[GZG] Victory Points, Point Systems and Balanced Scenarios

["Thomas Barclay" <kaladorn@xxxxxxxx>]

1. Point Systems:
A big shout out to the SG2 players defending the lack of a points system. I too have
argued this as a strength a number of times (sometimes tougher at first to get scenario
balance, but lots of good scenarios in the book or on the net and you get a feel for it
eventually and the end result is games driven more by fun or realistic
outcomes/scenarios). The inclusion of a point system, even an optional one, would
inevitably focus people on it the same way it does in FT and I think that would be to the
detriment of the game. So I don't feel like I'm so 'out in the wilderness' when I hear
others say the same thing. ;)

2. Victory Points:

One comment to Binhan is this: 
I think some of the observations people made (as I saw them) revolved around the idea that
VPs may be unknown and the value of some enemy ships may be higher or lower than your
intelligence appreciation would normally suggest, but that usually your intel folks are
going to give you the best data they have available, your leadership is going to outline
strategic goals, and you as a fleet commander are going to make your own decisions based
on a composite of the strategic goals, the intel assessments, and the idea of preserving
your people. In the event your intel tells you nothing useful about enemy dispositions,
even if you knew that a valuable enemy figure might be aboard one of the vessels, you'd
still be none the wiser, so you'd probably still prioritize neutralizing the most
threatening enemy vessels (or obtaining the best attritional exchange possible) as your
first goal. You might get lucky and get the valuable NPC, you might not. But the point is,
without intelligence to tell you fairly specifically where he might be ("He's likely to be
on one of the destroyers"), then you are going to not be able to factor that aspect into
your choices. And sometimes, even a strategic goal would be considered with a jaundiced
eye if that strategic goal was only obtainable by clearly unwise or suicidal tactical
choices. 

When you send out a force to do something, it knows what it has to do. It knows what it
*thinks* the victory conditions are, what the local and enemy assets are (or what they
think those are anyway), and therefore also they have a battle plan that accounts for
those. These may not BE the actual victory conditions, as reality sometimes throws
serendipitious events (an enemy leader on a ship, an unforseen valuation positive or
negative of an enemy vessel, etc). But the point is, they can only plan based on the
things they know or believe to be true, not things that might maybe perhaps be so but
about which they have sparse information. Real battle plans tend to be forged from fairly
decent intelligence most times. Sometimes it is wrong or incomplete, but even then, the
plan that was evolved was made from the information that was available. So you'll always
make your decisions based on what you know about the scenario and establish an idea of
your own sides victory conditions and act to cause those to happen. 

Contrast this with not knowing what your objectives are or how the enemy forces ships are
valued. In this sort of situation, you'll always fall back to force preservation or
best-case exchange of losses as the default response. This means targeting enemy firepower
quickly and trying to limit your own losses. You don't have clear direction and
objectives, so you revert to keeping your ships alive and trying to score advantageous
exchanges with the enemy. Both sides will default to this. This will end up not being the
best targeting for a game where VPs aren't known until after the fact, but it will make
sense *given what the players know at the outset*. Any other strategy, given unclear
victory conditions, means that your forces aren't considering the larger need to preserve
ships or gain favourable exchange rates. 

Serendipitious events happen in war. Intelligence is not always complete. Sometimes things
have unascribed value. But having said all of these things, most times this is not the
case. Most times you have some idea of the value of your targets. Almost always you have
*an* idea, even if it isn't right. 

I think all that people were getting at is, in the abscence of known victory conditions
(that is to say knowing fairly particularly what enemy ship must be taken or destroyed to
capture or kill the enemy leader), people will default to an approach which is very anti-
to the types of approach the proposed scenario requires to win. They will go for what is
most tactically sound, because winning battles is generally also strategically sound (by
default). So if you don't know what to pursue on a tactical board, go for the best
exchange and in the long strategic run, this will tend to turn out as good as can be,
given what you knew when you took the field of battle. 

3. Balanced Scenarios:

VPs are necessary to allow unbalanced and interesting scenarios to work. It is the only ay
you can make a 3:1 scenario work and be fun - that is, if the player who has the limited
forces understands that his compensation is more generous victory conditions. And you
should also understand that many things like this don't scale linearly. a 2:1 advantage,
for instance, if correctly leveraged, may result in a 4:1 hostile kill/friendly kill rate.
This isn't just simply double, it is more than that. There are some fancy game theory
equations to define these sorts of things, but suffice to say having 3x the number does
not simply make the defenders task 3x harder. It may make it much harder. (Of course,
advantages like terrain, mines, better quality troops, etc. can effectively offset the
numerical attacker advantage...). Point being, in some way, you need to have the VPs speak
to the inequality of forces in such a way that *with victory conditions considered* the
scenario is fun and balanced. Not all FT battles need to be 1500 pts. per side. Not all SG
battles need to be platoon on platoon. But where forces are inequal, one needs to have a
good estimate of the difference in real combat power this causes and be able to have
victory points scaled accordingly. Thus, in the end, although the forces are not balanced,
and the fight results may go a particular way almost gauranteed, the victory points
compensate for this enough to make the scenario's win-loss evaluation (from the
perspective of the players) fairly even. The only real reason I find to track this sort of
stuff explicitly is to give people a feeling for how well they did versus others playing
the same scenario or to give them an idea if they did better or worse than the default
expectation. The game itself is the fun, and post mortem evaluations won't change that (or
won't save it if the game setup was poor....). 

So, balanced scenarios are boring. And some unbalanced scenarios (what the military loves
to arrange, given the chance!) are not worth playing because there is no reasonable
victory conditions for the outnumbered side that can make for a fun game. The only
scenarios worth taking to a table are those where some form of victory (even just in a
points sense) is possible. No one wants to participate in a slaughter of their own troops.
So we only game out the close battles, or at least the interesting ones where good play
and decisions can make a difference, not the ones where one side is shot up like fish in a
barrell with no real options to change that. This is sometimes how it works out in real
life, but those sort of games just aren't fun to play and can't really ever allow a player
to improve on the results, so aren't worth taking to a wargame table. 

And just to clarify: 
John A, Laserlight: You're both too far gone to be helped, in different ways. :) 

TomB
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