Markus Stumptner - Jan 14, 2012 2:07 am (#48799 Total: 48829)  
You may just have missed your last chance for incremental garbage collection.
 	 
After The Napoleonic Wars session, I put a game on the table for trying
out solo: the old S&T Charlemagne. This is one I've had for a long time,
but never got around to. Not only is the topic interesting, it is
essentially ungamed. The game also is from an era when Joe Miranda was
doing some good stuff. 

One unusual factor that was part of the reason why I didn't put this on
the table before is the nature of the player sides: one side represents
Charlemagne (fair enough), but hte other player is labeled as "Chaos"
and runs all the territories, external empires and minor fiefdoms that
Charlemagne didn't control (and that historically would have been rather
much at odds with each other). 

The game looks very nice, great Joe Youst map, and reasonably tasteful
counters and icons by Beth Queman. (The two most frequent units in the
game, militia and warbands, have icons that look almost the same, so you
ignore the icons anyway and just look at the ratings.) Unfortunately the
counters suffer severely from some of these subtle effects that graphics
artists who don't play the games can never pick up. First, there are
about two dozen different nationalities in the game since every region
(the game uses another term but I've forgotten what it was) has its own
separate forces and the whole game revolves around bringing those over
to you via conquest or vassalization. But the counter base colours are
done in terms of which faction they belong to at a given point. So there
are two ways to differentiate between nationalities: the colour of the
counter ratings (two dozen different pastels - good on the side, but
useless for sorting), and the name of the nationality. That name is
printed in minuscule font at a right angle to the counters, because the
upright icons means there's no space for it at the top. Now, that alone
is already one of my pet peeves. I hate having to crink my neck
constantly when trying to make out important ID information, but it gets
more funny. The map labels are oriented sideways, towards the narrow
side of the map, so in a two-player game, both players can see them if
they crink their head. (Also they're pretty big and not all caps so you
can like read them from the side without problems.) The tables, however,
are universally oriented towards one long side, convenient if you play
solo as I did, and you will then naturally seat yourself on that side.
The counter nationalities are printed in all caps, so you can't tell the
difference between Austrasia and Anglo-Saxon units by the shape of the
name, you actually have to read the thing. Now, to distinguish neutral
units (since there can't be a third, neutral, side), you have to orient
them differently. If you turn them sideways, they either face the other
way from the map, or they face away from you if you orient them that you
sit where you're apparently supposed to sit. Not a big deal, but
careless design and needlessly difficult to work with. 

The system is fairly clear, you do a certain number of operations per
year, fight and besiege, raise troops and then build. The map has a
large track for "operations points". I don't know what it's used for, as
it is far too large for the number of operations points that you'll
usually have. There is also a large track showing the initial allegiance
of all the regions. It wouldn't have needed to be so large just for
that. Unfortunately, it is too small for using to sort the reinforcement
counters for the 24 nationalities, which will therefore end up in a
muddle on the edge of the map. It has half the size, so with some
thought, a set of colour coded boxes for all the regions could have been
put in place instead. A missed opportunity. 

The points you really need to keep track of in the the game are treasury
points. You gain them for all kinds of things, and you use them to raise
units, build castles (burgs) and spend the money on rebuilding
civilization (which helps you gain friends, and also win the game). The
physical aids for that are summarized in one terse sentence in the rules
(paraphrased from memory): "The players will need to keep track of
treasury points on paper". 

So, a big fat minus for physical systems design, despite the wonderful
looking map. At this point I was already significantly less enthusiastic
about the whole thing. I have no problem with keeping track of points on
paper, many games I like (such as Imperium Romanum II) used to do that.
But here it seems to be treated like an afterthought, especially since
actions that impact the treasury are spread across all rule sections. 

Anyway, I start to play. The system is based on dierolling to see how
far you go; leaders double (or, in the case of Charlemagne, triple) the
result. Each point allows you to move a hex, and a couple of points
allow you to fight a battle (with the attacker having a slight advantage
at 1:1 which is odd for an era with set piece battles, but at least it's
not as bad as it was in Miranda's earlier Byzantium, where strategy
basically, and absurdly, consisted of making contact with the enemy in
your turn, so you either keep out of range and never fight, or you set
up some little force as bait so the other side gobbles it up but in that
fashion gets its main army in range of you so you can attack it.
Complete nonsense).

Anyway, here that was not the case. So you roll, and then find out that
it takes your average army a turn to go from Paris to Aachen, and two
turns (ten years) to go from Paris to Hamburg. Yeah, right. This is
starting to unpleasantly remind me of Miranda's Asian Crossroads, where
an army would take a decade just to march between a couple of Russian
cities. But, OK, this is a large scale game, and runs for only ten
turns. And it gives you a lot of options. So, i start with Charlemagne
and a big army in Aachen. As there is a lot of terrain to grab, you
don't want to spend ten years collecting armies from different regions
all over the place. So I take Charlemagne's Austrasian army and march it
(with Charlemagne) over to the vicinity of Hanover to attack some other
tribe there. (The army barely makes it, only due to Charlemagne's
tripling effect.) I attack. The CRT is the usual odds-based thing
(again, doesn't really make sense for an era of set-piece battles, but
what the heck). Charlemagne's army outnumbers the enemy by an (for the
time) rather significant 50% but it still ends up at 1:1. Charlemagne
however produces a tripling effect, so they go in at 3:1. Now, 2:1 and
3:1 odds are the columns where you are most likely to find one of Joe
Miranda's favourites, the Bloodbath result. He didn't always have them,
they started cropping up around that time and he just keeps putting them
into pretty much every game regardless of era, scale, or topic. Anyway,
Bloodbath means that the weaker side is eliminated, the stronger side
has to lose equally much, and 2 out of 6 results at 3:1 are BB results.
You guessed it, I roll a BB, and since Charlemagne's army is only about
50% stronger than the Saxons (?) because he has the same number of units
but some of his units are stronger, this has the net effect of leaving
Charlemagne at the end of his five years of campaigning, sitting alone
in Saxon territory. At that point my bullshit threshold was exceeded and
I packed up. I may actually put the map on the wall, it's an
underappreciated era and you're unlikely to see those territories
(Neustria, Austrasia) on many maps even though they formed the basis for
a thousand-plus years of European history, so it should make a good
conversation piece.