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Greetings Designers,

I know I am old fashioned. There are some genres where I dislike pre-measuring, and others where it doesn't bother me. A lot of times it is more of a can you Pre-measure Yes/No.

I am a bit old fashion, but I like my games pre-WWI to not allow pre-measuring and post-WWI to allow it. My rationale is that WWI to today there is a lot or tools to help measure distance. Before, it was all done by the Mark I eyeball.

I think it was the military history book Mask of Command where the author mentions that one of the key differences between a good tactician and a great tactician was their ability to judge distance on the field of battle. How fast a unit could quick march from here to there. How far the archers could shoot across a field effectively. How far a group of cavalry could cross the gap and still hit effectively. Stuff like measuring distance was a key success factor for Military command in the age before WWI.

As I play, I have found in ancient games where no pre-measuring is allowed led me to a more nerve wracking game of judgement. Am I close enough to make the charge? Am I not? This leads to a stronger game as there are decisions to be made with consequences. If I make the wrong decision I will suffer.

However, in a more modern game I find that same decision to be less relevant. If I can see it,I want to be able to shoot it. Maybe I can shoot it easier or worse but I still want to shoot it. Instead, distance measures are more focused on maneuver. Can I get from Point x to Point z in a single move or will I be exposed?

I know, personal preferences; but they definitely impact how I design games since I design them for myself first.

Now, how do you go about answering the question: Pre-measure Yes/No?

One thing that warmachine showed was that without premeasuring it created a bias for players.

Those with more practice and experience could eyeball distances fairly well. They would also use tricks like known measured elements on the board to help them. So if they know a bit of terrain they were near was x inches long then they could use that to better estimate distances near to it.

Meanwhile a newer or less experienced player might well lack these skills. This makes the game far harder for them and introduces a while new required skill set for higher level play.

Personally I think it depends on the game . In a game of strict measurements it is ofrten not a benefit to not pre measure. Whilst in a game eith more casual moving its not so bad.

Good one.

Honestly, it really depends. I think allowing pre-measuring can make things a little easier and avoid arguments over nudges and "accidental" movements. (See Warmachine/Hordes which was, in earlier editions, an extreme case of micro-measurement.) Not being able to make a melee attack because you're 1mm short on your movement can be extremely frustrating, and shifts the focus of the game from higher level strategy and tactics to anal retentiveness in measurements. I get the thrill of wanting the reliance on the eyeball, and agree in games with sufficiently lower tech levels it might even "add flavor." But in my experience, no premeasuring also adds a lot of potential for arguments, especially with "pick up games" and random players.

Sci-fi games where tech is pretty advanced, no premeasuring actually seems dumb. Starships, even modern naval/air craft, all have systems that can pinpoint things within a couple feet or even finer grain. It's completely reasonable to think that even handheld rangefinders for sci-fi marines (think Aliens) can get things within a foot or so. Also, most modern and later weapon ranges are way more than the typical game board, so the idea of "if I can see it, I can shoot at it" is completely reasonable (with modifiers of course...).

So, I guess what I'm getting to is that while I can see some arguments for no premeasuring, especially based on setting/period, in my experience that only leads to "more tenseness" in the game, but that is not always a good thing, and in most cases is not. So I've started just allowing it in most games I write, regardless of setting.

This leads to a stronger game as there are decisions to be made with consequences. If I make the wrong decision I will suffer.

I think this is a somewhat false sense of what a "stronger game" really is. No premeasuring does indeed make judgement of distances far more important, but think about this: is the ability to judge 6" or 5.5" something that would have been even remotely relevant to a battlefield commander? No premeasuing brings in a reliance on a player skill that is, ultimately, irrelevant to the tactical play of the game, in my opinion.




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Another consideration is that every game will likely have some kind of "effect X if within Y of unit/terrain/thing," which means you have to measure those things. If you generally have "no premeasuring" then you have to write out some clunky rules of "except if..." and then also figure out ways to prevent player abuse of that (which again was something that Warmachine saw abused A LOT). IMO, that's verbiage that could be better spent elsewhere.

Even in ancient times measuring was a thing. And archer trained for years would know thier range, artillery would mark the ground with range markers or fire rangefindong shots. Things that would be hard to fit into a game with only 6 turns or so.

If your army is being commanded by a competant general then they would have extensive experience in eyeballing thingscand consulting unit specialists and using rangfinders and other devices.

IMHO, I always felt that allowing someone to measure before they declared a move/charge just made it a cat and mouse game. You measure to charge and find you are 1/2" away, so you stay put and the enemy knows they can't charge either, so they move up 1/4". It just makes everyone stay just out of range and drove me crazy.

Just announce you will do it and you gamble - you either make it, or fall embarrassingly short and have to suck up a charge from the enemy - put on your big boy pants and go to battle!

 Overread wrote:
One thing that warmachine showed was that without premeasuring it created a bias for players.

Those with more practice and experience could eyeball distances fairly well. They would also use tricks like known measured elements on the board to help them. So if they know a bit of terrain they were near was x inches long then they could use that to better estimate distances near to it.

Meanwhile a newer or less experienced player might well lack these skills. This makes the game far harder for them and introduces a while new required skill set for higher level play.

Personally I think it depends on the game . In a game of strict measurements it is ofrten not a benefit to not pre measure. Whilst in a game eith more casual moving its not so bad.

Judging distance is a skill (and there are tricks to it that help make it easier). I think a lot of us play these games because we like to think (regardless of whether or not its justified) that there is a level of skill involved with playing, and being successful at the game is an indicator of ones level of skill, which theoretically carries some weight or clout within the community (or at least for ones own ego). To me it seems antithetical to that mindset to eliminate a mechanic from a game on the basis that theres a learning curve involved/a skill that players need to develop.

In my case, I agree with Easy that there are settings where pre-measuering makes sense, and those where it doesn't. In my case with my own game designs, I have attempted to tie that into the games mechanically in some way, e.g. - pre-measuring is an action that some, but not all, models can take if they have the right equipment, but sometimes there might be a penalty for doing so, i.e. a dude equipped with a rangefinder can use it to premeasure distance from their base to one specific point (either a point on the table or another model) as an action - but taking that action means they can't also fire their weapon in the same turn - which is fine because the guy with the rangefinder is usually a spotter working in tandem with a sniper or a marksman, so you measure distance from the spotter to get an idea if the target is in range, and then the sniper right next to him can take the shot if it is - and if there happens to be a squad of grunts standing nearby that benefit from the measurement made by the spotter - thats fine too, because I have to imagine that they probably have radios or some form of communication to eachother and they are relaying information to one another.

Agree that pre-measuring certainly makes sense in some games, but if the discussion is wargames only, I can agree with above where only units with certain equipment can do so - well done, chaos0xomega!

 MDSW wrote:
IMHO, I always felt that allowing someone to measure before they declared a move/charge just made it a cat and mouse game. You measure to charge and find you are 1/2" away, so you stay put and the enemy knows they can't charge either, so they move up 1/4". It just makes everyone stay just out of range and drove me crazy.

Just announce you will do it and you gamble - you either make it, or fall embarrassingly short and have to suck up a charge from the enemy - put on your big boy pants and go to battle!

Yeah, that can be a problem when there is premeasuring. Of course, without it also leads to issues as well (mostly sour feelilngs by those who aren't as adept at judging distance). Part of that comes down to the necessity of breaking things into turns and staggered movement. In real life, folks don't run 30 feet then suddenly stop in place.

I think we always have to make some sacrifices in "realism" in order to have a playable game. I think part of the trick is abstracting just enough, but not too much things like movements, weapon ranges, etc., in order to have a rule system that is playable but still offers some degree of "realism," whatever that means with respect to giant robots and the like.

I do remember some old games of micro armor with off-board artillery that required you to nominate a distance and a degrees from center of the table edge before lobbing the shot. That was kind of fun, and that's a place where premeasuring definitely doesn't work.

I think there are some ways to mitigate the cat-and-mouse thing where everyone makes sure to stay 1/2" out of charge range and you wind up having everyone just sitting there, but the exact ways to do that will depend on your setting and what else you want out of the game, I think.

I'm planning my wargame to have infinite range but modifiers for it, with no premeasuring.

I used to like the no premeasuring aspect of 40k, but then I was excellent at putting my dudes 12.5" away from the enemy and coaxing them out of cover to try and charge me, only to blunder aimlessly in the open when they were 6.5" away. I was also a dab hand at guess range weapons.

One of the "tricks" people used to use was to attack the furthest thing first and then "check the range" when firing, thus getting a decent idea of the distances for other attacks (back when if you declared an attack out of range, it was wasted). avoiding this would be quite important to me, I just need to work out how...

There is a strong dichotomy on this subject and it boils down to what your game system is eventually designed or perceived to be and the player base it attracts.

The more "casual" the less the player base cares for premeasuring the more "tournament oriented" the more they care because competitive people will try to get the edge and imperfect information takes control from them and they hate it.

Everything else like "fairness", "barriers for disabled people", "ruins the depth of the game with gotcha moments" ectr etr are excuses for the simple fact that competitive players want as perfect information as possible.

And they will try to abuse the system to get that information from it.

So we come back to the start what your game is designed or perceived to be, if you go for tournament game or the game due to balance and structure attracts competitive players premeasuring will eventually be either demanded or creep in in some odd and abusive way so better plan in advance for it.

I think one important aspect of tabletop games is to identify that there are two sets of gameplay rules

Those formally written in the book

Those dediced from the rules in the book


To use warmachine 2 as another example one rule was that if you declared a charge, you had to make the move, even if you fell short of the target distance.
Thus an informal interpretation of that rule was to declare charges in the first turn when you were guarenteeded to fail. You did so because you could move further on a charge than a run.


A game rule has to balace this latter element of rules and tricks carefully. If the system has too many or has them allow for major benefits then you risk splitting the playerbase. Whilst you can argue that it is gameskill, it is also a set of game tools that new players wont pick up on first. Worse some game groups won't pick up on them.
This isn't like magicthe gathering where you are looking for spell combos, but closer to if you were looking for ways to change the fundamentals of the gamrs rules

 PsychoticStorm wrote:
There is a strong dichotomy on this subject and it boils down to what your game system is eventually designed or perceived to be and the player base it attracts.

The more "casual" the less the player base cares for premeasuring the more "tournament oriented" the more they care because competitive people will try to get the edge and imperfect information takes control from them and they hate it.

Everything else like "fairness", "barriers for disabled people", "ruins the depth of the game with gotcha moments" ectr etr are excuses for the simple fact that competitive players want as perfect information as possible.

And they will try to abuse the system to get that information from it.

Great post Psychotic Storm. People who want control will find ways to bend the system to get that control, because ultimately competitive players want to remove potential unknowns. This also leads to Overreads point that there are two types of rules, those written in the rules and those interpreted from the rule to be true.

I think if you try to design for the minority (Competitive players) you are setting yourself up to fail. Competitive players are the most vocal, but they are only about 25% of the audience if you go by Communication/Thinking Styles as a broad defining concept of players as well. There are just as many players who care about "forging the narrative, build relationships at the table, and the analytics of the game itself. Therefore, over focusing on Competitive/Controller players in your rules writing is a mistake as it limits your target audience arbitrarily.

However, you are right Storm, it all boils down to what you are trying to accomplish on the table and finding the best tool to do it. Sometimes it is pre-measuring and sometimes it isn't.

Personally I prefer games where pre-measuring is allowed, and that's the way we always play it in our group. Wargames are a test of the players skill as a general, but this should be about strategy and tactics and how well you command your troops, not about how well you can judge distances on a tabletop.

 MDSW wrote:
IMHO, I always felt that allowing someone to measure before they declared a move/charge just made it a cat and mouse game. You measure to charge and find you are 1/2" away, so you stay put and the enemy knows they can't charge either, so they move up 1/4". It just makes everyone stay just out of range and drove me crazy.

IMO this is down to poor choice of rules mechanisms (often due to charge bonuses being granted). Wargames are supposed to bear some semblance to reality (or for sci-fi or fantasy, some sort of imagined reality), and in real life there was no "charge range". Charges did not fall short or fail, resulting in the troops standing still and getting charged by the enemy. The only time charging troops would not contact the enemy is if the charge is disrupted (typically by shooting) or if the enemy runs away.

Pre-measuring all the way. Guessing has always felt awkward and was prone to abuse.

To be honest I think grid would be a great way to go for many wargames too, removing imperfections and ambiguity for the sake of clean, strategic gameplay. Dust seems to be praised for this solution.


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 MDSW wrote:
IMHO, I always felt that allowing someone to measure before they declared a move/charge just made it a cat and mouse game. You measure to charge and find you are 1/2" away, so you stay put and the enemy knows they can't charge either, so they move up 1/4". It just makes everyone stay just out of range and drove me crazy.

I don't know where the idea that you can't beat hard threat ranges in a pre-measuring wargame comes from. A good game has tools that let you compensate for shorter ranges with tactics and manoeuver. I have written about this here, including a RL game example: https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/60/790903.page#10894594

Stay out of range indefinitely = can't take objectives and lose the game. Easy.

Polkovnik wrote:
Personally I prefer games where pre-measuring is allowed, and that's the way we always play it in our group. Wargames are a test of the players skill as a general, but this should be about strategy and tactics and how well you command your troops, not about how well you can judge distances on a tabletop.

Not to be "that guy", but if you read the Mask of Command by the excellent historian John Keegan, he explicitly mentions one of the core tasks of a general was being able to estimate distances, wither marching over range, dispersion for scavenging, musketry ranges, and march speed/distance in a tactical sense. Therefore, warfare has always been about who can "judge distances on the tabletop". Therefore, times before accurate range finding the human eye and estimation was what counted, and only rarely did they get to "pre-measure" it.

Now, these are games and not real life so whatever works best for what you are trying to achieve. In my mind an game system either allows it or it doesn't. There are pros and cons to each option.

Pre-Measuring Pros:
- Removes ambiguity
- Levels the playing field
- Fairness

Pre-Measuring Cons:
- Removes ambiguity
- Takes extra time for measurements that are not actions
- Adds uncertainty


Templated Movement
I think another aspect we have not talked to much about is template movement versus free-measuring? How does that play into the discussion? You know exactly what and how far you will move each time, but often times you can not use the template without committing to the move first. However, each template is a known element.




@Cyel- regarding Grid play. You might want to check out a game called To The Strongest. It is an Ancients game, but uses grid based movement. It is a relatively popular set of rules.

It's like being a carpenter. An experienced carpenter of many years can eyeball measurements pretty darn well. Sure they use a ruler to check, but they can botch something together that's pretty accurate by eye.

A novice will have to reach for the tape measure every time.


So in a sense wargames at the same. An experienced player will be able to eyeball many distances fairly often. However a novice won't have that same experience and it could take many years to get there. Remembering that for many they might only game once a week and that is not every week of the year.


Furthermore both carpenters and generals would use tricks to help them measure distances. They won't just trust their eye, they'll use tricks and methods that allows them to better estimate the distances. Bring it to wargames and you've got those people who can do rough trigonometry in their head or on a calculator pretty fast - so they might not be able to measure A to B, but they can eyeball the angle and work off measurements they do know.

However you won't get that info in the game rule book; you won't get the expectation to do it in the games structure.


So now you've got a system that is rewarding experience and skill; but in a setting where many players will not accumulate the gameplay experience time to develop those skills.
It also creates a very harsh boundary in skill level that is hard to overcome. Great if you've a huge population, but hard if you've not got a huge population of players and thus skill barriers become far more damaging.


By all means we have to compete with skill, but at the same time I think we have to be careful which skills are required to play and which we are competing with. Is eyeballing a distance really a skill we need compared to tactical manoeuvring; target selection etc...

I am a firm believer in pre-measuring and from my experience with many many systems and styles fo games have yet to see any advantage in not having it.

Pros:
Less arguments: Both players can check and agree any distance at any time, even if the table/models has been knocked or similar.
Less cheating: Having expereinced people using various methods to actually measure distance, this removes what is often seen as a "Skill" - even worse was games like War Machine with an inbuilt cheating mechanism.
Friendly to newcomers
Speeds the game up as decisions can be made quickly and distances checked without trying to guess small distances.

Grid based games are often even better.

I think an option that's easy to overlook is the potential of a dual-mode ruleset - in this instance, one for casual players which removes pre-measuring, and one for tournament players which explicitly includes it. Usually, I'd say to include it as an optional rule, but I understand more competitive players like things to be set in stone from the outset.

Of course, this is taking the GW approach to rulemaking, so naturally should be approached with some caution. Rather than saying "Hey, feel free to use this rule or not", we'd write something like "Use these rules for a casual game, and those rules for competitive matches".

The issue is that creates double (or more) workload for us.

If you had to pick one? I think the best call on that came from earlier in the thread: write based on the target audience. I wouldn't write for a competitive crowd by choice and I quite like the extra tension that comes from judging distances by eye, so no pre-measuring fits quite well for me. That said, it doesn't really make sense not to pre-measure for a typical sci-fi game, IMO.

Edited for clarity.

These days just play casual and want premeasuing as much or more than in more compteative games.

 Overread wrote:
It's like being a carpenter. An experienced carpenter of many years can eyeball measurements pretty darn well. Sure they use a ruler to check, but they can botch something together that's pretty accurate by eye.

A novice will have to reach for the tape measure every time.


So in a sense wargames at the same. An experienced player will be able to eyeball many distances fairly often. However a novice won't have that same experience and it could take many years to get there. Remembering that for many they might only game once a week and that is not every week of the year.


Furthermore both carpenters and generals would use tricks to help them measure distances. They won't just trust their eye, they'll use tricks and methods that allows them to better estimate the distances. Bring it to wargames and you've got those people who can do rough trigonometry in their head or on a calculator pretty fast - so they might not be able to measure A to B, but they can eyeball the angle and work off measurements they do know.

However you won't get that info in the game rule book; you won't get the expectation to do it in the games structure.


So now you've got a system that is rewarding experience and skill; but in a setting where many players will not accumulate the gameplay experience time to develop those skills.
It also creates a very harsh boundary in skill level that is hard to overcome. Great if you've a huge population, but hard if you've not got a huge population of players and thus skill barriers become far more damaging.


By all means we have to compete with skill, but at the same time I think we have to be careful which skills are required to play and which we are competing with. Is eyeballing a distance really a skill we need compared to tactical manoeuvring; target selection etc...

How is this different from people who are good at doing probability calculations in their head? They have an unfair advantage than a novice or people who are not wired that way. I play games against computer programmers who can do complex math in their heads, but I can't because I am a silly History major. Is this unfair? Do we have to remove probability from our wargames then?

Is this a skill we should reward even though real life generals could not calculate for probability since real world units do not have "stat" blocks?
They did have to calculate distance? Which one is more important in a wargame then?

Again, to me pre-measure or not..... depends on what you are trying to accomplish in the game. I just want to think about the 'assumptions' we are making as designers. Almost all "modern" game design use pre-measuring, but I am unsure we actually gain anything from it.

Less arguments? Why, whether you pre-measure or not you eventually measure it for your action.
Saves times? Why, people start pre-measuring every action before deciding on their one action. That is more time?
Fairness? Makes no sense as their are tons of inbuilt uncontrollable differences between players, why is spacial recognition singled out as bad compared to other skills, like memorizing stat blocks or probability?
Control? Is control always good for a wargame player? Depends...

So, the question remains why are you as the designer choosing to allow or remove pre-measuring?

Pro-premeasuring and pro-probability charts being provided up-front, or even easily provided via an external app.

Mind, one of the main assumptions nowadays is that a wargame is 'player 1 versus player 2', but the older assumption (especially with old Napoleonic games) was "two teams and an umpire". (There was an old story of 'drama' I read secondhand, where one team was planning their maneuvers in a locker room, then they heard a sneeze, as the opposing team had hired a midget to take notes...). More heads=more collaboration/more 'parallel' mathhammering/etc, and that isn't particularly reflected when it's just 1 player vs 1 player...

That's something nice about board-games, they hand-wave this sort of thing about with squares or hexes or nodes or whatnot.

Heroscape was a great game for this - handled LOS and range really well.

 Easy E wrote:

...one of the core tasks of a general was being able to estimate distances, wither marching over range, dispersion for scavenging, musketry ranges, and march speed/distance in a tactical sense. Therefore, warfare has always been about who can "judge distances on the tabletop". Therefore, times before accurate range finding the human eye and estimation was what counted, and only rarely did they get to "pre-measure" it.

Yes I'm sure estimating distances was a useful skill for a general, but I don't think estimating real life distances of hundreds of metres or a mile or two bears any semblance in terms of skill to estimating 6 or 12 inches on the tabletop.
I want my strategy and tactics to be tested against that of my opponent, not to see who can get a gamey advantage from being best at estimating 12 inches.

That is the thing.... distance and time to target IS part of the tactics!

For example for games, you know a unit will take X turns to move over Y distance on the table. You do not want this unit to get to their final location because if they do, they will tip the balance at the objective.

Therefore, you need to slow or stop this enemy unit, but what is in position to respond or react in a timely manner.......

Judging distance is critical to tactics.

 Easy E wrote:
That is the thing.... distance and time to target IS part of the tactics!

For example for games, you know a unit will take X turns to move over Y distance on the table. You do not want this unit to get to their final location because if they do, they will tip the balance at the objective.

Therefore, you need to slow or stop this enemy unit, but what is in position to respond or react in a timely manner.......

Judging distance is critical to tactics.

I think it depends on what sort of tactics you envision any given game to have. Like my previous post mentioned, I think most of the time the ability to accurately eyeball 11.5" vs 12" is not as representative of the kind of tactics most people are considering when they want to play wargames. Flanking, choice of positioning, choice of which units to engage with other units, etc., are probably more what people envision as "tactics."

For some genres, that additional requirement to accurately judge distances (while conceding that judging inches is far different than judging yards) might be important. For modern and sci-fi, it's completely unnecessary IMO, since technology will provide rangefinders and the like, or even targeting computers, that makes "am I in distance to fire? no longer even a question.

Really, though, as I mentioned before, if a game system winds up having high reliance on micro-measurements, you'll wind up with arguments either way: pre-measuring can lead to "unrealistic" cat-and-mouse shennanigans of staying exactly .25" out of charge/shoot range, and no pre-measuring can lead to arguments of fudged measuring at crucial times and sometimes "gotcha" moments where you thought you might be in range but weren't. I don't think there's one single answer to solve the problem, but rather you need to consider what you want your game to do, and what kind of tactics you want to generally be important to it, and develop the mechanics from there. Measurement, whether pre-measured in inches, "on the spot measurement" in centimeters, or templates/sticks, are all just mechanics that should be there to help reinforce the game experience.

(That said, most of my current designs do use pre-measurement, because currently it fits best for what I'm trying to achieve.)

The thing is in reality measurements of distance have a bit of fuzz around them. You might know that your catapult can fire X distance but that's only a guideline - sometimes it might be a bit more sometimes a bit less. So not only have you ranges and distances, but you've some room to move around them.

A unit of horsemen might charge X distance but you can make them go X+2 and know that they can just push themselves that far etc....


In a tabletop wargame distances, functionally speaking, are very exact. You are either in or out of range down to an accuracy of a few millimetres.


So now if you make it a required skill you're making it a very exacting very high level skill to work with. It might work better in a game where there's more random on distances being used and where there's room to "push" units to go a bit further etc... ;but otherwise in a game with exact measurements it adds a very high level skill to the game. One that is perhaps not a skill most getting into wargames are going to think is important.

 Overread wrote:
The thing is in reality measurements of distance have a bit of fuzz around them. You might know that your catapult can fire X distance but that's only a guideline - sometimes it might be a bit more sometimes a bit less. So not only have you ranges and distances, but you've some room to move around them.

A unit of horsemen might charge X distance but you can make them go X+2 and know that they can just push themselves that far etc....


In a tabletop wargame distances, functionally speaking, are very exact. You are either in or out of range down to an accuracy of a few millimetres.


So now if you make it a required skill you're making it a very exacting very high level skill to work with. It might work better in a game where there's more random on distances being used and where there's room to "push" units to go a bit further etc... ;but otherwise in a game with exact measurements it adds a very high level skill to the game. One that is perhaps not a skill most getting into wargames are going to think is important.

That's actually a very solid point about distances in real life vs. on the table. A longbow shot in real life has a fungible range, affected by lots of things, but in most tabletop games it's something like "exactly 24 inches then it just stops and falls to the ground." Of course, we have to have some sort of those measurements on the table (or use other things to compensate) because, well, it's a game.

If we were to add in something like "A longobow range is 20 + 1d6 inches" people would likely throw lots of complaints about that system, even if it was slightly "more accurate" and would remove the cat-and-mouse shennanigans (for either pre-meausre or on-spot-measure).

The other thing is most wargames are very fast. 6 or so turns and most are over. So you have to consider that most choices players get have only a limited window to work in.

Yes old battles were fairly fast once you made contact (physically speaking you can only fight for so long and moral often breaks before that); but the manvouers could go on for ages moving around.


Heck I recall in Total War games one thing many disliked was when you'd be playing chase the army with the AI. When the AI would make a smart choice to avoid combat and keep moving away and it would frustrate most players. The AI wasn't often gaining advantage it was just trying to avoid committing to a fight; which ina closed situation is near impossible so it just wastes time.
But it also highlights how people have a perception of how a fight/battle should be and want an experience (more times than not) closer to that.

Thanks for engaging with me guys.

Great point about the actual distance is Fuzzy Overread. I have seen a few games that do try to add that with some variable ranges for charges, moving, range, etc. to account for battlefield variations.

Normally, gamers have not appreciated it or reacted poorly to it.... but it is an interesting idea to revisit.