Meshwesh minor errors and typos

[MarkusB]

While exploring Meshwesh, I realized that I was finding a few typos and minor errors, so I started to take note of them in case this could help future revisions. Unfortunately after I decided for this I only found two errors, but I'll try to trace back my steps to see if I stumble again on the previous ones (I didn't find many, don't worry). So far I've got:

-Numidian or Early Moorish
Roman-trained light foot should be available from 213BC onwards, not 215 (Quintus Statorius was invited by Syphax to prolong his stay in 213). The list should also probably end one year earlier (Tiqfarin died in 24AD).

-Sikel
They're allowed 6-22 light infantry stands, which should probably be 6-12.

[David Schlanger]

This is a great idea. Thanks so much!

We did the best we could to avoid typos and error, but with so much data... it is a real challenge.

DS

[David Kuijt]

-Sikel
They're allowed 6-22 light infantry stands, which should probably be 6-12.

6-16, since they can be all Light Foot for 48 pts. But you're right to point it out; 6-22 makes no sense. Fixed; you'll see it next update.

[David Kuijt]

While exploring Meshwesh, I realized that I was finding a few typos and minor errors, so I started to take note of them in case this could help future revisions. Unfortunately after I decided for this I only found two errors, but I'll try to trace back my steps to see if I stumble again on the previous ones (I didn't find many, don't worry).

We do appreciate this; even if it only triggers discussion of details of the army lists, such discussion is useful and (to me) interesting. And where omissions or errors were made, crowdsourcing the QA is the best way to find them.

[JonathanJ]

The Chinese Northern Dynasties army list says that the general must be knights or cataphracts.
There are no knights in the list.

[David Kuijt]

The Chinese Northern Dynasties army list says that the general must be knights or cataphracts.
There are no knights in the list.

Thanks; should be Elite Cavalry or Cataphracts.

[Andreas Johansson]

Is the Syrian Caliphate of Baghdad list "Syrian" in any sense beyond being included in the DBX Syrian list? Might be called "Revived" or "Later" instead.

[David Kuijt]

Is the Syrian Caliphate of Baghdad list "Syrian" in any sense beyond being included in the DBX Syrian list? Might be called "Revived" or "Later" instead.

Good name.

In this case the idea was to aid players who are morphing -- who might not know that they can use their 4-8 Javelin Cavalry from the Syrian Arab-ruled Citystates list as the 2-6 Javelin Cavalry in the Caliphate of Baghdad list. The list/sublist structure used in older systems wasn't a perfect aid for that, but it did sometimes help; we included some of that information in our lists for morphing reasons.

The name alone isn't much help, though. We need to put more thought (in the long run) into how we can help morphing. It would be nice if line items in Meshwesh were interconnected so you could click on the Javelin Cavalry of the Revived Caliphate of Baghdad and get a link to all the other troops that would look nearly the same.

Morphing support is a complex problem, though. At the data end there are nearly as many opinions on what is an "appropriate" morph as there are gamers. And at the implementation end, creating all those links would be a hell of a lot of work, and designing how it would function in the database is likely to be very complicated.

[Andreas Johansson]

The Early Seleucid list has 0-1 Knights, but the general's type listed as Knights, so you have to take that stand of Knights, right? So wouldn't it be better to list he minimum as 1?

[David Kuijt]

The Early Seleucid list has 0-1 Knights, but the general's type listed as Knights, so you have to take that stand of Knights, right? So wouldn't it be better to list he minimum as 1?

There are actually a number of cases where that sort of thing happens -- where the general's type is listed as something that could appear 0 times in the army. So it isn't an error. It might be a bad idea, but it isn't an error.

The problem is this. Do we want the fact that a general's stand is designated to distort the army list? Some legacy systems said yes, so there was always one stand of Companions for the Seleucid. I'm not so sure. It wouldn't be a bad solution for the Seleucids, where the critical point is "if there is a Knight stand, that stand must be the General". But what about armies where there are two or three possible General types, but all of them have a minimum of 0? We can't use the same solution (having all three types have a minimum of 1 stand) without even worse distortion of the army lists.

We also can't put (for example) "Knight or Javelin Cavalry" for the Seleucids without another oddity -- that would allow an army that had a stand of Companions but the General wasn't with them.

So the current solution is what you see. What does it mean? It means that if you have a Knight for the Seleucids, that stand must be the general. If you take no Knight stand, you can make the General something else.

I realize that we haven't expressed this anywhere at this point. It's not completely clear where we ought to express it. There are a large number of upsides to having online army lists, but a few downsides exist. One of them is cases like this, where the complexity of the information being expressed by the army list is not intuitive, and normally would be expressed in the rules.

So the options are three (or at least three):

• Make the stand type for the General always have a minimum of 1. Might distort the army lists, and becomes quite complex and unpleasant if there is more than one type that can be the General but the minimums are still 1. Not sure how many times that happens.
• Expand the number of types that can be General. Another way to distort the army lists, with its own disadvantages. We're making up history, which is unpleasant in a history-based game.
• (current solution) Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. In other words, express the army lists as history dictates (or to be honest, seems to dictate, since many decisions are educated guesswork), and have a (currently unexpressed) rule for how you handle it if you take an army without any types that can be General.

I'm sure there are upsides and downsides we haven't thought of -- I'd value feedback on this issue. It's small (doesn't happen frequently), but complex.