Battle Card Summary of Cards is Up

[Rod]

So on the Meshwesh front page you can see all the battle cards without going to a specific army.

[Andreas Johansson]

Nice

Two thoughts:

It would be nice if you from each battle card could see a list of the armies for which it applies. (I do realize this might be tricky from a programming standpoint, depending on how stuff's set up, and it's definitely a nice to have rather than a must have.)

Sword-Fighting Cavalry (I liked Not So Bad Horse better) is essentially a new troop-type - wouldn't it be simpler and cleaner to make it an additional troop-type rather than a battle card?

(Supernumerary thought: Despite the name, whether battle card or proper troop-type, it might be considered for things like Arab "fencing lancers", who neither shoot, chuck, nor charge at the drop at the drop of a hat, but neither are particularly bad.)

[David Kuijt]

Nice

Thanks.

Two thoughts:

It would be nice if you from each battle card could see a list of the armies for which it applies. (I do realize this might be tricky from a programming standpoint, depending on how stuff's set up, and it's definitely a nice to have rather than a must have.)

Hm. Interesting idea. Not sure how much work that is to program. We'll see.

Sword-Fighting Cavalry (I liked Not So Bad Horse better) is essentially a new troop-type - wouldn't it be simpler and cleaner to make it an additional troop-type rather than a battle card?

Maybe. As you say, it might be simpler and cleaner to make it an additional troop type. Those are reasons why we might want to do that.

There are also reasons why we might not. Reprinting the entire rulebook, newly released just pre-Covid19, is a powerful disincentive. Even without that, like all the battle cards, the Sword-fighting Cavalry card needs playtesting, so rules for them cannot yet be considered written in stone. And we are very resistant to creating a new troop type for cases that appear in like only four of the six hundred and fifty army lists. That way lies madness. A couple of years ago we seriously discussed the possibility of unrepresenting Warwagons (removing them as a troop type), with the primary argument being that they appear in less than forty army lists, and half of those appearances we can't prove that the Warwagons actually moved during the battle. We decided that they (WWg) were sufficiently widespread and prevalent to deserve inclusion, in spite of the line between fortifications that move pre-battle and ones that move mid-battle being quite indistinct. But my point is that if we open the door of representing super-rare troop types in the main rules, there are a number of other special-case combatants that might try to slip in -- Tuareg charging camelry, for example, have a very similar footprint in the army lists to Kurdish sword-fighting cavalry. Or the cataphract camelry of Parthia or Edessa (iirc?) that cannot be proven to exist for even a single ancient battlefield (in spite of the single surviving cataphract armor for a camel in the archaeological record).

So introducing a new troop type that would only support a handful of army lists (and in almost all of them being in tiny numbers as Kurdish mercenaries) is ... undesirable. Battle cards are a good mechanism for representing rare special cases. In that light, at the moment, it seems like the proper way to represent the Kurds and Swabians whose mounted fighting technique doesn't really fit in the established buckets of Knights, JavCav, or Bad Horse.

(Supernumerary thought: Despite the name, whether battle card or proper troop-type, it might be considered for things like Arab "fencing lancers", who neither shoot, chuck, nor charge at the drop at the drop of a hat, but neither are particularly bad.)

That's an interesting idea. The primary issue I see is finding a clear (or relatively clear) way of distinguishing which troops should have that ability and which should be classified in the normal way. That was a difficult struggle with the shower-shooting battle card. Are you aware of anyone who has already done a lot of work establishing the boundaries (cultural and chronological) of that fighting technique?

[Andreas Johansson]

(Supernumerary thought: Despite the name, whether battle card or proper troop-type, it might be considered for things like Arab "fencing lancers", who neither shoot, chuck, nor charge at the drop at the drop of a hat, but neither are particularly bad.)

That's an interesting idea. The primary issue I see is finding a clear (or relatively clear) way of distinguishing which troops should have that ability and which should be classified in the normal way. That was a difficult struggle with the shower-shooting battle card. Are you aware of anyone who has already done a lot of work establishing the boundaries (cultural and chronological) of that fighting technique?

Not really. I could list some core exponents (jundis, Fatimids) but not tell you were the boundaries should be. And there'll probably be cases were we simply don't know whether spears were used for throwing, stabbing, or both.

And then there's the question if the results would be better than if classified as Jav Cav (which most suspects are currently), which seems to be the current default classification for non-sucky cavalry that don't use bows and don't qualify as knights or cataphracts, even if they don't chuck javelins either.

[David Kuijt]

Not really. I could list some core exponents (jundis, Fatimids) but not tell you were the boundaries should be. And there'll probably be cases were we simply don't know whether spears were used for throwing, stabbing, or both.

And then there's the question if the results would be better than if classified as Jav Cav (which most suspects are currently), which seems to be the current default classification for non-sucky cavalry that don't use bows and don't qualify as knights or cataphracts, even if they don't chuck javelins either.

Right. JavCav gives good performance against Crusader Knights; Swordy Cavalry (by whatever name) might not give results that work as well in that matchup.