Re: [eia] battle of Bordeaux: British withdrawal roll, overwhelming odds and trivial combats

[Joel Uckelman <uckelman@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thus spake MICHAEL P GORMAN:
> 
> But that is explicitly not the order in the land combat phase.  The only time
>  any statement of corps identities, and thus the forces present, have to be m
> ade before resolution of withdrawal chit choices is if somoene chooses outfla
> nk.  Then the forces have to be pre-divided before the outflanking army knows
>  the opposing chit choice.  Otherwise revealing strength is a specific step i
> n land combat sequence.
> 
> Corps composition does not appear to be secret normally, but corps identity i
> s supposed to be secret.  I agree that the overwhelming force rule is written
>  as if that is not true, but mostly that means the overwhelming force rule is
>  poorly written.
> 
> Otherwise it was apparantly the goal of the writer of this rule to make small
>  corps very advantagous as they can scout out large armies with almost no ris
> k of combat and at no cost to the power throwing troops to the wolves if they
>  end up failing their repeated chances to escape a battle.

I think the question here is whether it would be possible for the defenders
to plan to fight but still slip away after seeing how outnumbered they
were. This doesn't strike me as being uniform across sizes. E.g., I think
it might in reality be possible for a 1-factor army to do this against
a 5-factor army, but probably not a 10-factor army against a 50-factor
one. Unfortunately, the overwhelming numbers rule treats these as the same.

The rule is written as though someone could know beforehand whether there
will be a trivial combat. In this case, it was pretty clear that we would
have one, since the composition of the British corps was public knowledge
prior to the battle, but that wouldn't always be so. What this really calls
for is some way of determining whether it will be a trivial combat before
choosing tactics, and without revealing force information to any of the
players if it won't be a trivial combat. I could write something which
would do that.

-- 
J.
_______________________________________________
eia mailing list
eia@xxxxxxxxx
http://lists.ellipsis.cx/mailman/listinfo/eia