[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