RE: Initiative - was RE: Piquet

G'day Binhan,

> If you are going to place that much of the battle to luck, 
> then there is not much point in setting up the pieces, you 
> can just do half a dozen opposed die rolls and determine who wins.

I'm not trying to be a right royal pain here, but couldn't you say that
about any dice based wargame? ;)
 
> Most of the games I play, I prefer that there be 
> opportunities to act and react, to generate and counter local 
> advantages, which the overall initiative system of Piquet 
> doesn't generate. 

I'd disagree actually the intelligent use of the opportunity and morale
chips means a good (i.e. very skilled) Piquest player can pull it off,
where a less skilled on (whether through inexperience or personality or
whatever) won't be able to. It seems to capture well the natural
abilities some leaders have and some don't in spades ;)

> The plain-vanilla version of Piquet definitely favors the aggressive
player 
> over the passive player.

Again I don't wholly agree with that. If you mean aggressive and
disciplined I could see your point, but just plain aggressive then no
because repeatedly breaking from a plan with Piquet and just responding
to what card turns up can be very fatal. Some sense of what you want to
get accomplished, the flexibility to change it if need be but the
discipline to not change it indicriminantly gets you far in this game -
so passive players can still do well.

> The problem with house-mods and the huge variety of them is 
> that when you play at cons or other large gatherings, if all 
> the players are not playing with exactly the same mods, their 
> level of play may be adversely affected. 

I can see thaht, though cons aren't as big a thing in my gaming life so
must admit to not thinking of them up front.

> Historically battles are not won or lost by the commanding 
> general's initiative, but by his knowledge of the battle 
> conditions.... errors occurred, not because the general
> was slow in giving the order after the appropriate
> infomation was available, but is almost always 
> due to incomplete information being available to the general 
> in a timely fashion.

This may again be down to personal perception of the game and my own
biases, but I have never thought of a card being when the action was
started but when it was completed or effective. So to me Piquet does
capture poor intelligence, the card took ages to turn up and that
reflects poor intelligence or courier getting delayed or phone lines cut
or whatever best fits the situation. But that could be the story teller
in me coming through ;)

> Just setting up the game provides a 
> huge amount of intelligence... With just this information a player is 
> able to reduce the command decisions dramatically, no 
> decision for re-supply, weather, communication lines, worry 
> about opposing reinforcements, flank attacks, terrain or 
> man-made traps, super-weapons, feints or probing attacks vs. 
> the start of an assault, etc. etc. etc.

That's where the dereaded stratgem cards come into play... and you
thought that flank was safe... or the river impassable... or the weather
fine all day... or ;)

> To truly generate "historical" results, the key factor is to 
> reduce or eliminate player knowledge of specific details of 
> the battle...  

While not quite to the "its happening in another room" level that you
seem to be referring to here, I have seen Piquet capture many facets of
what you're after.

> For those reasons I prefer games to have some degree of 
> responsiveness - even if just Overwatch or pass-through fire 
> to allow units to react to a local condition, even if orders 
> from a higher command aren't forthcoming or a side didn't win 
> initiative for that turn.

As a mentioned above there is some of this already in Piquet, though
maybe not to the magnitude or as transparently as you're after.

Cheers

Beth