VIKTORY II Expansion Rule - Pillage Attack
In addition to the two existing methods of attack (bombard & battle), a pillage attack allows players another attacking option. A pillage attack allows a unit to pillage a hex adjacent to a town/city, and is reflected by placing a damage marker on the hex.
Pillaged Hexes suffer two effects:
- units cannot utilize any notional roads
- adjacent towns/cities may not receive reinforcements during the Reserve Placement Phase (capital excepted)
A unit may still only participate one type of attack per turn: either one Bombard Attack, one Battle Attack, or one Pillage Attack.
A player can still upgrade a town to a city if there is an adjacent pillaged hex. This is consistent because a pillaged hex functions like an enemy unit in an adjacent hex. A player can still build a town with an enemy unit adjacent; a player can upgrade to a city with an enemy unit adjacent. So a player is similarly able to upgrade to a city with a pillaged hex adjacent.
To repair a pillaged hex a player must end a unit’s movement there; the unit may have just fought a battle in that hex.
Frigates can pillage in a single adjacent non-enemy-occupied land hex. Frigates can also repair pillaging in a single adjacent non-enemy-occupied land hex.
A player may move one unit into a pillaged hex, repair the hex which ends that unit’s movement, and then immediately use the notional roads with other units.
A player may not pillage hexes that are NOT adjacent to a town/city. Pillage attacks must be adjacent to towns/cities; however, players may pillage around their own towns/cities.
If a unit wins a regular attack, it may not pillage in that hex, because it’s already conducted it’s one allowed attack.
Posted: December 13th, 2006 under Expansion Rules.
Comments: 14
Comments
Comment from Peter
Time: December 15, 2006, 10:00 am
Background behind Pillage Attack rules:
In VIKTORY II, almost all of the action takes place in town/city hexes. Few battles occur out in the open in an undeveloped hex, due to the close distances between towns/cities and good mobility of units.
I wanted to provide an incentive to having units located outside of towns/cities, encamped out in the countryside. The pillage attack helped offer that incentive. Now if you move units into the open terrain adjacent to enemy towns/cities, they would be able to cause damage by pillaging that hex if you wanted them to.
The original effect I envisioned pillaging to have was to destroy roads.
Early in playtesting, I wanted to add little road segments to the game. The notional roads in VIKTORY II work well (where roads are said to exist between all friendly towns/cities that are 2/3 hexes apart), but I wanted to experiment with another option - actually laying out little wooden or cardboard road markers.
I thought laying down roads would be a great idea, and a big part of what I wanted the Pillage Attacks to be able to do was to REMOVE road segments. I thought that made sense. Player A lays down a road segment, Player B comes along, pillages the road segment and destroys it (ie removing it).
However, like many ideas, this road segment idea fell completely flat during playtesting. It wasn’t worth the rule baggage. It took too long to do and was just too complicated.
The decision I came to though was:
Instead of having players over the course of the game lay down 50+ road segments, just to allow enemy units the opportunity to destroy perhaps 5 or 10 of them in the course of the game, I could use the notional road concept (where roads are just assumed to exist between friendly towns/cities), and then have enemy players lay down 5 or 10 pillage markers over the course of the game to show where the notional roads don’t exist anymore.
So what I did with the Pillage Attack markers is basically take a “negative” or invert the road segment rule. Instead of units destroying real, tangible road segments and taking them UP or off the map- units would destroy notional, nontangible road segments and lay DOWN a pillage marker.
In the playtesting I’ve been able to do so far, the Pillage Attack marker method has worked pretty well. I was able to achieve the result I wanted (allowing players to destroy roads), but without adding a cumbersome rule to the process.
The idea to have towns/cities be unable to reinforce if there is an adjacent pillaged hex was in order to pack even more punch into the Pillage Attack rules, and make them more substantial. It’s nice when you get a rule to work, and then that opens the door for adding other beneficial features.
This has added an entire additional layer of potential strategy to the game, as by cutting off roads and denying reinforcement, you can have a huge impact on targeted areas of the map.
Comment from Tim Fiscus
Time: December 17, 2006, 4:45 pm
Peter-
Great idea here! The one concern I would have, from a marketing standpoint, is that people could easily use stones or pennies or whatever to mark Pillaged locations. This makes a purchase of “official” pillage markers less likely. Is there more in the works for the expansion?
The game has really taken off with my family and friends. Love it!
Tim aka HuckmanT @ BGG
Comment from Darker
Time: December 17, 2006, 9:25 pm
Hmm, interesting!
Some questions: What’s the range of a Pillage attack? (Is it like a Battle Attack in that it can only be done where an army is, but then continues to affect the area when they leave - or is it done at range of some sort? The former seems to make more sense.)
Is there any roll for success? Or is success automatic?
Why only permit Pillaging adjacent to towns/cities?
For settlements next to pillaged hexes, have you considered “loses ability to support 1 Infantry” rather than “prevents reinforcement”?
Regarding motivation: Thus far, while our games have certainly centered around the settlement hexes, I don’t feel like we’ve lacked for armies in the open - they most often start as small forces for blocking enemy movement or enabling movement through slow terrain, but an opponent wanting to take one of those small forces out will generally have to escalate if they (a) want to be sure of victory in the battle, and (b) don’t want the hex to simply be re-taken on the subsequent turn. There’s also times people use out-of-settlement forces to prefent reinforcement or threaten multiple places.
Overall impression: Neat idea, though the “prevents reinforcement at that location” effect feels kind of forced, even as an abstraction.
Comment from Peter
Time: December 17, 2006, 9:37 pm
There is definitely more than just the Pillage Attacks in the works, as it would be easy to use pennies (or in the case of my own playtesting - scraps of paper) for the pillage markers. I hope to update this blog every few days with something new concerning the proposed expansion.
Pillage Attacks aren’t conducted at range. Your unit must be in the hex and the effects remain after your unit leaves, and until someone repairs the damage by ending a unit’s movement on the hex.
Success is automatic with a Pillage Attack. A unit must be in a hex adjacent to an enemy town/city, and obviously there can’t be any enemy units present, though if there had been a regular Battle Attack would have settled the question of hex ownership.
It’s only permitted adjacent to enemy towns/cities, principally because that is where the effects would take place. All hexes with notional roads running through them are adjacent to a town/hex and to effect reinforcement, you would need the pillaged hex to be next to the effected town/city.
Comment from Jim McCourt in DC
Time: December 17, 2006, 9:56 pm
The pillage rule does not really do a lot for me. I am not saying that it isn’t a good rule, just that it doesn’t add a lot of spice. I will guess the pillage rule will do for your game what it did historically–make war even less fun than it was before. I suppose if playtesting showed it quickened the game and made it even more decisive, then I would concede its value. That said, I like the idea of “expansion” rules.
Comment from Phillip Heaton
Time: December 18, 2006, 2:07 am
I’m kinda neutral on this one. It seems like a good idea, but the losing all reinforcements from the town/city seems a bit much.
The other problem would seem to be how to enforce it. “No, I’m not building a replacement infantry unit from the pillaged town; I’m building a replacement infantry unit from a different town.”
Phil
Comment from Peter
Time: December 18, 2006, 8:45 am
Enforcement should be easy. It’s just like the enforcing of the original rule that prevented reinforcement if there was an adjacent enemy unit. During the Reserve Placement Phase, the supported infantry aren’t tied to a specific town. Any infantry can be reinforced into any town.
So for purposes of towns/cities adjacent to a pillaged hex, the owner of the town/city can’t add ANY units during the Reserve Placement Phase to that particular town/city.
Comment from Tom
Time: December 19, 2006, 2:09 pm
I don’t think it would be unreasonable to allow pillaging in any hex, period. Only effects that were applicable would apply. If someone wants to pillage something with no notional roads, they would be free to.
Comment from Peter
Time: December 19, 2006, 4:15 pm
My concept of pillaging is one of destroying an enemy’s resources. So, I don’t see it as being accurate to allowing pillaging to take place in hexes out in the middle of nowhere.
To some extent - how can the roads/bridges/ferries, stores of supplies, crops, outlying farmhouses, etc get destroyed or pillaged if you’ve got a hex that is out in the middle of an unsettled area of the map?
Comment from George O’Ravis
Time: December 19, 2006, 9:01 pm
Shouldn’t a pillage attack also gain the attacker some additional benefit. After all, not only do they rape the land, but they run off with much “Booty”. This might add an additional element to encourage an attacker to use this option.
Comment from Peter
Time: December 19, 2006, 9:19 pm
The prospect of a positive benefit to the attacker, as opposed to just a negative hindrance to the defender, is an interesting proposition.
The difficulty is that there isn’t all that much to the currency of VIKTORY II, as the economy has been so streamlined and tied to the military units.
If there were resource chip accumulation, or production values being accrued, that would be one matter, but it would be difficult to do in VIKTORY II, because all you principally have to work with are:
1. units, you can have more or less
2. strategic/tactical positioning advantage
What I’m going for with the current pillaging effects is #2.
Opponents are at a positioning disadvantage if they can’t reinforce and they can’t use their roads to resupply besieged and embattled towns/cities.
Comment from Napoleon Blownaparte
Time: December 30, 2006, 1:47 pm
One of the things I really like about Viktory is how streamlined it is. I would probably shy away from adding rules that increase bookkeeping or create additional layers of exceptions. These rules don’t add a LOT of complexity/bookkeeping, but I’m not convinced that they would add enough to the game to make them worthwhile. The attack rules as they are are so nice and straightforward, it just seems like a shame to muddy them at all.
Comment from Peter
Time: February 10, 2007, 10:41 am
As a followup to:
“To repair a pillaged hex a player must end a unit’s movement there; the unit may have just fought a battle in that hex.”
it should be added that:
“A player may wait until the end of his turn to decide to repair the pillaged hex.”
Comment from Arcadious
Time: March 20, 2007, 7:05 pm
Quote:
“Shouldn’t a pillage attack also gain the attacker some additional benefit. After all, not only do they rape the land, but they run off with much “Booty”. This might add an additional element to encourage an attacker to use this option.”
I have an idea on how to impliment that. Every player has pillage markers in their color. If an enemy town or city has 2 of your pillage markers next to it, your capital supports an infintry. If a city (not town) has 3 of your pillage markers next to it, your capital supports the secondary unit (cavalry, altilerary, or frigate) instead of the infintry based on the ajacent city’s terrain type (not the pillaged hex). If the city’s hex is plains, then your capital supports 2 infintry instead of 1.
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