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× For those who like to push chits.

ASL -- Just begging for a Cease & Desist

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29 Dec 2014 10:23 #193483 by Sagrilarus
I don't think there are a lot of new gamers flocking to it, just a steady stream of players that enjoy complexity and freedom of action. ASL is one of the games where you can really set your own agenda with a wide array of options, a concept that I'm proving by getting veteran soldiers mercilessly killed via incompetent command decisions.

Most modern games are very channeled, very controlled in comparison. They provide a more reliable result, but you don't get the same level of freedom of action. I doubt I'll be playing full-blown ASL ever, but I can appreciate having a wide open field of options in front of me.

S.

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29 Dec 2014 10:45 #193486 by bomber
each to their own commander, each to their own! :)

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30 Dec 2014 01:36 - 30 Dec 2014 01:37 #193559 by Cranberries

ldsdbomber wrote: I'm not sure I quite get the appeal of stuff like ASL/SL, at least as an outsider who's only skimmed the rulebooks and read up on it a bit. Just a painful level of detail that still ends up with some cheesy "gamey" tactics (or is that not true any more, I read a lot of articles about this whole move, shoot and then move back round a corner gaminess etc). And what are you trying to achieve with that level of detail. Honestly, I feel like once you get to that amount of simulated detail, I'd much rather just read a historical book account of the conflict, because throwing dice and pretending it somehow tells a "what if" experience feels a bit daft if you're modelling everythging in such fine detail. I can believe the game has a lot of old timers, hard core guys lifestyle gamers, but I'd be more surprised if new gamers flock to that kind of game rather than more streamlined "modern" titles that focus more on the abstract and narrative with some level of historical accurary (this gun or unit is better than that one). But I have no idea if thats the case.


boardgamegeek.com/thread/998996/tactical-wargamer-what-asl-isnt

These omissions and distortions aren't necessarily a big deal; ask anyone who has ever played ASL what he thought about the experience, and if he was brave enough to make it through the 300 page rulebook and the steep learning curve (and you never, ever really stop learning the rules), he'll tell you about the quirky game play, how fickle the dice are, and how things start to happen on the board that almost seem patterned or 'real' somehow - a squad standing firm by passing multiple morale checks, a leader becoming killed at a crucial moment, an AFV knocking out several others at an opportune time. An ASL game rarely fails to provide entertaining narratives, which provide nourishment to the imagination and have contributed to its longevity and reputation as, despite the gargantuan costs in time and money associated with learning it, fun above all.
Last edit: 30 Dec 2014 01:37 by Cranberries. Reason: Came crawling back.

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30 Dec 2014 03:21 - 30 Dec 2014 03:52 #193569 by bomber
Oh I dont doubt it, but all those things I hear (and have experienced) with, say, a game of Combat Commander, which can be learned at the table during a single session and demo game. But a beast like ASL is obviously more of a long term lifestyle game investment, its not something you pop out for the hell of it.

thanks for the link to that thread, I'm going through it now, unsurprisingly involving quite a bit of handbag waving.

For me, I'm still not convinced that the huge rules overhead is giving you an equal amount of upgrade in terms of narrative and experience when compared to something like

Combat Commander
Up Front
Ghost Panzer

CC is very "WW2 movie story" driven, GP seems to be trying to get a tactical game that rewards actual military tactics (suppress and assault), and UF for me is the perfect distillation of an abstracted infantry collision with fog of war. If I could find someone who would commit to playing regularly and teach me how to really get the most out of it, I'd probably go for UF

I think Combat Commander would be improved if you could draw extra cards in the beginning and discard down to your hand size, with that reducing with each time track advance until you are only drawing to your hand size limit later with a presumably degraded deck. That would provide some kind of solution to the flat chaos criticism that Sean McCarthy made where command and control is worse at the start rather than the other way round. So lets say your hand size is 6, you might start off drawing 9 cards and discarding to 6 before each turn, then only 8, then only 7, then draw just to 6. I suppose that could be gamed by chucking back the better cards and turtling early on while you're not so close into the enemy and waiting for your tuned deck to turn up at the end when you'd actually expect command and control to go to shit.

Fog of War has always been one of my bugbears, which is why I really like the abstracted way UF works. I also love the "opponent chit pull" system of Tank on Tank and would like to see a lot more of it
Last edit: 30 Dec 2014 03:52 by bomber.
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30 Dec 2014 05:38 #193571 by ThirstyMan
CC is like a rail driven video game. It's OK but it does not have the depth of ASL. I like it and have all the expansions but it is not, in any way, comparable to ASL.

To have a full opinion on this, you need to have played ASL and CC. To not play ASL and then pontificate on it, is like being teetotal and telling people how bad/good being drunk is.

UF, I don't want abstracted military tactics in a card game (I do have this though and enjoy it, in its own right)

Ghost Panzer? This looks like some rules from ASL distilled into a simpler tactical game but (amongst other things) no smoke grenades (even though these are essential to understanding military tactics), no prisoners, no multi level buildings, limited concealment effects only, no broken units that need to get to command to rally, no final protective fire and that is just the infantry sections. Where are bypassing buildings (going around them instead of through them)? An essential tactic for overwatch. Where is dashing through open ground? What about double time, causing exhaustion but allowing greater movement? It has taken the easy bits from ASL and presented it as a full military tactical experience game. Not true. Again, it is a casual gamers tactical game which is fine.

BTW ridiculous rout rules that state you are forced to rout if you are in LOS of an enemy or adjacent and fail a morale check, compare this with ASL: only broken units rout they do not take a morale check, they run. They break, not because of an arbitrary morale check because they are next to the enemy, but because they have been under fire and panicked.

Fog of War is covered in ASL with concealment rules and hidden pieces rules allowing for true surprise within a game context.

TL:DR Lee, you are a dick
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30 Dec 2014 06:38 #193572 by bomber
I'm not comparing anything to ASL because as you rightly say I havent played them, what I'm saying is the things I've read as justifications for the thousands of rules is that it provides a tapestry to allow a rich event driven real life narrative as a story unfolding, not unlike a WW2 movie (since we can I think agree that none of these titles come anywhere near to succeeding as "simulations"). So to that end, as an outsider looking in, you are going to have to do a hell of a lot of convincing people to commit to a game which is presented as a lifestyle game of choice because of the sheer volume of it all in terms of it giving an equally large improvement in game experience. And I don't need to have played ASL to say that I very much doubt that level of (IMO) needless detail gives a commensurate increase in the gameplan fun and satisfaction. Of course thats qualified by me not committing to learning ASL to compare. But thats more the point. Its never going to happen. I can believe all the things you say ASL does better, I should hope so for 3 billion sentences of extra rules and modifiers, but is it 3 billion words worth better. I don't believe it, and that's why I woudl not commit to finding out.

None of this relates to my dickishness though, that's a well known and confirmed fact ;-)

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30 Dec 2014 22:47 - 30 Dec 2014 22:55 #193676 by JMcL63

ThirstyMan wrote: The idea [of the ASLSK] is partially to teach new players but also to segue with the full rule book so, when the time is right, that becomes more understandable. When I learned ASL, sonny boy, I used the full rule book and that was really difficult. You kids have no idea how hard it was when we used horses instead of cars and made our own electricity in the shed.

As an introduction to core ASL and intended bridge to the big ring binder in all its glory, ASLSK is something that wasn't available in my day either. I've tried ASLAK#1 but found the stripped down infantry game frustrating, the missing ASL chrome making the game such a pale imitation of its 'real self' that I think that CC is here the better game. I also agree with Sag's OP rant about how badly served ASLSK is by its rulebook, which I found to so be so poorly organised compared to the full rules that I just winged my few ASLSK#1 solitaire scenarios using my mid-80s ASL rules knowledge.

ThirstyMan wrote: This is Squad Leader which is not an easy version of ASL, it's an entirely different system which was trashed because it was internally inconsistent (rules wise) and the rules could not be made to work. Turned out to be broken.

Hence, the development of ASL as a response to start from scratch with an internally consistent set of rules. Squad Leader rules are maybe 3% of the rules load of ASL but broken once you get to vehicles.

Having started with Squad Leader and expanded through the 3 following modules in turn I can only echo ThirstyMan. Squad Leader's revolutionary model of men, guns and leadership set a paradigm whose shadow hangs over the hobby to this day, but by the time you added the 3 expansions the result was bloat and confusion compared to basic SL: the basic rules categories- infantry, terrain, ordnance and vehicles, were split across 4 programmed instruction rulebooks meaning that reference was a nightmare; the counter set was inconsistent because counters from earlier modules hadn't all been upgraded to rules added in later modules; not to mention the huge hole at the heart of the defensive fire system.

Back then there was clearly an appetite for Squaddie to mature into a peerless universal WW2 tactical system, something which patently couldn't've happened if more expansions- eg. a Pacific module, had been released in the same format. Hence the ground-up rationalision that became the infamous ASL core system rules, which shocked me originally because I for one was expecting a condensed version of 4 36-page rulebooks!

ThirstyMan wrote: CC is like a rail driven video game. It's OK but it does not have the depth of ASL. I like it and have all the expansions but it is not, in any way, comparable to ASL.

To have a full opinion on this, you need to have played ASL and CC. To not play ASL and then pontificate on it, is like being teetotal and telling people how bad/good being drunk is.

UF, I don't want abstracted military tactics in a card game (I do have this though and enjoy it, in its own right)

Combat Commander is the game which revived my former habit of regular WW2 tactical sessions- I played a lot of Squad Leader, ASL and Up Front back in the day. As such I prize it greatly and admire it as a perfect mash-up of SL and UF, a brilliant marriage of map, counters and cards with the added enjoyment of random events. And it's so lightweight, just such a coherent engine slickly delivering basic WW2 ground combat, game after game for years. So I think it's definitely comparable to ASL in some respects, perhaps even better in some others: CC's determined lack of guns and vehicles means that it's merits- in relation to ASL, can only reasonably be assessed against ASL's pure infantry game, with radios and a couple of infantry guns thrown in for good measure. So CC's lack of vehicles certainly equates to a lack of depth relative to ASL: with ASL you can conduct any operation in any theater at any time in the conflict; with CC you get most WW2 theatres all of their time and many operations in which there'll be SSR's standing in for what, in ASL, you get as *proper kit*.

As for Up Front? It's innovations are at least as revolutionary as any in John Hill's original Squad Leader, as witness the subsequent history of CDGs and other card wargames.

ThirstyMan wrote: I don't think anyone is trying to defend the ASL rule set, as such,

I certainly will, though I confess a love/hate relationship with ASL because of that rulebook and its distinctly serious weight, especially with Chapters C and D- those gun and vehicle rules which scratch the itches CC just won't prickle when I'm looking for my WW2 tactical fix.
Last edit: 30 Dec 2014 22:55 by JMcL63.

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31 Dec 2014 01:46 - 31 Dec 2014 10:55 #193681 by JMcL63

ldsdbomber wrote: Oh I dont doubt it, but all those things I hear (and have experienced) with, say, a game of Combat Commander, which can be learned at the table during a single session and demo game. But a beast like ASL is obviously more of a long term lifestyle game investment, its not something you pop out for the hell of it.

Combat Commander is definitely better than ASL as a 'pick up and play' game for the casual gamer: the intro scenario's Russian setup is largely fixed- making it ideal for the beginner; and start with open hands- the card-driven play concentrates the mind on immediate priorities and opportunities so easing newbs into decision making under the simplest of IGO-UGO turn sequences. If you haven't played a demo game of CC:E's Fat Lipki you've no idea how easy they are to run- just explain the units and the terrain, setup, reveal opening hands and you're off.

ldsdbomber wrote: For me, I'm still not convinced that the huge rules overhead is giving you an equal amount of upgrade in terms of narrative and experience when compared to something like

Combat Commander
Up Front
Ghost Panzer

CC is very "WW2 movie story" driven, GP seems to be trying to get a tactical game that rewards actual military tactics (suppress and assault), and UF for me is the perfect distillation of an abstracted infantry collision with fog of war. If I could find someone who would commit to playing regularly and teach me how to really get the most out of it, I'd probably go for UF

From the BGG review already referenced:
boardgamegeek.com/thread/998996/tactical-wargamer-what-asl-isnt

John Hill on SQUAD LEADER:
Squad Leader was a success for one reason: it personalized the boardgame in a World War II environment. Take the "leaders," or persons, away from it and it becomes a bore. Though this may sound surprising, the game has much in common with Dungeons & Dragons. In both games, things tend to go wrong, and being caught moving in the street by a heavy machinegun is like being caught by a people-eating dragon. Squad Leader was successful because, underneath all its World War II technology, it is an adventure game, indeed Dungeons & Dragons in the streets of Stalingrad.

My years of SL/ASL gave me epic games memorable to this day- some 30 years later, so do not doubt that ASL's "huge rules overhead *is* giving you an equal amount of upgrade in terms of narrative and experience"because it still delivers games of true adventure.

ldsdbomber wrote: I think Combat Commander would be improved if you could draw extra cards in the beginning and discard down to your hand size, with that reducing with each time track advance until you are only drawing to your hand size limit later with a presumably degraded deck. That would provide some kind of solution to the flat chaos criticism that Sean McCarthy made where command and control is worse at the start rather than the other way round. So lets say your hand size is 6, you might start off drawing 9 cards and discarding to 6 before each turn, then only 8, then only 7, then draw just to 6. I suppose that could be gamed by chucking back the better cards and turtling early on while you're not so close into the enemy and waiting for your tuned deck to turn up at the end when you'd actually expect command and control to go to shit.

One or two minor quibbles aside I just don't think Combat Commander needs improvement. What CC 'needs' is tanks, but that's a whole new game entirely if it's not just ASL.

ldsdbomber wrote: Fog of War has always been one of my bugbears, which is why I really like the abstracted way UF works. I also love the "opponent chit pull" system of Tank on Tank and would like to see a lot more of it

Smashing the 'God view' with C3i systems is a personal pet obsession too, exactly why I love UF to bits, naturally enough.
Last edit: 31 Dec 2014 10:55 by JMcL63.

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31 Dec 2014 09:06 #193696 by JMcL63

Sagrilarus wrote: -SNIP- A post and a half's vent -SNIP-

Poor baby. All you've got to worry about is applying the fire and movement rules to the phased IG-UGO turn sequence; pity the poor sap who's got to prep, organise and store the counters for all your scenarios and then teach you how to play.

For the record I played four different races in Star Fleet Battles, so I know what "big" looks like. The rules were rough there too, but the starter boxes were dead simple and very easy to read (this is thirty years ago). I'm suspicious that ASLSK1 may be a bit of a toll gate, not designed to make the game TOO accessible because it would set the wrong example early on. The thing that busts that theory is that some of the simple improvements (e.g., an index) would have no impact on the remainder of the dogma.

I played just enough Star Fleet Battles to realise that it wasn't going to become a gaming obsession like the SL series, and that the game shares true monster status with ASL and other, traditionally regarded monsters with their multiple large maps and 100s of counters. And the ASLSK most definitely are "toll gates"- they are pitched as self-contained introductory modules intended to bridge players into full ASL. That the ASLSK rules could be better edited and organised I have to agree. The paradox here is that the more successful ASLSK is as a system itself the less useful it'll be in feeding new players into the full game. Without sales figures we can merely speculate on how many might be so moving on.

The original post was just in jest by the way, trying to blow off steam. I had walked into Line of Site (LoS) unintentionally, and Andy (DoL) explained to me in detail why it's a bad idea to have everyone standing in the same place on a hot battlefield. I felt bad that he had gone to the trouble and that I had been such an incompetent opponent.

Apparently standing in the forest is not sufficient to avoid detection. "Stop der vhistling Schaefer!"

S.

We all take our sound hosings while we're mastering our men, guns and leaders on the Squaddie board. Tremble at the thought of the pastings you'll receive when you finally face tanks and guns!

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31 Dec 2014 09:31 #193700 by Msample

ldsdbomber wrote: mit to playing regularly and teach me how to really get the most out of it, I'd probably go for UF

I think Combat Commander would be improved if you could draw extra cards in the beginning and discard down to your hand size, with that reducing with each time track advance until you are only drawing to your hand size limit later with a presumably degraded deck. That would provide some kind of solution to the flat chaos criticism that Sean McCarthy made where command and control is worse at the start rather than the other way round. So lets say your hand size is 6, you might start off drawing 9 cards and discarding to 6 before each turn, then only 8, then only 7, then draw just to 6. I suppose that could be gamed by chucking back the better cards and turtling early on while you're not so close into the enemy and waiting for your tuned deck to turn up at the end when you'd actually expect command and control to go to shit.


The issue with this is that the decks will draw down more quickly, so the time/Sudden Death settings for scenarios would have to be adjusted. Also, nationalities with shitty decks ( Axis/Allied Minors ) would benefit more than say the Germans because they could cycle through their Command Confusion cards more easily since this mechanic would in essence increase their Discard limit.
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31 Dec 2014 13:45 - 31 Dec 2014 23:37 #193719 by Cranberries
Apparently there is a stripped-down, 18-page rulebook called "Retro" that works with existing ASL modules and scenarios.

boardgamegeek.com/thread/printerfriendly/1009739

It presupposes some knowledge of select ASL bits, like line-of-sight rules.

Retro has allowed me to take all those ASL components off the shelf and actually get some enjoyment out of them again. This is because Retro's 36-page 5.5 x 8.5 inch rulebook boils down ASL to 18 pages, including the introduction and optional rules. Really. The other 18 pages contain several scenarios, a scenario design system, game tables, and a thorough index. The Retro rules set yields a game with a very similar feel to SL/ASL, but with a mere fraction of the rules overhead. It ends up being simpler than even basic SL. It is also fast, allowing play of a scenario in a much shorter timeframe than the original. In my experience, it cuts the playing time by nearly half. As a bonus, it was also designed to be solitaire-friendly.
Last edit: 31 Dec 2014 23:37 by Cranberries.

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31 Dec 2014 16:06 - 31 Dec 2014 16:12 #193726 by ThirstyMan
This is messing with ASL so drastically you might as well play CC. You will succeed in unbalancing all the scenarios simply because you don't want to learn a sequence of rules that is, frankly, not that hard to learn.

If you don't like ASL then it's simple, don't buy it, don't invest time in it and don't play it. There are loads of simpler tactical games.

Messing with the core rules seems easy but it definitely hasn't been play tested and some of those rules seem very arbitrary indeed. That is 100% not ASL nor is it a simplified version of ASL.

If you are a casual gamer and don't want to spend the time learning ASL, then don't.
Last edit: 31 Dec 2014 16:12 by ThirstyMan.
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01 Jan 2015 14:48 - 01 Jan 2015 14:49 #193760 by ThirstyMan
Well, I just dug out CC because I haven't played it for maybe 6 months and all this talk made me want to give it a whirl, while I wait for my students of ASL to complete their navel staring and beard scratching.

OMFG what a disaster of a rulebook! It's so fucking hard to find things. It isn't organised in any kind of coherent way. It took me ages to find how triggers work. Christ what a mess. I've even played the bastard before!!

I'm not just saying this because of previous discussion but that is a shitbag rulebook. ASL is indexed properly and you find things where you expect to find things. I am flicking backwards and forwards through the CC rulebook finding trivial shit. If you think this rulebook is just fine then ASL will not be a problem for you.

This is more like an Eklund rulebook.
Last edit: 01 Jan 2015 14:49 by ThirstyMan.
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01 Jan 2015 16:35 #193769 by bomber
I think its different philosophies, I thought CCs rulebook was OK but its more the amount, I think one set of people dont worry about amount but are more into references (Avalon Hill bullet point style), the other set are more about having a feel for general concepts and limited rules so you can remember most if not all of them before you get going. I played a lot of AH sports sims though so I quite like the reference style, but I remember some guy emailing me once when I used to host all the stuff for Statis Pro football on the web, and he had no idea how to actually play the game, I was like, if you know the sport, just do what you would do on the field and reference the appropriate section but he just didnt seem to get it because the rules didnt include a specific "order of play, flowchart style". haha

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02 Jan 2015 00:44 - 02 Jan 2015 00:44 #193806 by JMcL63

ThirstyMan wrote: Well, I just dug out CC because I haven't played it for maybe 6 months and all this talk made me want to give it a whirl, while I wait for my students of ASL to complete their navel staring and beard scratching.

OMFG what a disaster of a rulebook! It's so fucking hard to find things. It isn't organised in any kind of coherent way. It took me ages to find how triggers work. Christ what a mess. I've even played the bastard before!!

I'm not just saying this because of previous discussion but that is a shitbag rulebook. ASL is indexed properly and you find things where you expect to find things. I am flicking backwards and forwards through the CC rulebook finding trivial shit. If you think this rulebook is just fine then ASL will not be a problem for you.

This is more like an Eklund rulebook.

You cannot be serious ThirstyMan! I'll give that the CC rulebook isn't optimised to learn from- that's what the demo game is for, but as a rules reference it's : clearly written, well organised, and thoroughly indexed, well deserving its shining reputation. It's a veritable quart in a pint pot. Take that back I say!
Last edit: 02 Jan 2015 00:44 by JMcL63.

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