TI3 has the Fleet Supply mechanism, which regulates the maximum amount of (capitol) ships you may have in any given hex.

I favour such a mechanism because it prevents the much dreaded "stack of doom" from taking control of every game and annihilating most other strategic approaches.

So far I haven't seen any indication yet that there will be such a mechanism in Runewars as well, though I really hope so.

It could be a very good and elegant system really.

How ?

The answer is in the Resource Dials ( right in front of you and clearly visible for everyone )

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/ffg_content/runewars/previews/preview1/runewars-faction-sheet-latari-elves.png

Suppose you're playing Elves and you have your arrows pointing at

4 food = 2 Warriors

5 Wood = 3 Archers

5 ore = 1 Sorceres and 1 Pegasus Rider

There you have it : each area you control may hold no more than 2 Warriors + 3 Archers + 1 Sorceress + 1 Pegasus Rider.

Get your Resource Dial Arrows up and you increase the number of specific units you can have in a stack, when your Arrows go down, you may have to slim down your armies ( yes, discarding units )

Thus, sizeable armies are possible ( with maxed out Resource Dials ) but you can't stack every unit you have in one area and move your Stack of Doom from one area to another.

Players having maxed out armies will have to watch out carefully for when the Harvest Order Card can be played and Dials are readjusted as I expect that armies will have to adjust to Supply changes immediately, thus there is a chance of losing units in some armies simply because your Resource Dials go " down".

Looking at it from this perspective, you'll never have more than 2 Sorceresses and 2 Pegasus Riders in any army, so drawing 1 Fate card per unit type during battle seems a more reasonable mechanism and isn't as "luck" based anymore as most people are currently assuming ( in case you can have any number of units in any given army. )

Drawing just 1 Fate Card for a stack of 10 Archers seems like a very poor and luck based mechanism, not even mentioning not being able to score more than 1 Hit.

However, since the Elves could only have 4 Archers max in a stack, I think I could live with the "draw 1 Fate Card Mechanism" in battle as the other Elves would be there to soak up enemy damage and to help you win the Strength count.

Another possibilty ( though unlikely ) would be to let you Draw 1 Fate Card per unit = 4 Fate cards in case you have 4 Archers

but ... choose one Fate Card to play as their battle result. This could make battles more tactical ...

As a conclusion : I would really like a hard limit to the number of units you can have in a certain area as it prevents endless " build-ups" and turtling and besides, there's only so much room in each area, you probaly can't have too great amounts of figures in them without cluttering up the board. If maxed out armies are not easy to get as well , due to the limitation of Resources, we could see alot of interesting battles between "smaller" armies.

Good, look forward to that.

As an encore : taking into account the above mentioned supply limits, this is what each race could field in any given area with maxed out Resource Dials

Daqam Lords : 11 units

4 Footman 3 Archers 2 Knights 2 Siege Towers

Uthuk Y'llan : 11 units

4 Berserkers 3 Warlocks 2 Flesh Rippers 2 Chaos Lords

Undying : 11 units

4 Reanimates 3 Skeleton Archers 2 Necromancers 2 Dark Knights

Latari Elves : 11 units

4 Archers 3 Warriors 2 Sorceresses 2 Pegasus Riders

While that's certainly an interesting idea, I think it would make producing units a little problematic (assuming you can't just produce units anywhere you want), especially early on in the game - even more so if you start out with units. My guess is that there will be a limit, but it will either be a hard limit like they have for activation tokens (4 per player, presumably 4 activations per season), or will be based on a mechanism we haven't seen yet. And I'm fairly sure that regardless of how many fate cards you draw in battle, some number of Daqan Bowmen is supposed to be able to deal more than one damage in combat, based on:

"The Knights may not get a chance to fight, however, if the quick and deadly Bowmen take out the enemy first. With their Concentrated Fire special ability, they can bring down large units with haste."

Edit: It may even be based solely on the food dial (or some variation of the number on it), as that is the only dial that has blank spots and must have some use other than producing units.

broken said:

I don't think this will be a problem, Broken.

Take a look at the Recruit Order Card. You only get to recruit units from 1 or 2 resource dials, not all three your dials, so it will be important to make sure you get units "out of the area" before you "recruit" new units of the same type to get the maximum out of your recruiting.

I also assume each player will start the game without any units on the board because your dials do not start at "zero" but rather at a fixed starting number and you have the recruit Order to cash in on that.

I'm guessing the text on top of the order cards will apply to all players in the game, while the player who played the order also gets the bottom effect.

Reason for that is the Harvest Order Card.

If only you would get the top effect, why would you ever play that card again as long as your resources are lower than the last time you played the Order. You could potentially cheat this way by keeping your arrows high while in reality not possessing any resources at all.

I'm also almost completely convinced there must be some kind of troop limit when I look at the Flesh Reaper's special ability.

On an Orb every Flesh Reaper in battle gets 3 Hit Points instead of 1 and this is an Initiative 1 unit so its ability can trigger before any other's of your army.

Imagine you can just stock up on that unit, say five in an army and you get 1 Fate Card per unit = 5 fate cards , almost certainly giving you an Orb.

That would mean these units now get 15 Hit Points.

You can sink 10 damage in them without losing a unit.

I'd say that is highly unlikely to be possible, so I'm fairly sure at this point that there will be a unit cap and only one Fate Card will be drawn per unit type.

... though there still could be something in there which we haven't seen yet and which changes everything ... ah the wait ...

DarkElf said:

Correction : it's Flesh Ripper, not Reaver

and the 3 hit points are until end of battle so they die anyway after taking one hit, but the point is, they would be able to soak up a lot of damage if you were allowed to have an unlimited amount of them in your army.

Wouldn't your idea be somewhat unbalanced, in that it would allow the strong to get stronger and the force the weak to get weaker?

The reason why the fleet supply limit in TI3 works is because you have to take resources away from other areas in order to suppliment it (i.e, strategy and command pool). This isn't the case if you just use the resource dials as the unit limit. Every tick up the resource dial is a "double bonus", and if you took a hex away from an opponent then all the better - a "double penalty" for him as well (meaning that he may even have to destroy quite a few of his own units to conform to his new unit limit).

Bleached Lizard said:

Well, I don't know, I don't think so because ..

The resource dials do not change unless you play the harvest order card, so taking a hex away from an opponent doesn't immediately change his dials.

There may very well be time to take the area back ... or take another area before the dials get reset ... or take an action so that excess units get into another area before the dials are reset ... and there may be more actions available to counter the loss of an area/resource.

Your army may not be maxed out in units from the resource you just lost, meaning, for example you just lost a Food area but your armies are maxed out with Wood units, so, no real harm done there.

I'm sure it will be a valid strategy to attack certain areas which contain resources which are vital to your opponent's armies.

And maybe the most important reason why I think this would not unbalace things is that it doesn't matter how many units you have of a certain type. If you have just one in your army, you draw a Date Card and you can do battle. 2 or 3 units have just as much odds to hit/miss as one.

It will make a difference though in the strength count, but that's the point of it I reckon.

DarkElf said:

This may be the case, but you will still do more damage with multiple units of the same type than with just one. It is definitely not the case that the max damage any number of Daqan Bowmen can do is one, so you MUST either draw multiple fate cards, or modify the result of one in some way.

broken said:

I was assuming that drawing a Fate card that deals 1 damage meant 1 damage PER UNIT of that type. So if you had 10 Daqan Archers and drew a card for 1 damage, you did 10 damage to the enemy. Orbs may or may not work that way, but that seems like the most obvious way for damage to work, to me.

I think the problem is that there are some rules we don't know about that tie all the aspects together, but are not immediately obvious. Speculate all we want, we probably won't have any real clue as to how the combat works until we see the rules.

Steve-O said:

Honestly, that would be a very poor mechanism because it's all about hit or miss.

If they hit they all hit, if they miss they all miss, no middleground.

I don't think it's going to be that way.

How do you reconcile this:

DarkElf said:

with this:

DarkElf said:

?

Good spotting

broken said:

When I say " that is highly unlikely" I'm referring to having something like 5 or more Flesh Rippers in 1 army because their Special Ability would become insane when triggered. So, I guess there will be some kind of Army Size Limit that prevents this from happening.

If you could have no more than 2 Sorceresses or 2 Chaos Lords for instance in any given army I can see the combat mechanic of drawing just one Fate Card per unit type working.

After reading the fourth preview however and interpreting the Beastman Special Ability, it looks more like each unit is allowed to draw 1 Fate Card, so I'll probably be wrong on the aforementioned statement... in which case this sentence from the second preview "When any number of Skeleton Archers attacks, the player controlling them draws a Fate Card from the appropriate deck." seems to deliberately put us on the wrong foot. Not sure why.

The second statement is different from the first statement in the sense that it would be a very poor mechanism if there would be no army size limit .

When you can mass as many units together in one stack as you want, then drawing 1 Fate Card is a very poor mechanic.

They either all hit, all miss, all deal Rout or all trigger their Special Abilty.

That would be very unpredictable and thus luck based combat.

However, if the number of units in an army couldn't be more than 2 to 4 per type, then drawing just 1 card per type would be a more acceptable mechanic IMO and could probably make sense because there wouldn't be so many units whose result would depend on that one card.

So, my point here is, the mechanic becomes worse as more units are affected by it.

DarkElf said:

I'm not suggesting that one would regularly field ten of the same unit in one battle (I don't think it would be feasible and might not even be possible.) Ten is just a number I pulled out of my ass. I think a more reasonable limit would be 3-5, and based on your subsequent comments I think we're in agreement on this mechanical point. It's all hit or all miss (or all orb or all rout), but the number of units of one type involved will likely be smaller in any given battle/hex.

I was just saying I think that's how damage works, I wasn't commenting on the probable number of units of a given type per battle.

DarkElf said:

I still don't think the army size limit will work in this way though, most importantly because it's anti-auto-balancing (whereas FFG games tend to be pro-auto-balancing). It would mean that the player who controlled all the land would be able to create uber-stacks of monsters, whereas the poor trailing players who need to be able to create uber-stacks in order to take their land back will instead be forced to go into combat with a single sorcerer. I can't see that working well.

Bleached Lizard said:

The player controlling most of the land is able to recruit more units than his opponent already as it is.

Saying that that player would be able to create uber-stacks if the army size limit I suggested would be used is not quite correct as this same player would be able to create even bigger uber-stacks if that size limit weren't there, correct ?

Bleached Lizard said:

The trailing player's army will most likely be smaller anyway, regardless of Army Size Limit or not, since he can't recruit as many units as his stronger opponent.

Putting a cap on how many units of any given type can be in an army may very well hinder the stronger player more than the weaker player because the stronger player can't assemble all his power in one area and from there on steamroll the weaker opponent.

So, IMO, having an army size limit is going to be more of a game-balancing mechanism than not having an army size limit.

You may be correct of course that the Army Size Limit mechanic I suggested here may not be in the game at all and another mechanism is used.

We'll have to wait and see on that one.

Just to be clear, the point I'm making is that the army size limit won't be implemented by *this* method. I'm sure there will be an army size limit - I just don't think it will be done this way (for the reasons I stated).

I wouldn't worry about 'Stacks of Doom' if I were you. The game probably won't take that long to create those. You can't build that many units every round and I'm guessing every game will take only 5-6 gameyears. Somebody will have collected those 5 Dragon Shards by then.

I think it will take longer than that to collect the six dragon runes simply because the movement mechanics make it somewhat slow. The average hero probably gets one dragon rune from the average quest by around year 4 or 5, since heroes only activate every Summer, and the other methods of acquiring runes don't seem much faster than that.

Hm, you could be right about the number of turns. I don't know, maybe I'm hoping too hard this game won't take forever to play. Because I'm definitely going to buy it asap. But how many times I'm actually going to play it...

Anyway, wether or not 'stacks of doom' -cool term,btw- appear on any gameboard depends more on the playstyle of the ppl involved than on the game itself IMHO. Even a stack of doom can only control 1 space at a time.

Charian said:

It controls only 1 space at a time alright, but it annihilates everything it encounters on its path and is often a surefire way to victory for the "leading" player.

I wouldn't say it depends on the playstyle of the people involved, but rather that it's often the playstyle of those who know how to win the game.

broken said:

Lazy heroes, only heroing during the summer! =)

Actually a lot of the core rules look like they mimic BattleMist. In that, you had a hard limit of 10 units in a battle, and lost the battle immediately if you had no unrouted infantry. I would be unsurprised if a variant of this still existed. My supposition is that this time It will be that you lose if you have no triangle units and that your stack limit is your food number (to give it more value as it's the only dial without a benefit on every rank of the dial)

I doubt the number of triangle units remaining at the end of a battle will have anything to do with victory, since some units can fly and/or are fast, so are meant to go places alone or in groups of similar units. Since these units do not have triangular bases, that kind of shoots that idea down. I agree that the limit may be based on the food dial (as I said earlier in this thread) for the same reason.

What other unit types did BM have besides "infantry?" I can see that having no unrouted *units* would be a fail condition for battle, but I agree that restricting it to no unrouted triangles seems a bit harsh. Most rectangle units are cavalry types, I don't see why they would auto-lose just because the foot soldiers are gone. I could understand abandoned seige engines being easily overrun, but then again not all hex units are inanimate constructs. I should hope that heroes wouldn't cut and run, but there's also the arguement that they are only one person whereas a triangle infantry figure probably represents a whole lot more than just one solider.

I haven't played BM before, so I'm mostly just working with what little we know of RW so far. If BM only had "infantry" and "seige engines" then I can see how that old rule made sense back then, and also how it would be ill-suited to RW's new unit types.