"Hail Caesar! - First Battle" Topic

Boring! Boring! Boring!

No arguments, no what the hell does this mean? No cries of "Ridiculous!" Just around 25 units of Sassanids and 25 units of Romans, beating the crap out of each other and not a decent disagreement all night!

For a first game this was so easy it was embarrassing. OK I'll admit we are all BP players so that gave us an edge (when we were not jumping to conclusions – we spent the first few turns disordering each other from Ranged Fire on a roll of a ‘6' to hit before we remember that was BP!) but outside of that it was smooooooth!

We had the Sassanids defending a boarder town that lay on their left flank with heavy scrub to their right. The Romans had more scrub to their right with some rocky out crops covering their left. So either player could stand and fight or come forward as they wished.

At the start the Romans moved forward to secure both flanks properly and the Sassanids decided that they would just flat out ‘Go for it!' Throwing their Medium Infantry, supported by Elephants and armoured cavalry straight at the Roman centre!

Well, that was a hell of a fight!

As both sides had decided to use the Support rules to the full, two solid lines of infantry units plus ‘hangers on' hit each other like a train wreck! I have to say it was a really good visual representation of what an Ancient battle must have looked like – a solid mass of figures locked together along the line of battle!

The Sassanids managed to put a sizeable bulge in the Roman front driving them steadily backwards with their combined arms attack but the Romans elected to use the "Close Ranks" rule, which allows Heavy Infantry with Shields to trade off some of their fighting power for better saving throws, to gradually bring this to a halt.

Some well directed cavalry counter attacks and the gradual increase in Sassanid Infantry casualties over their Roman opponents turned the tide and eventually the Sassanid Commander admitted it was time to pull out while he still could.

Both sides took every opportunity to use the rule having commanders join in Hand-to-Hand combat and predictably each time they gambled the maximum number of dice this adds to the fight, along with the maximum risk to the general! Less predictably only one (Sassanid) commander managed to get themselves killed as a result!

By half way through the game we were already playing of the QRSs and working out combat/dice throws in our heads. Which must mean something.

Our local Rules Lawyer now has his own copy of the rules, so he's been sent off to find out what we may have missed out, pick holes and generally try and break them.

It's what he does.

The only real change we have done to date is one carried over from changes we made to BP.

Which is that instead of a Turn that has one side Move, Shoot and then fight Hand-to-Hand; before passing things over to their opponents to do the same. We substitute Move, Get Shot At and then fight Hand-to-Hand as we feel it gives the non moving side a better deal.

Anyone who has played Fire and Fury would recognize this sequence immediately.

All things considered the rules are even better than we hoped. Well, apart from the lack of arguments. Maybe that will come with time.

Sounds like a good game was had – that's exactly what I'm looking for in a set of Ancients rules!

I don't have my first game planned for a couple of weeks yet; but fingers crossed it goes as well as yours…

Michael

Thanks, very interesting

What is the time frame covered by the army list?

thanks Norm.

Don't think HC contains any army lists. Like BP it includes several descriptions of scenarios played using the rules:

"The battles covered are:
* The Battle of Kadesh 1274BC-between the Hittites and Egyptians.
* 426BC-Athenians vs Spartans (yelling "I am Sparta" not obligatory)
* Border Raid AD52-Romans endeavouring to crush the Britons, capture their women and send their livestock away.
* 260 AD-Romans (again) battling the Persians.
* 500AD-More Romans but this time against the Hun.
* 937 AD-Viking alliance of Welsh and Celts versus The Saxons who accompanied by Viking poet Egil Skallagrimsson.
* The Battle of Brada River 1148AD- King Baldwin III crusading against The Damascans."
link

I like the Move/Get Shot At/ Fight Hand to Hand idea , might try that out next time we play BP.

Still waiting for HC to arrive.

Did you have different sized units , Large ,, small or just standard?
What scale did you play ?
How many figures/unit ?
What was a standard unit's frontage and depth ?

Thanks for the report :)

thanks for the report.
Sounds like fun was had and no arguments, so the rules are successful.

Margard – thanks, that is a very nice spread of history, more than I expected.

normsmith,

A book of army lists is on the way. I understand the first draft is completed and that Warlord Games will introduce a few sample armies on their Website at some point.

Keithandor,

One of the things the game proved is that, in this case, the old "no rebasing required" line is actually true!

We fight 28mm. Our armies are based for Warhammer Ancients so have three 80mm stands per unit, which makes them a fraction over the book maximum size for a "Standard Unit" frontage.

We also have some cavalry mounted on the "Shock" (40mm per stand) frontage from those rules and we are treating these as "Small Units" as they are exactly half the front of a "Standard Unit"

Depth is dictated purely by the size of figures and their individual base.

Standard infantry are in '24s' and all cavalry are in '9s' as are Skirmish infantry, which we deem to be in Open Order having only three figures per base on the same 80mm frontage.

Yeah, I was considering 10mm armies for HC, but Mr. Priestley's article on basing made things more confusing. What is a 'standard' versus a 'large' unit? How many men does that represent? Etc, etc. Makes it hard for me to get a sense of how many minis to plan around (especially in a 'big battle' game).

Does that man just loath discussions of actual ratios, distances and scales or something? :)

We also adopted the Move/Get Shot At/ Fight Hand to Hand sequence aswell. Works much better.

darth,

The plain truth of it is that like BP (which Rick Priestley also wrote) there are no "actual ratios, distances and scales" in HC. An inch is just a unit of measure and there is no real figure = men ratio.

This is not unique, in fact as far as I recall a number of rules in various periods in the recent past have adopted this approach for simplicity and to allow the use of existing units without players rebasing from other rulesets.

Within the rules the difference between Large, Standard and Small, in playing terms, is not a lot more than a sliding scale of ability to cause damage and to withstand it.

Within the rules any units of 15mm Figures and smaller have the following overall frontage.

Standard 120 – 160mm Large 240 – 300 Small 60 – 90

Infantry are 2 deep Warbands are 4 deep

Phalanx are 4 deep Cavalry are 2 deep

How many stands these are made up of and how many figures is up to you, your taste and wallet.

Thanks, Trajanus. How is the small, standard, large distinction made?

Is it a player decision (e.g. "let's play a quick battle tonight – all our units are 'small'") or an army list-based (for lack of a better term) decision (e.g. I play Romans, and a cohort is a large unit, while a century is a small unit)?

The unit sizes are decided upon before the battle starts by the players. Technically speaking, any unit type can be designated Small, Standard, or Large. In the book itself however it makes suggestions, and provides stat lines, for the appropriate size of the various types of unit.

Most of the main Roman units would be Standard sized I think. However if you had something for a scenario in mind, you could make them larger or smaller to suit the situation. The scenarios as given in the book give you a better idea as to how to do this in practice.

Leigh

Simple way to work it out, is to line up both armies and count up the number of models in each regiment , and what ever number is most common, they are your standard units,anything significantly bigger is (obviously) a large unit etc…

Remember that dependng on the sort of game you want to play a standard sized unit can be represented by anything from one man ( in a warband skirmish) to half a dozen men (in platoon/company level engagement) to an entire battalion, or even a full corps.

My group decided that 20-25men wouldbe standard in our naps games , but when we rewrote it for ECW we set the standard at closer to 40 models, simply becouse thats how many models our units already had.

I suspect for HC we'll set the standard unit as being about 16models (well thereabouts anyway) in two ranks, as our available forces are currently quite small.

So what is needed to play HC? What table size is required? How many units of about what side? What is the time-frame?

HC is Biblical to Middle Ages (pre gunpowder). A good size game would be about 12 units. Standard unit is a set of figures with 160-240mm frontage Could play with fewer or more. 6X4 is OK for the rules as written. Bigger is always better or play at reduced measurements. We played 20 units a side of 15mm figs, 80mm standard unit frontage and halved all distances. Looked great and played well.

"So what is needed to play HC?" :
Toy soldiers, dice, tape measure, opponent, pot of tea, biscuits (pref. tea time selection or cadburys fingers)

"What table size is required?" :
6 x 4 is fine,but you could use smaller or much much larger depending on the size of game you want to play.

"How many units of about what size?":
Might as well ask how long is a piece of string, you can have as few as many as you want…how many do you have?

"What is the time-frame?": Ancient and early medieval but easily adaptable for any period.

I'm noticing a trend of people asking "what scope?" and the answer being "whatever you want."

That's possibly all well and good if you have existing armies of minis, but that's not at all helpful for anyone interested in starting from scratch. If there were defined scales (figure ratios, distances, etc), that wouldn't be as big a problem, since the player could do some research and math and reach actionable conclusions. As it is, however, it sounds like a rather nebulous mess.

For the experienced ancients wargamer/club with lots of minis already based, etc, the vague nature of the rules can be a plus, as you can more readily switch to this system. For anyone new, however, it's another large barrier to entry.

If you're starting from scratch, make a decision based upon the figure scale that you want/have readily available, then stick with it.

If you want to read the suggested figure numbers per unit as inviolable restrictions, then you certainly can. It even gives you suggested unit frontages that you can rigidly adhere to if you wish.

Leigh

darthfozzywig,

Some fair points there.

However, I'm not aware that most Ancient gamers I know or have met, give a monkey's about actual figure ratios, distances and scales!

In my experience its all about points and army lists, a lot of which is generated by the desire to fight 'Competition' games. Not to say some don't care about such things and not to say you are not entitled to ask why the rules don't have them.

I tend to look at it this way. Frontages should be tied to scale distances to mean anything. To know the frontage you wish to represent you need to know the regulation distance occupied by each man/unit.

Now no doubt some clever people might be able to tell me the regulation frontage for say Roman or Byzantine infantry, as they had detailed manuals but I doubt Vercingetorix did!

So how would you represent a Warband standing pretty close to each other while they physic themselves up and then inevitably spreading out more as they run at you screaming?

What's standard Warband represent anyway – 300, 500, 1467?

You are going to compromise a heck of a lot in Ancients the information is thin in places and non existent in others.

I've been trying to get people to use proper formations, frontage and distance in Naps and ACW for years where there is a cornucopia of data. I have yet to be hailed as a wargaming genius! :o)

The main disadvantage of the more flexible stance of HC to my mind is that new players, unless they play in a group who are agreed on what standards they are going to use, can't be sure that what they as individuals adopt will be of any use for future games playing other people.

Outside of this, as I've mentioned already, if both sides have a common frontage, the basing schema you chose is immaterial in playing the game.

Thanks darth..

What I meant was: How many units would one normally have in an army?

If a 6x4 table is big enough, thats good news.

@Trajanus 3:48 am

"…while they physic themselves up…"

Pass the potion, Getafix!

%P

If you look at the shooting ranges and recommended unit frontages in HC, you will find that a ground scale of 1 inch = 10 yards and a figure-to-man ratio of 1:20 works very well. Using those numbers, a 160mm-wide Standard unit with 24 figures deployed in 3 ranks would represent a 480-man Roman cohort quite nicely. However, the scenarios included in HC also clearly include battles set in a variety of figure and ground scales.

IMHO this is most likely due to the fact that many gamers – myself included – enjoy "bathtubbing" our favorite rules for really large historical battles. This can also be seen in AARs for the SOA Battle Day, where rule sets that include specific ground and figure scales, such as DBM and DBMM, are almost always played during the Battle Day at a different "bathtubbed" scale. There also used to be a fan web page for DBM devoted to the "question of scale," pointing out how the published army lists implied a variety of figure-to-man ratios, in some cases within a single army.

IMHO rule sets such as WAB, FoG, Impetus, and now HC are simply acknowledging that fact when they deliberately avoid the use of set figure and ground scales.

Cheers,
Scott

Pass the potion, Getafix!

LoL! Exactly!

Good answers, all. I get the advantages of divorcing fix scales from your rules, even if having a nominal sense of one is foundational for development. My issue is the hurdle that creates to starting (particularly from scratch). If it comes with sufficient relevant examples, however, that goes a long way to making it accessible to new players.

Well, the HC rulebook certainly includes plenty of relevant examples to assist new players! It also contains seven full battle scenarios from various periods, complete with after-action reports from the author's games.

After doing some testing this weekend, I must say that I have to agree with Trajanus – the rules play like a dream!

Cheers,
Scott

all sounds very encouraging – hopefully some samurai action to come.

Sekigahara sounds a natural for the HC treatment.