Over the past couple of weeks, this issue has twice come into my thinking. Firstly, I am presently beavering away, working on a campaign system for a series of figure games and have been trying to determine the point at which unit cohesion will collapse and the soldiers reach that desperate point of either disorderly retreat or fleeing for their lives.
Secondly, while playing a boardgame, the issue of what exactly rout or panic is, cropped up and how should that determine the actual path of retreat.
So this is something that seems to cross the boardgame / tabletop genres.
The question that I have been left with is, what does the individual designer mean by rout and has it become a weakened term that covers a number of different levels of state of mind from simply not have confidence in training or environment, through to absolute panic?
The term ‘rubber routers’ has been around for many years and refers to units that get a rout result in combat and ‘run away 3 hexes’ or so, then they recover by a morale check in the next turn and a turn or two later are back fighting at the front line at normal capacity.
My own thoughts on routing are that units are fleeing in blind panic, with self preservation kicking in and they are unlikely to be ‘restored’ at all, or perhaps not until nightfall or say at the end of a battle etc, when the immediate danger has passed.
So when I look at the occurrence of rubber routers example, I just think the designer has used the wrong term for what is actually happening to that unit.
In the same vein, there are, or at least should be, in the designers tool box, a subtle difference between disorder and disrupted and between retire and retreat and yet each of those pairings often tend to sit at the same level of ‘effect’ in our list of combat results, with a sort of inter-changeability between the terms, but that we generally understand as being what they are meant to mean.
One of my favoured napoleonic boardgames is the Jours de Gloire system. Now on first impression that suffers the rubber router syndrome and I know that a fellow blogger (VH) has largely abandoned the system because of this.
When looking at this game, turns are typically 90 minutes long. So at best, if a router runs away for 3 hexes and then manages via morale to stop routing, it will become disordered instead. It will then take another turn via morale to become ordered IF it passes a morale test and then another turn before it can start moving towards the front light to re-engage.
At best, this is taking 3 - 4 turns for better trained troops, so all of that sits in a timeframe of occurring over 4½ - 6 hours of battle time.
Additionally, the unit might fail any one of those the morale tests and not recover and then at the end of each turn be subject to further automatic rout retreats, keeping it out of the game for longer.
So is that a rout or something else?
One interesting point is that when ‘routers’ pass through a village or town in this system, the player can chooses to halt them there or let them carry on routing.
To show where I hang my hat, a few years ago, I designed a pair of 1066 games. As the battle progresses and units are lost, those units standing next to the unit just lost, must take a rout test. This is based upon a die roll, plus the number of casualties already lost by that class of unit or its formation. The greater the number of units lost, the higher the chance of routing and once a unit routs, there is little chance of stopping from leaving the battlefield.
The main influence of this mechanic is that by mid battle, a few units here and there are starting to rout away, but that as the battle continues, larger numbers are put to flight, until large gaps start appearing and the collapse of the army becomes a real and apparent thing. So for me, obviously, anything much short of this is probably best not described as a rout - though this is just a view, not a statement of fact, as I am not in any qualified position to know for sure.
In a recent game, we had the issue of how does a unit rout, or should I say, what is or should be the ‘deliberate’ direction of rout. Unless the rules are very tight on this sort of thing, it allows a player the freedom to do some fancy footwork that has the unit being very helpful and courteous to the general and other troops by not routing as the crow flies and consequently not crashing into them and causing them to also take rout / disorder / cohesion tests, or whatever terminology is on offer, to create potential domino effects.
Routers did and could sweep other wavering units away with them, but we come back to the design intent. Is the designer really advocating rout in the true and maximum sense of the word or something less than that and how would that best be described or rather, how should it be described?
Underpinning this is the question of how do routers naturally behave (I can only be guided by what I have read and what I assume), bearing in mind that the unit’s collective clear thinking and training have gone to various degrees and the animal instinct to survive has kicked in (if we really are talking about rout).
So do routers only move in one direction in the knowledge of certain escape, do they tend to run towards friends, are they inclined to run after others who are already running (herding), do they take the line of least resistance and will they always, above all else, increase the distance between themselves and the enemy ….. even to the detriment of their own forces?
I am more than happy to have units take the shortest direction to (say) a supply point or line of communication, even if that has them crashing into a load of friendly units along the way, but I am there for the simulation, not for the sake of the game.
Please, put your answers on a post card - enquiring minds would like to know.
By the way, if you have a problem commenting here because you get an error message, please press the PUBLISH button again … and again! In fact it needs to be pressed 4 times and then it will go through. I have no idea why, but there is an occasional bug that makes this happen - the joys of blogging!
Resource Section.
My sister webspace ‘COMMANDERS’ is being re-configured to showcase various figure and boardgame systems that I am enjoying and gives a flavour of where current projects are up to. Link.
