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I think the shift to complete objective play in 6th, as opposed to objective/objective/kill points in 5th and victory points for killing + bonuses for objectives in 4th, has made the game a better game. Aggressive, tactical play is rewarded.

Alas, most of what you described was the rationale behind 4th edition missions. Units gave up points based on their cost, with bonuses for accomplishing objectives. The unintended consequence was that highly resilient units became very powerful, and "VP denial" was a meta strategy. This reached an apex with top armies rotating between AC terminator spam, Nidzilla, and Falcon Eldar. It was, in a word, not super fun.

6th edition does not really model standard company sized encounters in the 41st millenium. Instead, like all things GW, it's cranked up to 11 so that each game represents a crucial clash, a tipping point for a much larger matter. Thus, of course it makes sense for Eldrad to fight a rearguard action, or for Wolf Guard terminators to act as a suicidal drop pod unit, or for IG to accept 80+% casualties.

I think it makes for a more fun game, to be honest. Playing to keep stuff alive is more realistic, but realism is often dull.

Now... if you really wanted to make attrition a factor, just bring back old school victory points. Call them casualty points now. Although, don't make them unit by unit (as that encourages deathstars). Instead, either keep track of each model killed (averaged out from the unit cost), or keep track of whole units when under 100pts, and increasing fractions for more expensive units. So a 400 point unit with 10 models would give up 100pts after 2 casualties, 200 after 5, 300 after 8, and all 400 after 10. ICs, MCs, and vehicles would give up VPs after each wound or hull point lost.

If you have half the casualty points of your opponent or less, you get +2 Victory Points, less +1. If you're within 10%, it's a draw.

Skirmish level games, like 40k and Flames of War, are very, very tiny portions of the battle raging around the table. And thinking about it, yes the objectives are rather minor compared to taking a bridge or an entire town, but its the number of "little skirmishes" within a battle that can make a later stage of a battle possible.

Also, its a compromise of model scale vs battle scale. Massive troop formations taking major objectives? play Epic Space Marine. Smaller, more manuverable units? play 40k.

As others have said it boils down to the narrative and whether you want to play a campaign system or not.

Regarding real life forces there are plenty of situations that are time dependent. For example, a group of troops going in to rescue a reporter before their head is chopped off. Another is pitting a force against the enemy whose only purpose is to delay them from reaching another battle.

We started down the campaign path using tiles from planetary empires and a superset of the crusade of fire rules. The games are so much more fun because a win or loss has a huge impact. Because we leverage a points system where troops removed from play impact your total army available, it really makes you think about whether getting the immediate objective is worth it if you end up losing 400 points trying to hold.

The only part we really aren't playing is fleet engagements. Which we might do in the future.

With ours all named characters were defined beforehand. If one gets "killed" in game, it's a chance they are permenantly removed from the campaign. Rolled for when the battle ends.

There are a few game systems that have stuff like this but its usually in a campaign system. Battletech and leviathans does this well with you having to make a decision to retreat a heavily damaged unit so you can repair it (with funds technicians and time) or push it a bit farther to try and win the match. In infinity there is a distinction between a downed unit and a dead unit and it has rules for casualty evacuation so you could easily adapt the paradiso campaign for you to have a finite force to pull from.

Im sure other games can be adapted in different forms whether it be tracking specific units or a resource pool of some kind

Campaigns will punish you for pyrrhic victories or for marginal strategic losses depending on the set up and rules.

Particularly if they involve political factors.

Lots of games have campaign systems that penalize you for loosing a given battle, but some do even better and penalize you in the midst of a battle.

In Tomorrow's war you have to care for and evac your wounded. Thus taking casualties has real consequences to how the forces are able to fulfill their mission.

The exception to this is if you are playing the part of an insurgency, in which case you don't have to worry about your wounded, but you do start with much inferior troops.

If you are playing a game that is generally extremely deadly in its combat results, you're going to get these kinds of outcomes. 40k, for example, does not have any result other than 'killing people' from fire, and it has a mechanism that lets you totally annihilate other units in close combat just by them not running away fast enough.

I mean, I play warmahordes where the scenario and the caster are, for the most part, the only things that matter in a tournament, and I know it's not realistic but it makes for better gameplay, because if preservation of units were important games would take way longer as both sides played cautiously and sometimes even passively.

 MrMoustaffa wrote:
If you're telepathic, you've probably figured out where this is going, but for the non witches, here's where I make my point. If we were in a "real" (and I use that term very lightly) combat scenario holding all the objectives would mean almost nothing, as my opponent still has his force mostly intact. Oh boy, my 10 surviving guardsmen have all the objectives, their victory is surely secured even though there's still 80 chaos marines on the field. Yeah, I "won" in that short window of time, but thanks to the sustained losses I took, it would make my force severely crippled for an enemy counterattack. Essentially, I may have won the battle, but I have opened myself up to losing the entire war (in extremely simplistic terms) For those of you who play video games, think of it as a RTS, where one player destroys almost his entire army but "wins" a battle. However, the fact that he lost almost his entire army leaves him vulnerable to a counterattack that the opponent can exploit. We never see that second step.

For my money, you’ve got this, in a way, backwards. If, as you’ve said, holding all the objectives on the field would really mean almost nothing, than the IG wouldn’t have won at all. So the rules must be representing a different situation from the one you’re envisioning. The victory on objectives is representative that as part of the larger battle, securing those objectives is actually more important than the casualties sustained. Obviously if there’s 80 chaos marines left on the table and only 10 IG, the CSM have achieved massive local force superiority, which would clearly be a victory if casualties inflicted were the priority of the engagement. But they’re not; the rules of the game represent a situation where taking those objectives is actually what secures the victory.

So instead of picturing “that second step” being “the IG get wiped and the CSM actually win”, what I figure is “The IG achieved their objective, so they’ve held the line LONG ENOUGH that their side wins despite the few guys they’ve got left at this spot.” I’m not picturing “And then the CSM gun down the last of the IG and win the day”; I’m picturing “The CSM have been stopped in their tracks at great cost by this beleaguered but heroic company of IG, holding the line long enough to prevent a Chaos breakthrough into the IG rear, and giving the IG the strategic victory despite massive local casualties”. Or “The CSM have been pinned down by the sacrifice of these few IG soldiers, allowing artillery resources to be re-allocated and exactly sited in on this battlefield; at the very moment that the brutal CSM gun down the last few heroic martyred IG, a whole formation of a dozen or more Basilisks (off-table) blasts those CSM back to oblivion or their evil gods.” That’s the “second step” I picture. Which may simply be a question of choosing what fluff rationalization makes the game make more sense to a given person, as either could easily be true, but mine rationalizes the issue for me.

For the scenarios on 40k to make sense, given that 40k has moved away from victory points (pure casualties) as the measure of who wins or loses (which was the primary measure in 2nd-4th editions), they must be representing a critical and desperate point of the battle where the actual proportion of casualties is nearly irrelevant. Where the commanders expend their forces in heroic sacrifices at this time due to the desperation of their situation, and the absolute requirement to achieve the strategic objectives on the field, regardless of losses.

 MrMoustaffa wrote:
Only real solution I can think of is campaigns that took track of what your army had and recorded what it lost. You would have to have an "army group" of sorts head out, and that's what your reinforcement pool is. For example, my "army" consists of 1500 guardsmen, 14 basilisks, and 28 Leman Russes. Losing 6 leman russes would mean that I only have 22 tanks left to pick from on the next battle. This would require lots of record keeping, but I think it would have lots of potential. Problem is that it's entirely self regulated, open to abuse all it's own (clever players "bleeding" an opponent by playing to just kill units even in objective based scenarios) and is almost impossible to balance. I think it could be incredibly awesome for a campaign though, especially if you're with some cool friends and can figure out a good way to balance it.

As you’ve said, this is very difficult to balance and to reconcile with fluff. The only reason, for example, that Space Marines are as easy to kill in the game as they are is precisely because the player doesn’t have to worry about his diminishing supply of a thousand-odd marines in a chapter. If we were playing a game better representing the fact that Space Marines are rare and their gear difficult to replace, fighting against IG who come in massive waves and have near-endless reserves, the marines would have to all be insanely powerful on the board. The kind of game you’re describing with tracked losses and “bleeding” the enemy of forces would wind up being balanced by the SM kicking the crap out of the IG on the field 90% of the time, suffering miniscule casualties. Which would be balanced in the long-term strategic sense by the IG easily replacing their losses, but would be no fun in the short term tabletop tactical battles.

 MrMoustaffa wrote:
TL;DRAre there any games that were made with this in mind for the core mechanics? A game where you have to balance long term consequences of your actions with the short term (do I sacrifice this tank to shield that squad from fire to win this battle, or toss the match to ensure I keep the tank around?) A game where strategy and tactics are at odds with each other, forcing you to make tough decisions and pick and choose where you will sacrifice for victory, and when you'll pull back to preserve your force? I realize you can house rule dang near anything, but are there any systems where it's built in to begin with?

I think there are good campaign systems out there, which allow you to run a sequence of games where the outcome of each game influences the ones that follow. How close the games are, and how heavy casualties are, can be factors. When I've seen people try to keep close track of individual casualties, though, they usually lose interest, and complain that it tends to create a snowball effect where a lead builds, and someone who's already down stays down.

In Necromunda you had "bottle tests", which were gang-wide leadership tests you had to take after taking a certain number of casualties. If you failed, your whole gang fled off the table and you lost. I know that some wargames that are more in the "historical simulation" realm have similar rules, where the morale of the whole army degrades as you take casualties until even the veteran units rout. In a way WHFB has this in the form of taking leadership tests for friendly units fleeing past you. I suppose you could introduce some kind of mechanic for that in 40k, but it would really require a complete reworking of the system to be more realistic (and I think a toning down of the weapon systems and troops like we saw at the beginning of 5th, rather than the constant oneupmanship that happens in current codex updates).

But in regards to the point about holding the objective with a few guys while there are lots of enemy troops on the field, I think a lot of the scenarios are meant to be sort of taken in the light that the main elements of the army are coming up behind and your army is just the spearhead. That is, if your 10 Guardsmen hold the objective, then the Leman Russ company will be there in a couple more minutes, and if the Chaos Marines hold it then they can extract the artifact or perform the ritual or whatever and rejoin with the horde of slavering cultists that are coming up in the rear.

Or, dont use transports in the first place! I can keep loses to an extreme minimum by going to ground with my footslogging CSM army behind tough cover, or just staying out of sight and waiting to attack an unsuspecting squad. In fact, I played a game saturday, 8000 points on each side with 6 players. My oppents failed to set any units on half of the second table, a quick manuover and they're fighting on two fronts by units in heavy cover with long range support weponry and heavy infantry (abaddon, termies) leading in the front. All focusng on the extreme left of their army. Its hard for anyone to fight a battle on two sides while focusing on an objective, real life or not!

Just play a second game based on what is left from the first.

I agree with everything Mannahnin posted!

There are missions in 40K that put survival of your assets above all else (anything where Victory Points aka Kill Points are the main determining factor such as Purge the Alien), but in all other cases the missions represent a situation so dire that commanders are willing to throw their units into the fray with the express goal of completing whatever mission objective that may be regardless of whatever casualties they suffer.

Because just like others have said, the game represents a tiny sliver of the action, so at the end of the game we can imagine both sides receive reinforcements, but the side that has completed whatever the objective is, has accomplished the actual important mission.

In a larger war, it is highly unlikely that two forces would clash against each other a bunch of times simultaneously without getting reinforcements or resupply. So if one force lost a bunch of tanks, for example, they would either receive new tanks as reinforcements, or the entire force would be retired from the front line to be resupplied or reorganized into other divisions.

So in a way, its kind of less realistic to have the casualties from one battle literally carry over from one game to the next. I think coming up with campaign rules where losing a battle means a slight disadvantage in the next game is far more realistic than trying to literally imagine that because you took out 4 tanks in one game, the opponent suddenly doesn't have access to 4 tanks in his next game.

Unless of course you're playing some sort of themed campaign where two tiny scout forces keep clashing with each other, and if that's the case more power to you, but again one side would generally not choose to fight a 2nd battle if they lost all their good units in the first one. They'd simply retreat or surrender.


Finally, the last thing I like to keep in mind when playing 40k is that every model removed as a casualty is not representing someone necessarily being killed. So while your entire IG or Ork army gets wiped out, you can imagine there are still tons of injured guys limping back to camp (and plus there's always more where they came from). And even more so for armies like Space Marines. While in the game they seem to get killed way quicker than what the fluff suggests, but if any army has individuals who would pick themselves up from being injured and live to fight another day it would have to be them.

Back in Second/ Third edition Fantasy, Mighty Empires was what this was for. These days, supposedly that is what they made the expansions for 40K, that you could do this with. I played a game where the effects of one table interacted with another, and then after the fact, you fought with what you had, and then after the battle, you went on to the next table. If you won something, ( Objective, I think it was) or you held out, and kept your squad on the table, you could keep it, reinforce/ rebuild it before the next battle, and if you had the points, you could "reforce/ resupply". with something like a couple of Terminators, or a tank, or something.

Played that game a long time ago, and IIRC, there was something about the objective markers in those expansion books you might dig around about.

They worked like that in the skirmish games, as was already discussed, and they used to have something for Fantasy in those "Campaign books", such as Lustria.

I'd honestly like to see something like that for Infinity. I think that it would go over pretty cool if you worked in these sorts of things to a campaign over a planet or in a general exploration scenario of a new territory.

I think the side controlling the field of battle would be able to recover a large portion of damaged vehicles, routed and wounded troops, and supplies. The side that was denied the area of the fight would lose all supplies, wounded and routed troops would be finished off or captured, and equipment would be left behind.

In a campaign for fantasy battle we had the winner lose no points in a battle for future games. The loser lost 20% of points for a minor defeat, 30 % for a decisive loss, and 50% for a massacre. It worked pretty well.

The current rules make sense if you look at it in that sense.

 Mannahnin wrote:
As you’ve said, this is very difficult to balance and to reconcile with fluff. The only reason, for example, that Space Marines are as easy to kill in the game as they are is precisely because the player doesn’t have to worry about his diminishing supply of a thousand-odd marines in a chapter. If we were playing a game better representing the fact that Space Marines are rare and their gear difficult to replace, fighting against IG who come in massive waves and have near-endless reserves, the marines would have to all be insanely powerful on the board.

A few editions ago, there were rules for "cinematic" Space Marines, powering them up to where one squad vs an ork army was a fair fight.

kenofyork wrote:
I think the side controlling the field of battle would be able to recover a large portion of damaged vehicles, routed and wounded troops, and supplies. The side that was denied the area of the fight would lose all supplies, wounded and routed troops would be finished off or captured, and equipment would be left behind.

In a campaign for fantasy battle we had the winner lose no points in a battle for future games. The loser lost 20% of points for a minor defeat, 30 % for a decisive loss, and 50% for a massacre. It worked pretty well.

The current rules make sense if you look at it in that sense.

Don't you then run the risk of a player having bad luck is essentially out of the campaign after the first game? If they get tabled for whatever reason they are left with potentially half the points of everyone else, which would be bad even if things were balanced. Then because they've been so badly beaten their only real option to stay in the campaign is to try and not get beaten too badly.

A campaign should factor in some consequences for win/lose/draw or casualties, but only having the losing side take a significant points hit is going to cause things to become very unfair very quickly.

For instance, you've got 4 players @ 1000pts: A, B, C, D.
First round A v B, B is massacred, C v D, D suffers a decisive loss. That means A: 1000pts, B: 500pts, C: 1000pts, D: 700pts.

B now stands no real chance of victory against A, C or D. D stands a good chance against B but a poor chance against A or C. Only A v C is likely to be fair.

2nd round: B v C, B is massacred, A v D, D suffers a decisive loss. That means A: 1000pts, B: 250pts, C: 1000pts, D: 490pts.

B stands no chance of anything but massace, D can still beat B but will probably be massacred by A or C.

And so on.

Unless the penalties aren't cumulative. But it still seem fair as A or C could have taken huge casualties both times but won by a significant points margin due to things like first blood, kill the warlord and objectives, yet still have a larger force than armies which may not have taken so many casualties.

 Elemental wrote:

 Mannahnin wrote:
As you’ve said, this is very difficult to balance and to reconcile with fluff. The only reason, for example, that Space Marines are as easy to kill in the game as they are is precisely because the player doesn’t have to worry about his diminishing supply of a thousand-odd marines in a chapter. If we were playing a game better representing the fact that Space Marines are rare and their gear difficult to replace, fighting against IG who come in massive waves and have near-endless reserves, the marines would have to all be insanely powerful on the board.

A few editions ago, there were rules for "cinematic" Space Marines, powering them up to where one squad vs an ork army was a fair fight.

Codex Movie Marines!!! It's pretty ridiculous but looks like a lot of fun. the only really dumb part is the stunt double rule which is basically like LoS ing a wound onto a guy who is not really there.

Annoyingly, they never released them in the UK, despite promising it for 3 months of white dwarfs in a row....

 Elemental wrote:

 Mannahnin wrote:
As you’ve said, this is very difficult to balance and to reconcile with fluff. The only reason, for example, that Space Marines are as easy to kill in the game as they are is precisely because the player doesn’t have to worry about his diminishing supply of a thousand-odd marines in a chapter. If we were playing a game better representing the fact that Space Marines are rare and their gear difficult to replace, fighting against IG who come in massive waves and have near-endless reserves, the marines would have to all be insanely powerful on the board.

A few editions ago, there were rules for "cinematic" Space Marines, powering them up to where one squad vs an ork army was a fair fight.

No, it wasn't. I still have those rules, and out of fun, thought it would be funny to pit 2000 pts of Tau against that many points of movie Space Marines. My friend lost 2 wounds on two models. I lost my army down to 4 Stealth Suits.

If anyone wants to try though, be my guest. Make sure you do it with someone you like a lot, though.

White Dwarf 300! That is a fun article.

Try Tomorrow's War, or Ambush Alley if you're more into contemporary warfare. Believe me, it feels more like a simulator than a tabletop game - It probably has all you asked and more


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Ops, sorry I misunderstood - thought you were speaking of cumulative effects DURING the battle, not something you carried along from one battle to the next.

Any game system will work, then. Just write a campaign that gives you and/or your enemy buffs and penalties depending on the outcome of each battle. Apart from the obvious benefits from capturing objectives, you can come up with some creative ones, such as imposing an army-wide leadership penalty on a player that loses two or more games in a row to represent the troops' loss of confidence, restrict the number of points spent on infantry or vehicles to depict heavy losses... And maybe some faction and unit-specific rules, too. Say an ork player manages to wreck (not explode) three or more enemy vehicles in a battle - It'd be ok if looted wagons came at a reduced cost, then!

I've used a Movie Marines army twice before: won one, lost one. The trick to beating a Movie Marines army is to realize that to kill a single Movie Marine requires roughly the same amount firepower as it takes to normally wipe out a full squad.

Anyway, regarding the rest of the topic, I also find it somewhat unrealistic as to how cavalier people can be about throwing soldiers' lives away. i understand the theme of W40K is often that life is cheap, but it's often hard to accept that I may have won a game because the last three models of my army were on the objective, when one more turn would have seen them blown away. Sure, there's all those fluff reasons that they were there just in time to receive/transmit a signal, or held the enemy off long enough, etc., but after awhile, those reasons just get harder and harder to accept. Especially when the next game is yet another clash between Eldrad's personal army and Calgar's personal army, because, you know, they're always in every battle at the front lines.

Regarding one example about using Rhinos as sacrificial walls, that always bugged me too. 40K often makes it very clear that life is cheap, and that vehicles and their machine spirits are often more rare and valuable than a Space Marine. Sometimes, the fluff even makes it seem like the suit of power armor is more irreplaceable than the Space Marine wearing it.

This may seem stupid but it's what I apply to online multiplayer games that let you respawn. It's Valhalla but modern day kinda thing. You fight, you die, you come back, you do it over and over again.

But I just presume that a lot of these 40K battles are just small fights that don't really matter in the long run.

I suppose it's up to the player.... the whole respawn thing in video games bugged me a ton so I figured out a solution to the problem.

I liked your point though TC, the whole army would be left open for a counter attack that would slaughter them.

Reading the Dark Vengeance "How to Play" booklet it mentioned a game where you are a group of three scouts on bikes and you fight waves of Chaos Cultists and if I remember correctly if you bolt past the Cultists they will come back in the final wave or something, the kills are permanent.

Is it realistic? No, not at all. Having one surviving guardsman surrounded by a dozen nasty demons and "winning" because the game ended before the final shot could be fired is nonsense. You could come up with a fluff reason for it occasionally, but when it happens time after time after time you just have to admit that the objective scoring is a game mechanic, not a realistic representation of what happens in a real battle.

Is it necessary? Yes. If you've ever tried organizing a long-term campaign you'll understand why effects aren't cumulative. You just can't have both hours-long individual battles (a current game of 40k) and effects that require several (or even many) battles to become relevant. People just won't play a single campaign long enough for all of that to matter. Existing players drop out, new players join, and pretty quickly you realize that unless you've got a very dedicated group of fluff-focused players all the extra trouble of tracking a campaign is just not worth it.

....when it happens time after time after time you just have to admit that the objective scoring is a game mechanic, not a realistic representation of what happens in a real battle.

As opposed to all the realistic representations of battles involving space demons.

Or, to be less flippant, of real battles involving greater than 10% casualties in general. IRL, of course, the casualty percentages of battles are normally nowhere near as high as they are in 40k. The sense of drama gained by a bloodbath is fundamental to the over the top nature of the game, and goes a lot deeper than just looking at which side's survivors happens to be holding more objectives, and arbitrarily deciding that THAT's the unrealistic part.

 Agent_Tremolo wrote:
Try Tomorrow's War, or Ambush Alley if you're more into contemporary warfare. Believe me, it feels more like a simulator than a tabletop game - It probably has all you asked and more

They have a campaign system that includes localized resupply, even replacement troops of varying quality.