Kevin's Rule Requst - Off-Map Final Rushes

[Kevin]

This is copied from the semifinals reports.

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The above photo perfectly illustrates why I allowed off-map final rushes, will in future tournaments, and hope that this becomes an official rule.  Notice on the far left that 2 Roman Equites are converging on the High Elf Knights.  If the map edge had been treated as some sort of High-Voltage electric fence, then the Equites would have had to final rush the Knights one at a time.  As it was, they threatened a pinch, so the Knights had to charge forward. 

I will add that, to my knowledge, not one unit actually made a final rush off-map during the entire tournament.  However, the ability to do so prevented map-edge shenanigans and encouraged units to fight.



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Allowing off-map final rushes has now been tested in a large tournament.  It does not create complications--it prevents them!  It's simple, makes intuitive sense, and makes for better game play.

Can we please give it the Official Stamp of Approval?

The rule text, again:

Off-Map movement and Final Rushes
When determining which side of an enemy unit a unit will final rush, the map edge is not taken into
consideration. A unit may go partially, or even completely, off-map when making a final rush.
If a unit which is off map destroys its opponent, it must attempt to move back on map as much as possible,
unless making another final rush.
If a unit which is off map routs, it moves as far away from its opponent as possible, but its center can go no
more than 1 millimeter further off map. It is considered on the map edge in that, if not rallied on its
controller's next turn, the unit is removed from play.
These rules apply to units which are making a final rush. Units which are not making a final rush must stay
on the map.

[gull2112]

I'm rather lukewarm about this because it assumes that off map is clear terrain. Usually a battle was fought on the most open spot of ground the armies could find, not always, but it was often the case that a commander would seek to anchor his line with a river or forest or other rough terrain to prevent any shenanigans from being pulled. At Guagemela Darius had prepared the bettlefield ahead of time so it would be advantageous for his chariots and the battlefield was surrounded with rough terrain, whixh suited the Mecedonian companions just fine.

I could see a very simple rule where a die was rolled if a unit was going to do the off map final rush  and a 1-3 meant it was vlear and 4+ meant it was not.

[Hamilcar]

Being an official member in good standing of the Flat Earther's Society, I've always played as if the map edges ARE the edge of the world - units that fall off the edge perish!  And that's that...

  Sorry, I just couldn't help myself!!!   
I like the "roll the die" thing - unless players decide there's a 2" clear area around the playing surface.  But this is better placed into the "house rules" section of the rulebook, no?

[BubblePig]

How about giving a unit which final rushes off-map a straight -1 MC if there is less than 1/2L of open path on-map. Having to roll dice to find out the results of the chaos of combat seems appropriate. Not finding out whether the edge of the map is a hard boundary or not until you roll the dice, not so much.

PS Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the Earth around 230BC. I'm assuming that means it is round, though I guess that doesn't rule out cylinder.

[Hamilcar]

I've fallen to believing it's Banana-Shaped!!

[Kevin]

If even you doubters acknowledge that allowing final rushes off-map works useful, why not just keep things as simple as possible?  Especially you, Mr. "Please no rules bloat." BubblePig!

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By the way, if a die were rolled to determine if off-map final rushes were allowed, when would you roll the die?  If done right before a unit final rushes, you end up with one side or the other getting screwed ("What do you mean there's a cliff there?  Didn't anyone notice before now?  or "Hey, where the Hell did our cliff go?")

If you do it at the beginning of the game, what you've accomplished is a workable solution 50% of the time and the electric-fence status quo 50% of the time, while wasting a minute rolling a die for a situation which is likely not to come up in a given game.

[Niko White]

That picture is really only a smoking gun to people who already agree with you, though.  People know that under the current rules the board edge can sometimes prevent otherwise legal final rushes - so can impassable terrain or, as noted, the errant corners of enemy units.

I'm pretty agnostic about the board edge issue; I'm glad to play it either way, honestly, now that the FR off board edge solution is simple and workable rather than the initial proposals.  But I don't really see it as offensive to balance or anything like that - it's completely public knowledge and much easier to see coming than something like fiddly possible engagement issues involving traffic jams.

I think this one is kind of amusingly similar to the final rush with a flank "en passant" maneuver that I find offensive - in both cases we've identified something that seems really wrong to us that the rules allow and decided it's completely unacceptable, but in both cases the fix involves a minor but relevant amount of additional rules.  I think that's not a smoking gun on deciding either of them, but it does incline me more towards just leaving both in.

Btw, the "roll the die" thing is completely a GW rules team move and therefore should be avoided like the plague

[Kevin]

Niko, there's a fundamental difference between the 1.25" flank final rush and the off-map final rush.

The person who will get screwed by the opponent sliding over to pinch him when he has 1.25" of card showing, can prevent this by being on guard and moving his card accordingly.  If he does so, there is no way that his units will ever get pinched.

The person who will get screwed by being unable to have multiple units pinch some dude dangling off the end of a short line but twisted at an angle (Where he has to send his light units in one at a time to die while their friends pick their nose) can do nothing to prevent this.  (Short of making some sort of rock-paper-scissors guess as to whether the opponent will stand-and-shoot, and the exact number of line units the opponent will take, and not take any more than that while praying that the opponent doesn't decide to just close-and-hose with a wider line.)

One situation forces people to maneuver more carefully.  The other takes a basic principle of the game--that lighter units have less umph for their points, but that their superior numbers will defeat a smaller number of heavies via pinches--and turns it on its ear.

I am, and have always been, in favor of giving people the ability to screw themselves.    It's the other kind that bothers me.

[Niko White]

I've rarely seen a battle where map edge train-wrecks like that weren't the result of some sort of error, either of army creation or of deployment.  Predicting if an opponent is going to stand and shoot isn't rock-paper-scissors because there's a lot of relevant information you have access to when you're making that choice - both factions involved, terrain, scenario, etc.  Meanwhile once deployment has started, holding back on deciding how much you're going to commit where is a key skill element as well, and light, cheap units have a lot of utility against stand and shoot armies even if you have to actually break through to get your pinch on.  Backup units, for example, can seriously thwart a lot of stand and shoot plans.

Again, I'm not 100% sold we should keep this one as we have it, but the idea that you'll sometimes be basically tossing the dice and get screwed by this one isn't very convincing to me.  I mean, it might happen if you have so many cheap dudes that you can double cover everyone on your front line and still have some to spare, but you've said yourself, not every army should be viable.

[Kevin]

I've rarely seen a battle where map edge train-wrecks like that weren't the result of some sort of error, either of army creation or of deployment.

Here are three cases, all from January and February 2011--during which I played maybe 8 or 9 games--which I personally witnessed, none of which I would attribute to an error:

1)  See photo 5 in http://yourmovegames.com/forum/index.php/topic,2194.0.html

The Hydra ends up an an angle when it makes a final rush and gets flanked.  The Wolf Riders, whose sole purpose is to cover the Hydra's flank, are unable to legally final rush its attacker, and the Hydra is killed by some orcs.


2)  See the playtest game http://www.dndonlinegames.com/showthread.php?t=109180  Start at the third photo.  I was able to tilt my unit in a funny way for free due to a Hold order with a location target.

By the way, Jaime had previously been opposed to allowing off-map final rushes, but he changed his mind in the middle of this game once he was on the receiving end.  We've been allowing off-map final rushes ever since, hence no more recent examples.


3)  I don't think I have photos for this one, but it was a situation very similar to your semifinals game.  I had two 150ish point units (One was light cav, the other was either a second light cav or a light 5" move infantry) going up against some pretty good unit (Halfblood Levies or possibly Highblood Blades) on the far edge of a 5-unit arc formation (It was positioned essentially where your knights were in the semis) of a Dark Elf stand & Shoot army, but because of the map edge rules they could only get in there one at a time and get slaughtered.

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Contrast that to ZERO map shenanigans out of 30 games played at the Championship tournament.

[BubblePig]

How about giving a unit which final rushes off-map a straight -1 MC if there is less than 1/2L of open path on-map. Having to roll dice to find out the results of the chaos of combat seems appropriate. Not finding out whether the edge of the map is a hard boundary or not until you roll the dice, not so much.

If even you doubters acknowledge that allowing final rushes off-map works useful, why not just keep things as simple as possible?  Especially you, Mr. "Please no rules bloat." BubblePig!

Ouch! Please note that my counter-counter-proposal is every bit as streamlined as the counter-proposal I was responding to. And it has the desirable quality of not flying in the face of logic. Also, the difference between your proposed rule and my modification in terms of bloat is in fact smaller than the difference between the current situation and the current situation + your proposed rule. Hah.

Having said all this, I would get behind your rule basically as you proposed it as my first preference, and my second preference would be basically anything that doesn't involve rolling dice, my third preference (which is waaaaayyyy behind number two) would be that the die be rolled before army build.

[Niko White]

I can't remember exactly what the council game situation was like and it's hard to sort out from the pictures but it looks to me like the wolf riders should have been able to FR with flank there; playing with the geometry on my table I can't come up with a situation where they can't.  It also looks like Jaime could have avoided the situation entirely by moving his wolf riders first and herding the Hydra with them, or invoking Indirect Path the turn before to move them sideways around it.

For the Greece vs. Persia one, I agree that's a bit strange, but I'd like to point out that allowing FRs on corners would have allowed an engagement by the cavalry there, and that's definitely a change I favor.

Again I'm not 100% opposed to this change or anything but I think it's a reasonably complex addition, and because it doesn't remove every situation where the board edge matters, it's sort of strange how it sometimes helps and sometimes doesn't.  For example, it doesn't let you set up a two-turn pinch against a unit abutted to and perpendicular to the board edge, because you can't get around your friend in the setup turn to get line of sight.  If I'd rolled my line back more in my tournament game, such that the Knight's side center point was against the board edge and the card was pependicular to it, he still would have been unpinchable.

[BubblePig]

I'm afraid I am with Kevin on this one. You would need a powerful computer and a bunch of programming time to generate all the situations that could have happened, but it is dead easy to look at the empirical data of what did happen, and that would seem to favor Kevin's position.

[Niko White]

I'm afraid I am with Kevin on this one. You would need a powerful computer and a bunch of programming time to generate all the situations that could have happened, but it is dead easy to look at the empirical data of what did happen.

Ok, so now if I want to do a curled back flank I just have to make sure I put my guy perpendicular to the board edge?

I think if the situations that have come up are covered by current or other proposed rules, that's quite relevant.  The first two are, the third is like my council game where, as I've pointed out, I could have created a "board edge shenanigan" regardless by just making my guy perpendicular to the edge.

At the very least, the complexity cuts both ways on this one, and before we implement anything, we need to figure out what the exact wording and things like that needs to be.

[BubblePig]

I agree that the wording of the rule should be looked at, and perhaps modified. My position on this can be summed up as follows:

1. There will always be shenanigans, so 'not 100% shenanigan proof' is insufficient objection.
2. If a proposed change results in a net decrease in shenanigans sufficient to justify any added complexity of the set of rules as a whole, it gets a big thumbs up from me.

In this particular case the net decrease seems to be a sizable one, and the shenanigans that fall through the cracks are (correct me if I am wrong here) only hypothetical.