Anyone playing Soldiers of God?

[mmcv]

Crusaders and Saracens were the first big wargaming project I did and remain the biggest collection I have. I've played a few different rule sets with them and most general ancient and medieval rules play well enough, but don't always capture the feel of the period. So I was keen when I came across Soldiers of God as a period specific ruleset.

I've played a few games over the past few years with them, mostly small battles and find it can be a mixed bag. I've had some really fun games with them, while others have been a complete grind with very little happening.

I really like the concept of the rules, and the narrative potential for the special events, but I do feel like I need to put in the work to make that fun (usually writing up a battle report afterwards) that doesn't necessarily happen for me during a lot of the game itself.

I wonder if other people are having similar experiences?

I do like the rules, I've even spent a fair bit of time building spreadsheets to allow me to quickly create army rosters and track experience through a campaign.

I started that long awaited campaign today and was somewhat disappointed. The first game ended in the very first turn, which just seemed a bit mad, so I disregarded this somewhat and played on. It played on to a reasonable conclusion and I'll be able to put together a decent report for the first action of the campaign. I'm part way through the second action in it and having the opposite issue of not a lot happening.

As a caveat I've mostly played smaller actions and always solo, so there are possibly multiplayer aspects that improve things.

Part of me wonders if there's just too many different things going on at once. In any one turn you could have a pretty wide variety of actions and special events going on. The issue here is that it reduces the chances of the actions you need coming up and can lead to some quite crazy special events.

I'm wondering if limiting the number of special events that can be used per turn may help, or tweaking some of the standard actions to be a bit more flexible so you don't just end up hanging around turn after turn rallying off the odd point of disorder.

What are other people's experiences of it? Similar, or have I just been having a run of odd luck with them?

I'll probably play another few games before I decide if I want to keep using them or find a different ruleset for the period. I'll have to use other rulesets anyway for historical recreations as the troops types are a little inflexible given the breadth of the Crusades.

[mmcv]

Report of the first raid: http://mmcvhistory.home.blog/2021/03/26/holy-war-a-soldiers-of-god-campaign/

[SJWi]

MMCV, Before writing any more I will confess I don't own or play Soldiers of God....

Being a confirmed ancients and Medieval gamer with 1st Crusade and Fatimid/Abbasid armies I was intrigued by the rules as the author has a solid reputation.  What put me straight off was the basing convention. All my armies are based for Impetus either as whole bases or individually on Impetus sized sabots.  That would make most infantry units twice the size of what is needed for SoG.

I'm sure there is a good reason for having the base sizes stated but once again a unique basing requirement put me off what looks like an interesting set of rules.

Pity.

I'll follow the answers on this thread with interest 

[Hu Rhu]

LIkewise, I don't play the rules so I am commenting only on the info in your post and the AAR on your first battle.  It seems that in creating a 'special' environment for the Crusades the writers have tried too hard to cram all the possible events into a single game using the special rules etc, without giving the game mechanics a chance to come through. This may be unfair but any game that can end after a single turn, suggest that the rules are too skewed in favour of flavour and not enough on the actual actions.

Hail Caesar are my go to rules, there is enough options in troop types to allow you to field the force you want without making it too gamey i.e. every Frankish army full of knights.  They give a good game, albeit geared to larger table top armies.

If you are looking for a bespoke set of Crusades rules you might want to try Ager Sanguinis.  They seem to offer a good feel for the period and are written by James Roach (Olicanalad here on the forum).  They were made available through Miniature Wargames some years ago but James's blog will give you an idea of where they can be found.

http://olicanalad.blogspot.com/2010/02/ager-sanguinis-available-from-miniature.html

[fred]

I’m not familiar with these rules - but a couple of general thoughts

Most rules are designed and tested around a certain size of game, and often don’t work as well if you grow or shrink the game greatly beyond that. It does sound that the army morale mechanism is rather expecting a bigger pool of morale to be lost? You could perhaps adjust this so that the morale loss for a unit 1d3+1 rather than 1d6?

It sounds like there is a card deck, and you are seeing too many specials - which again might be because you have fewer units than expected, so the ratio of specials to actions is off. You could either just put in fewer specials for a game. Or put in 1 or 2 generic special cards, that when drawn you draw a card from a separate special events deck?

It can be frustrating when you get all the elements together - and produce a good looking game - then it falls a bit flat because of the rules. I’ve found this a couple of times over lockdown with solo projects.

[mmcv]

@SJWi you could fudge things slightly to use markers to represent number of bases, as the frontage doesn't impact too much. A basic unit is 2 bases, then for a few additional points you can add extra bases. Extra bases give one extra attack dice and can take one extra disorder before routing. So you could treat your impetus bases as two bases, or just treat them as the unit and mark number of bases present with a dice. There are some special events that result in base removal, but 90% of the time your number of bases are the same.

Luckily my crusades forces are mostly based to multiple 40mmm bases so can use multiple, but in pretty much all my projects since I've used a single base per unit as I don't find multiple bases that useful for any armies prior to regular drill, much prefer diorama basing. Most modern rules tend to accommodate this, so it is unusual to come across one requiring multiple bases for the period.


@hu rhu I suspect you're right that there's too much flavour available. Every single action card also has a potential special event. Not all of them will apply to the current situation, but there is a lot. I am tempted to limit the number to be used, but that will then risk slowing the game down more as action cards you can't use will just be discarded. The one turn end game was a fairly rare event, the result of building up a lot of damage on a powerful unit then them rolling two sixes in a row when routing.

Hail Caesar was actually the first ruleset I ever played and I've had a few good games with it. It's one of my go-to for creating historical scenarios, most recently I used it to refight the battle of Dorylaeum (https://mmcvhistory.home.blog/2020/08/09/battle-report-the-battle-of-dorylaeum-1079/) and it does produce a good game, though of course keeps things fairly generic. Might be tempting to take some of the special events from SoG and see if they can be tailored to other rules like HC to inject some of the flavour. I've also used To the Strongest for more straight up fights.

@fred the scenario I played was right from the rulebook. It provides 4 different types of games, raid, small battle, large battle and seige, along with special army lists for each and a campaign mode to link them together. The lists themselves are sensible to the action size and type so it's all well balanced in that regard. The card deck is the driver of action and has a lot of different actions and special events. I suspect the play testing was skewed to the larger engagements as you say where the larger number of units reduce the effects of chance so things happen a lot more often in smaller battles.

[mmcv]

Also looks like those rules aren't available hu rhu, though will try a deeper dive and see. Do you know how they play?

[Hu Rhu]

Also looks like those rules aren't available hu rhu, though will try a deeper dive and see. Do you know how they play?

I'd contact olicanalad as they are his rules but I understand they are based on Piquet rules.  Try the link to his blog in my earlier post.

[mmcv]

I'd contact olicanalad as they are his rules but I understand they are based on Piquet rules.  Try the link to his blog in my earlier post.

Yeah I did try the link but seems to be dead. Will read up on piquet and see.

Played a few more turns and nothing much happening in this game. Think it's definitely broken for the raid scenarios as too easy to rally off disorder.

So becomes a grind unless something wild happens. May play the next few with different system then try again on a larger battle with the rules.

[mmcv]

Part two, in which I attempt to spin a yarn from very little action...



http://mmcvhistory.home.blog/2021/03/27/holy-war-part-2/

Different ruleset next time methinks...

[mmcv]

When in doubt, make it up! Decided to fight another small engagement using my own homebrew rules I've been developing with a few adaptions for the period. Sir Hugh and Sir Henry take another tilt at the village only to run into Barbai and Wot-a-din. Ashamed of their poor showing last time, both sides set to with great gusto.



https://mmcvhistory.home.blog/2021/03/27/holy-war-part-2-5/

[fred]

It’s a shame that these rules don’t seem to be working - from a rules perspective can you share what didn’t work in game 2.0?

But glad to hear that shifting to home brew rules made a better game for instalment 2.5!

[mmcv]

It’s a shame that these rules don’t seem to be working - from a rules perspective can you share what didn’t work in game 2.0?

But glad to hear that shifting to home brew rules made a better game for instalment 2.5!

The game is card driven and each turn players draw several cards in their hands along with three pre defined battle plan cards. In the raid scenarios the types of troop and battle plans you can choose are limited.

Each turn players alternate playing a card chosen from their deck. That card will have a standard action and a special event on it, so the player can choose to play the standard action (which would apply to all units in the division) or the special event (usually applied to a single unit to cause a positive or negative reaction, though some safe Crusader only and some Saracen only). They may also trade in two cards to draw a new one or discard a card to remove disorder.

The main issue was that given the small force, once melee was engaged nothing more could happen. There's only a small number of cards that trigger melee events, then you can use ones that cause fear and confusion to wear down points, but it was basically a repeated cycle of run a few melee events, cause some disorder, maybe a special event to cause an arbitrary morale drop, then just rally and discard the rest of the cards to reduce disorder in the units and you're back to where you were. I went several turns where literally nothing had changed by the end, except maybe grinding down s point of army morale.

Game ends when morale is 0, which is reduced by losses and special events. But I felt I had no real way of ending the melees. In one engagement the turcopoles were forced to make a mad charge into formed infantry due to a special event. Rather than being crushed and driven from the fight they just sat there all game not able to do much.

The knights at the bottom were surrounded in the sides and usually only able to cause max 2 hits per round of melee, so even if they got a few rounds of melee in a turn, the chance of doing more damage than could be rallied off was negligible.

You need to cause more disorder than bases to rout a unit, whereas having equal disorder to bases causes a list morale point at the end of the turn.

So even if the three units surrounding them were able to cause a lot of hits and disorder, there were enough cards that the crusaders could just rally or off so they don't break.

In a bigger game where there are a lot more units so you can't just discard cards down to save the same few units over and over it might work well, and can bring more powerful units to bear, but part of the appeal was that the rules had this system that seemed well designed to run through a series of linked battles escalating from raids to large skirmishes to full field battles and seiges, gaining experience and upgrades, but I just don't think the mechanics work for those smaller actions.

[fred]

Thanks for the detailed explanation. It does seem the card mechanism doesn’t really scale to the sizes of games, which as you say, seems odd for a game that aims to cover these different sized scenarios.

While I can certainly see that having cards to initiate combat (ie charge) seem very reasonable, once units are in melee, it seems a bit counter intuitive to have to keep spending cards to get them to fight again.

Are the special options on the cards compulsory, or do you choose to use the standard or special? It’s been a while since I played Maurice, but I seem to recall its cards had something similar with a standard number to use for most actions, and an event - but I’m struggling to recall the details.

One simple change would be perhaps to have a smaller hand of cards for smaller games, then you have less chance just to burn cards to rally.

We’ve been playing a lot of TFL’s If the Lord Spares Us recently, and in it units are card draw activated, but at the end of a turn units that haven’t done anything do get an opportunity to fire if at close (infantry) or effective (MGs and Guns) range. This reflects that manoeuvre and rallying was harder than shooting, and units would happily take cover and fire away at the enemy. If the end of turn comes out a few times early in a turn, units can really rack up shock without the chance to rally it off.

Not really sure if all the above is going anywhere - but just some slightly linked thoughts

[mmcv]

Yes as there is no end turn as such, both sides take turns alternating play, there's not really an option for that. And since units are only removed at the end of the full turn, unless you're able to cause a lot of damage at the very end of the turn it's unlikely to cause any problems as you can plan on rallying somewhat. On the flip side because the morale drop after losing a unit is based on a dice roll rather than fixed value, the loss of a single unit can end things pretty rapidly which is what happened in the previous game where the first unit to be routed wiped out the entire armys morale, also a bit of an odd one, even if it was an edge case of some extreme rolling.

I should say as a caveat that playing these solo mean there's not the hidden information aspect you'd get with an opponent regarding card choices, but I can't think of many/any occasions where not knowing the opponent cards would have changed my decision making, though I can't rule out subconscious bias.

The special events are optional, so you can play the standard action or the special event as you wish. So a special event might be that the Saracen commander can force one Crusader unit to charge them. Or that one melee can be activated and reroll misses. Or to increase your own morale or decrease the enemies. Or removing all disorder. There's a lot of ways to remove disorder. The number of cards drawn is based on the number of commanders + 1, so as you lose commanders (they act just as normal units strangely enough) you do get less cards, but doesn't make a massive difference.

It feels a bit strange for there to be so many different things happening in a single engagement. Special events, fear and confusion and the like certainly add flavour to a battle, but it's something that should happen from time to time, not necessarily over and over as it feels more gamey than narrative.

What you describe for ITLSU sounds a bit like some of the concepts I've been trying out with my home brew feudal rules. They use random activation per command, roll for number of actions modified by a command score than may move, maneuver, charge, etc. Various actions will require resolve tests then at the end of the activation anyone in melee will resolve a round of combat. I also want to include tests for units under fire to simulate the pressure of horse archers harassing and the like but still tweaking that, thinking it'll be done at the end turn rather than per activation so leaving your units in harm's way without proper support will risk losing them. Since turn lengths are random (based on drawing an end turn chit) you never know whether you'll be able to get support from other commands up or not so adds nice friction.

I've not actually played and of the TFL rules but just the last couple of weeks I watched a few videos online and picked up a copy of Sharpe Practice and they do look interesting.