Scoring
This thread will cover discussions of the VP scoring system. Obviously, if we move away from the VP system altogether, these discussions will become irrelevant, but I think it's worth pursuing several lines of discussion at once even though clearly they can't all be used.
One idea that I had during NWOL-2 is that I probably made cities too valuable. In the NWOL test games they were worth 50 points, either by capture or by transfer. Either before NWOL-1 or after it, I forget which, I raised it to the current 200 for capture, 100 for transfer. In NWOL-2, I know Denmark shot up in the standings at one point when we liberated a couple of Prussian cities during the sweep to Warsaw that the Russians hadn't really defended. For the Russians to lose points for not defending their cities makes a lot of sense, but for Denmark to get a lot of points for picking up the empties, less so. When we transferred the cities back to Prussia we gave away some of those points, but not all. (We could have tried to extract VPs from Prussia in the exchange, but we didn't, and I think probably wouldn't ever want to.)
I didn't closely follow the experience of Portugal, but I'm pretty sure that's how they did it too, took a lot of cities and gave them to the newborn Italian frags. Pomerania is partly that experience too, though I think there were more VPs for the ships than for the cities. Probably some other cases that I'm not aware of also.
So I'm thinking two things. First, lower the total number of points at stake. Instead of 200 for capture in battle and 100 for transfer, perhaps make it 100 and 50. Then second, change the ratio, so it's maybe 100 for capture but 75 when you transfer diplomatically. That way you can't retain so many points if you take a city, transfer it, and then your side loses it again right away.
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City Scoring
Steve,
I would support the notion of lowering the VP value of cities simply because it will help us get away from the city-centric combat we now engage in. The majority of Napoleonic battles were not fought for possession of cities, they were fought in the open field with the immediate goal of the contenders being destruction of the enemy force, not capture of its territory.
If you do this, should you not also lower the morale consequences of city capture? For example, this last game even though it had a solid string of successes Sweden/Pomerania never managed to get its morale over 50. The reason was because we were allied with the Russians and the Austrians for most of the time and every time they lost some backwater city we took a morale hit. I'm not suggesting that there shouldn't be some impact but I think an adjustment needs to be made. A successful force should not have low morale because of what is happening on the other side of Europe. The best historical example I can think of is the relatively high morale of the Anglo-Portuguese forces in Iberia when Napoleon was elsewhere sweeping all before him.
Jim
Jim Voege
cities and battle focus
My only concern on this is that it's relatively difficult to bring two armies together. Having cities be a focus for VPs means the armies can usually get together at the cities. If the cities weren't worth as much, then I see three possibilities:
1) Armies would get together there anyway since it's the only choice;
2) Armies would be unable to get together and battles would get a lot less decisive because they'd rarely be fought with most of an army's brigades engaged;
3) Armies would find some other way to engage each other.
Sadly, I think 3 is not likely. I think 2 is more likely, and perhaps isn't such a wrong thing, if one thinks about what the warfare in the pre-1805 wars were like. It should be hard to get a really decisive battle against the enemy. On the other hand, it should be possible, and maybe it wouldn't be. I don't think we should revert to a 1700s form of warfare. I think 1 is probably the most likely; there'll be fewer VPs but the form of combat won't change for lack of an alternative.
Still, it's worth trying. If 1 is right we lose nothing and at least improve the scoring system; if 2 is right, we might end up better off than we were before; if 3 is right, we definitely would.
I am a wizard. I make things using magic. SJS
Scoring
Well, I've made my thoughts known about this before...but, yes, I think the VP value of cities is too high.
It should, in fact, be "zero" (talk about "keeping it simple"!)
That's because cities, after all, already have their own, intrinsic value:
- For majors, the taking of cities is a prerequisite for achieving a "vanquish" by conquest.
- Frags can increase their territory by taking other--but only--frag cities...they're the only ones that can ever truly "own" a city that they take (it was actually quite frustrating to keep hearing how many players didn't realize this in NWOL II).
- Cities manufacture, store, and are the "links in the chain" for the transfer of supplies. Try maintaining a deep offensive without them. Besides, a large cache of supplies provides much more of a "magnet" than a few VPs. Even if we decide to make a city "worth" 100 VPs, that equals exactly 20 supplies, which is a fraction of the quantity that main supply bases usually hold.
- Cities are the only place you can create units.
- Cities are the source of income, in the form of "Crowns".
- Conversely, the loss of cities not only denies you the ability to create units in that particular location, but you also lose income (a portion simply due to the proximity of enemy units to that city) and your force pool population decreases, reflecting the loss of population, as well.
- Cities receive a defensive bonus...even more so if there are fortifications.
- Port cities are the bases for fleets, obviously...so if you wish to retain a navy, you must hold them.
- Finally, the "morale" factor. It's a bit disheartening to lose cities...and it ain't because you're losing a few VPs.
What is the purpose, then, of trying to artificially make cities even more "valuable" than they already are? Is there a fear that armies will no longer fight over them if we take away the "carrot" of VPs? It simply won't happen. There are plenty of better reasons, based upon the strategic "reality", than that of arbitrarily assigning a VP value to them. The only way I could see giving cities any more value than the game already allows it to place some historical value to them...to funnel the battles towards the "real world", strategic choke points...but that was deemed too complicated--and understandably so.
Why not make it simpler, still?
Armies will still gain VPs by justly defeating an army that either foolishly attempts to take a city or to foolishly hold it. Anyway, does anybody honestly use, as part of their grand strategy, the the goal of acquiring cities merely for points? If so, "you're doing it wrong".
I say, we save ourselves even more "play-balancing" and tweaking of how many VPs a city is "worth" (especially given all these "variables in accounting" for exchanging them, whether in battle or by agreement) and accept that they're pretty darned valuable, as is.
Steven Mathena
I am in marketing. I make you buy things you don't need. SGM
Scoring
Steven,
In Napoleon's first Italian campaign he managed to produce a surplus in that the expense to the French government of the campaign was far exceeded by its share of the booty taken.
NWOL doesn't have booty. It should. I've said so before but nobody listened and I don't expect anyone to listen now.
However, I cannot disagree more with a notion that suggests that you don't even get VPs for capturing those fat Po Valley cities.
Jim
Jim Voege
City VPs
I'd certainly be willing to try a game in which cities are not worth VPs. That implies that battlefield victories and casualties would be the only source of VPs - or, Steven, do you think we should add other things as VP sources as well?
Anyone else think this is a particularly good idea, or see problems with it?
I am a wizard. I make things using magic. SJS
Stephen, > Steven, do you
Stephen,
> Steven, do you think we should add other things as VP sources as well?
Not really, no...
The battle should be "the thing", shouldn't it? Anything else distracts from the real objective, which is defeating the enemy on the field of battle.
Even capturing the enemy's capital didn't "do it" anymore in the Napoleonic era...so why should you get any additional "Brownie points" for doing what you should be doing in the first place...which is finding, fixing, and destroying the enemy's armies?
Steven
Steven Mathena
I am in marketing. I make you buy things you don't need. SGM
Scoring
Steven brings up an interesting point in this string. If something has an intrinsic value it shouldn't be rewarded with VPs.He argued in favor of cities, so now I will argue in favor of eliminating the VPs for armies.
first, it is a war game, and people that play war games want to play war. People are going to fight and try to win even if there is no award for the individual battle.
This also brings up another point. If you reward the individual battles it is possible that you can win enough battle to win the game, but ultimately end up losing the war. I believe that if we were using the current VP system France would have been the winner of the real Napoleonic Wars. I almost suspect that the 100 Days was a direct result of a message board flame war gone wrong where Napoleon said he had the most VPs so he won, Russians arguing they won since they captured Paris and ended the Revolution, and Wellington arguing something about Britain having achieved its national goals. :-)
Everyone knows I favor National Goals, but I will admit there are some major hurdles in having them work. I will throw out some more ideas just to facilitate suggestions.
One could be that their aren't individual winners, but rather it is the Revolutionaries vrs the Monarchists. You share the victory with your team. If people believe in coalition victories just accept it. If the Revolution VQs the majors they win, if the Monarchist overthrow the revolution they win.
Another suggestion is to not have an objective winner based on terms set forth in the rules, but rather have a couple few awards that could be given. If everyone is going to have their own definition of victory why not just accept it, but give some people opinions a bit more weight. There could be a GA's prize for each category, a guild's Choice, where they players vote for a winner in each category (but can't select their own team), and maybe some other prizes based on some set criteria.
-nick
scoring
It is definitely the case that in NWOL the winner is the one with the most battlefield success, and the VP system is intended to track the nation with the most battlefield success. I think there need to be VPs for battlefield success, not as an incentive, but as a measuring device. If you don't have some method to quantify battlefield success, how will you know who had more of it? And whatever method you use, people will try to get as much of it as they can.
That said, Pomerania is a case in point of a nation that had a lot of battlefield success but only after losing their entire homeland and becoming nomads. It does seem at least slightly odd to declare a state that lost all its cities the "winner" among frags on the grounds that they took a lot of cities and burned a bunch of ships. But they did genuinely have more battlefield success. After all, they lost their home cities as the result of one battle, one which their side came close to winning.
I could take away a whole bunch of points for a nation which loses its home cities - but I'd have to have taken a huge number of points away to offset all the successes the Pomeranians had once they went nomad.
One possible solution is to have a nation that doesn't own any home cities stop accruing points until they get one back, or something like that. Not easy to do, though. Also, if they keep taking losses, surely those should accrue, but it's unfair to give them only their losses.
Pomerania's result is probably the most challenging thing to think about in NWOL-2. It's clearly an odd result but it's hard to find a way to change it that wouldn't produce yet odder results, or bad incentives.
I am a wizard. I make things using magic. SJS
Scoring
I can personally attest (since I work for the Defense Department) that the most important metric used to access the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is how many VPs we are getting. If your slides for the daily briefing are even slightly off the actual number of VPs there is hell to pay. ;-)
Now from actual NWOL experience when I am summarizing a battle I list how many troops were lost on each side and how many units were routed or shattered. Who got the most VPs is irrelevant from a tactical point of view. In fact there are several situations where forces lose the melee phase but inflicted more damage than they took. In those cases I am more concerned with the extra fatigue point for falling back than the fact that the enemy got more VPs.
This may be my view because I am more of a boots on the ground type of guy and my monarch may be upset that I'm not more concerned with VPs.
The bottom line is that people should be able to tell if they are winning or losing without having to look at the VPs.
The one problem I see with the no cities = no VPs is that it will only ever conceivably affect the frags and small minors. There is no way France or Austria is never going to have any cities (or if they don't they won't be getting many VPs).
-Nick
Combined scoring
Someone asked in another topic what the problem was with creating and destroying frags. By far, the most heated comments I've gotten have occurred when an attacking state created a new frag and transferred cities to it which the defending side expected to retake (correctly or otherwise). People perceived that the idea was to have the original state score a bunch of points, then transfer the vulnerable city to the new frag, have it take the losses, then once the new frag was down several hundred points, let it be destroyed, thus protecting the VP score of the original attacker. I don't think anyone was ever doing it quite that cold-bloodedly, but certainly the rules permit such a thing to occur and it's probably not good that they do. One of the main reasons I think we should make it harder to create and destroy frags is to eliminate options for playing games with the score like that.
A second way to deal with, probably a complementary way, is to say that when a major or minor state controls a frag (Austria with Tuscany, Sweden with Pomerania, other cases) or when a major or minor state creates a frag (which might be limited to France in future), then that frag's score is not kept separately, but is added into the score of the controlling major. This depends on the idea that all frags have controlling majors, which under the current rules might be tricky (what if France and Britain and Holland all take one German city each, and create Baden with the three cities?). But if only France can create new frags, and thus all "revolutionary" frags are inherently French creations, then it gets a lot simpler.
In practice, it'd be easier to keep the scores separately, and do the adding up at the end of the game, or the end of each campaign for campaign victory.
I am a wizard. I make things using magic. SJS
Combined Scoring
It seems very hard to manipulate cities to protect one's score. After all there is only one time that new states can be created and that is EOC.
What, I sensed to be the motivation for Majors, Minors to create states is that they now get full income for holding frag cities. They also have a safe place to store supply that cannot have any revolt. They can also create units if there is manpower closer to the front. These factors seemed to be more important than score manipulation. I never heard any reference to using vp's as a score manipulator. This seems so much harder for majors with a larger base. Minor point swings do not really affect their score. Maybe minors who frequently have a base similar to a frag can contemplate such an idea, however 100 points will not be worth the gymnastics involved in states with base scores 10k and above.
Majors using captured frag cities to create new states, seems to make playing a frag state for experienced players not an ideal situation. With the direction that new states is going, frag states should only be played by those who never had minister experience and thus their time controlling a frag is put to that use before a major or minor comes hunting for their cities.
Robert
The doomed life of Frags
One way I thought about this, as the 'your life is limited and mini-France 2 is coming' is not really that good, would be that if a major creates a Frag, then any members of the Frag's cabinet can NOT also be members of the Major's cabinet.
thus it would force the Major to 're-use' the frag player, or other ousted frag players, or else remove someone from their own cabinet to do the job. Creating a Frag should be creating a new state, with the associated risks of it's independence. This might go some way to solving the problem.
Also it is more fun, saying 'you there! As reward for your service you shall become duke of thingummy!' rather then just a mini-major-nation that makes money for the major.
One more point on combined scoring
The problems of creating a "bad frag" to hold the losses gets compounded when one major is running two frags, so it can transfer all the "bad assets" to the "bad frag" to protect the standings of the other frag. (Those following the economics of the banking crisis will no doubt recognize the parallel.) It was alleged that this was the purpose of Hesse, and while I don't think that allegation is necessarily true, I can see where someone looking at the situation would wonder about it. If we limited creation of new frags to France only, and put all their scores into the French score, there would no longer be any way to manipulate the frag rules to promote one frag at the expense of another, expendable one. That is what I think we really need to render impossible - even if it hasn't happened yet, sooner or later it will, and we should block that before it does happen.
I am a wizard. I make things using magic. SJS
Scoring
So why wouldn't you make the points given for taking a city a function of the economic value of the city? Not all cities should be equally valued. And why does only one country get points when the city is taken? Shouldn't all of the allies fighting for a city get some VPs for taking it. It seems that the VPs for taking a city are divided into points for doing a good job of taking the city (the act of conquering) and points for owning the city. That explains the difference in points for when you win the city and the points for when you transfer it to another nation.
I may have missed it but what is wrong with the country morale or national will concept. It seems that something like that could be used to make sure countries act more historical.
Jerry Gouge
Scoring
Jerry,
I guess the quick answer to your question is because cities have value for reasons other than their economic output. A few examples. Suppose Britain captures a poor city in Russia. Britain doesn't need its income but it is running short of supplies. This city happens to have 300 supplies captured with it. This is an invaluable boost to the British campaign. Again suppose the British capture a single port on an enemy shore. The port only gets 1 or 2 economic points but obviously it is of vital importance to the British because without it they are dead (until they capture another one). The bridge over the Rhine at Remagen wasn't a particularly large or important bridge. Nor was Remagen a large or important city (it ain't on the NWOL map). But the capture of the bridge intact by the allies in 1945 was of the greatest possible importance. A good analogy I think. What about a city with low economic value but a strong fort in a militarily important location?
Jim Voege
National Morale
I, obviously, think this is a good idea. ;-)
Just not sure how to code it and all that jazz. One way, similar to the way I do it in 'the game that I made to play with friends on a board' is to have a relation between, in that game, the 'power' of your nation, and the 'power' of your allies - In this it would be closest to the VPs. The closer you are in VPs to one another, the more of a detriment to National Morale, representing each nation's 'political sphere' desiring the advancement of the country and being reluctant to work to empower another nation. If countries are weaker then you then allying with them is seen as a useful way of fulfilling your ends, if they are stronger then it is seen as a good way of protecting your interests. Although 'my game' is much more complicated in the politics and diplomacy field so certain elements are not very transferable really.
One problem I see is that if the loosing a city looses you morale, and gaining a city gains morale, then the attacking multiplier goes even higher. Yes it may force people into suing for peace, but as diplomacy is just people talking, there is no way to make the attacker accept, or his demands reasonable.
One more point on combined scoring
Steve,
Is that going to create a whole new set of problems? Do you add the frag base to the French base? As of the game start? Or as of the commencement of French control?
Jim
Jim Voege
combined and base scores
It raises a few new problems but I think they're solvable.
My first guess is: If you start the game with a frag (ie, Britain with Hannover), then it goes in your base score. If France creates one, then it doesn't go in their base score for the game, but does go in their base score for subsequent campaigns. If one is destroyed, it goes back out of their base score for subsequent campaigns. The latter may be too complex and it may be better to just say it doesn't go in their campaign base score either. But in any event it shouldn't go in their game base score, otherwise it waters down their gain percentage if they create one and it might not be worth it to them.
I am a wizard. I make things using magic. SJS