[GZG] Victory Points, Point Systems and Balanced Scenarios

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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