Mass Combat System and Archery Units

[Drohem]

My group used the Mass Combat system presented in 6e Fantasy HERO book for the first time on our last game night. We were dissatisfied with how missile fire played out: not one volley hit an opposing unit due to range penalties (even with the Brace and Set maneuvers utilized).

We are considering changing missile fire so that it's an area of effect, and, therefore, only needs to hit the hex (DCV 3) of the opposing unit instead of hitting the unit's DCV rating.

• Has anyone else used the Mass Combat system for the 6e HERO System?
  
• If so, what are you thoughts on it?
  
• Did you run into the same issue?
  
• If it was an issue, how did you resolve it in your games?
  

[Captain Obvious]

Re: Mass Combat System and Archery Units

 

Keep in mind that if you're firing more than a couple of hexes away, it's pretty long range. Depending on the scale you use, firing more than one or two hexes away might not be reasonable for muscle-powered missile fire.

 

That said, missile fire was rarely decisive in combat until the end of the 19th/beginning of the 20th century. Even into WWI, common wisdom in military circles was that fixed bayonets and martial spirit were what won battles. It took a generation of Europe's young men being thrown into the meat grinder to get the idea across that you just don't charge machine-guns.

 

Tactically speaking, if your troops are armed with ranged and melee weapons, the ranged weapons are just there for one attack before steel meets steel. If you have troops that are armed only with missile weapons, they should hang back and harass the enemy, keep them from flanking friendly units, keep them from taking a breather and regrouping, but unless they're purpose built to dish out some seriously accurate and damaging ranged attacks, they're just a sideshow.

[Lord Liaden]

Re: Mass Combat System and Archery Units

 

It does depend to some extent on the range to the target, and also on the missile weapon used versus the type of attacker. The powerful English longbow, for example, helped end the heavily-armored mounted knight as the decisive force in battle. Massed longbows turned a cavalry charge into pincushions, although at relatively close range.

[Markdoc]

Re: Mass Combat System and Archery Units

 

It does depend to some extent on the range to the target' date=' and also on the missile weapon used versus the type of attacker. The powerful English longbow, for example, helped end the heavily-armored mounted knight as the decisive force in battle. Massed longbows turned a cavalry charge into pincushions, although at relatively close range.[/quote']

 

It did no such thing. Improvements in armour eventually made the longbow obsolete, not the other way round. Though the English like to talk of Poiters, Crecy and Agincourt, it's worth noting that the guys with with all the knights - you know, the French? - won the 100 years war. Perhaps more relevant, in subsequent conflicts, like the wars of the Roses, even though longbowmen participated in their tens of thousands on both sides, they had become relegated to secondary status: deadly against lightly-armoured enemies, like the breechless and barbarous scots, the poorer retinue foot or indeed other archers, but acting as support for the real battle-winners ... heavily-armoured men at arms (both on foot and mounted). It took the arquebusier and the pikeman to really retire the cavalry charge.

 

That said, you are dead right about short range: Hollywood has given us a wholly inaccurate picture of the ability of medieval range weapons. In my own experience, by the time you are close enough to do real damage, you are close enough to be ... well, way too close. That matches medieval writers' comments too. Bows were used for harassing, wounding and confusing an armoured enemy, not killing him in huge numbers. It should be noted, that even in slaughterhouses like Agincourt all the French charges reached the English line: but they did so in a piecemeal, disorganised fashion, allowing the English men at arms to throw them back. Unfortunately, that kind of morale/co-ordination damage is not well simulated in Hero system.

 

One solution to the problem (and the one I use) is simply to scale up basic Hero system combat. I have that worked out, but don't know how to post formatted text (like tables) here, which makes it a bit unreadable. That approach makes missile weapons unhistorically nasty in terms of actual killing power but historically nasty in terms of their "disrupting" power.

 

 

cheers, Mark

[Escafarc]

Re: Mass Combat System and Archery Units

 

I thought it was the stirrup that won Agincourt for the English.

[Old Man]

Re: Mass Combat System and Archery Units

 

I think Agincourt was won by mud, actually. And Crecy was won by trou-des-loup.

 

For archers to really be decisive, they need either a terrain advantage (as they had in these battles) or a mobility one (as mounted archers had at Carrhae).

[Markdoc]

Re: Mass Combat System and Archery Units

 

I think Agincourt was won by mud, actually. And Crecy was won by trou-des-loup.

 

For archers to really be decisive, they need either a terrain advantage (as they had in these battles) or a mobility one (as mounted archers had at Carrhae).

 

Agincourt is one of those battles which everyone knows about ... but when you ask most people, what they know about the battle tends to be wrong. There's the common picture of mounted charges by knights being turned back by hails of arrows. But all the chroniclers who were present agree that the vast majority of French knights actually fought on foot, and as noted, they walked through the hail of arrows to come to grips with - and push back - the English line. It was the stout defence by the English knights - supported by archers - that prevented the English being annihilated. The whole "mounted charges" thing was given solid form in the public eye by the lovely (but historically anachronistic) paintings by Gilbert in the Victorian era.

 

Agincourt was won by lots of factors. Mud certainly, but mud was the result of repeated charges over the same already boggy terrain. If I had to order it, it'd be:

1. Terrain: the English had chosen a point uphill of the French, with a ploughed and muddy field in front of their lines and heavily wooded rising slopes to either side. The French advantage in numbers was essentially neutralized by this narrow front - much of the army was only peripherally involved in the battle and they were forced to send in waves of soldiers, who churned the muddy field into a swamp - and who in the later stages had to clamber over piles of dead to get at their enemies. That's not good for morale or cohesion

2. Professionalism. The English army was composed largely of veterans, and it had a single, distinct chain of command. The guy at the very top had relatively little combat experience, but he was inspirational and had trusted and experienced subcommanders. The lower ranks knew that death or maiming was the likely outcome for all of them if they lost. As a result, the English army did what it was commanded. The French army was actually made up of several factions, two of whom (Armagnac and Burgundy) had - literally - been at war with each other and who (shortly after the battle) went to war again. The Burgundians certainly didn't cry many tears to see knights from Armagnac being slaughtered! Even worse, they had not one, but two seperate commanders, who not only disagreed with each other but one of whom had bad relationships with half the army, and both of whom were outranked by many of their own subcommanders! As a result, their chain of command was fractured (to put it mildly) - and fractious - with orders being ignored or disputed or even countermanded further down the chain of command. As a result the French tossed away several good opportunities, simply because their command structure was paralysed and different parts ofthe army would not do what they were told.

3. Tactics. The English had a simple plan and stuck to it. The French Constable also had a good plan - engage the archers with their own missile troops to tire them, make them use up their arrows and then deliver a (hopefully decisive) mounted charge on the English centre. If they had stuck to that, they might well have won. They didn't. Squabbling over who would get to engage first (important because most troops served for bounty and the biggest bounty was ransom: the troops who got last into the fighting would likely go home with no pay at all) and distrust between the factions meant that the French arches and crossbowmen were set off to one side and behind the van, where they got to play almost no role at all. The mounted charge was delivered with no support, against a fresh enemy and not concentrated but in little dribs and drabs. The foot were thrown in - again without support - and when they got bogged down and then outflanked, more troops were simply pressed in, so that any coherent tactics became impossible. And ... etc.

 

cheers, Mark

[Markdoc]

Re: Mass Combat System and Archery Units

 

I thought it was the stirrup that won Agincourt for the English.

 

Why? European heavy horse of all nations had been using stirrups for about 6-700 years by the time of Agincourt.

 

cheers, Mark

[Drohem]

Re: Mass Combat System and Archery Units

 

The GM and others in my group are more reactionary and are looking for a 'solution' to this 'problem' immediately even though we only played the Mass Combat system once. I, on the other hand, would like to give it some more time before changing things around. Upon reflecting on this issue, I came to the conclusion that the system is, somewhat, representative of how this units operated. I am of a mind that the system is fine and that's just the way it works in large combats. I was hoping that someone had some concrete insight regarding the numbers for OCV/DCV for the units presented in the Mass Combat system. My first blush was that maybe the DCV listed for units is too high.

 

Setting aside all the historical battle discussion for a moment, it seems that my gut reaction is the general consensus here: archery units just weren't terribly effective in large scale combats.

 

Does anyone see it terribly damaging if archery unit fire was switched to target a square instead of the unit's DCV?

[Old Man]

Re: Mass Combat System and Archery Units

 

That was the exact solution I was going to propose. Against missile fire, individual combatants in formed units simply aren't full DCV. It's really a question of whether one of them is in the path of any particular missile. There's a point at which 'DCV' is really decided by unit size and density more than anything else.

[Old Man]

Re: Mass Combat System and Archery Units

 

As for Agincourt, I will simply add that it is one instance in a pattern that defines French performance in warfare throughout most of recorded history--individual heroism and skill of their soldiers sabotaged by the politics or incompetence of their leadership.

[Markdoc]

Re: Mass Combat System and Archery Units

 

To go back to the original question, here's an easy approach to mass combat that I use. It's based on the simple idea that the more dice you roll, the more closely you approach the normal distribution for those dice. In other words, if you are rolling 200 attacks for a unit of archers, you're likely to get pretty close to the average number of hits you'd predict just from the numbers. Based on that concept I whipped up a bunch o' tables.

 

Since I stil don't know how to do tables on this forum, here's a link to Reocities showing the tables (and explanatory text) in all their retro-90's, colourful Geocities-design-sense glory.

 

The advantage of this approach is it gives you exactly what you'd expect from Hero system characters: 20 archers will be about 20x as effective as one archer of the same type.

 

cheers, Mark

[Captain Obvious]

Re: Mass Combat System and Archery Units

 

Units in close formation are able to concentrate their fighting power, use tactics like shield walls, and are generally easier to keep together and under command and control. They are also susceptible to area effect attacks and are easier to hit with ranged attacks.

 

Units in open formation aren't as susceptible to area effects and not as easy to hit with ranged attacks, but are easily overwhelmed in hand-to-hand combat.

 

Effects of these in-game are left as an exercise to the reader.

[AmadanNaBriona]

Re: Mass Combat System and Archery Units

 

Been thinking about this problem for quite a while myself as well.

I don't recall quite what I came up with, rules-wise, but yeah, I did it as an AOE attack/attacking a hex.

 

I used an autofire style "multiple hits for better rolls" resolution system, IIRC, but it's been a few years since I toyed with the ideas.

[Lethosos]

Re: Mass Combat System and Archery Units

 

This is probably one of those cases where a set of percentile dice would do better to determine the actual strength of an attack over its full strength.

 

YMMV.

[Barwickian]

Re: Mass Combat System and Archery Units

 

Depending on the scale, it may be that the only advantage of archers (or other missile troops) is to attack first - and possibly from behind defence such as stakes or mantlets, or even from behind another unit.

 

Being generally lightly armed, they'd also tend to have more mobility than other foot troops.

 

IIRC this is how the Wargames Research Group's games De Bellis Antiquitas (DBA) and De Bellis Multitudinis (DBM) handle them.

[Narf the Mouse]

Re: Mass Combat System and Archery Units

 

Also, in war, a single formation isn't going to fill a single hex as a block, unless you're playing Phalanxes (Phalanxi?). They'll spread out in lines, with maybe five lines of pike, then five lines of archers, or somesuch.

[Zane_Marlowe]

Re: Mass Combat System and Archery Units

 

Why? European heavy horse of all nations had been using stirrups for about 6-700 years by the time of Agincourt.

 

cheers, Mark

 

I think he means Hastings

[megaplayboy]

Re: Mass Combat System and Archery Units

 

Well, the range for these weapons, using the base power active points x 10 in meters, is from 150 to 400 meters(for extremely heavy bows and crossbows). Assuming a +1 CV built into a decent bow or crossbow, and adding in bracing and setting, we get +2 OCV and no range mods out to 32 meters. Let's assume a trained archer has at least two PSLs vs. range, and a couple CV levels with their bow or crossbow. Then you get no range mods out to 64 meters(200 feet), and a total of +4 OCV out to that distance. The CV bonus goes away past 128 meters, and a penalty gets incurred past 250 meters, but then this is the upper limit for missile weapons' range anyway.

It'd be nice if someone could feed me the numbers for the speed of light, medium and heavy infantry on the march, and ditto for cavalry. I assume a trained longbowman can loose 10 arrows per minute, maybe half that if they're painstakingly aiming each time. An unencumbered normal jogging forward at full combat running speed will cover 24 meters per turn and needs 6 turns to close to melee from 150 meters, 10 turns from 250 meters and about 16 turns from 400 meters.

[Lucius]

Re: Mass Combat System and Archery Units

 

It'd be nice if someone could feed me the numbers for the speed of light

 

About 300 million meters per second. Or did you need it more precisely?

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Moving at the speed of a palindromedary