Best Combat Resolution for Boardgame

[ArizonaTank]

Wondering what my fellow boardgamers think is the "best" combat resolution routine in terms of yielding a realistic result. 

Having started out as a boardgamer in the 80s, then moved to computer wargames, and now coming back to boardgames, I find that Gary Grigsby and Norm Koger have spoiled me on expectations for how "realistic" combat resolution should be.

Then I recently played AH's classic France 40 and almost became sick at the stupid back and forth routine (attack -> counter attack) and realized how many games (even good ones) have combat routines that just don't feel real.  AH's early classics like Afrika Korps, and Waterloo are easy to pick on for example....one bad roll, and your army disappears. 

But I think there are plenty of games that do a great job in this area.

My nominations for realistic combat routines in a boardgame would be:

-Yalu (Conflict Games):  The defender has a choice to use counter fire, and the Chinese can use human wave assaults.
-ASL you name it, it's in there
-GDWs Eylau:  seemingly simple, the overall effect yields a result that feels very Napoleonic.

So interested to see what others think

[bob48]

GMT's Normandy '44. I love the 'determined defence' option.

[MengJiao]

Wondering what my fellow boardgamers think is the "best" combat resolution routine in terms of yielding a realistic result. 

Having started out as a boardgamer in the 80s, then moved to computer wargames, and now coming back to boardgames, I find that Gary Grigsby and Norm Koger have spoiled me on expectations for how "realistic" combat resolution should be.

Then I recently played AH's classic France 40 and almost became sick at the stupid back and forth routine (attack -> counter attack) and realized how many games (even good ones) have combat routines that just don't feel real.  AH's early classics like Afrika Korps, and Waterloo are easy to pick on for example....one bad roll, and your army disappears. 

But I think there are plenty of games that do a great job in this area.

My nominations for realistic combat routines in a boardgame would be:

-Yalu (Conflict Games):  The defender has a choice to use counter fire, and the Chinese can use human wave assaults.
-ASL you name it, it's in there
-GDWs Eylau:  seemingly simple, the overall effect yields a result that feels very Napoleonic.

So interested to see what others think

My current favorite board game combat systems are:

1) Elusive Victory -- gosh, there's a million ways not to hit things with bombs.  My favorite sequence is:  You get detected by a radar, SAM gets a "partial acquisition" (I'm not sure what that would be exactly, but I sorta feel that's kinda the point), the missile scores a hit, BUT you roll to evade and sure enough, you survive, but you have to dump your bombs.
AND should you reach the target and do a bomb run and get what looks like a hit (rated 1-4 IIRC), well, that's still not necesaarily a hit.
Meanwhile Mig-21s and Mirages attack each other and nobody gets hit despite lots of die rolling.

2) at the other end of the "things get hit" spectrum is The Grand Tactical system.  Plenty of clear hits and effects in that.  In this case, if you are lucky enough to pull your chits in the right order and have arranged set up the radio links to your artillery properly, you can fire barrages, cut the enemy's opportunity fire to almost nothing almost automatically, charge in and do an assault sequence that will pretty quickly go through enough cohesion hits and/or outright step loses to wipe out a thin defense pretty fast.  On the other hand, if you attack a moderate defense without much support, you're just going to get chewed up by opportunity fire (assuming the defenders have average troop quality) and very little of your force is even going to reach the defenders, though on the flip side, if the defenders don't have much support, you're still going to push them back eventually.

In both of these systems, no one roll is going to resolve things (except in the GTS, if your troop quality is kind of low, you're either not going to get enough opportinity shots to break up an attack or not close with the enemy in a coordinated way) and you can try just massing your forces and overwhelming the defense in an uncoordinated way.

[ArizonaTank]

My current favorite board game combat systems are:

1) Elusive Victory -- gosh, there's a million ways not to hit things with bombs.  My favorite sequence is:  You get detected by a radar, SAM gets a "partial acquisition" (I'm not sure what that would be exactly, but I sorta feel that's kinda the point), the missile scores a hit, BUT you roll to evade and sure enough, you survive, but you have to dump your bombs.
AND should you reach the target and do a bomb run and get what looks like a hit (rated 1-4 IIRC), well, that's still not necesaarily a hit.
Meanwhile Mig-21s and Mirages attack each other and nobody gets hit despite lots of die rolling.

2) at the other end of the "things get hit" spectrum is The Grand Tactical system.  Plenty of clear hits and effects in that.  In this case, if you are lucky enough to pull your chits in the right order and have arranged set up the radio links to your artillery properly, you can fire barrages, cut the enemy's opportunity fire to almost nothing almost automatically, charge in and do an assault sequence that will pretty quickly go through enough cohesion hits and/or outright step loses to wipe out a thin defense pretty fast.  On the other hand, if you attack a moderate defense without much support, you're just going to get chewed up by opportunity fire (assuming the defenders have average troop quality) and very little of your force is even going to reach the defenders, though on the flip side, if the defenders don't have much support, you're still going to push them back eventually.

In both of these systems, no one roll is going to resolve things (except in the GTS, if your troop quality is kind of low, you're either not going to get enough opportunity shots to break up an attack or not close with the enemy in a coordinated way) and you can try just massing your forces and overwhelming the defense in an uncoordinated way.

Both of these sound like my kind of systems.  I have to admit the entry price for GTS has kept me from looking at it too much in the past.  But I'll keep my eye on it now...

[GJK]

Combat resolution has evolved quite a bit from the old AH days of the simple CRT that had a wide range consisting of up to four possible results. 


"Dice-less" is a current trend with the results being generated by card draws or chit pulls or some other means.  A buddy of mine that visited this past weekend was just talking about this.  Combat Commander uses the dice-less system.  What happens with this is a limited range of results.  Yes, they are randomly determined, but once that last "fire" card is pulled, the chances end there until the deck is reshuffled.  With dice, you can roll the same results an unlimited number of times.


I've played some games that had a whole matrix of tables that then cross-referenced onto other tables to finally get to the result.  Yikes, what a nightmare!  Fortress Berlin is one such game.  It's a fun game covering an interesting topic in a unique manner, but rolling on one table in order to determine the next table to roll on to get your result after applying a dozen modifiers is a pain.  I guess ASL is similar when it comes to AFV combat (To Hit and then To Kill tables) but it's not as difficult as what I found with Fortress Berlin.


Most newer games have step-reductions so even if it uses the old standby CRT, you only lose a portion of your unit at a time instead of the whole thing (except in extreme cases).


The "bucket o' dice" system is used in a few games that I own.  You roll a handful of dice (the number depends on how much firepower you're bringing) and then you take all the 5's and 6's that you rolled and count those as "hits".  Some love this system, some hate it.  I don't mind it so much - at least my dice tower can handle 10 dice rolled at once.


I'm sure that there's others that I haven't yet explored or that I'm not remembering at the moment. 

[ArizonaTank]

Combat resolution has evolved quite a bit from the old AH days of the simple CRT that had a wide range consisting of up to four possible results. 


"Dice-less" is a current trend with the results being generated by card draws or chit pulls or some other means.  A buddy of mine that visited this past weekend was just talking about this.  Combat Commander uses the dice-less system.  What happens with this is a limited range of results.  Yes, they are randomly determined, but once that last "fire" card is pulled, the chances end there until the deck is reshuffled.  With dice, you can roll the same results an unlimited number of times.


I've played some games that had a whole matrix of tables that then cross-referenced onto other tables to finally get to the result.  Yikes, what a nightmare!  Fortress Berlin is one such game.  It's a fun game covering an interesting topic in a unique manner, but rolling on one table in order to determine the next table to roll on to get your result after applying a dozen modifiers is a pain.  I guess ASL is similar when it comes to AFV combat (To Hit and then To Kill tables) but it's not as difficult as what I found with Fortress Berlin.


Most newer games have step-reductions so even if it uses the old standby CRT, you only lose a portion of your unit at a time instead of the whole thing (except in extreme cases).


The "bucket o' dice" system is used in a few games that I own.  You roll a handful of dice (the number depends on how much firepower you're bringing) and then you take all the 5's and 6's that you rolled and count those as "hits".  Some love this system, some hate it.  I don't mind it so much - at least my dice tower can handle 10 dice rolled at once.


I'm sure that there's others that I haven't yet explored or that I'm not remembering at the moment.

I agree, more recent games are far superior to the old AH CRT IMHO.   

I kind of like some of the newer games that stay away from table look ups by putting most factors on the counters.  Conflict of Heroes and Red Poppies do this.  So after a few turns, players can usually memorize the dice mods on the player aids (for terrain effects and the like), and the game starts to move very quickly. 

One thing that Conflict of Heroes does that I am not a fan of however, is it also uses a cup full of chits to pull combat effects.  So if you get a "hit" you pull a chit with the combat effect, and put it on the unit.  While this reduces rolls and table look ups, it also means that if there are alot of chits already on the table, it skews the possible results for new combats...ie. the chits already on the table can't be drawn twice.  But the game plays quickly so this can be forgiven.

I'm not really a fan of the bucket of dice types...Command and Colors Ancients comes to mind.  But I have to admit, they play fast and are usually full of excitement.

[ArizonaTank]

GMT's Normandy '44. I love the 'determined defence' option.

I once got a review copy of this...but found I couldn't do the review so had to return it.  I do remember being impressed with some of the rules and the elegant presentation. 

Since then, it is on my eBay buy list.  But prices are usually pretty high, up to $80.  Pretty good for a game that was produced in the last few years.  But looks like it is on the reprint list, so that is good news.

[bayonetbrant]

I prefer the buckets o' dice because (1) I like rolled a lot of dice, and (2) it usually means no lookup table.

[MengJiao]

My current favorite board game combat systems are:

1) Elusive Victory -- gosh, there's a million ways not to hit things with bombs.  My favorite sequence is:  You get detected by a radar, SAM gets a "partial acquisition" (I'm not sure what that would be exactly, but I sorta feel that's kinda the point), the missile scores a hit, BUT you roll to evade and sure enough, you survive, but you have to dump your bombs.
AND should you reach the target and do a bomb run and get what looks like a hit (rated 1-4 IIRC), well, that's still not necesaarily a hit.
Meanwhile Mig-21s and Mirages attack each other and nobody gets hit despite lots of die rolling.

2) at the other end of the "things get hit" spectrum is The Grand Tactical system.  Plenty of clear hits and effects in that.  In this case, if you are lucky enough to pull your chits in the right order and have arranged set up the radio links to your artillery properly, you can fire barrages, cut the enemy's opportunity fire to almost nothing almost automatically, charge in and do an assault sequence that will pretty quickly go through enough cohesion hits and/or outright step loses to wipe out a thin defense pretty fast.  On the other hand, if you attack a moderate defense without much support, you're just going to get chewed up by opportunity fire (assuming the defenders have average troop quality) and very little of your force is even going to reach the defenders, though on the flip side, if the defenders don't have much support, you're still going to push them back eventually.

In both of these systems, no one roll is going to resolve things (except in the GTS, if your troop quality is kind of low, you're either not going to get enough opportunity shots to break up an attack or not close with the enemy in a coordinated way) and you can try just massing your forces and overwhelming the defense in an uncoordinated way.

Both of these sound like my kind of systems.  I have to admit the entry price for GTS has kept me from looking at it too much in the past.  But I'll keep my eye on it now...

GTS is a tiny bit over-produced and a little overpriced.  Bir Hakeim is the smallest and cheapest and I suspect it is the one I will actually play at least a few times using the actual scenarios.  There is a relatively small scenario in Where Eagles Dare (featuring Easy company's plight when the German armor comes to town) that I may play someday.  I'll probably never get the first one (about the 1st Para at Arnheim and the 82 at Niemiegen ) unless somebody puts one up for auction on ebay punched, incomplete and damaged.  I'm looking forward to the 4th in the series which is apparently a multi-map monster covering the early days of the 2nd Army's attempts to take Caen.  There's another game on that topic coming out soon too, so it will be interesting to compare those ( and  other the 4-5 different recent versions of that bit of WWII).
GTS plays well solitaire since you don't know what the chits are going to do.  On the other hand, once you settle down to move a formation, things play out in a fairly straight-forward way.  For example, a formation can be caught in a bad position and unsupported and take a beating, but you have several ways to control the situation -- you can shift your artillery support, you can intervene with direct command points, you can run for it with a divisional order, or you can bring up another formation with a formation chit or with direct commands or a divisional move.  And yet, sometimes things go just plain totally downhill.  I tried to block a British armored brigade with some 88s and assorted AT guns, bicycle troops and Jadgpanzers, and for a time it sort of worked.  And then the brigade got its artillery set, got deployed and obliterated my assorted stuff with a coordinated attack.  It was solitaire, but I was still pretty surprised.

[bob48]

GMT's Normandy '44. I love the 'determined defence' option.

I once got a review copy of this...but found I couldn't do the review so had to return it.  I do remember being impressed with some of the rules and the elegant presentation. 

Since then, it is on my eBay buy list.  But prices are usually pretty high, up to $80.  Pretty good for a game that was produced in the last few years.  But looks like it is on the reprint list, so that is good news.

Its well worth getting your hands on a copy if you can. It does have a nice system and its fun to play. I have Ardennes '44 on my 'to buy' list as it shares the same core system.

[ArizonaTank]

GMT's Normandy '44. I love the 'determined defence' option.

I once got a review copy of this...but found I couldn't do the review so had to return it.  I do remember being impressed with some of the rules and the elegant presentation. 

Since then, it is on my eBay buy list.  But prices are usually pretty high, up to $80.  Pretty good for a game that was produced in the last few years.  But looks like it is on the reprint list, so that is good news.

Its well worth getting your hands on a copy if you can. It does have a nice system and its fun to play. I have Ardennes '44 on my 'to buy' list as it shares the same core system.

Thanks for the info.  I'll keep my eye on Ardennes 44 as well.

[Cyrano]

I will always (I think) love the card system in "Frederick".  It's competitive and requires players to manage resources creating an interesting long-term versus short-term dynamic.  Not sure it would work in a less abstract game, but, for me, it was love at first sight.

Best,

Jim
"Cyrano"
:/7)

[ArizonaTank]

Just picked up a copy of Ardennes 44.  Haven't played yet.  But I like the Fire Fight mechanic, and bonus for recon units.