A big game… three 1600 point armies on the field, all beating on one another. And what were we playing? WARRIOR, I was told. A couple of years ago, Phil Barker yielded the rights to WRG 7th to a group which was going to change the rules and publish a new, all-new, brand-new system called WARRIOR. But, at tableside, I was told that the group really didn’t change anything… they “modified” the text in the rules booklet to make it more coherent and understandable. In other words, WARRIOR turned out to be a “clarified WRG 7th”. And here, we were gaming with yet another “edition”… a “modified WARRIOR”… more clarifications, more changes. A month later, another WARRIOR layout… essentially the same forces as in the first battle. This time, I commanded an “English army”… lots of archers, and a couple of cavalry units. In the first battle, Cleo Liebl and I jointly commanded an Aztec army… about ten units, ranging in size from a puny 4-stand unit with 8 figures in it, to a 10 stand unit composed of 40 figures. No cavalry for our Aztecs. The other two armies on the field consisted of a Samurai army, and a War of the Roses army… each force, therefore, had different attributes and combat parameters, and all three forces were of the 1400 era. Cleo and I agreed to execute Plan 101… we would advance across the field and beat the crap out of any unit which stood in our way. We noted, however, that our Aztecs were outgunned… our units had darts with a range of around 3 inches, while a couple of opposing bow units, standing in our way, could reach out to around 9 inches. Our boys could move up a distance of around 5 inches, which meant that we’d be hit a couple of times by the bowmen before we could close to contact. No to worry. Note… although I give the distance in inches, the rules stick to the ol’ WRG “paces” system, wherein 40 paces is around 1 1/2 inches. Why couldn’t the WARRIOR people at least change paces to inches? With 8 players, we had 2 umps at tableside. Definitely not enough to speed the game along. In both battles, things went fairly rapidly for the first 2 or 3 turns, but this was while the forces were out of contact with one another. Then, after contact was made… the game came to a complete halt. Lots of archery encounters and melees to be adjucated… lots of chart looking up… lots of computations to be made. For combat resolution, there are two time-consuming key charts. The first is an attacking-weapon-versus-target-troop-type matrix, which lists, for melee purposes, 11 attacking weapons versus 14 different types of troop types to be matched up, i.e., “heavy thrusting weapon vs heavy cavalry… +3”, and so on. The matrix has 11x14 entries in it… 154 entries in all, purportedly giving accurate and realistic assessments for every type of encounter. After getting these parameters, you can tag on a number of "tactical factors” (there are 14 of them), such as “charging impetuously… +2”, for additional realism and historicity. And, as I say, not only are these results accurate and realistic, but they are further modified by a dice toss, so they can go up or down a couple of points, making them even MORE accurate and realistic. The second key chart is a factors-vs-figures chart… Here, you take the accurate and realistic factor you get from the first chart, and reference it to the number of striking figures. This will get you the loss, i.e., the casualties, inflicted on the target unit. In the diagram, 2 of my Aztec units, A(1) and A(2), contacted an enemy archer unit, B. Since 2 of my units contacted 1 enemy unit, the B enemy unit, for resolution purposes, was divided into two sections, B(a) and B(b). This single melee gave rise to four separate sets of calculations… A(1)’s effect on B B(a)’s effect on A(1) A(2)’s effect on B B(b)’s effect on A(2) Here’s what’s interesting about these calculations. They are run through a filter, and the filter used is has to do with the number of figures in the targeted unit. Unless you can score a number of casualties on a target unit equal to the number of figures in the unit, the target unit simply sloughs the casualties off… they disappear and are ignored. This was the case with my second Aztec unit, A(2), above… it had 40 figures, and B(b) couldn’t score 40 hits on it. Note that even if section B(b) of the enemy archer unit scored 39 casualties against A(2), tha’s tough… 39 ain’t enough. A(2) escaped unscathed. Both of my units, A(1) and A(2), together scored over 200 casualties on the opposing B unit. The B archer unit had a total of 48 figures in it, and you use the filter by dividing the casualties inflicted on the target unit by number of men in the unit. Here, 200 by 48 (200/48), gets you around 4 casualties per figure in the unit. This “casualties-per-figure” number is called a Fatigue Point… 15 Fatigue Points and your unit is gone. This meant that the archers had 200/48, or 4 Fatigue Points inflicted on them. This was not good for the archers. The rule is that if (a) you receive twice as many casualties (Fatigue Points) as you inflicted, and (b) also suffered yourself 3 Fatigue Points, you’re up the creek…. your unit routs. This was the case for the unfortunate archers. Way back when, when the WRG 7th rules were drawn up, someone decided to use this particular filter mechanism. It’s a silly one… it envelops large units in a protective coating… it penalizes small units. One would have thought that the WARRIOR boys would have come yp with some improved variation on the filter idea. Back to the battle. In truth, I’m not sure of what happened to the other armies on the field… my Aztecs kept me busy in the first battle, and my Englishmen kept me busy in the second. But I did note that the umps were constantly in demand to adjudicate the results of different situations, different pair-offs of unit types, which meant that for most of the game, there was a lot of dead time for the majority of the players, those not involved in the situation under discussion. The umps said that in a regular game, wherein everyone was familiar with the rules, the flow would be much quicker than in our set up. Umps always say that… don’t believe ‘em. Back to PW Review July 2002 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2002 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com