'NPC' Armies for Fantasy

[Eternus]

Hey guys. I found a book the other day, in a bag of stuff that came from my dad's house that I didn't take with me when I moved out. The book was 'Military Modelling Presents: Solo Wargamer'. Now I much perfer to play against a living opponent, but sometimes this isn't possible, due to timing, distances etc, and also, it might be interesting to have two players jointly face an enemy army 'controlled' by the orders system as opposed to facing each other. The main idea is to come up with a system of deploying and controlling an army through a system of responsive orders.

This is a little project I wanted to try out, to really see if it could be done, and whether it works or not. To start off with, I need to categorise all of the units in the game into some broad unit Types, that will allow an assessment to be made of how an enemy unit should respond to them on the battlefield. Below are the categories I think should cover everything. This is very much a work in progress, but this is the first thing I want to get sorted. It may be that some units straddle more than one type, but we'll see:

Unit Types:

Light Infantry
Heavy Infantry
Monstrous Infantry

Light Cavalry
Heavy Cavalary
Monstrous Cavalry

Warmachines
Static Artillery
Monsters (ridden or unridden)
Flying Units

Lords & Heroes

What are your thoughts on these categories? These are just to split units into their types. I will also be categorising units according to their quality and unit size. I think that Type, Quality and Unit Size should tell us as much about pretty much any unit as we need to be able to make an assessment on how to react to them on the battlefield.

Any thoughts you may have are appreciated.

[Haravikk]

While I like the idea of coming up with NPC rules, I think the problem is that they'd need to be pretty complex to be able to account for flank attacks, terrain, objectives and so-on. And if the system isn't really good, you may get cases where a player can be as strict to the rules as possible but still end up biasing the game by luring units into charges that a player might not have chosen to do and so-on.

The best way to play NPC armies is just to play both sides to win; if you can't leave your bias aside then even with the most comprehensive rules for NPCs you'd probably still end up with your bias affecting the outcome anyway.


It might be better to focus on making NPC units that can be more useful, for scenarios and such.

[Eternus]

Thanks for the feedback. I have played before by simply controlling both sides, which I can do unbiasedly, because I want to create an exciting story, and even if I prefer one side to win, I want them to fight hard to earn the victory, or die in the attempt. I think I am likely to make it more difficult for the side I want to win!

I don't know whether everyone can play in this way though, and having a set structure (if it works) might make it easier.

What I wanted to do was come up with a different table to roll on for each unit type against each opposing unit type, so that the response can be tailored to the enemy unit and the situation, so if the enemy unit is Heavy Cavalry at a certain range and facing, this will affect which table is used, via some kind of matrix to make it easy to determine which table to roll on.