of success at all and we shouldn't have worried about evening it up when setting the battle up.
Anyway, I have once again ended a campaign turn in front and I can't be the only one to be surprised by that.
I agree that the Victory Conditions seem unfair, but I am very excited to see a rare appearance of "squexes" - something you really don't see a lot (hence the term "rare", of course). If you are desperately short of something to do, there is a reference to squexes here:
ReplyDeletehttp://prometheusinaspic.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/the-man-who-killed-pythagoras-and-other.html
As a footnote, I have subsequently learned that 3-sided football does exist, of course, and conceding the least goals is exactly how you win.
I suffer from no aversion towards hexes as such so I think the biggest advantage was James' ease of drawing the grid. I'm more than happy to give the experiment another go, but I think you've hit the nail on the head when you say that units seem to neither line up properly nor advance straight enough. That's probably just the prejudice of a table top wargamer. I can't imagine that in real life troops actually did either of those things.
DeleteAnd a form of football - or any sport - where one wins by not conceding doesn't seem likely to generate very exciting games. What would be the incentive to attack?
Correct - as you step from 2 protagonists to 3, something weird happens to strategy - in any game, or in political diplomacy, or whatever. This effect is commonplace, and expected, in multiplayer Risk or similar, but the simple(ish) move from 2 sides to 3 in any contest suddenly introduces scope for negotiation, and concepts like Balance of Power. This is probably blindingly obvious, but I'd never thought of it until I started dabbling in tri-chess. I don't know much at all about 3-sided football, but the scope for collective strategy is obvious - is match-fixing the norm in such sports?
DeleteOr, you didn't cycle through your units, pulling damaged ones out and replacing them with your abundant reserves.Once you did bring up your reserves Peter looked doomed to fail, but by that time you had lost too many units (you were both down to a couple of victory 'banners') and it became a lottery that Peter won. To be fair, you started to do this towards the end of the battle and I thought it obvious (though not earlier) that if you had planned to do this from the beginning Peter would have been in serious trouble. There is a great temptation in Commands and Colors to try and kill something with every card - I'm not sure it's the way to win.
ReplyDeleteAll perfectly true, but equally perfectly irrelevant to the question of whether the victory conditions made any sense.
DeleteReductio ad absurdum is the analysis tool of choice for this one. If Peter had selected a different mix i.e. one or two fewer, but higher value units, and we had set the victory conditions using the same mechanism then it would have been impossible for me to win even by destroying the whole Carthaginian army.