Poll on how Defender Retreat should work

Cernel

@beelee said:
Defender either stays and fights or retreats. If retreating, they undergo 1 rd of combat that they cannot fire back at.

I did understand that @iratoric does not want this rule, but I'm not sure. Nevertheless, I would much suggest having a property to define whether or not retreating units must be subjected to a round of fire (with no fire-back) before they can retreat.

I also suggest retreating happening before everything (beside air battles), meaning that retreat also happens before any AA can fire.

Personally, instead of having a retreat round, I guess we should better have 3 settings for game-makers:

Retreat is possible before each combat round (and also before AA fire), meaning that you can defensively retreat without even engaging in battle.
Retreat is possible in the middle of each combat round, between offensive and defensive attacks, meaning that, if you defensively retreat, you will be subjected to offensive fire without being able to fire back (but both the AA fire as well as any first strike will fire both ways). However, you have to decide to retreat before the combat round. (In this case, a unit with first strike would be able to fire before retreating as that happens before offensive fire.)
Retreat is possible at the very end of each combat round, immediately after the offender is possibly offered the option to retreat (and refuses to do so or cannot retreat). In this case, you decide this at the moment.

I understand that point 2 is how it works in North Africa. Can anyone confirm this? @panther? (I've never read the rules.)

@iratoric Can you please clarify which one of the 3 points above you primarily want (or letting us know exactly otherwise)?

Personally, I don't like the point 2, and I think it is messy. It is up to @iratoric if he/she wants to support such North Africa rules as part of its proposed feature or not. I'm not advising it, but I do believe that (like @beelee) persons will expect defensive retreat to work at least possibly like in North Africa (not doing so having the likelihood of being seen like a problem no matter if this feature was never done for supporting such rule-set).

If not supporting point 2, I strongly suggest trying to make as clear as possible that this is the case, to avoid misunderstandings (persons assuming this is the North Africa's retreat rule).

I think the best way of doing this is generally giving game-makers the ability to customise the battle round more or less in the same way they can currently customise the phase order within the round. In doing so, if supporting North Africa, it would be needed to have 2 defensive retreat combat phases, one in which you decide whether defensively to retreat or not and the other one in which the retreat happens (if still possible). (Obviously, the former must always be before the latter.) (This would be somewhat similar to having two phases for tech development and tech activation of what you developed.)

beelee

Thinking on this some more and to add what I previously posted,

Defender retreats.

Next turn, Defender attacks and retreats after 1 rd. They can only retreat from a TTy where they started, assuming no units from other TTys attacked, they would have to retreat/remain where they started.

Original Attacker still has units in the TTy.

Their next turn they can either attack with some or all of their units, including units from other TTys, as per current rules.

Remain in place, no combat takes place and they retain control of the TTy. Can be reinforced in NCM, even if all units at turn start have moved out.

Can move some or all of units out of the TTy and either attack or NCM. They would still retain control of the TTy even with no units present.

The retreated units would have to attack the empty TTy on their turn to take control of it. Blitzing allowed.

I may have misunderstood what @iratoric was originally proposing. I thought it was basically to work like submerging Subs.

At any rate, Good Luck with whatever you decide

iratoric

Thanks everyone for your opinions. I have thought about this a lot, and it is probably best if we start with implementing one set of rules and branch out from there. Otherwise there are simply too many possible combinations to do all at once. Since the North Africa game is the “official” ruleset and an already existing game that needs this rule, I think that whatever I implement should support that first. I will code it in such a way that it still leaves room for more variations later. Thoughts?

Cernel

@iratoric said:

Thanks everyone for your opinions. I have thought about this a lot, and it is probably best if we start with implementing one set of rules and branch out from there. Otherwise there are simply too many possible combinations to do all at once. Since the North Africa game is the “official” ruleset and an already existing game that needs this rule, I think that whatever I implement should support that first. I will code it in such a way that it still leaves room for more variations later. Thoughts?

I instead think that the baseline should be some version of what you/we can devise as the simplest retreat system, have that done and tested, then adding properties and/or options for each element adding complexity.

For example, in the basic system you retreat to the same zone. Next step, with property, is retreating to an other zone. Next step, with property, is limiting retreat only to zones not under attack by land units. And so on.

LaFayette

@iratoric which North Africa game? AFAIK some of the variations are mutually exclusive. I think the first task it is to identify which variations should be plausibly supported. Once done, I would like a full spec identified. Following, we can then look at the plan for how that would be encoded into XML. Doing so iteratively and not all-at-once is perfectly fine. Though, I think we should know beforehand which retreat variations we are likely to want (and also in which maps).

iratoric

@LaFayette This game: https://forums.triplea-game.org/topic/4074/north-africa-triplea-module

Here is the rulebook I've been looking at, Pg. 20
https://renegadegamestudios.com/content/File Storage for site/Rulebooks/Axis Allies/A&A_NorthAfrica_Rulebook_v8_WEB_090324.pdf?srsltid=AfmBOopVwvgEyZeJnjYp_ruRU2jn9aTpuvxW6KJfxVfl6WqGoXWC8mog

iratoric

This is my interpretation of the rules & what I coded:

At the very start of the round, if any unit has the attachment canDefensiveRetreat = true, the defender gets a prompt if they want to retreat, and to which territory. They may only retreat to friendly/neutral territories, not an enemy territory, and they can't retreat to a territory with enemy units in it, unless only enemy air is present, which is non-blocking.

If the defender chooses not to retreat, then the battle proceeds as normal. If the defender chooses a territory to retreat to, then that territory is saved and stored for later. The attackers fire at all of the defending units. Any units that are doing a defensive retreat do not fire back. Casualties are removed, and then any retreating units retreat to the destination we stored earlier. Any defender units not capable of retreating remain and must fight to the end/get captured/get removed, whatever happens normally

EDIT: I was originally going to have a property that applies to all land units, but it turns out that in A&A North Africa not all land units can defensive retreat (the truck and the supply token can't) so it pretty much needs to be a unit attachment. This offers some variation as the mapmaker can select what units they want to be able to do a defender retreat

VictoryFirst

Defensive retreat should probably be a unitAttachment as @iratoric is deducing as some units can retreat while defending while others cannot in various games that have this feature.

One important thing to note that supply and trucks are defined as infrastructure in the North Africa module. If this cannot be coded using the unitAttachment as a basis, it might be possible to allow all non-infrastructure units to defensively retreat, as a last resort.

Retreat-to-same-zone would be useful for v2 games where there is defending submarines can retreat from combat instead of rolling (e.g. Europe 1999). It might be best to work first on this as it's probably easier. This would probably require extending the logic of submerging/retreating of attacking submarines, and make sure the decision occurs before the defending submarine rolls, and then use a boolean to skip the defending submarine's roll (just thinking out loud, haven't looked at the code yet)

VictoryFirst

Have read quickly through this thread, noticed something about "units should not be able to use retreat to move more quickly". I am not sure what's exactly meant by this, but if we look at G40 where Germany can attack Yugoslavia using units in Romania and Greater Southern Germany, and retreats after one round of combat to Romania, the infantry in GSG also retreat to Romania and have technically moved two spaces. This should not be disallowed but is a feature of the rules. So the defensive retreat should also allow this (again, not sure if I understood this correctly).

VictoryFirst

@lafayette Actually, I think NA and Europe are the only variations that are waiting for defensive retreat, and Stalingrad probably too once a module for that comes along (i'm talking about the A&A game, not the apparently already existing module called Stalingrad that has nothing to do with the A&A game).

Maybe Zombies or East&West?

RogerCooper

@VictoryFirst East & West has the ability for tanks to withdraw from a captured are in non-combat but no retreat. Axis & Allies & Zombies has no defender retreat (except for subs)

Cernel

@VictoryFirst said:

Have read quickly through this thread, noticed something about "units should not be able to use retreat to move more quickly". I am not sure what's exactly meant by this, but if we look at G40 where Germany can attack Yugoslavia using units in Romania and Greater Southern Germany, and retreats after one round of combat to Romania, the infantry in GSG also retreat to Romania and have technically moved two spaces. This should not be disallowed but is a feature of the rules. So the defensive retreat should also allow this (again, not sure if I understood this correctly).

I pointed that out firstly. Obviously, that (as well as indeed moving faster via retreat, which could be addressed with a better retreat system or with units having greater non-combat movement) makes no sense and is silly.

You might have missed that this whole thing started (by @iratoric) as an advanced rule for TripleA games in general (not as a port of any particular existing game).

Eventually, @iratoric changed his (assuming gender) mind, and now instead he is going for supporting North Africa, thereby of course implementing existing rules. At this point, of course, it does not matter how good or bad such rules are, so you are indeed right that it is nonsense to discuss whether or not rules make sense.

I think it's unfortunate that North Africa or any such games with a retreat system exist. If they did not, this could have been a very interesting community effort to have some very good retreat rules rather than implementing and supporting this or that more or less flawed retreat system of this or that game.

However, I still hope that properties or somesuch may be made to have alternative versions of such rules rather than hardcoding it all mandatorily working as per North Africa rules or whatever. The more the system is customizabile by map-makers and game-makers, the better.