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AFAIK there are exactly zero intra-indiginous American historical wargames*, though. Native Americans exist in wargames almost exclusively in a context of colonialism, which is why it's such a baffling inclusion in the "people don't mind playing the baddies" list. (*Warlord did a pre-Columbian fantasy game that I don't really know anything about. Looks cool though.)
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May 21, 2023 01:29
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moths posted:AFAIK there are exactly zero intra-indiginous American historical wargames*, though. Tribal just got a second edition which I picked up after watching this insanely cute video of a dad playing the game with his daughter. It's a skirmish wargame about pre-colonial warfare between tribal peoples. There is also a wargame called Flower Wars about pre-Cortez Mesoamerican warfare, but I'm not sure if it is out yet or not. Edit: Oh, and Flint & Feather.
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May 21, 2023 01:39
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It's really hard to make a wargame about poorly recorded warfare.
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May 21, 2023 01:44
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Do you guys think the guy asking us to take "politics" out of wargaming was referring to all that NA history, or is he just another Joe Rogan type?
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May 21, 2023 01:53
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Slyphic posted:It's really hard to make a wargame about poorly recorded warfare. Tell that to the people writing 'ancient' and 'biblical' rulesets 
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May 21, 2023 02:01
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Endman posted:Tell that to the people writing 'ancient' and 'biblical' rulesets
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May 21, 2023 02:04
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Endman posted:Tell that to the people writing 'ancient' and 'biblical' rulesets I won't defend biblical, but mediterranean ancients are vastly better understood than native American wars. More records and artifacts.
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May 21, 2023 02:09
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A lot of early North American / Central American indigenous warfare would make games of limited interest, assuming people are interested in battles conducted in a typical European style we see in historical films. While there are definite limits to what we know about the conflicts, we do know the style of conflicts often focused around raids or smaller scale involvements, typically of between 10-50 attackers, who mostly waited and ambushed people leaving their village and then absconding with goods and prisoners. There were, of course, documented sieges, especially between the Mohawk and Algonquin, but they were slightly different than how we would imagine them to be. Siege warfare and larger battles that were more than just simple raids became more common in the Northeast area after the formation of the Iroquois League, mainly due to economy of scale and the ability to field a larger army. Many sites were walled and fortified with watch towers, Cahokia being an example of that, but many other Missapian sites have evidence of that as well. For quite some time in the 10,000+ years of the pre-Columbian period numerous groups did not have vastly developed agriculture or an agrarian lifestyle, even those societies with large settlements. There would have been difficulty for a defender to attempt to outlast a siege without sallying out, and the mobile nature of a large part of societies changed the way in which war was conducted. There was also vastly more territory per person compared to Europe as well, Weapons themselves also changed the face of warfare and how it was practiced. Limited metalworking saw the prevalence of sharp rocks such as obsidian being used, made most famous by the Aztec Macuahuitl. The arms race between weapons and armor was relatively non-existent compared to the European nations. Bows and Atlatl weapons had different construction and range characteristics as to what we would see in most European games, while of good construction the typical range was smaller than what was achieved with larger European longbows. Oddly enough, the scale of unit sizes and weapon ranges of a 1000 point game of Warhammer 40k probably captures the essence of the primary sort of conflicts fairly well, aside from the theme, of course.
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May 21, 2023 02:42
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It may not be a satisfying answer, but this is the truth. The only kind of wargame you get for the vast majority of North American precolonial warfare is skirmish sized ambushes of civilians by identically armed and loosely organized forces. I can't readily think of a more boring kind of wargame than that.
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May 21, 2023 03:03
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I mean a limited raid of like 50 guys using broadly similar equipment is a good description of SAGA. It's even also historically dubious!
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May 21, 2023 03:07
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StashAugustine posted:I mean a limited raid of like 50 guys using broadly similar equipment is a good description of SAGA. It's even also historically dubious! Now I'm thinking about all the cool rear end battle boards SAGA could come up with if they expanded outside of European history.
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May 21, 2023 04:05
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Slyphic posted:It may not be a satisfying answer, but this is the truth. The only kind of wargame you get for the vast majority of North American precolonial warfare is skirmish sized ambushes of civilians by identically armed and loosely organized forces. I can't readily think of a more boring kind of wargame than that. Um...you're describing the typical Role Playing Game. A small party of 4-10 attackers attacking a fortified or small settlement, killing the inhabitants and looting everything. Granted, Role playing games have been annoying their wargaming relatives for decades now, so this is hardly new.
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May 21, 2023 05:03
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Both StashAugustine and Comstar are correct. That sounds like a great setting for interesting skirmish warfare.
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May 21, 2023 05:23
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StashAugustine posted:I mean a limited raid of like 50 guys using broadly similar equipment is a good description of SAGA. It's even also historically dubious!
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May 21, 2023 05:49
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moths posted:Most YouTubers are just looking to drive up engagement, so braindead takes like that are actually good - from a purely fiscal perspective. Nah we did the editorial about stallard’s wokes are destroying gaming because we wanted to make it clear where we stood on it. If it got 0 clicks, fine. The point was to establish our stance in the goonhammer historicals team and to outline our commitments to our own reviews and engagements. I want people to read it because it’s good and important, but I wrote it for me and for the team. What we do is inherently political. We play at war. The idea we can take politics out of it is laughable. moths posted:AFAIK there are exactly zero intra-indiginous American historical wargames*, though. Also we’re correcting this at goonhammer with the flower wars game. The warlord précolombien game is as dodgy as gently caress like you’d expect from warlord. lenoon fucked around with this message at 07:20 on May 21, 2023 |
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May 21, 2023 07:15
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At no point was I equivocating native americans with the loving holocaust. I provided a random list of combatants in various conflicts that you could justify (as this thread has proved) as not being paragons of impartial godly virtue and then IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWED THAT with "because <the whole moral grandstanding thing> is clearly nonsense." Do we think it's distasteful to model the Mongols? How about the Holocaust of the Celtic peoples? I'm pretty certain if you queried Ukrainians during the communist famine they would be slightly less keen on your red Army models. If you asked the opinion of a French person suffering under the English Chevauchée during the hundred years war they would be aghast of the idea of you depicting the rapists and murderers that destroyed their part of the country. The point very obviously was that Nazis don't have a monopoly on evil and NOBODY are the 'good guys' in war where the explicit method is extermination of human life. If you find that too much of a controversial opinion to deal with then you'll be happy to know, I'll be taking break from this thread for a while.
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May 21, 2023 07:19
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What you said was pretty easy to misinterpret, there's no point getting this mad online about people having a problem with it. If you want to storm out of the thread in a huff about it, that's your business, but there's no need to now that you've explained what you actually meant.
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May 21, 2023 08:36
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Slyphic posted:It may not be a satisfying answer, but this is the truth. The only kind of wargame you get for the vast majority of North American precolonial warfare is skirmish sized ambushes of civilians by identically armed and loosely organized forces. I can't readily think of a more boring kind of wargame than that. This pretty much describes viking period wargames, which is pretty popular.
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May 21, 2023 10:21
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Southern Heel posted:At no point was I equivocating native americans with the loving holocaust. I feel like you're trying to have your cake and eat it too here, to be quite honest. But I agree that this derail has become tiresome so I'll just drop it on my end.
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May 21, 2023 13:15
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Is Konflikt 47 discussed here? It's an alternate history game based on Bolt Action and apparently has fairly spotty resources in forums (as fast as I have found). Does anyone here play it?
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May 21, 2023 14:36
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Indolent Bastard posted:Is Konflikt 47 discussed here? It's an alternate history game based on Bolt Action and apparently has fairly spotty resources in forums (as fast as I have found). K47 is discussed about as often in this thread as in the thread it belongs in - https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3253037 which is to say it's been like 5 years since a real conversation about it, as opposed to an offhand reference.
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May 21, 2023 16:40
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Indolent Bastard posted:Is Konflikt 47 discussed here? It's an alternate history game based on Bolt Action and apparently has fairly spotty resources in forums (as fast as I have found).
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May 21, 2023 18:19
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I saw that Xenos Rampant has a weird war chapter, which might be a better system overall. I still want to model up a FFI French force that includes ghost knights, the spirit of tits-out lady Liberty, phantom revolutionaries, and a spectral guillotine.
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May 21, 2023 18:44
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I'm reading through Xenos Rampant right now and it's a surprisingly in-depth section. It isn't just "ww2 1946" the guy has a whole alternate timeline starting from 1914. It has suggested national trait rules for the big players including France and Japan. The WW1 forces are pretty normal but inter-war you start seeing occult poo poo like Freikorps Covens vs. Indiana Jones crews and Red Army forces with a literal Baba Yaga psyker. You could easily go either the hyper-tech route with walkers and exo-suit troopers or ramp the occult up with psykers, summoned undead and extra-dimensional demons. I will say the forces will probably be smaller than a game of Konflict '47, by default you're only allowed 1 AFV or Transport per army, but it's suggested to be played on a 4x4 space so it could be scaled up easily.
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May 21, 2023 20:40
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Speaking of viking wars, what's the goon rec for big scale early medieval/"dark age" stuff? My partner's gotten interested in my tiny mans and while we're painting WW1 at the moment, she's interested in doing some of the viking wars like Stanford Bridge, Ethandun, and Brentford since she saw how nice 6mm looks en-masse. I've heard Hail Caesar mentioned but, it's a warlord property, which always makes me hesitant.
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May 21, 2023 21:34
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The second edition of Lion Rampant has extra rules inside for playing the Dark Ages. The turn over system can be a bit of an acquired taste though. I personally like it a lot, but it can get frustrating with the wrong attitude.
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May 21, 2023 22:34
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Osprey's first blue book, Dux Bellorum. It's got a points system in it so you can just build bigger armies and scale up the C&C mechanism appropriately. Maybe build multiple armies a side and assume they're different chiefs or whatever. Uses DBA basing so you're pretty much golden to shuffle armies around for other systems too. Specifically aimed at covering Sub-Roman Britain to like 800AD. Also by Daniel Mersey but one of his earlier efforts so a bit less polished.
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May 22, 2023 02:52
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I'm a weak man and after just a little bit of watching videos about naval video games now have Osprey's Fighting Sail and Henry Turner's 1:2400 Napoleonic ships. Oh and Castles in the Sky and a couple fleets from Brigade on the way, but that's a different matter. Gonna print and paint a lotta teeny tiny boats.
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May 22, 2023 03:09
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Arquinsiel posted:A specific one of my friends wants to run demo games of it at a convention this year which given his track record means the game is dead by next March. I feel it doesn't have much gas in the tank, but I'm ok with dead systems. No meta to chase or expansions to buy. Plus tanks with Tesla lasers and werewolf troops sounds like more fun than big standard WW2 stuff to me. I'll give it a go 🤷
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May 22, 2023 04:08
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spectralent posted:Speaking of viking wars, what's the goon rec for big scale early medieval/"dark age" stuff? My partner's gotten interested in my tiny mans and while we're painting WW1 at the moment, she's interested in doing some of the viking wars like Stanford Bridge, Ethandun, and Brentford since she saw how nice 6mm looks en-masse. I've heard Hail Caesar mentioned but, it's a warlord property, which always makes me hesitant. Little Wars TV put out a ruleset called Ravenfeast that has scenarios for some of those exact scenarios. http://www.ravenfeast.com/
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May 22, 2023 05:35
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Indolent Bastard posted:I feel it doesn't have much gas in the tank, but I'm ok with dead systems. No meta to chase or expansions to buy. Plus tanks with Tesla lasers and werewolf troops sounds like more fun than big standard WW2 stuff to me.
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May 22, 2023 06:04
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IncredibleIgloo posted:Native Americans is a pretty large group of people; all the people of two continents for perhaps 12,000 thousand years or more, with a projected max population of over 50 million. There are numerous groups that saw different paths to survival, some of which involved cooperation, some of which involved complex gift giving rituals to create a wealth balanced society, and some that utilized warfare to achieve their ends. Is there a book that you could recommend on Native American warfare customs? This is interesting, but I'd love to have a source for it. Cannibal Smiley fucked around with this message at 15:22 on May 22, 2023 |
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May 22, 2023 15:15
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Cannibal Smiley posted:Is there a book that you could recommend on Native American warfare customs? This is interesting, but I'd love to have a source for it. I haven't read it and it focuses entirely on the Great Plains but I've heard good things about Anthony McGinnis' Counting Coup and Cutting Horses
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May 22, 2023 15:47
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lilljonas posted:The topic of which conflicts and/or armies are problematic or gives us the back stomach feel is a recurring topic. I admit to be highly illogical in my gut reaction: I feel ok with collecting WW2 armies and earlier while ’Nam and later typically makes me wanna pass. I have similar feelings, and can't explain why some wargame subjects are okay and some are personally unacceptable. There's no bright line there. If I looked at it logically ALL wars would be something I wouldn't want to use for entertainment - but here I am painting little French dude toys anyway. Count Thrashula posted:Anyway I know that civil war era steam frigates had masts as a backup to the steam-screw system, but did they run with sails and rigging and everything? Trying to decide how detailed I want to do my ships for Hampton Roads. They absolutely did have all of the sails and rigging:  That's USS Minnesota, the steam frigate that engaged CSS Virginia. moths posted:(*Warlord did a pre-Columbian fantasy game that I don't really know anything about. Looks cool though.) Oh God no. Run. Run away fast. I bought the rules when they came out. I'm very interested in pre-Columbian peoples and wanted a wargame about them. This was "Bullshit Ethnic Stereotypes: the Game." I ended up throwing away the rulebook, and I don't do that sort of thing. Do NOT buy this one. Slyphic posted:It may not be a satisfying answer, but this is the truth. The only kind of wargame you get for the vast majority of North American precolonial warfare is skirmish sized ambushes of civilians by identically armed and loosely organized forces. I can't readily think of a more boring kind of wargame than that. Well, no, unless you're going with the "All warfare is attrition warfare at the fireteam level" methodology, which is legit. Pre-Columbian warfare was broadly similar to contemporary European warfare. A lot of what a wargamer would call "skirmishes," yes, but also some big movements of armies, big battles, etc. People are people, a lot of their systems are pretty similar. Slyphic posted:I won't defend biblical, but mediterranean ancients are vastly better understood than native American wars. More records and artifacts. "Vastly?" There's still a lot of debate on exactly how "Ancients" armies actually fought. Look at the "Hoplite Heresy" academic flame-wars for example. Just say the word "othismos" to a Classical military historian and you'll get an argument. In very, very tl;dr terms there's a LOT we don't know, and all - yes, ALL - "Ancients" wargames are pasted together out of author's suppositions on how things went, based on a LOT of suppositions and assumptions. I'd even go so far as to say that "Ancients" wargames anachronistically use mental models more suited for modern (academic "modern," i.e., 17th c or later) warfare and project them back onto "Ancients" inappropriately. And - well, we DO have a lot of decent info on pre-Columbian warfare, especially the Mexica ("Aztecs") and Maya. The problem is historiography; European stuff is more familiar and taken more seriously by military historians due to tradition, which is a drat shame. I did my Minor at college on this stuff, I'm more than happy to recommend books if you like. I'd LOVE to play a wargame covering how the Mexica fought and lenoon posted:Also we’re correcting this at goonhammer with the flower wars game. Oh gently caress yes. Need a playtester? lenoon posted:The warlord précolombien game is as dodgy as gently caress like you’d expect from warlord. I don't think I've ever been so disappointed with a game.
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May 22, 2023 16:24
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Cessna posted:Well, no, unless you're going with the "All warfare is attrition warfare at the fireteam level" methodology, which is legit. Cessna posted:some big movements of armies, big battles, etc. Slyphic fucked around with this message at 17:19 on May 22, 2023 |
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May 22, 2023 17:17
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Slyphic posted:I spoke sloppily. I said Native Americans but meant North American Natives. Central and South American civilizations, yes, there's as much historical record there to learn from as for the Mediterranean ancients. Which is to say, it's as much fiction as history, imposing narratives on limited information. Cool, yes, agreed. Edit: Slyphic posted:And I don't believe we have many examples of large scale warfare in the US/Canada part of the continent, but I welcome correction and would love a good book recommendation. If you ever find such a thing, let me know, please. Cessna fucked around with this message at 17:39 on May 22, 2023 |
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May 22, 2023 17:20
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Actually I know this is doubling down on scant historical evidence but what models would be appropriate for Skraelings?
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May 22, 2023 17:24
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StashAugustine posted:Actually I know this is doubling down on scant historical evidence but what models would be appropriate for Skraelings? tl;dr, we don't know for sure what they wore. At the absolute best we're taking post-Columbian contact people - who are themselves relatively sparsely documented for a long time - and back-dating them by several hundred years. You could probably go with something like this:     But even that is very, very, VERY speculative. At a bare minimum it's hundreds of years off. (It's Pulp Figures, link here.) Edit: Again, and I cannot emphasize this enough, this is pure guesswork. But it doesn't look egregiously wrong, like the sadly all too common "Apache? Comanche? Close enough!" approach. Cessna fucked around with this message at 17:45 on May 22, 2023 |
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May 22, 2023 17:35
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Cannibal Smiley posted:Is there a book that you could recommend on Native American warfare customs? This is interesting, but I'd love to have a source for it. Most of the resources I utilized for this topic were specific research papers, so somewhat boring if you are not into anthropology or archaeology. Here is a link I pulled that is somewhat interesting. The bibliography on that paper has a lot of sources that are worth looking at. https://www.academia.edu/6138169/Bioarchaeological_Investigation_of_Ancient_Maya_Violence_and_Warfare_in_Inland_Northwest_Yucatan_Mexico
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May 22, 2023 20:14
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To continue this thread, I’m almost mulling the idea to make some Pacific Northwest warriors because those tribes had amazing drip (carved wooden armour) and they are painfully underserved by the hobby. I think Wargames Illustrated did a special on them? I dare you to google Tlingit Warrior and not want to build a small warband lilljonas fucked around with this message at 20:49 on May 22, 2023 |
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May 22, 2023 20:46
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