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 akai wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
AoS isn't designed as a mass battle system, it doesn't scale up to mass battles very well, but if people enjoy such battles anyway, you won't stop them by saying that you don't enjoy such battles.

Since there are warscroll battalions built upon other warscroll battalions, specific bonus rules for having 20+, 30+, and 40+ models within a unit, and no limit to the maximum size of your units, I do think AoS was designed, for better or worse, for people who want to play AoS as "massed battles."

People wanting to play mass battles with it is not the same as it being a mass battle system. That's just writing in some bonuses for making big units. It actually makes things worse for mass battle, because you have to keep counting the figures in a unit and referring to their special rules. More importantly, you still have to move every figure and roll every shot individually.

Whatever constitutes 'large model count' is relative to a particular design. A big game of Hail Caesar is going to be much, much bigger than a big game of SBG in terms of model count. (And the game of SBG may even so take longer to play.) There may be some who enjoy playing SBG with as many models as you might see in a big HC battle but that is hardly a reasonable method for evaluating the design of SBG. Looking to the accumulated deposit of miniatures gaming wisdom, what folks have done in the past to accommodate significant stress on a design is draft scenario rules. This is easier to accomplish with designs that do not emphasize out-of-the-box precision (independently of whether they achieve it). It's hard to imagine that anyone needed to actually run "RAW AoS" (in quotation marks because it is an ironic phrase too often used unironically) with a thousand and more models in order to discover that it plays a bit rough.

I've spent bank holiday weekends playing massive WW1 naval battles like Jutland. There aren't any shortcuts in this, because a ship is a ship and has to be manoeuvred and fought separately. Not everyone would enjoy it.

Of course there are shortcuts/abstractions if you so desire, ships no more have to be manoeuvred and fought separately than men, squads, companies, battalions, brigades, divisions, corps or armies. Same with tanks and all the upward formations, or aircraft etc. It all depends on the level of detail/abstraction you want vs time/playability.

Justand was, what, something like 150+ UK ships vs ~100 germans ships. That would be a large and probably long game. However, formations that tended to stick together and operate in unison were as common in such a large naval action of the age as they are in any land battle. Most ships of the era were organised into divisions of about 3-5 ships of similar type, so you could probably play a ~40 vs ~25 battle instead at division level. Much smaller and more manageable.

Not much difference to say Prokhorovka, do you play 100s of individual tanks, or take it up a level or two so that you only have a few dozen armor units etc.

To be fair, in naval games that big you generally group destroyers into flotillas, and don't track the damage to individual ships. That's because the Grand Fleet had over 100 destroyers and light cruisers present, the models are about the size of an inch cut from a thin knitting needle, and you're playing on the floor of a hall 40 feet wide and 100 long. But you play all the capital ships individually because that is the point of playing such a large game. One of the factors to take into account is possible collisions during formation manoeuvres.

AoS is only a problem if you where an invested 8th player and spent money on end times books. Though all those books can still be played. I personal was not an 8th player and I like AoS very much.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
But you play all the capital ships individually because that is the point of playing such a large game.

Emphasis added. Maybe folks are missing this? People who invest the time, effort, and money into organizing such a spectacle are hardly likely to complain that it takes too long to play. At the same time, the organizers also tend to figure out ways to streamline what can be streamlined including which rule set they use. For example, I'd love to play more huge Star Wars space battles. But IME the X-Wing rules are not a great fit. They don't scale too well in either direction. Even more importantly, the design is not conducive to tinkering.

 Manchu wrote:
Keep in mind that mass battles games tend to deal with units in the strict sense of formation. So hundreds of miniatures can end up counting for just a dozen or so "game pieces." The idea of playing AoS with thousands of miniatures strikes me as severely misguided, especially when deployed as an argument against the game's design.

I tend to think of "mass battles" as using lots of "game pieces." In that sense, I think playing AoS with hundreds of game pieces was considered part of the game design. From my experience, those type of AoS games are playable within 3 hours max. "Mass battles" in the sense of big blocks of rigid formation representing thousands of people, of course AoS is not that type of game imo. When i want to play games representing thousands of men, I switch back to Fantasy Battle rules.

 Kilkrazy wrote:

 akai wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
AoS isn't designed as a mass battle system, it doesn't scale up to mass battles very well, but if people enjoy such battles anyway, you won't stop them by saying that you don't enjoy such battles.

Since there are warscroll battalions built upon other warscroll battalions, specific bonus rules for having 20+, 30+, and 40+ models within a unit, and no limit to the maximum size of your units, I do think AoS was designed, for better or worse, for people who want to play AoS as "massed battles."

People wanting to play mass battles with it is not the same as it being a mass battle system. That's just writing in some bonuses for making big units. It actually makes things worse for mass battle, because you have to keep counting the figures in a unit and referring to their special rules. More importantly, you still have to move every figure and roll every shot individually.

"That's just writing in some bonuses" should be more appropriately stated as GW "writing in many bonuses" for using many miniatures . About your last two sentences, that would be an issue of all Games Workshop 25-28mm mass battle games. I think Warhammer Fantasy would be consider in the traditional sense "a massed battle game." As for moving every figure individually in AoS...in my games with AoS in which I have used hundreds of models (the most being ~400 versus ~600 models), the purpose of having large units is not to move every single model to get every single attack in, but to hold positions and deny maneuverability of opponents. Putting large units in AoS on movement trays saves a lot of time. I can see of course, anyone trying to play AoS with hundreds of models (or other 28mm war games) by moving them individually would not find it fun .

Right "mass of miniatures" is just a matter of model count but "mass battles" tends to mean a game in which a single model stands in for many soldiers and where soldiers operate in formations. Even so, mass battles games can entail a huge number of models but of course they only function together as game pieces. You could very well have 100 models representing a single game piece in a mass battles game. As far as I know, the scale of AoS is 1:1. Each soldier represents a character even if most of them are what you might call extras. Each model is a game piece. Design-wise, the only problem with that is if the game pieces have no potential impact on gameplay. But that's not the case. Even if a bunch of models get wiped out before doing anything, it's not like they couldn't have done anything.

To be fair, in naval games that big you generally group destroyers into flotillas, and don't track the damage to individual ships. That's because the Grand Fleet had over 100 destroyers and light cruisers present, the models are about the size of an inch cut from a thin knitting needle, and you're playing on the floor of a hall 40 feet wide and 100 long. But you play all the capital ships individually because that is the point of playing such a large game. One of the factors to take into account is possible collisions during formation manoeuvres.

As manchu said above, if that is what you want then that is what you want. But the same argument means that AoS is as good as big battles as any other game - if that sort of level of individual elements and control of such is your sort of thing.

This reminds me of Blucher (Sam Mustafa Napoleonic game). There are a couple of people in my local group who are not really keen on it as, for them, Napoleonics are about lines, column and squares etc. Blucher plays at a level higher than that, where those low level formations are assumed to be dealt with by the brigade commanders and not you. However, blucher allows large napoleonic battles to be fought relatively easily and quickly and with an emphasis on being a higher level commander working to a higher level plan and orders.

So in Jutland you do not have to worry about moving ships in formation and worrying about collisions, your division commanders and ship captains will worry about that, you just direct which division should be doing what and leave low level decisions to those best placed to organise.

Not to say either is the best or worst way. It all comes down to what you want, either from a playability/time perspective, or even just a visual perspective of seeing lots of minis across a gym floor or more a birds eye view of divisional bases on a tabletop.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Being subjective means it's only a valid point for you.

I'm sure it's valid for a lot of people. I know I'm not the only one who finds games that take a very long time to play tedious. Subjective or not it's still a valid reply to what I was replying to, which was....

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Obviously if you want to play really large scenarios, that is something you accept, and as long as it's fun, why worry?

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 Manchu wrote:
People who invest the time, effort, and money into organizing such a spectacle are hardly likely to complain that it takes too long to play.

Depends on the person I guess. I've invested the time, money and effort in to creating games that are spectacles.... I don't like it when they take too long to play.

I like the spectacle of a large game as much as the next guy, doesn't mean I enjoy the part where we go "Ok, lets spend the next hour moving each model individually to represent a single movement phase!"

That's, like, half the point of a regiment based game

 akai wrote:
I think Warhammer Fantasy would be consider in the traditional sense "a massed battle game."

Warhammer Fantasy was never intended to be a mass battles games - but over the editions, a much smaller scale game, such as in 3rd, when regiments were ~10 figures, expanded to the deathstars of 80 figures by 8th edition. Individual model stats and individual casualty removal put it on the opposite end of the spectrum of a "mass battle" game.

 judgedoug wrote:

 akai wrote:
I think Warhammer Fantasy would be consider in the traditional sense "a massed battle game."

Warhammer Fantasy was never intended to be a mass battles games - but over the editions, a much smaller scale game, such as in 3rd, when regiments were ~10 figures, expanded to the deathstars of 80 figures by 8th edition. Individual model stats and individual casualty removal put it on the opposite end of the spectrum of a "mass battle" game.

Yeah, that's one of the things that I believe led to the demise of 8th edition. Honestly 6th edition was the sweet spot with regiments of 20 human sized soldiers being perfectly viable, combined with the regiment kits for $20-$25 made army building simple. That was most likely the peak in popularity and sales, but the price gauging and horde obsession sank that ship.

I thought we established AoS was in fact intended as a mass battle game and everyone here was just playing it wrong from the creators point of view thanks to that blog post from a GW employee who was trying to point out people's misconceptions about the game?

 jonolikespie wrote:
I thought we established AoS was in fact intended as a mass battle game and everyone here was just playing it wrong from the creators point of view thanks to that blog post from a GW employee who was trying to point out people's misconceptions about the game?

No no, someone once ran a tournament with it. Therefore it's 100% supposed to be a tournament game, right?

 judgedoug wrote:

 akai wrote:
I think Warhammer Fantasy would be consider in the traditional sense "a massed battle game."

Warhammer Fantasy was never intended to be a mass battles games - but over the editions, a much smaller scale game, such as in 3rd, when regiments were ~10 figures, expanded to the deathstars of 80 figures by 8th edition. Individual model stats and individual casualty removal put it on the opposite end of the spectrum of a "mass battle" game.

From a topic I made on Warseer, someone mentioned that since at least 3rd edition - 1 miniature represents ~ 20 soldiers - http://www.warseer.com/forums/showthread.php?414716-What-would-you-consider-to-be-an-appropriate-size-for-an-army-in-a-major-battle&p=7560596&viewfull=1#post7560596 .

I guess I should clarify that when I wrote "traditional sense 'a massed battle game" I was referring to WFB use of each game piece to represent more than just one soldier.

AoS 1:1 scale it seems
WFB 1:20 or some other ratio that is not 1:1

Both games have rules to allow the use of "massed amount of miniatures"

Traditionally, skirmish rules count each figure as an individual soldier who moves and fights by himself in very small battles (skirmishes) with usually 10 to 20 figures per side. There is usually a lot of detail, with individual weapon and armour loads, skills, and often the ability to kneel, lie down, climb trees and so on, for advantages. The ultimate format of this is role-playing games.

Mass battle rules count each figure as a multiple, typically 20 up to 100 men per figure, and these large units move and fight in formations. (Because that is how people move and fight in real battles.) A lot of detail is abstracted because individual differences are unimportant and impossible to deal with when you have hundreds or thousands of men involved. You can take a large scale game and play it at different sizes for larger or smaller engagements, but generally you are simulating combats involving hundreds to thousands of men per side.

Mass battle rules don't necessarily make for big, long games. De Bellis Antiquitatis, for example, is designed as a fast play system. While each army represents an army that might be 5,000 or 50,000 strong, they are all abstracted to a standard 12 elements. This enables you to play a game quickly in a small area, and play more games in the course of an evening or tournament day.

Equally, you can take a skirmish game and keep adding more figures until you get closer to the size of a battle, but of course it will take lomnger and longer to play.

I don't remember WHFB ever being defined as a 20:1 ratio mass battle game. Of course you can assume that is what's happening, though the use of initiative to determine the order of combat seems more like a skirmish rule. IRL you don't get the situation where 600 men hit their 500 opponents before a single one of the 500 can attack back.

40K and AoS are what I call mass skirmish. They use more figures than a traditional skirmish game, with a similar amount of detail per figure, but organise a lot of the figures into loose units that must maintain coherency. This seems like a hybrid of the two ideas of skirmish and mass battle.

Yeah that 1:20 ratio thing was just the answer to questions like "why does the Empire army defending Altdorf only consist of 200 men?", "well, just imagine that each of your models represents 100 men instead!"

There was nothing in the rules that suggested the models were worth more than 1 man in my opinion.

In 4th or 5th edition, I can't remember which, there was part of the rulebook that spoke to scale and mentioned that 1 man could be 1 man, 10 men, 20 men, 100 men, etc. It was not a hard fast rule. It was just a blurb. But it was taken as concrete by much of the community. This was also referenced in white dwarf articles once in a while when discussing scales. Bear in mind we're talking back in the 1990s the last time I can remember GW talking scale.

auticus wrote:
In 4th or 5th edition, I can't remember which, there was part of the rulebook that spoke to scale and mentioned that 1 man could be 1 man, 10 men, 20 men, 100 men, etc. It was not a hard fast rule. It was just a blurb. But it was taken as concrete by much of the community. This was also referenced in white dwarf articles once in a while when discussing scales. Bear in mind we're talking back in the 1990s the last time I can remember GW talking scale.

I can confirm that at least 5th Edition WFB rulebook discusses scale as you have recounted, in appendix 2:

"In Warhammer each model represents a single warrior, monster, machine or whatever, whilst an inch on the tabletop is equivalent to about five feet in real life - the same as the scale height of the models themselves.

Players might correctly point out that in the real world a bowman can shoot an arrow well over 200 yards rather than the paltry 40 yards or so represented by the weapon's maximum Warhammer range of 24". The reason is that we have reduced all measured distances to produce a playable tabletop game. The game's designers reduced distances roughly in the proportion of 1" equals 10 yards, so a bow with a range of 24" is judged to have an effective range of 240 yards. The alternative is to allow the bow a range of 144" and fight all battles in a car park!

A similar observation could be made about the number of models comprising a regiment of troops. It would be impractical though not actually impossible to field regiments comprising hundreds of models, so battles are represented using fewer troops than a literalist might demand. The ten or twenty models in a game unit stand for a regiment of several hundred troops, and for this reason regiments manoeuvre and react as if they were larger formations. As both sides field regiments reduced in size, the relative values are preserved and the results amount to the same thing. To put it another way, if 10 Elves can beat 10 Goblins then 100 Elves can beat 100 Goblins just as convincingly!"

That was it - thanks akai. Its been many years since I've looked at the 5th ed rulebook

6th edition I don't think referenced scale, but the community kept pushing on with that abstraction to this day.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I don't remember WHFB ever being defined as a 20:1 ratio mass battle game.

It's a direct quote in either the Warhammer 4th or 5th edition rulebook (perhaps both).
edit: ninja'ed by like a regiment of ninjas

 judgedoug wrote:
a regiment of ninjas

This joke is eerily on-topic ...

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Mass battle rules count each figure as a multiple...

I don't think I've ever heard "mass battle" being defined, and googling doesn't bring up any specific definition.

I've always just heard "mass battle" in the context of "a lot of models" or "large scale battles" or even just "not skirmish". When Bolt Action released optional rules for what they called "mass battle" they simply meant bigger games, nothing about single figures counting as multiples.

I've heard WHFB called a mass battle game vs 40k simply because even though individual models have profiles in WHFB, they are essentially wound and rank counters for a single entity so you can have a bunch of models without running in to the time consuming issues 40k has.

As far as I can see there is no specific definition for "mass battle" and we don't really need one as context is typically enough to figure out what people meant.

If you prefer to call them battle rules and skirmish rules, that works fine.

Idiosyncratic usage abounds. But KK's post reflects my own understanding and experience, as well. Reading "Bolt Action" and "mass battles" together strikes me as bizarre and disinformative. Whoever at WLG that strung that together was certainly playing fast and loose.

Mass combat is often used to refer to large scale battle games.

There needs to be some distinction between how we refer to skirmish and battle rules because there is a difference between the rules themselves.

 Manchu wrote:
Reading "Bolt Action" and "mass battles" together strikes me as bizarre and disinformative. Whoever at WLG that strung that together was certainly playing fast and loose.

Well the rules are from Alessio Cavatore, I don't know if he wrote the article that contains them though.


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 Kilkrazy wrote:
Mass combat is often used to refer to large scale battle games.

There needs to be some distinction between how we refer to skirmish and battle rules because there is a difference between the rules themselves.

I don't think we need to define specific terms that are in widespread use but don't already have widespread specific definitions. Context is usually enough, if you mean something more specific then other terms like "platoon level", "company level", "battallion level", "brigade level" or just flat out stating "50-100 models".

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