This is part 3 of "The State of the Peasantry", in which I take a more
detailed look at Peasant usage where it actually matters.
The South Guard:
In "Born To The Banner", all Deoran can recruit is Peasants until he
reaches the river fort (typically second turn). Even after he reaches
the river and can recruit Spearmen and Bowmen, he's only got 90GP to
start so recruiting a peasant swarm is not necessarily a crazy
strategy.
Deoran's Peasants must fight chaotics of L1 and up. This means that the
way combat odds differ over the day-night cycle is going to be dominated
by the *enemy's* swing in expected damage dealt per round, not the
Peasant's. (Credit to Zookeeper for pointing this out.)
Take a typical case, Peasant vs. Thug in melee. Peasant oscillates
between 6-2 and 4-2 (6 vs. 4 expected damage). Thug oscillates
between 6-4 and 4-4 (24 vs. 16 expected). There's a factor of 4
difference in the day-night swing of expected damage.
Essentially, when the Peasant is fighting even a L1 chaotic, his
day-night bonus is swamped. (And the swamping only gets more thorough
for L2 and L3 creatures.) Changing the Peasant's alignment to neutral
or even chaotic would probably have no discernable effect on the
scenario balance even if the Peasants were doing most of the fighting.
But while fighting this scenario with a peasant swarm might be possible, it's
not the way any real player is likely to do it. Instead, one recruits
a handful of Peasants to run around grabbing villages while a couple
of armored fighters take out bad guys. When you get more villages you
build troops, not more Peasants.
This means that even the Peasant's combat stats don't matter much in
this scenario, and couldn't short of a power-up by a factor of about
two (Peasant's 5 expected damage on a hit vs. Spearman's 11.5).
My experience playing the scenario accords with this analysis.
There's been some suggestion (notably from Eleazar) that a neutral or
chaotic L0 with chaotic advances would make too many units available
to Deoran. But, in fact, Deoran later gets the ability to recruit all
the plausible advances for a chaotic Peasant. So, in this campaign at
least, we can't screw it up much by having those in its advancement path.
I conclude that both (a) none of the different L0 proposals floating around
will do anything significant to the balance of this scenario, and (b) any
other non-ridiculous L0 design we came up with would be safe too.
Scepter of Fire:
In the "Outriding the Outriders" (#7) scenario, the player must outrun
and outmaneuver Elvish pursuers. If I read the WML correctly (I
haven't played this), the player has no units other than himself. To
delay the Elves, he can activate a friendly AI-run team that recruits
Peasants and Spearmen.
The result is a 12-turn game of tag with the Elves as chasers, the
player's hero Alanin as "it", and some friendly but AI-controlled
Peasant and Spearman blockers.
Because the Elves are neutrals, the alignment of the Peasants might
actually matter some in this scenario, at least in theory. But with
only twelve turns and a fixed order of battle, the basic function of
the Peasants is just to get in the way for a short time while Alanin
skedaddles. Their survivability for longer than a turn of contact
shouldn't be an issue.
Again, we'd have to change the Peasant a *lot* before this scenario
would be at all sensitive to it. Even supposing we did, retuning
would be a simple matter of adjusting the number of prepositioned
friendly units.
And the advancement tree of the Peasant (or any other L0 plugged into his
places) wouldn't make a damn bit of difference, because you don't get to
recall the AI-run Peasants.
Northern Rebirth:
The first scenario of NR, of course, is the archetypal swarm'o'peasants fight.
It's the prospective mainlining of NR that led to Zookeeper (and some others)
to griping that the player should have a more interesting unit mix, which
led to the whole L0 debate.
I've played this one several times in the process of helping Taurus polish NR.
I've also discussed its tactical logic (and possible variations on it)
with him in considerable detail. (I find I can visualize the map in
a perhaps disturbing amount of detail.)
On the one hand, the Peasant's alignment doesn't matter here, either. Same
logic as TSG applies, but more strongly -- the Orcs have a higher average
damage than human chaotics, so the spread between their contribution to the
day/night swing and the Peasant's is even larger.
On the other hand, this scenario is uniquely sensitive to the
Peasant's combat stats and HP, for the obvious reason that Peasants
are doing all the fighting. If five or six peasants can swarm a lone
wolfrider, they'll need on average about two turns to take him out.
He will only kill one of them in a bit less than three turns on average.
And the Peasants do travel in mobs if the player has any clue at all
-- which means that the Peasants wouldn't have to get much more
powerful to throw the balance out of whack.
(Balance would also quite sensitive to relative movement speeds; the
outnumbered Orcs rely on speed to achieve local superiority against
the mob. But nobody is proposing to change those.)
The Peasant advancement tree isn't a serious issue here, either. The player
gets the ability to recruit Thugs and Poachers in the next scenario and
never loses it. And while it's possible to level up a few Spearmen,
conditions in the next couple of scenarios aren't good for them. The
smart way to build an army that will win this one is to build lots
of Dwarves as early as you can and level *them* up instead.
NR puts the only real constraint on the design of the L0s that can be in
it. They cannot vary much in the figure HP * expected damage per turn
(18 * 5 = 90 for melee). I'd say there's only about a 25% margin;
4-3 melee stats, yielding 18 * 6 = 108, would be OK, but 5-3 yielding
18 * 7.5 = 135 would be well over.
So, after having ground through 106 campaigns, we find we have a
rather free hand with the Peasant and other L0s, as long as we keep
them NR-compatible by not changing their combat power too much.
On the other hand --
There is one huge fact about the Peasant that I've been talking about
which may constrain a redesign for reasons other than tactical balance,
That is this: the Peasant's main use (in 35 of the 40 campaigns that use
them) is as extras. Mobile scenery. Even, comic relief. (Once again
I owe Zookeeper for pointing this out.)
For most of the Peasant's existing uses to not get screwed up, he should
continue to be a fairly silly figure, an Angry Farmer for the outskirts
of future Clearwater Ports. In that respect, these three campaigns --
with their serious Peasants -- are the outliers.
That brings me to the end of the State of the Peasantry report.
I will follow up with a 4th revised L0 proposal (or possibly a small
selection of proposals) based on what I have learned while compiling
this.
--
<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>
Whether the authorities be invaders or merely local tyrants, the
effect of such [gun control] laws is to place the individual at the
mercy of the state, unable to resist.
-- Robert Anson Heinlein, 1949
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