SKM Development: The Butcher Bill

Casualty assignment is actually what held me up for a bit.

Alright, last time we had our engagement between Red’s archers and Blue’s Cavalry.

RED

10 Archers (0.5/4)

AR: 5, DR: 40, Automatic Casualties: 10

BLUE

10 Cavalry (4/1)

AR: 40, DR: 10 Automatic Casualties: 2.5

Red vs Blue’s BR was -5.

Blue vs Red’s BR was 0.

Therefore, Red has suffered 2.5 casualties and Blue has suffered 5.

Now, the way that casualties are typically applied is by being bought off by the opposing force’s DR. This is bad for Red. Their cavalry only has one DR each. I made a decision that casualties are applied to whole units, meaning that 1 casualty has to be applied to a unit even if that casualty can’t ‘afford’ the unit’s DR. Meanwhile, So on our casualty ‘pass’ we end up putting a casualty on 5 individual cavalry units from Red, and the 2.5 casualties incurred on blue end up on a single archer.

Pretty simple, no? We’ll also decide that 50% of casualties are non-fatal, with injuries rounded up on uneven ties.. Meaning if we’re splitting 11 Light Infantry, we end up with 5 dead and 6 injured.  

 Also units to whom casualties are applied incompletely are injured not killed. So if a knight has to eat .8 BR, he's just straight up injured, but not dead.

Where this gets tricky is well, let’s complicate our scenario.

SKM Development: Hurly Burly

Whoo boy.

This one is pretty much hard math and mechanics incarnate.

Once again, ACKs does it better. ACKs however does it better for one player group. Not for five. They detail fun stuff like incredibly good morale issues, payment, injury tracking, healing, and so on.

I kind of wish I could imbed some of my test excel docs in this post (I might do that if I figure out how to do it in post).

Alright. Let’s start.

We have two Forces, Red and Blue. Each has their own AR and DR, as we’ve previously established. We get these numbers as a total of all of their respective forces. Then we compare Red’s AR against Blue’s DR and Blue’s AR against Red’s AR. This gets us two numbers. These are our Battle Resolution numbers. BRs translate directly into casualties (as I’ll explain below).

Now Spook, you ask, what happens if the BR is Negative? Like, what if my DR is so awesome that the enemy can’t hurt me. Do I get people back? That’d be silly wouldn’t it? Also, if I focused entirely on DR to the point that I can’t hurt my opponent and my BR against him is 0, do we just bounce off inconclusively?

That’s a good question, fictional questioner.  This was the first problem I had with developing this combat system. See, 10 Cavalry vs 10 Archers resulted in this sort of push. Cavalry couldn’t overcome the archer’s DR, and archers couldn’t overcome the cav’s DR. We, by which I mean me, decided a long time ago that this system is ‘defender’ focused though.

Therefore the idea of Automatic Casualties was created by Spook. Automatic Casualties are inflicted to the tune of 25% of the DR of the belligerent (our decimals only go to the ten's place btw). This means that in our above situation, where the archers have a DR of 4 each, they have 40 DR total, and therefore automatically inflict 10 BR of damage as automatic casualties, the Cavalry on the other hand would inflict 2.5 automatic casualties (their individual DR is 1, so ten of them is 10 DR, and a quarter of that is 2.5).

Automatic casualties  demonstrate that every combat engagement is a dangerous one, resulting in the possibility of deaths and wounds. And this, is also where that AR vs DR disparity comes in.

An Archer has .5 AR and 4 DR, so ten of them (as in our engagement above) have a total AR of 5. Meanwhile, Cavalry has a DR of 1, meaning 10 Cavalry have a DR of 10. This means that our archer friends inflict -5 BR on the Cavalry. Well, like I said above, the BR doesn’t bring people back to life, but it does help to negate damage.   

Having an AR that goes into the negatives indicates that you are so ineffectual at damaging your opponent’s forces that it helps to mitigate the Automatic Casualties he’d otherwise incur from engaging with you. So, to return to our archer example above. We determined the archers inflicted 10 BR of damage as automatic casualties but they’re so bad at actually hurting the cavalry their BR was -5, so they only end up inflicting 5 BR of casualties as a result. The Cavalry on the other hand had a BR of 0, and still managed to inflict 2.5 automatic casualties on the archers without a modifier since their BR wasn’t negative.

That’s step one. We figured out how to hurt each other. Next, we need to unpack how we apply that damage.    

SKM Development: The Butcher Bill Part 2

For a complication to our scenario. Let’s say I have

500 peasants,

100 Light Infantry, and

5 knights.

That’s a pretty beefy force, no?  AR 250 and DR 250. Pretty solid.

They get into a scrum with let’s say, a force of nasty orcs, who they beat up, but who in turn beat them up to the tune of a BR of let’s say 120, and automatic casualties they can’t tank to the tune of 40, so they have 160 BR worth of damage they need to expend their DR on.

The force isn’t homogenous like last time, there’s a lot of peasants, and some other units higher up. Now a player would be tempted to blow his peasants first, or cherry pick some other unit as a sacrifice. This is well and good, but it’s not a good representation of the randomness of combat.  

What’s important to remember if we ultimately only have six basic types of units. Peasants, Light Infantry, Heavy Infantry, Cavalry, Archers and Knights.  So we can split the threat up between them.

We could march right up the scale, taking one casualty out of each category, but that’s silly. You’d never bother taking a knight since they’d be on the bench or in the ground too quick, so instead, I came up with this system.

You cannot assign more than 10% of the damage you’ve incurred, to a category; except, you can assign up to 25% of the BR to the lowest tier unit type you have on the battlefield.

What I mean by this, is that casualties walk up a sort of ladder.  

Peasants get hit first.

Then Light Infantry.

Then Archers.

Then Cavalry.

Then Heavy Infantry and

Finally, Knights.

Whoever the low man on your totem pole is, you can toss 25% of the BR at them. Any BR you have left over rolls back around again. Anybody except the low man on the list, can opt to take no casualties on a pass, but that means that more casualties will pass through the stack. They can also allocate less than the minimum damage, even if this only incurs injuries.

Low man must take maximum on first pass. After that, they only need to take enough BR to incur an injury.

So looking at our part above.. The army has 160 BR to allocate. 40 BR can go to the peasants. 16 BR goes to the other categories. The maximum number we can allocate doesn’t change from pass to pass. Keep in mind also, these all represent the results from a single battle, not an ongoing one.

Obviously you can’t assign BR to non-existent categories though, so the maximum amount we can assign on this pass is 72. That’s 40 BR from the peasants, and 32 from assignment to the Knights and Light Infantry, who’d eat 16 each.

Now, 40 BR is pretty flarking nasty for peasants. Each peasant only has .2 DR, so that means that 200 of them end up on the block. 100 dead, 100 injured.

16BR hits the Light Infantry next, they’re meaner though with 1 DR each, so it kills 8 and injures another 8.

Then the Knights get hit. 16 is one full knight, and one partial. So two injuries. Why two injuries and no fatalities? Remember, we round injuries up and they only incurred one full casualty.

Our army now has a problem though, that’s only 72 BR dealt with out of 160 and we still have 88 to go! First round didn’t even take off half. Well, it rolls through again. This time however, you can pay off the BR with the injured, at the cost of making them, well, dead.

On the “upside,” we still apply the amount of BR we can allocate based on the initial BR.  So we can again plug 40 into the peasants, and 16 into each other group, as a maximum.

So the peasants come around again, we allocate 40 BR to them, again..which means 200 more of them up for the chop. We can choose to instantly toss the injured 100 we have in their graves, and then we’d end up with 100 fresh troops making up the difference in BR (50 injured and 50 more dead), or we can instead opt to grab a whole new bunch and put another 100 in the ground, and another 100 on the injured list.

To summarize:

Option 1:

We have 100 Peasants Injured. And 100 Dead from the First Pass.

We Can Opt to have the 100 injured die to pay off half of our BR requirement this pass.

To make up for the deficit of BR, we then put 100 new peasants up as casualties, so they incur 50 fatalities and 50 injuries.

Net result: 250 dead, 50 injured. We have 200 troops fresh.

Option 2:

We have 100 Peasants injured, and 100 dead from the first pass.

We opt to inflict casualties on 200 fresh troops. We end up with 100 dead, and 100 injured.

Net result:  200 dead, 200 injured. We have 100 troops fresh.  

The first option saves more of our men for fighting, at the cost of sending more to the graveyard. If we knew for a fact this unit of orcs was the end of it for this month, we might opt for the higher injury count.  

Let’s assume we decide to keep more men fighting. Orcish horde after all. We go with option 1.

We hit the Light Infantry again, they now have to make the same choice. They toss their 8 injured from last time, and take 4 more fatalities and 4 more injured. They want their fighting strength higher. There might be another orc army nearby.

The Knights on the other hand, are taking a pounding. 16 more BR worth of expenditure on them, is quite a bit! That’s two more knights out of commission at least. Well, this is where what I mentioned comes into play, they don’t need to take their maximum.

The Knights instead opt to take 9 BR. This incapacitates one more knight, but doesn’t kill any of them. So two hale and hardy knights, and three on the bench with injuries.

The Knights could entirely shirk on this, mind, and decide to take nothing.

However, this means that more rolls back around to the peasants and now they have to decide how to incur the 23 last BR from this battle. The peasants, if their commander wanted, could also opt to pay a minimum, and kick it up to the light infantry, but in the peasant’s case, they’d only be able to take .1 BR without losing a unit.

So at the end of the day, we end up with 3 injured knights, a few dead light infantryman, and piles of dead and injured peasants.

The unit then would act as if its dead units were lost, and as if its injured units were unavailable, if it got attacked again, or chose to attack again, this turn.

As you can see, this is just on basic unit vs basic unit. When you take into account the modifiers for say engaging an enemy, defending, being attacked while routing, and so forth.. The situation can get a lot more swingy.  And deciding what units to lose or keep, can be complicated on the basis of upkeep, rearmament, and so on.

The injured pop up back to fresh on the start of the next month. Yes, even if they got their butts kicked on the last day of the prior month.

Lost units, by the by, are lost. Your grandpa can’t train your son to be a Heavy Infantryman if he died on the battlefield. You need to rebuy them.