Tuesday, June 05, 2018

Roman-Sassanid Game 2



The gang got together to play another game of our Dux Bellorum-Impetus mash-up on Sunday. This time we broke the game by playing with too many points - 125 compared to our previous 100- and 75- point games. The Roman army stretched from one end of the table to the other, and had a few units to spare for a reserve.

With little room to manoeuvre, the Sassanid wings had little option but to advance towards their counterparts across the field. The Persian skirmishers gave up their lives to allow the elephant to finally charge the Roman line, but they were repelled by the spears and arrows of the heavy foot.

The Goth contingent spent most of the battle staring at their Persian counterparts, and when the Persians moved in to try to shoot them up they charged into battle and rolled well enough to push the Persians back.

Visually it was a nice game with lots of nicely painted figures, but tactically, it was not very interesting.

In our post-game conversations we decided that we would make skirmishers more useful by making them not count towards loss of Leadership Points, and to keep our games smaller.

Further, we are planning to play a 4-game campaign in the near future, using a set of campaign rules written by Dan Mersey himself (things come full circle!) twelve years ago.

The next couple of weekends will see me playing RPGs at local events - stay tuned!

2 comments:

Simon Quinton said...

Looks fantastic! I hope the changes make it a bit more tactical for you.

SteveHolmes11 said...

Excellent picture, and it sounds like a game with a narrative, even if here wasn't the table-space for outstanding generalship.

I've seen a few posts in different forums discussing the ideal size for a battle.
Gamers seem to fall into two camps: Those who want space to manoeuvre, and those who want to maximize figure density.

The figure density fans appear to be a minority, and typically play as 2 teams with each player running a single contingent.

Cavalry, and skirmishers will certainly have a tough time of it if they face an endless wall of heavies.