From Richard Bach

That’s what learning is, after all; not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we’ve changed because of it, and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way, is winning. - Richard Bach

Monday, January 14, 2019

Why I choose not to use the Field of Engagement rule

Before I get into this, I want to state right out that the system is so robust that it plays well with or without this rule. It is very important to keep the company's message intact, so I will support and answer any questions about the Field of Engagement (FoE) rules as published by Command Post Games.

The whole reason this rule came about was because people didn't like the idea of moving to attack someone just to have them back up an eighth of an inch and avoid the combat. This does sound reasonable except for the way it actually translates in play.

It actually makes attacking difficult because if you come up a little short you have to back up 1/3 away. It foments a lot of gamey tactics where you move one unit up to contact the enemy and then slide a backed up artillery unit a hair behind it. Then the first unit retreats after the first round of combat, leaving the artillery in place. Essentially, knowing little rules tricks that have nothing to do with  period history begins to creep in, and I don't care for that. Also, applying this rule is fiddly and time consuming as you must measure and calculate your intended move, then if you don't make it you have to measure a third back, this drags on game play, and has no historical correlation. If this were correcting a real problem with the simulation it would justify these efforts, but the only thing it corrects is the feeling that it just doesn't feel right. Let me address this next, because I like the way it feels!

Although it is subtle, the full power of the chit draw mechanic is amazing. It simulates a very fluid flowing event. It is a non-linear representation of a host of chaotic events. You can't describe the turn in a step by step fashion, only after the turn is complete can you look back and say, "This is what probably happened that led to these units in these positions in these conditions." Frequently, moving last may actually mean you moved first. It simulates a clever commander anticipating his opponent's intentions, basically making him show his hand first. If you're attacking, you usually want to move last, so you can choose exactly where you want the combat to occur. Frequently, on defense you want to move first so that you can recover from spent if necessary, unless you want to move last so you can react to the attacker's moves. Just because you are not rolling for combat does not mean no combat is occurring, far from it! What it does mean is that the attacking unit was not able to attack effectively enough to change the condition of either unit in game terms. Imagine fighting where the opponents are still locked in combat. The turns are arbitrary impulses on the battlefield. If a unit moves to attack and the opponent backs up a hair, it just means that decisive combat did not happen until the following turn.

In my discussions with the other developers over this, I constantly ran into entrenched linear "you move/I move, then we have combat" thinking. Even while acknowledging the simultaneous aspect to the design, it was just too revolutionary to imagine a state of probabilities existing undefined until the end of the turn, and maybe not even then. The game doesn't show you what is happening, it only shows you what happened, and even that can be interpreted in a variety of ways.

This is similar to the way historians look at an array of data and try to create a picture and narrative of what happened. This is, in my opinion, the best part of this game system. By not trying to model exactly what happened, it is able to model more fully what might have happened. No amount of rules can immerse you in the history, in fact, more rules tend to push the players out as they try to describe one tree in a forest. It makes the tree a dull subject, and gives no notion of the forest.

I have regular opponents who prefer to use the FoE rules, so we do. The beauty of this system is that it plays perfectly fine either way!