“You see me now a veteran of a thousand psychic wars. My energy's spent at last, and my armor is destroyed. I have used up all my weapons and I'm helpless and bereaved. Wounds are all I'm made of; did I hear you say that this is victory?” (Blue Oyster Cult, 1981) -Interesting discussion, gents…keep up the discourse!

A lot of games use target priority selection. Both in shooting and charging. Frequently rules will require a model to charge or fire at the nearest visible enemy. With exceptions for prioritizing enemies in the open over enemies that are in cover. Which opens up the possibility of strategies where you screen a powerful foe using smaller, and weaker figures, who have to be picked off before you can target the big bad.

Another oddity is "National characteristics". These appear heavily in Napoleonic rules - I believe it's to introduce variety. Otherwise every army would be similar chunks of foot, horse and guns. So we see a lot of: French - bonuses to movement and melee when they attack in column. Russians - very resistant to enemy shooting, unlikely to break until charged (Probably by French columns). British - infantry shoot well in line (Particularly against French in column), the cavalry are hot heads who'll dash after retreating enemy. Prussians - There are 2 sorts of Prussian: Until 1906 they're rubbish, after 1812 they're the original professionally staffed combined arms army. Austrians - The last vestige of a crumbling empire, a practice army for new French commanders, but there are loads of them, so they keep coming back for another battle. Now to be fair, most armies (British excluded) made a massive transition of doctrine during the Napoleonic wars. Historians describe linear tactics changing to shock tactics enabled by new Army Corps organisations. More modern wargames often abandon the "national" and reflect whether the army has a linear or corps based command system.

A lot of games use target priority selection. Both in shooting and charging. Frequently rules will require a model to charge or fire at the nearest visible enemy. With exceptions for prioritizing enemies in the open over enemies that are in cover. Which opens up the possibility of strategies where you screen a powerful foe using smaller, and weaker figures, who have to be picked off before you can target the big bad. The song of blades and heroes line comes to mind.

Really good section about 17 minutes where Glenn summarises how miniature wargames have handled (I'll say it) Morale. I don't think Morale has disappeared, but more efficient rules have found ways to roll it into the orders or combat outcome (input and output) stages of the game. Changing the subject toward good game design. Having effects or conditions is an interesting way past the "unbeatable behemoth" syndrome. Units that can't lose because they create so much damage, or have such incredible armour. I find one or two conditions works well, many more and you complicate the rules, and introduce a meta-game akin to rock / paper / scissors. Terror weapons certainly exist in real life. Elephants were popular in ancient times despite huge maintenance cost and being difficult to manage in battle. Elephants big superpower was that they terrified unaccustomed horses. That's really useful where your enemy has superior cavalry which make your troops nervous. Much later, the British fitted a very effective flamethrower to their Churchill tank during the second world war. They could pretty much guarantee the Germans in a bunker would surrender if one of these clattered forward and performed a couple of theatric near misses. (Even death's head fanatics don't relish being burned alive in a little concrete box). Prior to the flame tank, enemy bunkers meant wave after wave of expensive infantry attacks, or rolling up all your heavy artillery and blasting the strongpoint for a week or more. A real game-changer which saved many lives.

Another bit of well proven psychology has spring to mind, and it's pretty universal. Trained soldiers who lack ranged weapons are generally able to close with the enemy and engage in a close combat "dance of death". Provide the same men with a shooting ability (even a really ineffective one), and it's very difficult to get them to close with the enemy. There's something in the human psyche that hates close combat (a few confident or well trained elites aside), but is quite happy to stand in a line getting shot to pieces, provided they have a weapon to shoot back with.

The closest thing i have seen to the target priority you guys talked about is in Star Wars Legion the CIS Droids have AI where if they dont have an order to do something they will be forced to do an action depending on the unit (B1 Battle Droids have to attack a enemy unit if possible before they can do any other action)

Loving this series, btw, not that much has changed in the last year. As an additional thought for 'refusal' systems and morale in general, some games (Bolt Action being the big one that springs to mind) use them as a way to have shooting effect a unit even when it doesn't kill them. Having an easy to track way of non-lethally degrading a unit is a design space I don't see get used that much.

Seems to me people are backing off the psychology because they feel there is a desire for more predictable, calculable play with fewer madcap shenanigans. I personally love the unpredictability of psychology rules and feel it adds to the realism. As you mentioned, it is entirely possible that a unit may not want to do what you want it to do because in reality that happens.

Interesting to listen to as for half of the video I kept thinking "I can't believe they haven't even mentioned X". I think you guys clearly have come up through Warhammer and its shaped a lot of your thinking about things, even down to the choice of the word psychology itself. Interestingly I think you both made it through the video without either of you once uttering the word *morale* which is usually a chapter heading in a lot of rules. I think where psychology or morale rules are most important is in mass battle rules where you have to model the behaviour of a big units and especially the fact that they might all be still alive but also quite frightened. Obviously where this has been done the most is in historicals, and I know Glenn you touched on historicals a lot during the video, and quite rightly said that you really have to have rules for breaking and so on to have any chance of a historicals game feeling historical. To my mind the three categories of psychology that are most important (in a non-fantasy) mass battle context are breaking, pursuit and refusal. Breaking you talked about. I don't think you touched on pursuit at all but its extremely important in historical battles. Waterloo has a famous example of the British cavalry charging, pursuing out of control, and then getting counter attacked and destroyed by the French. In the English Civil War the Royalists won all their cavalry battles but then pursued their defeated enemies and didn't come back. Finally, refusal depends a bit on the type of warfare you're trying to model. Some historical periods really need it and some you can get away with out it (when armies are more professional). Flames of War has a refusal test specifically for infantry to assault tanks in close combat. Sometimes refusal isn't actually the men digging in their heels, but maybe their officers instead deciding that they don't like the order or they'll maybe follow it but only very slowly and cautiously. Despite historicals sometimes being considered a bit old-school, I don't remember the last time I had to keep moving broken units around on the table turn to turn In most rules I can think of you'd remove it a broken unit immediately but probably take some other break tests around it, maybe to everyone a certain distance behind the unit that broke or whatever.