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It's Broke, Fix It!

By David Kuijt

(Reprinted from the NASAMW newsletter, Spearpoint, with permission)

In the March/April Spearpoint Phil Barker wrote an article discussing the Built Up Area rule in DBA 2.0 and giving some of his thoughts on the matter. The title of his article was If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It. Well, Phil, It's Broke. There are a large number of problems with the rules for BUAs, and it is a major detriment to an otherwise excellent revision of a damn fine game.

First let me make clear that I love DBA, and I think the 2.0 version is a big improvement over 1.1. Blades are no longer quite so unbalanced, the addition of topography and army aggression factor is a major improvement, and the huge increase in army list diversity is fantastic, just to mention a few upgrades. I was part of the active playtest group while Phil was working on the revision, and I've played hundreds of DBA games since the revision came out, many of them with BUAs.

In the "Ain't Broke" article Phil suggests that players shouldn't complain about the BUA rules, they should learn to exploit them. Well, I can certainly exploit them -- I won the DBA NICT (National Invitational Championship Tourney) at Historicon 2001 in large part by exploiting the BUA rules, including successfully assaulting an enemy's garrisoned BUA that ended up in my deployment area, and also bombarding enemy troops with an artillery-garrisoned BUA in their deployment area. I've won other DBA tournaments at Cold Wars and Fall In, so failure to exploit BUAs is not the problem for me. In fact, at Historicon last year I defeated Phil in a DBA game in part by killing the garrison of his BUA. Ability to manipulate the BUA rules isn't the point, though. The question should really be, are the rules good or are they not? There are a number of problems with the use of BUAs in DBA 2.0; some problems with concept, scale, and history; other problems with play balance. A simple summary list follows. The first three problems are game design issues regarding the game concept, scale, and place as a historical simulation; the following four have to do with play balance.

1) Game Design: is DBA a Battle Game or a Siege Game?

What are the BUA rules attempting to represent? Field battles between relatively equal forces almost never happened at the same time as an assault on a BUA. As a siege game, DBA is a very poor simulation. Element combat factors represent abilities and matchups in field battles; these often don't correspond to abilities in fortification assault warfare. Some armies that were historically very adept at taking enemy cities, like the Assyrians, are now utterly incapable of it. Other armies that were very adept at holding out in fortified cities, like the Ancient Spanish, are utterly incapable of defending their walls for more than a few bounds in DBA. Missile weapons were historically crucial in defending fortifications against assault, but in the DBA BUA rules Bow and Psiloi elements are the worst types for holding fortifications against heavy foot.

2) Game Design: Time Scale

DBA is deliberately vague about the time scale. Nevertheless, the BUA assault rules are clearly not in the same time scale as the battle rules. Sacking a city or fortified area (larger than a camp) took days, not minutes. Assaulting a city took hours, and more than one attempt in a day was very unlikely. The battle rules represent a full battle, complete in some number of hours less than a day. Dozens of assaults on a city's walls don't fit within less than a week or two, certainly not within half a dozen hours. And the idea that a puppet administration could be found, organized, and set up in time to defend the walls against their original friends within an hour or less is frankly impossible.

3) Frequency of battles within a mile of a BUA

Mandatory BUA in Arable, and nearly half all armies being Arable, makes battles where the center of the battlefield is within 600 to 900 paces of the manned walls of a BUA far, far too common. Such battles are tremendously rare in history. Battles were named after nearby castles or towns like Bannockburn, Crecy, Agincourt, and many many others, but in almost all cases the town or castle is off the DBA map. Stirling castle, for example, is something like the width of three to five DBA maps away from the site of the battle of Bannockburn, which was fought to relieve the siege of the castle.

If you look at the army lists in detail, this frequency problem becomes even more obvious. Every battle with Hannibal in Rome will have a BUA on the field, just hundreds of yards from the center of the field. Every battle between Rome and Parthia, or Rome and Sassanian Persia, or Rome and the Ancient Spanish, or Rome and Pyrrhus, or nearly any pair of armies from Feudal or Medieval Europe, pits two Arable armies against each other, and thus will have a BUA. All the battles between Alexander the Great and the Persian Empire will have BUAs, when historically none of them did. 46% of the armies in the army list are from Arable topography, more than triple the number for any other topography. BUAs interfering within a mile or so of the center of a battlefield are tremendously rare; in DBA they are forcibly common.

4) Play Balance: Arable armies without Blade or Spear as Defender

Any Arable-terrain army without Blade, Artillery, or Spear is at a prohibitive disadvantage facing an enemy with any of the above. It must take a BUA in every battle and cannot defend it successfully. Phil's article in Spearpoint says "The invisible advantage [to having a mandatory BUA] is that you have the sort of army that goes with arable terrain." That may be true for the arable armies with Blade -- Romans, for example. But what about armies like Ancient British, Ancient Spanish, Gallic, Parthian, Sassanid Persian, Early Lombard, Visigoths, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Anglo-Saxon, Caledonian -- the list goes on and on. These armies are forced to take a BUA in every battle, yet cannot defend it against their historical enemies.

5) Play Balance: armies without Blade, Spear, or Arty as Attacker

An army without Blade, Artillery, or Spear cannot deal with an enemy BUA, and every enemy except those from Forest can choose to take a BUA when defending against those armies. Parthians, Vandals, Sassanids, Huns, Neo-Assyrian Empire -- the list goes on. The Assyrians are a particularly incongruous example, because historically they were the most adept city-crackers until the Romans, but the BUA rules make it nearly impossible for them to take an enemy BUA in DBA.

6) Play Balance: Constraining the Battlefield

Most DBA games are played in 15mm scale. A BUA takes up a lot of room on a 2'x2' DBA battlefield, even for friendly forces. With its ZOC, it takes even more room against enemy forces. In 15mm scale, where the forces are already quite compressed, battles become very odd and unhistorical. When you throw in a Waterway (Arable or Littoral armies can have both) the resulting battle space is way, way too small.

The worst case happens when a BUA ends up in the attacker's deployment zone. With no deployment within 300p of the side edges, and a maximum size BUA chosen by the enemy (and there is no motivation for him to choose a smaller one, since he is the enemy, after all) the deployment zone becomes two small squares, 600p wide and deep. The army must deploy in two columns three elements wide. I suspect that the Hussites, with their five 40x80 Warwagons, would be completely unable to set up their full army in that situation without entering the ZOC of the BUA and inhibiting their movement still further. Certainly if there was a large waterway on one side edge, they couldn't fit their army on at all.

In the past, when the constraint issue has been mentioned, Phil has responded "use a smaller BUA." He says it again in the last sentence of the Spearpoint article. But this begs the question. The issue arises in tournament play, where rules are enforced as written and where players are competitive. A truly competitive player is motivated to deploy the largest legal-sized BUA to gain advantage. To think that a typical competitive player would willingly forgo a legal advantage in tournament play is unrealistic.

Note that the board-constraint issue is much less important in 25mm scale play, where the board is 48" square -- the equivalent board for playing in 15mm scale would be 32" square, and the extra room makes it easier to avoid an enemy BUA.

7) Play Balance: Artillery in a BUA

With 360 degree fire zone, 500p range, and a "killed if beaten" result on any element where it can fire on its rear (quite easy from a BUA, where screening is nearly impossible), Artillery in a BUA makes for a badly unbalanced game. Artillery in a BUA in the attacker's deployment zone makes for a tremendously unbalanced game.

How do we fix it?

What's the solution? The constraint issue (6) can be solved by playing on larger mapboards, and larger maps (32" square or 36"x24" rectangles for 15mm play) make other parts more palatable as well. At Fall In 2001 the DBA tournament was run on 36"x24" boards, and the negative influence of BUAs wasn't as obtrusive. Bob Beattie's recent article in Spearpoint described some other partial solutions. Making a BUA in the attacker's deployment zone into a neutral BUA moderates the most severe subcases of (6) and (7). Making a BUA "optional" in Arable solves problem (4), allowing the Parthians to refight Carrhae without giving Crassus an easy victory.

The simplest and most complete solution, however, is just to play DBA 2.0 entirely without the BUA rules. Treat a BUA as an unwalled village, a patch of BGo that blocks command control and line of sight for missile fire the same way that Woods does. This takes care of all the objections.

DBA version 2.0 is an excellent game in almost all respects. The BUA rules, the way BUAs work in the game, and the whole concept of siege / assault / field battle interaction is badly flawed, however. If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It is a good rule of thumb; the flipside of that rule is If It's Broke, Fix It. BUAs in DBA are broke, and they need fixing.

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Last Updated: Nov. 7, 2002

Comments, questions and additions welcome. Send them to Chris Brantley at brant@erols.com.