Re: [eia] Comparing things

[Joel Uckelman <uckelman@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thus spake "Kyle H":
>     I don't know...  I've seen D&D mistakes published in Dragon magazine,
> and I've seen Blood Bowl mistakes published by Games Workshop.  In house
> publishers are often more interested in selling magazines than in getting
> things right.

Well, I'm not claiming that _The General_ was infalliable. But AH did publish
eratta and corrections there. I expect that someone would have written to
AH claiming that the article was inaccurate, and if AH agreed one might
expect that they would have published a correction in a successive issue.
There wasn't a correction like that, as far as I know.

I could bug a friend of mine who has a lot of old Generals to look up all
of the EiA articles:

http://www.grognard.com/indexes/e4.html

That might give us some more examples of PP changes as a result of battles
with mixed forces. I think I'll do that.

>     Here's the crux of the problem, as far as I'm concerned.  You say that
> they were being sloppy on the back cover.  But that's exactly the problem:
> exactly *where* were they being sloppy?  Or, more to the point, exactly
> where does the sloppiness stop?  We all agree that a mistake was made
> somewhere.  You say that we should reject as mere sloppiness the fact that
> the back cover refers to only one victor and one loser in a battle.
> Rejecting this wording (and only this wording) preserves the interpretation
> that you share with the man who wrote the article in The General.
>     For the record, I agree with you that we should reject the implication
> that there is only one victor and one loser in a battle.  Similarly, I think
> it was the *very same sloppiness* that caused the writer of the back cover
> to say that the (singular) loser loses 1/2 of a PP for each of "his" corps.
> If you think it was sloppy for the writer of the back cover to refer to only
> one victor and one loser, then wouldn't it make sense that the reference to
> each of "his" corps would be part of the same sloppiness?  After all, if you
> are assuming that there is only one victor and one loser, it would be
> perfectly natural to make reference to "his" corps.  It would not imply
> anything additional.
> 
>     So, as I see it, you think that the sloppiness of the back cover extends
> only far enough to protect your interpretation.  (We should reject the
> singular victor and loser, but we should place emphasis on the word "his" in
> the rule for losing PPs after a battle.)  I think the very same sloppiness
> extends far enough to protect the interpretation we are currently using in
> our game.  (If they were sloppy when they refer to a single victor and a
> single loser, that same sloppiness explains why they used the word "his".)
> In any case, we can each build our own interpretation depending on what we
> wish to ignore as mere "sloppiness".  So basically, we are left with
> inconsistent wording and only our own sense of what makes sense and what
> doesn't as the final arbiter of how to play the game.  Appeals to authority
> are interesting, but not decisive.
>     BTW, EIH tries to uphold the view that there can only be one victor.
> EIH has rules for determining which country is the sole "victor" in a
> combined force, and it gives that country all the PPs for winning (and gives
> none to the other contributors).  So, in that sense, EIH is more faithful to
> the rules as they are written than any of us are willing to be.

That interpretation strikes me as better than the one we've been using.
Regardless of how PP are awarded to the victors, it baffles me that
losing a battle jointly should be politically as bad for each of the
defeated, regardless of the breakdown of the defeated army. (Here I am
talking about real-world political consequences.) In the frist place, I
would expect that having an ally on which to blame a defeat would defuse
some of the political consequences of loss; and comprising only a small
part of the total defeated force would provide an even better excuse---"we
didn't lose the battle, it was our inept ally, who outnumbered us so much
that we couldn't do things our way!" 

Deducting from each defeated power PP's calculated from the whole defeated
army would seem to encourage the kind of behavior seen in bad ninja movies:
Members of the Coalition should attack any given French army one at a time,
rather than doing the rational thing and attacking together. Do we really
think that Wellington and Blucher put their respective nations at greater
political risk by attacking Napoleon jointly at Waterloo? I think that
just the opposite is the case, but that's what this interpretation commits
us to, since a Coalition loss at Waterloo would ding the Brits for each
Prussian corps present as well, and vice versa.

Returning to what I quoted before:

> > Although Napoleon said, "I would rather fight an alliance than be part of
> > one," the fact remains that allies do have one advantage in battle. If you
> > contribute, for example, two corps to a battle against the French, the
> most
> > political points you will lose in a defeat is one, while you stand to gain
> > as many as three. Your nation could lose three battles and win one and
> > still come out even. True, the French would then have nine political
> > points, but the important fact is that you would not lose nine.

Why is the most that could be lost by committing two corps 1PP? My
understanding of this is that each corps counts for 0.5PP, the only corps
that count are the ones that belong to the player, and Napoleon isn't
leading the French (otherwise another 2PP could be lost): 0.5PP x 2 = 1PP

Why is it that the most that could be gained is 3PP? I believe this reflects
just the PP cap for counting corps---everything above 6 corps counts as 6 when
figuring PP losses. (Again, Napoleon must not be involved, since then the most
that could be gained would be 5PP.)

So I don't think this example speaks to the question of what PPs a
victorious mixed force gets. I'd expected this to be symmetric, but now
I'm not so sure. I see the point that's being made about single victors,
though I'm not yet convinced. I'll see what my friend can dig up in those
_General_ articles.

(A further consideration in favor of single victory/split defeat is that
it keeps the PP for battle [neglecting the effects of Napoleon] zero-sum.
The victor can't gain more PP than the defeated lose. The way we've been
doing it, if France defeated everyone else in a single battle, the Coalition
could collectively loose 18PP, while France could gain at most 3PP, causing
a dramatic destruction of PPs. There are clearly examples of non-zero sum
PP transactions---e.g., ceding is negative-sum and successfully defending
a fortress in an assault is positive-sum---but my intuition is that combat
ought to be zero-sum if anything is.)

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