Action Economy is a phrase that we hear a lot as gamers, but one that is less often defined. If pressed to explain how we should evaluate action economy, most players would probably say: “We spend Points, to gain Actions“ By that logic, upgrading from Trained to Veteran should give us more actions.
Last week, I demonstrated the flaw in that logic. Both TrainedandVeteran units receive the same maximum of 18 actions, and if you’re sticking to [♥♣]/[♠♦] like we agreed, then both units receive the same average number of Actions, too.
What we need is a way to compare the value of those actions. Before we can do that, we need to translate raw, nebulous “actions” into something quantifiable – like damage! So it’s a good thing that I wrote this article to show you how to do that.
Action Mapping
If you’ve ever woken up to 50+ new replies on Firelock’s Discord channel and opened them to find some weird debate about how many times you can fire artillery in a game… First, I’m sorry. But second and more importantly – you might have seen me post something like this: 1. S/R/fR cR 2. fR/S/R cR 3. fR/R/S cR 4. R/R/R cS 5. R/R/R cR 6. S/R/R That’s not gibberish – it’s the Action Map for a Trained[♥♣] unit of Expert Artillery Crew firing a cannon.
Yes, that’s right: I’m shamelessly mining your nostalgia for images because I’m too lazy to find good Plunder -specific pictures for such a broad article
The Track
Action Mapping is “bench-racing” our unit. Like an ad for a new car, we are taking our unit to a “closed course” with ideal conditions, and seeing how fast we lap the circuit – which means our first job is to build the track.
Simply enough, the track is all of the actions that we need to take before reaching our desired goal. If we’re measuring how often our unit can shoot cannons, then the track looks like this: Reload / Reload / Reload / Reload / Shoot – repeat
We start the track with Reloads, because Shoot is the finish line. Just like a real circuit race, the Start and Finish line are the same; the race starts when we cross the “starting line” and then we go the whole way around the circuit before crossing it again. The same is true of Plunder – the game starts with us fully loaded, right before the shot; but then we must go the whole way around before shooting again.
When we assign our card, we count that many spaces around our “track”. If we color-code the track by suit, it would look something like this: Reload / Reload / Reload / Reload / Shoot – Reload / Reload / Reload / Reload / Shoot …
It does not matter what order we assign the cards to the track. You can assign all the ♥ and then all of the ♣ or you can alternate like I just did. It’s entirely up to you.
It helps to imagine the track in a straight line, or as a circle. That’s unwieldy on the page though, and makes it difficult to show the distinct activations, so I typically wrap my map. Wrapping our track from above would look like: ♥ Reload / Reload ♣ Reload / Reload / Shoot ♥ Reload / Reload ♣ Reload / Reload / Shoot ♥ Reload / Reload ♣ Reload / Reload / Shoot
The First Action & ‘Wheel Tricks’ Real Quick
We’re mapping the whole game, and obviously you don’t need to Reload before your first shot (usually). We could mark our first action as a Shoot, so that our map becomes ♥ Shoot / Reload ♣ Reload / Reload / Reload ♥ Shoot / Reload ♣ Reload / Reload / Reload ♥ Shoot / Reload ♣ Reload / Reload / Reload
But we could also just start from the last shoot action, and read the map backwards. Effectively: ♣ Shoot / Reload / Reload ♥ Reload / Reload ♣ Shoot / Reload / Reload ♥ Reload / Reload ♣ Shoot / Reload / Reload ♥ Reload / Reload
We can do this because we’re dealing with a wheel. When we made our track, Shoot was always separated by 4x Reloads. Whether you read front to back, or back to front. If you really want to put this to the test, start at the highlighted Shoot in the first example, and count backwards; when you get to top, circle back to the bottom.
You might have noticed something else, too: no matter the order we assign our cards, our unit will always Shoot on turns 1, 3 & 5, and will be busy Reloading on turns 2, 4 & 6. Full-turn gaps like this are most common with Artillery, but make a note of any “known holes” in your action map. They are helpful road-signs during your game. In our example, Turn 2 is a “known hole.” If we’re somehow firing artillery on Turn 2, then we know that we are either a turn ahead, or more likely, a turn behind. That means that now instead of shooting on Turn 3 or Turn 5, we’re going to be shooting on turns 4 and 6. I shouldn’t need to tell you how this can be useful during a game, to help you strategize things like when you should stop bothering with Reloads and just get into melee.
Free Actions
Adding Free Actions to your map should be straightforward. We know what cards we are getting, and how many. We can apply the Free Actions wherever they would legally occur. Most Free Actions come from suit-activated abilities. Remember also – you cannot take a Free Action on the same turn that you use a Dedicated Action (looking at you, Drilled + Fast Reload)
In all other ways, Free Actions can be mapped exactly as a standard action would be. I always make a note that the source was a Free Action. To add Expert Artillery Crew to our example is simply:
Just by counting the times Shoot appears on our map, we can see that adding in Expert Artillery Crew to our Trained unit has taken us from 3 shots to 4. You can already see how Action Mapping can help to compare units.
Command Points & Push (& Fatigue)
Just like Free Actions, you can “count” Command Points and Pushes in the same way as standard actions. UnlikeFree Actions, both Commands and Pushes count towards your 3-Action limit. You might not be able to apply them to every card; our example of a Trained unit cannot Push on a ♣
Of course, Command Points can get around this rule by originating from outside of the unit. When this happens, the Command (Action) must be mapped either before or afterall other actions on the card. An example of when this might be important, is a map for rules like Broadside, Strict, or Cold Blooded – you will notice that sometimes the unit is ready to fire partway through a card, and that the remaining actions will be “wasted” if you choose to wait for the command. Commands which originate inside the unit can be applied whenever you like, barring the 3-action limit.
Pushing carries the unique effect of applying Fatigue. Not only does this put you at risk of becoming Shaken, buteven in our idealized closed-course we cannot Push more than twice without a Rally. This makes it necessary to track Fatigue. I typically do so with an asterisk ‘*’ on each card where I’m carrying Fatigue. For example: ♥ Shoot / Reload/ Push (Reload) ♣ * Reload / Reload / Shoot ♥ Shoot / Reload/ Push (Reload) ♣ * * Reload / Reload / Shoot
Rallying, whether done as an action or through a freebie like Tough is a quandary. We’re on a closed-course, we’re talking about averages – what do we do? We don’t want to leave it to dice. If we “pretend” to roll for it, then we need to do a little math. The chance of failure for any roll in B&P is:(Target for Success -1) ÷ 10 So a unit with Resolve 5 rolling a Rally Action will still have (5-1 = 4) ÷ 10 = .4xFatigue points left. That means if you rallied on 2 Fatigue, you would have 2 x .4 =.8 Fatigue points still remaining. I always round to the nearest whole number, since you cannot have part of a point of fatigue. If you are pessimistic, or want some extra insurance – round up to the next whole number instead (such that .4 becomes 1)
Dedicated Actions & Marksman / Deadeye
I don’t want to spend much time talking about these actions, because the value of the -1 Bonus is best left for the next article, where we use maps to actually compare units and abilities. All you need to do at this point is decide how you want to notate that these actions spend multiple standard actions. My usual method is to underline or use an ‘&’. So, pretending for just a moment that our unit has muskets:
♥ Reload/ Reload ♣ Marksman & Shoot/ Reload
Putting It All Together
Now that we know how to set up our track and apply our activations to it, we can create Action Maps for specific scenarios. For instance: what if we added a Expert Artillery Crew to our Trained unit? That’s going to add a Free (Reload) to our ♥. Just for good measure, let’s also add a Command Point from outside the unit. Let’s map it out:
We can compare this map to the one that we made for the “Plain Jane” Trained unit and see that we’ve gone from 3 shots per game up to 5 shots.
Leftover Actions: Waste Not / Want Not
I’m really scraping the bottom of the barrel for images here, guys
In the example above I highlighted the final 3 Reload actions. In a series of articles that are all about efficiency, you would think that those extra actions are simply “wasted,” and that it would be better to end with exactly enough actions to get that final shot.
The problem with having exactly enough actions for the job is that you’re only 1 missed action away from disaster. Those dangling, extra actions are an insurance policy against that. In the example above, we can afford to “lose” 2 actions, and we’ll still get our 5 shots. For our Trained unit, that could be drawing a ♠ for only a single action, or ♦ where we don’t get our Free Reload.
It could also be lost to Fatigue from enemy fire. Throughout the entire article, we have been in “ideal conditions” – we’re not being shot and gaining Fatigue or having to stop to Rally, and most importantly we haven’t Moved.
Movement is the one thing that we can’t easily quantify. There is no interaction with the enemy, so there is nothing to compare. Even a melee unit which must move in order to attack has nothing to compare until it reaches combat. Comparing “which unit moves faster” is simple enough that you don’t need to map it. Even if you did map it, Movement is too variable for us to state definitively that we will meet an enemy at a particular turn – what if there’s terrain, or the enemy moves away from you?
Free Actions, Commands & Leftovers
If you have Suit Activated Free Actions or Command Points as part of your map, then you have an extra consideration when it comes to counting your Leftovers: you don’t know your last card.
In our example above, we mapped our final card as a ♣ and had 3 standard actions to spare. If that had been a ♥ then we would still have had 3 actions to spare (wheel tricks) but one of those actions would be the Free (Reload) from Xpert Arty Crew.
This also matters with Command Points that originate inside the unit, if they might be affected by the 3-action Limit on activation cards. This is also relevant for Fighting Men who have specifically limited commands, such as a Master Gunner who can only issue Shoot or Reload orders.
X Marks the Spot
I have been informed that this is, in fact, a muppet.
That’s it, you’ve done it again – you’ve reached the end of another dense, sweat’cicle of a DMC article. I promise, just one more of these boring bastards to go and then I’ll have taught you everything that I know about how to play Blood & Plunder. That’s because this trio of articles forms the backbone for any other analysis that we’ll do here on DMC.
Next time, we’ll look at how to use these Action Maps to actually compare the value of different options and upgrades in a real list. As an added bonus, you’re going to learn some electrical engineering!
Once that third article is out, I’ll get back to some lighter fare; I’ve got some reviews and some painting articles to publish.
Oh but first – bonus content for those cool folks putting the ‘u’ in artistic:
Only Click If you Like Math
You probably realized that you can express all of this stuff mathematically, and skip the whole “action mapping” thing.
I still recommend using the Maps because they provide a visual. It’s a more detailed approach, and it helps when thinking about action combos and patterns. But if you need to do it quickly, here are the steps:
Sum your Action Total Using either [♥♣]/[♠♦] depending on your Experience Level, total up your actions for 3 cards of each suit.
Add any Free Actions or Command Points For example, if you get “Free Reload” on a ♠ then you add +1 action for every ♠ (3 cards). You can add up to 6 Command Points, since you are limited to 1-per-turn from any source. Just remember the legality of applying them; a Trained unit will only gain +3 Total Actions from a Command originating in their unit, because they cannot take commands on a ♣ (already have 3 actions)
Subtract 1 from your Action Total, for the “First Shot” Remember that you begin the game loaded, and do not need to reload before the first volley.
Total Actions Around the Track Using your Action Track, tally up how many actions it takes to cross the finish line. For example, our Artillery: – Reload / Reload / Reload / Reload / Shoot Requires 5 actions.
(Action Total – 1st Shot) ÷ Track Actions, then add back the first shot The whole number is to total number of shots you get. The decimal remainder can be multiplied by your Track Actions to determine how many spare actions you have.
Example: Using the Trained unit, with Expert Artillery Crew and an outside Command Point…
