From: mst@vexpert.dbai.tuwien.ac.at (Markus Stumptner) Subject: REVIEW: SPQR Date: 15 Sep 1994 12:17:28 GMT Great Battles of Alexander and the Roman counterpart, SPQR, are probably the most acclaimed tactical ancients system around. Units accumulate cohesion hits (i.e., disruption) through movement (slowly) and combat (big time). If they reach their limit, determined by unit quality, they rout. The combat system places emphasis on choosing the right types of units to engage, i.e., don't use cavalry against infantry unless you manage a flank attack. Very convincing. Unfortunately, the command/movement system is not nearly as good. Leaders are activated one after the other, can give a certain number of orders (mostly movement). Good leaders can attempt to be activated repeatedly in a turn (called "momentum") or interrupt the "momentum" of a weaker leader ("trumping"). This leads to complete anomalies like units on the charge stopping because there is no leader present to give them a new movement command the next turn, or especially in GBoA, where the Persians have lots of weak leaders, an inability to launch large-scale cavalry attacks - not a problem historically. Still, you have lots of tactical options open to you, and there's a lot of fun (though not much history) in micro- maneuvering your units. Summary: probably the best ancients games around, but not very historical in the feel of play. (Though appropriately chosen leader and troop quality ratings will usually lead to the historical outcome). Solitaire playability is about average (there is no hidden information to deal with). In fact, it could be claimed that at least GBoA is better for solitaire play because the scenarios are so unbalanced (and don't contain any yardstick for measuring degree of success). Markus Stumptner ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: koubaje@warp6.cs.misu.NoDak.edu (Jeff Kouba) Subject: REVIEW: SPQR Date: Fri, 16 Sep 1994 20:53:06 GMT If you are interested in games on ancient warfare, run, walk or crawl to your nearest game store to buy The Great Battles of Alexander and SPQR. You won't find any finer games on the era than these. I dare say it would be hard to find a more flexible tactical game system in any game of any era. When you take into account all the modules available for these games, there is no better way to study ancient warfare than with these games. The Great Battles of Alexander will be coming out in a 2nd edition, which as I understand it, means updated graphics and 1 more battle, that being the Battle of the Hydaspes. (This battle used to be in the module JUGGERNAUT. That module is out of print, and will now be part of the 2nd ed. game.) So, you might want to wait before this comes out before getting the Alexander game. This does relate to my one great beef with GMT Games, though. They are not very good at all at putting out products on their published dates. They are almost always way behind on most anything. For instance, at one point they were saying the GBoA 2nd ed. game would be out by this fall. After calling them, they now say they don't even have a printing date set. Same with the Alesia module for the Julius Caesar game. It was said to be out this summer. I called them yesterday, and it will be probably be months before this game is out. Regarding their C3I magazine, (which is an excellent magazine), they told me the 4th issue would be out at the end of August. Also yesterday, they now say it will be October. I can only guess at the current state of other entries in the Great Battles of History series. Oh well, back to the game system. To me, the great joy of playing this game comes from the many combinations of shock combat the game provides. Armies of the era had light infantry, medium infantry, heavy infantry, missle-throwing skirmishers, light and heavy cavalry, lancers, legions, elephants, chariots, etc... The game system is based around the central tenent that you would try to push your opponent back and try to disrupt his formation. Soldiers of the era usually lined up very close to each other, presenting a formidable wall of weapons and armor. It has hard to cut down soldiers in this formation, hence the desire to break them up into disorganized units. So, to do this, you had to have the right weapon sysems. For example, it was very hard for lightly armed troops to disrupt heavily armed troops, but easy for the reverse. It would be hard for cavalry charging headlong into a wall of spears to disrupt infantry, but easy if the cavalry was attacking their undefended rear. (It was easier for charging infantry, too!) The game system recreates this aspect of ancient battle. As commander, you are required to attack your opponent with the needed weapon system, while making sure your flanks and rear are defended. With all the different types of units I mentioned above, there are any number of possibilities for combat, making it a varied and always interesting game. You need to present a solid front to the enemy so they don't come pouring through gaps in your line, so you need to make sure you don't get overextended in spots. Once your flanks are laid bare, you're done for. Part of the enjoyment of these games comes from the graphics. From top to bottom, I have not seen any game (which uses counters and hex maps) with better graphics. The detail on the counters is incredible. Rodger MacGowan deserves many kudos. As another poster mentioned, there are down sides to the game, which I think arise from the necessity to create a playable system. Often, a side is at a disadvantage because they have poor leaders. The Persians in GBoA are a classic example. There, the worst Persian leaders have an Initiative of 2 or 3 (out of 10), whereas Alexander has 7. Not only can the Persians give just a few orders, they don't usually get Momentum (the opportunity to give more orders in the same turn). On the other hand, Alexander can give 7 orders and easily get momentum (by rolling his Initiative or less on a 10-sided dice). So, Alexander can give 21 orders to an opponent's 3, thereby just burying the enemy. I think the designers did this to give a sense of how and why certain leaders (Alexander, Scipio, Hannibal, etc...) are remembered to this day. The game recreates their genius and ability to quickly respond to challenges by giving them higher Initiatives, thus allowing them to outmaneuver the enemy before he can get going. True, a Persian leader can't send many units of cavalry into action, as perhaps they could historically, but for game purposes, the player can see why the better leader usually won. One small point that isn't historical but necessary for game purposes involves Cohesion hits. Each unit has a Troop Quality (TQ) rating. This is the most important rating in the game for combat units. These are numbers between 0 and 10 (the game is based on a 10-sided dice) with the lowest TQ being 3, and the highest being a 9. This rating reflects how effective a unit is in combat, and how able and willing they are to withstand combat. A lousy, rock bottom, conscript unit will have a TQ of 3 or 4, whereas a crack Roman legion or the best of Alexander's cavalry will have a TQ of 8 or so. In combat, units take what is called Cohesion hits. When a unit takes a total of Cohesion hits equal to its TQ, it routs. This means the unit can no longer participate in combat. Instead, it heads for its Retreat edge, and will leave the battlefield unless a leader rallies it. So, it doesn't take much to rout a lousy unit, but it takes a fair amount of damage to rout the best troops. Relating this to what I said about watching your flanks, combat damage is doubled for a unit being attacked through the rear or flanks! So, a crack unit might be routed in one combat phase if a enemy unit can get around behind them. But, to relate what the one ahistorical point about all this is, a unit also takes Cohesion hits when moving over rough terrain, such as rivers, woods, uphill, downhill, etc... This reflects the disruption in formation. What this means is that a unit can be miles (actually, yards) behind the front lines, with no enemy units around, and say this unit is walking uphill, or over rough terrain. Conceivably, the unit could take enough Cohesion hits to cause it to rout, sending it off the map, even if no enemy unit ever came near it! But again, this is something that arose out of game design purposes. From what I have said before, I think you can see that these games would be excellent for solitaire purposes. True, like most solitaire games, there are no surprises, because you know what each side will do. You are moving for both sides. But, the unique game system allows you to see how ancient warfare was conducted. You can move the pieces around and see the interplay between the various types of weapons systems. You can set up the battles and see what the ancient commanders were faced with, and why they made the decisions they did. You can see why these decisions were wrong or right. You can do all this because of the simple yet varied combat system. I don't think there will ever be any better games on this era for this scale. Hence, my wish that GMT would be faster at putting out their games so I could give them lots of my money for this great series of games! Jeff Kouba ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: mst@vexpert.dbai.tuwien.ac.at (Markus Stumptner) Subject: REVIEW: SPQR Date: 22 Sep 1994 13:11:24 GMT OK, here it is. It's a bit long, unfortunately. (It also took some time to compose. Note to Jeff Kouba: In case you're wondering, I wrote that first paragraph *before* I read your followup question on the shock combat system. :-) Let me start out with what I liked. That, basically, is the combat system: cohesion hits, the attacker/defender superiority stuff, and also the idea of accumulating cohesion hits through movement). The first comment one usually reads is the "scissors-paper" view of ancients combat that the system represents, and the necessity to use combined arms correctly. I agree the system does a very good job at this. I'm also quite impressed by the orders of battle (the reason why I didn't sell my copy of GBoA). Btw, I have somewhat more experience with GBoA than SPQR, so my comments are mostly based on the former, but they still apply. I've played nothing in the series that came out after SPQR. Many of the scenarios have minor problems (such as the fact that at the Granicus scenario, the Persian rout edge is directly behind their line, so that if a unit routs, it's gone immediately, while the Macedonians have some time to catch theirs), but I'll concentrate on the faults we found with the system. The main annoyance, to me, was the movement system. The second was the rout/rally mechanism. All references to historical happenings in my elaborations include a huge IMHO. If one can convince me I was wrong and the historical battles did work this way, go ahead and restore my trust in the game. The movement system has three goals: interactivity, to show the shifting initiative in those battles, and allow players to grasp those fleeting opportunities that arise during battle, restrictions to movement, because coordination on the ancient battlefield was not too good, and bringing out the quality differences between leaders. Momentum and trumping are, to a degree, successful. However, the effectiveness of mechanisms that change movement order suffers if the scale isn't right. In West End's Tank Leader games (which have similar possibilities), "trumping" is OK, because longer weapons ranges and opportunity fire mean that it's not possible to provide completely unrealistic tricks through the resulting double movement rates. In GBoA/SPQR, a cavalry unit with perfect sight to all sides cannot react to meet a charge from head-on, because 8 movement points for cavalry means you can go from battleline to far behind the enemy lines in one turn - not much better than traditional move-fight. In fact, I've noticed a tendency of players to deploy cavalry in "fortress" patterns, to avoid its being taken in the flank. This is doable in the game, but appears ridiculous to me in historical terms. And momentum, in addition, means that a given unit can triple its speed in a turn, though why it's top speed should depend on the strategic ability of its general is not clear. OK, you say, that is supposed to represent reaction speed of the commanding general, not actual movement speed. But then why not simply provide for a true "interruption" mechanism instead of the trumping mechanism that allows changing the move/fight sequence only if the opponent "allows" it? Another argument could be made: That momentum actually represents not greater speed of the phasing player, but instead slower reactions of the non-phasing player, whose units and commanders can't react in time because they are dumb with surprise (like the Greek mercenaries at the Granicus and the Spartan Allies at Leuktra, where Epaminondas introduced the oblique phalanx). Not unreasonable to assume, Mark Herman has used such techniques before (in Pacific War). But then, the designer's notes should really acknowledge that shifting timescale. They don't. And anyway, the temporal distortion such a mechanism produces is OK in a game where you are keeping track of a half dozen task forces spread over a huge map. Not in a game where you have a hundred or so units compressed in a narrow space. And in any case, the surprise at Leuktra or Granicus was due to the completely unexpected situation facing these units, not the fact that their commanders could not order more than three to move at one time. Next, "orders" (including the # of orders meaning of the initiative rating). Worst aspect: A moving unit that does not get a new order the next turn stops moving. Good example: At Issus, the attempt to produce a cavalry charge with the right Persian wing has the cavalry leapfrogging in successive waves across the Pinarus because only five can be moved in a turn (well, more in theory, but Nabarzanes then needs momentum without being trumped by Alexander - not the most common turn of events). You need half an hour to an hour in game time to get all that cavalry moving. Now, this is weird already. But on the other hand, you can get them moving quite well by having Thymondas (the Greek hoplite commander!) and Darius visit Nabarzanes on the right wing to give him a hand in sorting out his troops. This is positively bizarre. By the way, the left wing at Gaugamela has the same problem. It's not that the Persian cavalry at Gaugamela did not get to attack in time - they did, but the attack was held off. Note that this has nothing to do with "slavish attention to absolute accuracy" - instead it's fundamental flaw in the way the battle develops, and what you spend your time concentrating on to be successful in play. Tricksing with your spare command allowances to get your charge across is a classic case of fighting the system, not the battle. Last, individual unit control. I've already talked about the problem that in cavalry battles, whichever unit happens to move first once they get in range (eight hexes or more if you get momentum) will take the enemy in the flank, by moving around him. You get elaborate positioning of units to prevent/allow a maximum number of flank attacks, moving skirmishers around to capture defending units in ZOCs. Was this how those battles worked? Not to my knowledge. I would liken this aspect to Wooden Ships and Iron Men. The latter is an incredible lot of fun (when I entered the hobby, I didn't play anything else for years). It has a quite successful combat system, and unless one used house rules or a large number of players, can lead to quite ahistorical courses of battle, because there are no realistic restrictions in terms of command control. Nothing keeps you from executing superbly timed complex maneuvers that would have been completely impossible for an admiral of the era to orchestrate, quite apart from the fact that the support of his captains decided the success of his plans. On both British and French side, the decisiveness of battles hinged on the question if individual captains or squadron leaders would follow the lead of their superiors or not - due to lack of initiative, aggressiveness, or just plain ignorance of what was wanted of them. The combat system of GBoA/SPQR is great. The Command/Movement system has a number of awkward abstractions that give battles a stilted, unreal feel and means that the way in which engagements come about is not realistic even if the net effect is the same. OK. Routing/rallying. The effect of leaders with regard to this is the ability to remove cohesion hits away from the furor of battle, somewhat reducing the danger of routing (not too much, since a given column of the combat table usually will have only small differences between rolls of 0 and 9), and rallying troops *after* they've routed. The second is underrepresented, since the main activity of leaders at the time actually was keeping morale high *during* combat, which is why they usually led from the front (somewhat different for Roman times). Basically, it raised the troops' morale and being under the eye of their commander may also have made them less likely to flinch from entering the thick of battle. Once they *did* rout, and all the sources I've seen agree on this, the first thing they did was to throw away their weapons and shields to run faster, from which point they were worthless in terms of continuing the battle. Instead, here we have them running away at top speed, being intercepted by some leader to be moved at top speed back to the battle as soon as possible. Instead of forming a truly hardened point, units close to leaders are used in a kind of rubber- band process, to be slung repeatedly at the enemy line. Now, granted that you will lose a percentage due to failed rally rolls, but the weird part is that especially Alexander, who had virtually no routs/rallies in his battles, is the most adept at this due to his high initiative. Command range plays a role in rallying too - Alexander can rally his troops by shouting at them at the range of half a mile, apparently. Some argue that's supposed to represent junior officers, but did those subordinate to Alexander automatically inherit his effectiveness as regards morale when 500 meters away? Hardly. But this, I concede, is a minor point. Summary: Is there another game out there that addresses all these issues adequately? Not to my knowledge. Nor do I claim it would be anywhere like easy to design such a game - I am quite convinced of Mark Herman's ability as a designer, having probably spent more time on his games than any other single designer's over the last five years or so. But that no other game manages it doesn't mean that this series addresses them adequately by default. Ancient battles are very hard to simulate at a detailed level due to all the soft factors involved. The GMT games produce historical outcomes, but that I think one can get with more abstract games as well, without the distracting, inconsistent details. If units were moved in larger "lumps" and with less elaborate maneuvering historically, then larger scale and smaller movement allowances might produce quite good results. (Note to Jeff Kouba: this would in fact *increase* playability because the number of units is reduced.) Anyway. This is my "not universally positive" view on the GBOH series as a vehicle for recreating historical battles. Your mileage may vary. Btw, as I'll be on holiday the next week, please send responses, if any, also by email, since they'll probably be expired when I get back. Markus Stumptner