Saturday, December 1, 2018

Troop Quality

The third axis of troop characteristics is quality - this is a combination of moral confidence, unit cohesion, including esprit de corps, and level of training.  All (or almost all, anyway) wargaming rules reflect this in some way, often by sorting different units into categories such as "raw", "trained", "veteran" etc.  Throne and Altar does it with a numeric rating, which unlike Altar of Freedom varies between units.

I mentioned in an earlier article that AoF represents degradation of unit effectiveness, including casualties, by means of "fatigue" points.  In AoF, if a brigade accumulates more than four such points it breaks.  Once enough brigades have broken, the entire army breaks and the battle is lost.  This number (the army break point) is known in advance, and is calculated based on the scenario designer's judgement of the general state of enthusiasm of the army