How is one supposed to utilize the Strategy Track rules found in the Mass Combat section of Ultimate Campaign?
It seems to me that the modifiers to OM and Damage Dealt are double dipping, since OM determines Damage Dealt.
Also, it's not made the least bit clear if the Damage Dealt modifier is for the incoming damage made against your army, or the outgoing damage against the enemy army.
Why does this section even exist at all? It seems like strategies are pretty well covered already in the Army Tactics section.
Yeah, I think that is strange as well. I can't explain why the double-dipping seems to exist or why you have two separate ways of putting your army on e.g. full defense.
Found the following discourse in the Ultimate Campaign Errata thread:
As long as we've got a dev in here:
In the mass combat section, p. 239, the so-called Strategy Track has columns for both +OM and +Damage. Damage is only ever defined as OM-DV, or the difference between your OM and opponent's DV (if positive), so isn't having a +Damage modifier unnecessary? Shouldn't it just be +OM?
This was there in Kingmaker, but I seem to remember bringing up this discrepancy back then and being told to ignore the +Damage column since that was a vestigial remainder of an earlier version of the system where Damage was rolled separately.
If that's the case, it seems to have been accidentally grandfathered into Ultimate Campaign. There is still no specific verbiage as to how the +Damage modifier is meant to be tallied, so at the very least it's an oversight.
There is a great thread that did a statistical analysis of the MC rules and seemed to find that certain tactics/special abilities are horribly broken as well (i.e. always leads to a win against evenly-CRed armies).
You can have +damage as a separate statistics, it's just not as valuable as +OM.
+OM means you're more likely to overcome the target's DV, and (because damage = offense check – DV) adds to damage if you "hit."
+damage doesn't help you overcome the target's DV, but if you do manage to do so, you deal extra damage.
OK, there's just nowhere that spells out how those things interact, since the only definition of damage just says OM-DV.
But you understand that if you have an effect that adds to your damage, it adds to your damage, yes?
And there are other effects that only affect damage: fog or snow reduces it by half, sniper support adds to damage, breath weapon adds directly to damage, so does channel negative energy, incorporeal affects damage, judgment alters various stats (including damage), rake and rend add to damage, rock throwing adds to damage, and so on.
It's a stat. Sometimes game effects alter it.
Great. Snark from a dev.
How is it snark? Damage is a stat. If something says it adds to damage, it adds to damage. Or does the game actually need to "define" damage as "OM minus DV plus other effects that may add to, subtract from, divide, or multiply this value"?
Yet another reminder that I should never bother to check the boards on the weekend, it's not worth my time and not appreciated.
It felt like snark because your comment seemed to boil down to "duh, use common sense!"
Damage is not a "stat" as it isn't defined in mass combat army stat blocks, or the "Army Statistics" section. Damage is a RESULT of and derived from subtracting the target army's DV from your army's OM. As such having a bonus to specifically damage seems to needlessly complicate what is otherwise a simple and elegant system.
Yes, you ought to define damage as such. It IS already explained, in the section "attacking and taking damage", so acting like it needn't be defined is sophistry. It simply doesn't explain how +Damage modifiers work, and when they are applied. All you need to do is add a line that says "Some tactics, army special abilities, and the strategy track add to damage, but that damage is not applied if the army would not otherwise deal damage."
Again, I was under the impression that the +Damage column was an artifact from an earlier version of the rules in which armies attacked and did damage as separate rolls, similar to skirmish combat. Which made sense to me since getting potentially +10 to damage for a -4 to DV is crazy good. It also isn't mirrored by a deduction of damage TO an army fighting defensively, which seemed to confirm my suspicion about hit and damage being decoupled at one time. Fighting Defensively seems to be an absolutely foolish move unless said army is several ACRs above its opponent.
However, if this is working as intended, the question I then have is this: You don't do bonus damage (static or variable) if you wouldn't otherwise do damage, correct? What about if you exactly meet an opponent army's DV? Do you do +6 damage if you roll a natural 20 but wouldn't otherwise surpass an army's DV, thereby increasing your damage in such a circumstance from 1 to 7? When fog is a factor, or something else that halves damage, presumably rounding down, do you halve the adjusted damage or do you then do 0 base and thus not apply any damage bonuses?
I'm happy to re-ask this in rules if you feel that's more appropriate.
So it looks like the damage column is either an artifact of an older version of the rules (can anyone substantiate meatrace's claim?), or else you are supposed to compare OV to DV to determine whether or not you "hit," THEN you subtract OV from DV to get the "damage" dealt. (Provided I am understanding SKR's explanation correctly.)
I would very much like to know. I urge you all to please FAQ the opening post so we can get a clarification.
Interesting. I can see how tactics can be seen to obviate the need for the strategy track (just imagine going full defence using the defensive strategy...), but I did come across an interesting point:
When armies attack, each army attempts an Offense check (1d20 + the attacking army's OM) and compares the result to the target army's DV.
If the Offense check is equal to or less than the target army's DV, the army deals no damage that phase.
If the Offense check is greater than defender's DV, the defending army takes damage equal to the result of the attacker's Offense check minus the defender's DV. For example, if the attacker's Offense check is 11 and the defender's DV is 7, the defending army takes 4 points of damage. Because these attacks are resolved simultaneously, it is possible that both armies may damage or even destroy each other in the same phase.
Unlike every other check that exists in the game, equalling the DV doesn't provide any result at all. Now, I would house-rule that less than means no damage, and equalling or exceeding means (OM check - DV) + strategy track modifier is the damage dealt, but it is a house rule.
As it stands, though, I think the blurb about the strategy track does pretty much answer the question:
Strategies adjust the army's DV, OM, and damage modifier.
Even though "damage modifier" isn't actually defined anywhere, it is kind of "use common sense" that "the army's [...] damage modifier" is a modifier to the army's damage.
I just saw that in the PRD, Chemlak, and came back to report on my findings, but ya' ninja'd me it looks like.
I didn't see your bolded passage in my book two weeks ago though, when my group ran into this conundrum. Was it errata'd in, in a later printing?
How is one supposed to utilize the Strategy Track rules found in the Mass Combat section of Ultimate Campaign?
It seems to me that the modifiers to OM and Damage Dealt are double dipping, since OM determines Damage Dealt.
Also, it's not made the least bit clear if the Damage Dealt modifier is for the incoming damage made against your army, or the outgoing damage against the enemy army.
Why does this section even exist at all? It seems like strategies are pretty well covered already in the Army Tactics section.
Always choose reckless. Always have a ranged weapon. The rules kind of suck. These two options are so over powered they're the only options.
That still leaves the question of whether the damage dealt modifier is against you, or your enemy. I can see both ways being rationalized.
EDIT: Never mind. It's in the second sentence.
That makes it pretty clear that it's the army that is picking the strategy, I think.
If I were going to use these rules in my game I'd probably change the chart to something like this.
Strategy DV OM Damage Dealt
Defensive +4 —4 —4
Cautious +2 —2 —2
Standard +0 +0 +0
Aggressive —3 +2 +2
Reckless —6 +4 +4
That seems quite a bit better. Reckless is still probably the best option in most cases but it's not overwhelmingly the best option in every case (like the official rules) and if your opponent has a high base damage, there's a good chance defensive is the way to go.
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Ultimate Battle, from Legendary Games, modifies the strategy track, toning it down so that it isn't quite so extreme, and IIRC, explains it better.
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Agreed on Ultimate Battle: the (reduced) damage modifier (called "casualties" in UBat) applies to both damage delivered and damage received. (For anyone interested, divide the Damage column result from UCam by 3 to get the UBat casualties modifier.)
Edit: RD, it's in the original book, third paragraph under Attacking and Taking Damage on p236 (column 2).
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What...on...earth...? I'm seeing it in my book now too.
In two different games we've had five people go over those rules ten times apiece and we ALL somehow missed that both times.
We must be roleplaying WAY too late in the evenings...
I've got an easy answer for why the Strategy track exists:
Multiple armies.
If you have one army facing several armies, it makes sense to be cautious because you'll reduce damage from multiple attacks.
If you have several armies facing one army, it makes sense to be reckless so you maximize damage. Except, say, if you're pretty sure that one enemy army is going to attack a particular one of your friendly armies, in which case you should be defensive with that one but reckless with the others. If you're besieging a city, you'll want your castle crashers to be reckless but your siege gunners to be defensive (since the siege engines deal damage vs fortifications every melee phase regardless of whether or not you hit.
If you have multiple armies on both sides, it gets even more complicated.
That's it. One-on-one, though, it almost always makes to go reckless.
That said, there are certain scenarios where an army should be defensive etc. in a 1-1 battle. Let's say you have a CR3 army with high DV facing a CR1 army. You're pretty sure you'll beat them if you get in 1 good hit, but you don't want to take any damage ahead of another approaching battle, so you minimize the chance that you'll take damage at all in exchange for a more certain victory.
Yeah, our first game of using the strategy track properly got one of our two armies smashed to pieces.
Despite what everyone seems to recommend on these forums, you definitely don't want to choose reckless all the time.