"A Review and Summary of Impetus" Topic

Primarily a Napoleonics gamer, I dove into Ancients, Medieval, and Dark Age gaming about a year ago. Since then, I found myself playing Impetus almost exclusively. Here are my thoughts on the blog concerning Impetus.

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What are the prevailing thoughts on Impetus now that it's been out for awhile? Is everyone playing Basic Impetus or the full rules system?

madmacsattic.blogspot.com

Good review. I also am a big fan of Basic impetus, though mostly I use that for both solo gaming, and for introducing folks to both wargaming as well as ancient gaming, and for coaxing some of the Warhammer folks into historical gaming.

But yeah, Impetus is my primary gaming system, though I also maintain armies for WAB as well as Dux Bellorum and Lion Rampant.

I ran the ECW version, Baroque, yesterday and we had a very enjoyable game from start to finish in about three hours with 14-16 units per side.

Good review. I agree with pretty much all you wrote.

We found Basic Impetus a few years back after most of us sold off our Ancients and Medievals. After a couple of games, we graduated to Impetus as it had more period chrome. It's been played regularly, and exclusively, ever since.

My young son cut his teeth on Basic Impetus with Wars of the Roses Lancastrians, and now at eight is a capable player of Impetus who appreciates the subtleties, even at his young age.

We also have embraced Baroque, which most of us consider is even better than Impetus. It's led to an upsurge in ECW and TYW armies.

Great system.

I can't see us ever replacing it as we're of the "Don't mend a wheel unless it's broken"…..and it ain't even bent let alone broken.

:-)

How have you found all the rules updates/changes for Impetus?

Cheers

I'm a big fan of both regular and basic Impetus. An elegant system the flows along smoothly offering interesting tactical flexibility along with looking great on the table with it's scenic bases.

Christopher

How have you found all the rules updates/changes for Impetus?

They are refinements to the system and improve the game. The updates don't effect the basic rules. One example. In the Impetus only Light Cavalry and Skirmishers could evade. The evade was automatic. Now CL(LC) and S troops have to pass a discipline test to evade (with certain bonuses) and Medium cavalry are also permitted to attempt to evade. Lots of little subtle changes that make the games more interesting and fun to play.

Basic Impetus 2 is a very different game from the earlier versions of Basic Impetus. Yes, there are a lot of minor changes which alter plusses and minuses, some in a good way, others not, but there are a couple of quite fundamental changes which alter the game, in my opinion, quite dramatically. Having to dice to evade is one. (after all this was what skirmishjers and light horse did for a living – thery shouldn't need to dice for it) The other is the ability of archers when charged to fire at their attackers before melee and then fight them. This double bite at the cherry, I suspect, will alter the balance quite a lot. (I see also that pila and PBW have become more powerful too in a similar way)

But it remains the best simple aka elegant apporoach to ancient wargaming around. I've tried most of the others and they don't hold a candle to BI – even if at our club we will stick with the earlier 1.14 version in our longrunning campaign.

Any word on when Impetus 2 will be released?

(IMPETUS 2, not BASIC IMPETUS 2)

Cheers

I have read that Impetus 2 is slated for release for late 2017…..

The upgrade of PBWs is a good thing in my opinion. Hopefully this gets rolled over into Impetus. Not so sure that archers getting a pre melee fire is necessarily a good thing. With the protected flank rules now in effect archers of good quality are pretty decent at holding their own. We will see if this gets over into Impetus since the firing charts are very different between the two games.

Looking forward to playing more games of Basic Impetus 2 and hopefully using it for campaigns in the near future particularly.

We've played the full version in our group for quiet some time now. Impetus has encouraged many veteran ancient gamers back into the period which says a lot about the game in my opinion.

I prefer full impetus, it returned me to ancient gaming 4 years ago……four new armies since then!

what scale of battles can be fought with impetus?

By "scale" what are you thinking? Figure scale or the size of table top battles? Not sure. Definitely a mass battle system, not a skirmish or semi-skirmish game.