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Hard to convey this in a short and sweet answer (damn cold meds), convenient TL;DR at the bottom if you want it.

So, when one fights a battle in 40k (or any game really) we're viewing a small moment in time. Maybe a half hour to hour of combat time tops. Short, simple, bloody fighting. Naturally, these fights can be very intense, and result in the almost total annihilation of one or both armies. However, sustained losses rarely matter to your victory conditions, as almost all missions are objectives based.

For example, this means that through clever play, I can "win" a battle based on objectives against an opponent by losing almost my entire army while he takes almost no losses, as long as I control more objectives at the end. My force can nearly be routed, it doesn't matter.

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.

This also leads into situations where armies with units that are considered "unexpendable" (eldar, space marines, etc.) use units as meatshields or throw them away in an extremely uncharacteristic manner. For example, space marine players love to use their rhinos as portable walls to deny line of sight. In "real life" wasting machines with such importance would be viewed as insanity, as you would destroy your incredibly important and hard to replace armor for extremely temporary gain. Suicide units like dropping a 5 man assault squad in just to kill a leman Russ fills this description. No sane commander would put in that much effort to train and equip those marines just to kick them out the back of a thunderhawk to kill a single tank. If I had a dollar for every time I've seen a super special snowflake dark eldar/eldar/space marine unit that only 100 of them exist in the entire universe get sacrificed for extremely trivial reasons, I'd have enough money to have a brand new sisters of battle army.

So, ultimately the question I have is this, "Are there any systems that punish you over the long run for decisions you made in a game?" For example, let's say I play against a space marine player with my foot IG army. I lose the match, but take relatively few losses, while destroying almost all of his transports and fire support tanks. In the next battle, most of my stuff is still intact, but the space marine's tanks have been severely damaged and his armored support is understrength as a result. He would still get an even number of points to me, his choices are just restricted slightly due to heavy losses. Basically, a system that punishes you for being reckless with your units or sacrificing them in extremely odd/stupid ways.

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.

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 you have a good idea, but maybe make it so just in the next battle, you dont have access to enough of one FOC slot. So, if 3 rhinos were killed, you could only use 1 next time for every 3 tacical teams.

Fluff wise, you have to sieze an objective to call in reinforcements.

I think having a campaign with a resource pool is the only way to really control it, as long as the resource pool is sensible enough to begin with. You may get players trying to weaken opponents by taking out all their transports, but with a fair pool to begin with that seems reasonable enough.

I don't think there's any way to introduce this into a single battle game whilst keeping it fair. Maybe modifying the victory points based on what you've still got at the end? But I can't think how to do that without biasing for/against horde armies.

Actually Mordheim and Necromunda are pretty similar to what you are describing, this is because when I guy is removed as a casualty, they are just "out of action", not necessarily dead, but close enough, after the battle things can happen such as -1 Toughness, to outright dying.

Well GW used to have a campaign system that somewhat took losses in account, there are strategic wargames with campaigns that take losses in account and what GW ignores supply lines.

 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?

Flames of War

You have objectives to achieve to decide who wins or looses a battle but then you have unit preservation as the measure of by how much you have actually won. It can go from a 6-1 (6 points for you, 1 for your opponent), for a victory where you didn't loose any of your units to a 4-3 for a victory where you have lost 2+ units.

Judge Dredd, Mordhiem and Necromunda and other games with persistent lists fit towards the attrition gaming you described.

I would say the problem with this is that 40k has balance problems and fluff=/=gameplay hurts the ability to represent certain aspects of the game. Eldar and space marine troops aren't as bad ass as described in any fluff, much less their venerated vehicles. Add in GW's number problems and this can cause fluff distortion to the campaign, which is supposed to feel fluffy in the first place.

A fair point, but also easily dismissed. The game allows and encourages you to use fluff and utilise a back story, and it would be trivial to think of a story, such as they do during multiple game campaigns.

The guardsmen could have secured some weapons and teleported them to HQ, so that the surviving 80 space marines lose in the long run anyway.

The rich background allows you to work around it so it's a non issue, but it's a fair point nonetheless!

The thing with GW, and some other wargames, is that they are not just small bloody fights, but that we are playing a vital point in the battle. The IG gunery line that just has to hold until backup arives, or the vital landing point to capture to either let your main force land or stop the enamys bulk deploying.

40k is not about the whole story, you don't play the IG gun emplacement lobbing shell after shell on to an unsean enemy for months on end, you play the point the enamy tryes to overrun that vital emplacement when they have taken you unawares with a scout force etc.

It's not that losses don't matter in a war, but that the point you are looking at is not the big picture, however I take your point. I understand allot of historicals are more interested in the overall strategic view of long term campains and the like so it may be worth looking at them.

One of the easiest methods is to work out a set of house rules to connect it with a strategic game that already deal with the long term issues in some manner.

We have a long running campaign game that is based on Risk for the basic campaign management (simple and easy to fudge with) connected with a pair of miniatures rules to handle tactical battles.

As opposed to the simple opposed dice rolls used in Risk - we wage an actual battle with miniatures. The survivors are all you have left to garrison until you re equip them.

Remember that 40/fantasy etc are as you said, designed to show a short, bloody combat in a single 'snapshot' of time.

When you want to use supply lines/resources etc you are really looking towards a campaign system (e.g. GW's Mighty Empires) IIRC there are some rules in there where depending on how well you did in your last battle, the point costs for the next battle are better/worse (so if you lost badly when beseiging a city, you only get 1500pts instead of 2000pts when you defend that city).

But campaign systems have, by and large, been left to the players to come up with, some like 'story' campaigns, some like map-based campaigns, some like linear campaigns where everything happens in a set order bt the victor/losers gets/loses extra things in the next battle based on the outcome of the previous battle. Some insane people (and I mean insane) like to use other game systems to play out different parts of the campaign (as a truly insane example, perhaps you could use BFG battles to work out which planets in a system are invaded, use Planetary Empires to work out a map-based campaign per planet, using planetfall missions to establish initial bases. Then come up with some wierd system where the points value of your army determines whether it is fought using 40K, Apocalypse or Epic 40K rules, all the while using simultaneous inquistor/necromunda/ to perform covert ops missions that affect your opponents forces...)

If you want to play a 'hard core' wargame, you looking at things like 'Campaign for north africa' (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4815/the-campaign-for-north-africa). This tracks resources etc down to the individual person, average play time is 1200 hours, everything is micro-managed to an insane level, etc. But IMHO at this stage you have lost the fun of wargaming...

Battlefleet Gothic. Ships have very, very different victory point values depending on if they withdraw, are crippled, are blown to smithereens or are left as drifting hulks to be captured by the opponent.

That's even outwith a campaign. In a lot of games of Gothic, especially if you've got a more fragile army like the Dark Eldar, a major decision is to work out exactly which point you should run away. You want to inflict enough harm on the enemy, without being too badly mauled yourself.

I think this is where you want to make homebrew campaigns with persistent forces for 40k...

The unexpendable armies throwing away their troops is also an example of the ridiculous fluff GW has built up around some of their armies and the disconnect between the fluff and game mechanics.

 Krellnus wrote:
Actually Mordheim and Necromunda are pretty similar to what you are describing, this is because when I guy is removed as a casualty, they are just "out of action", not necessarily dead, but close enough, after the battle things can happen such as -1 Toughness, to outright dying.

Wow - I just how awesome a Necromunda-style 40k campaign would be with wound tables for destroyed vehicles. Battle-scared tank, with only one headlight. Or the skimmer that needs a mechanic to coax it into the battle, but occasionally gets a power surge and goes supersonic. lol

This is easily achievable by smashing your minis to bits everytime you play, then you would have a "limited" supply of stuff so you can't just throw them at your enemy~

I have p[layed games where this is possible, you strart the campaign with a large force list and from this you choose your fighting force. Losses are replaced, depending on game results and with restrictions, so once that uber elite unit is gone its gone, but forces will always dwindle, this does make commanders more careful with their troops

Battle Tech.

If you play a campaign, you better be getting salvage from mech on mech fights, your your vehicles will be falling to pieces. It's certainly a game where you better be ready and willing to back off in a fight.

I've never really thought about it like that.

The objectives may be in place so that other divisions of the army reinforcements can notice your force and so help you? A guy may have a flare on him or something to draw attention to the 10 lonely guardsmen. Maybe Rhinos are insanely easy to make? I'm not sure, it's quite a good question.

I'd like to play a campaign in which all this crap matters.

There are also such things as pyrrhic victories, mind you, but again it goes back to what you were saying, it's not in the scope of the game.

Play campaigns, like others have said, with an agreed with pool of resources. It'll require an honour system where players truthfully downgrade their armament after loses.

I would assume, also, that the winner gets to salvage some of his equipment lost, so there would have to be rolls à la Mordheim or a simple "repair" roll for Rhinos. Bonus to roll if you have a techmarine with full servitor team.

This could be a great project, you know. And even a better read than some GW supplements.

You're looking for a Campaign system.

Even a limited one, such as in Campaign - Paradiso for Infinity, brings a lot of new decisions to the table.

I assume you're mostly talking 40k, so that's where I'm directing my answers...

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.

This is where many games shape a narrative, and it's up to the players to determine it. If the objective is a switch to a massive orbital bombardment your surviving guardsmen will make quick work what ever is left, or they likely bug out seeing you have it, and want to get out in time. You also might have a massive group of reinforcements over the hill after turn 6, so they leaves. On and on, it's up to your imagination at this point. That said, I've never had an objective based game end this lopsided for the winner. But I see what you're saying... "what if"

I also think 6th edition has done a good job with more elaborate missions. In 5th edition I made every army of my SM with the goal of winning objective games. In 6th, I've got to bring more thought to the table.

This also leads into situations where armies with units that are considered "unexpendable" (eldar, space marines, etc.) use units as meatshields or throw them away in an extremely uncharacteristic manner. For example, space marine players love to use their rhinos as portable walls to deny line of sight. In "real life" wasting machines with such importance would be viewed as insanity, as you would destroy your incredibly important and hard to replace armor for extremely temporary gain. Suicide units like dropping a 5 man assault squad in just to kill a leman Russ fills this description. No sane commander would put in that much effort to train and equip those marines just to kick them out the back of a thunderhawk to kill a single tank. If I had a dollar for every time I've seen a super special snowflake dark eldar/eldar/space marine unit that only 100 of them exist in the entire universe get sacrificed for extremely trivial reasons, I'd have enough money to have a brand new sisters of battle army.

I think armor is used as infantry shields in conventional modern day warfare as well. I think there is a mission in 6th which awards taking out heavy support. Rhinos are troop transports, which are far more expendable than heavy support, even in "real life" as you say. This is also the dark future of the 41st M. Things that seem illogical, might fit into the overall narrative of 40k. Space marines might willingly sacrifice a battalion of rhinos to rescue a fallen venerable dreadnought (objective).

I wouldn't consider units that were removed from play as being killed. Many of them may have slight injuries (enough to put them out of a fight temporarily), ran out of ammo, or simply got lost. The five "throw away" space marines you described vs a leman russ may have had orders to take out the tank and then be extracted in a LZ thats not hot, rather then just fight to the death.

I played in a Warhammer campaign one time that ran just the way you want. We played a series of preset potential battles so we knew what was coming (the geography), and designed our army for the campaign accordingly. After a battle, the winner got some advantage for the next battle (even choice of which battle they wanted to play). Casualties on the field were rolled off to see if they were actually gone (d6 only 1,2 didnt return), or able to continue fighting. At certain points we were given an allotments of points to rebuild units or expand our army size. Sometimes units were so beat up we had to combine them with similar units. So, we came up with a table to roll when we did this to see the affects of combining units had, and how long it lasted.

During the campaign, I found myself having to hold off committing better units during battles because they were still beat up from prior battle and hadnt received replacements yet. It was really fun and easy to do. Everyone just had to commit to the idea that there was more accounting between battles, but not much more then you'd have for blood bowl, mordheim or necromunda.

I actually find that I miss that campaign, and now that many of the players have moved on cause of life (and death), or simply quit Fantasy period, am having difficulty recreating it. I think some people get into the tourney scene because they like "games that mean something". They get tired of playing one up games without any implications from the results of the game. The campaign (linking a series of games) really fills this need, and it was really fun! I had units totally ground down in the first battle, come back and over the course of the campaign, become a real powerhouse. Oh, we had also built an experience system into it for units.

Battletech. One of my favorite features was running longer campaigns.

I actually have a half finished set of rules for a sort of larger scale battletech. It focuses on scratch building your giant robots/pilots, and their supporting contingents (infantry, fighter jets, tanks, etc). You would run campaigns, track pilots/mechs from game to game. I abandoned the idea because I was having trouble with scale, play area would need to be 10x10 feet.

The biggest problem for me is probably finding people willing to commit.

Didn't GW make an expansion that was like the campaign in Dark Crusade? If not, it would be really easy to cook one up: make a planetary map, agree on rules for making hero squads, make rules for each map location (points, terrain, scenario, etc). Probably a couple days work, but it could be fun.

I concur that it's a shame when armies aren't played to character. If you're invested in the 40K background, it's always painful to see Eldar Guardians used as meat shields.

The only way around this that I can think of would be to assign some kind of "Sacrifice" value to the each unit, where 1 = "Oh well... plenty more where they came from" and 5 = "Nooooooooooooo! Why God?! Why?!"

So...

Tyranid Termagant = 1
Imperial Guardsman = 2
Tau Fire Warrior = 3
Eldar Guardian = 4
Space Marine = 5

At the end of the battle, you add up "how much" you have sacrificed to win your objective and if you surpass a certain value, any victory is considered "Too great a cost." and is reduced to a draw or even a loss.

Now obviously this opens up a can of worms regarding actual point values i.e. in game terms, does a Space Marine become less valuable if you can't use it as a suicide pawn?

Intriguing debate anyway...

It's less of an issue in 40k where the fact the life is cheap is a crucial part of the background for most armies. But with Historical gaming it's a thing that does bug me. In FOW for example it does seem quite odd to see people throwing away 80%+ of their men in a single game and then claiming victory. In the real world any Captain who got that many of his men killed or wounded in one action would be sent home is disgrace and be considered an incompetent butcher. Certainly in the western armies anyway, less so in the Red or Imperial Armies.

In reality even in major actions losses of 10% (killed and wounded) are generally considered to be very heavy, yet in game terms losing only 10% of your men is a triumph. Most Wargames are far bloodier than real battles, understandably so as most Wargames are focused only on the immediate objectives of that game. Players don’t have to concern themselves with making sure their army is still functional tomorrow.

makes sense really with armies like Tyranids (who don't think, save the synapse creatures) and orks, who use things like grots, most not seeing much in the way of tactics (neither do I when I play them, running forward and killing everything I touch, worked pretty well in 5th ed, though with 6th ed's love of fliers I retired that army and, it being the only 40k army I own, stopped playing)

Just a thought. Would setting the game conditions to give FULL VP for units reduced to less than 50% , and Half VP for units that take any damage, make players a bit more careful?

People have already hit on these points, but I think they need to be emphasized.

The missions within the standard 40K ruleset have predetermined objectives and turn limits. If the 'real scenario' in your mind doesn't fit those missions, it will deliver unsatisfactory results. If, on the other hand, you come up with a semi-plausible narrative as to why you need to accomplish those objectives in those time constraints, the tactics used will seem more 'realistic'. If you assume that the ground forces can just continue fighting after the turn limit, then obviously, determining the victor after that turn limit expires is arbitrary.

Models removed from play shouldn't consistently be thought of as "killed". They might be panicked and fleeing, knocked unconscious, bleeding out, or simply combat ineffective. This was called out really effectively in one of the GW books on WFB Dwarves, where the 'casualties' of a battle were fairly high on the dwarf side, but due to natural dwarven toughness, most of those casualties were back in fighting trim soon thereafter. Thus, the grot or IG grunt might just be blown apart by the CSM's boltgun, but the CSM might be knocked out by return fire, and regain consciousness minutes later, or have his backpack power supply cut off, and be unable to keep up with his squad.

Campaign systems do reflect this much better, but have a host of their own problems. Injury charts for a game like Necromunda, where almost everyone is a human ganger, are reasonably easy, but coming up with a system to differentiate humans vs. post-humans vs. orks vs. tyranids vs. wraithguard for 'injury effects' starts becoming ridiculously complex (or incredibly inaccurate to the fluff, as orks, for example, can just get new limbs stapled on with a fair degree of success) Also, campaign systems with injuries can irrevocably cripple one player's army with some bad injuries. While this is 'realistic', it isn't terribly fun for the guy who then loses every subsequent game horribly.

Models removed from play shouldn't consistently be thought of as "killed". They might be panicked and fleeing, knocked unconscious, bleeding out, or simply combat ineffective. This was called out really effectively in one of the GW books on WFB Dwarves, where the 'casualties' of a battle were fairly high on the dwarf side, but due to natural dwarven toughness, most of those casualties were back in fighting trim soon thereafter. Thus, the grot or IG grunt might just be blown apart by the CSM's boltgun, but the CSM might be knocked out by return fire, and regain consciousness minutes later, or have his backpack power supply cut off, and be unable to keep up with his squad.

This reminds me of Mantic Games, Kings of War (fantasy table top) where miniatures aren't ever removed from play, but as you take damage your unit has a greater chance of being routed, and the whole unit is removed, or shaken, and can't do certain things. I thought I'd mention this as an aside. I really like this rule set for this reason.