From: torbenm@diku.dk (Torben AEgidius Mogensen) Newsgroups: rec.games.board Kristian (c/o Ole Østby) writes: >I'm not pleased with the battle rules (how the battles are resolved) in Britannia. >Are there any alternative rules for this, or do I have to come up with some myself? >Are there any alternative rules for Britannia at all? Please let me know. Assuming that the problem is the high degree of randomness in Britannia combat (e.g. a fairly good chance that a single unit can win over 2 or 3 opponents), I have a few suggestions. The first is fairly simple: Lower the rolls required to hit, in the following way Before After 6 5-6 5-6 4-6 4-6 1-6 3-6 1-6 (6 kills 2) 3-6 is only possible for cavalry with a leader. Since we can't get better than 1-6 (certain success), I have compensated by allowing a double kill on a 6. This is little help when fighting against a single opponent, but that should happen rarely. I have tried a large number of computer simulated battles with 1-6 units (of different types, but not mixed) on each side, and these rules give almost the same average results as the original rules (assuming combat until one side is eliminated). Are they less random? Well, replacing 4-6 by 1-6 certainly makes the result less random. The other changes moves the threshold closer to 50%, which also reduces the randomness somewhat. An added bonus is that combat is sped up. The main effect on the game as I see it is that combat is much more deadly, so there will be fewer pieces for potential retreat after one round of combat. This may be what you want, but otherwise we should allow (a chance of) retreat before combat. Another way of reducing randomness is to increase the number of dice rolled, so chances even more out. The idea is that a unit rolls two dice, but requires two hits to kill. One hit "wounds" the unit, at which point it rolls only one die. The next hit kills it. Wounded units can be represented by turning them up-side down or by putting "wound" tokens on them. Hits must be taken on wounded units before healthy units (except where the wounded unit is of a different type, e.g. cavalry versus normal units). After battle, a die is rolled for each wounded unit. If the result is odd, the unit dies, otherwise it survives. As there can only be one wounded unit of each type per side, this doesn't add much randomness to the outcome. It is certainly compensated by the overall higher number of rolls. The disadvantage of this method compared to the above is that it is more complicated and takes more time. But it doesn't make combat more deadly, so retreats are not affected as much as with the first suggestion. Also, the relative strength of units is preserved exactly, where it is slightly modified in the first suggestion. Torben Mogensen (torbenm@diku.dk)