"Tactica II, who's playing and what do you think?" Topic

Ever on the quest for the holy grail of ancient rules…

Whose playing T2 and what do you think?

It is good.

The good parts…
The foot vs mounted interaction is much improved.
The variable size of units for army lists are welcome.
Light troops now operated in a better fashion.
The rules really extend the period from the original. You can certainly play Medieval battles with it without too many house rules.

The bad parts…
You still need a ton of figures to play. The army lists help… but wow… still!

The Roman battle line rules are odd and somewhat difficult to understand.

I don't like the format. It is case organized… but this actually makes reading and comprehending it a difficult task. In trying cover everything they made the rules overly long and boring. I find it akin to slogging through old SPI wargame rules.

The End Result…
A fun game for a Club to play. It isn't much good for head-to-head play. It would probably make a great Convention game for 6-8 players depending on the battle size.

Joe Collins

My friend and I play Tactica II fairly frequently and enjoy it. It is a definite upgrade on the original Ancient Tactica. Aside from the comments made by Joe above I think one of the biggest improvement was going over to a point system in setting up armies. More likely to get balanced forces opposing each other. It plays better with 1500 to 2000 points per army but you can play as low as 1000 points per army.

It is a detailed rule set and needs to be played at least a couple of times before you get all the nuances. The Roman rules are probably the best I have ever played but do require some practice to master. If you really like Ancients and are willing to spend the time mastering the rules these are the best Ancient rules around.

are the rules actually available?

You can order the rules from On Military Matters.

I just spent the last 2 days playing my first games of Tactica II. We did Rome vs. Carthage, only.

We started with a smaller game as an intro, about 150 figures per side. It played pretty well at that size.

The last game had 700 figures on the table, and we finished in 2 hours and 15 minutes.

The special rules to simulate the Republican Roman system worked really well. You got an idea of line relief and flexibility without getting bogged down in fiddly mechanics.

The Carthaginian played like a colorful, unruly mess, which is fun.

It is bloodier and less stylized than the original Tactica. You can see the better mechanics of both Tactica Medieval and Armati grafted in. I'm happy with Tactica II for this pairing. It felt like the Punic Wars to me.

Our group plays Tactica II on a fairly regular basis. We just did a 1900 point Ptolemaic vs Seleucid game with very similar results to the Battle of Raphia. T2 allows you to play really big battles with lots of figures in a reasonable amount of time. Most of our games are over in about 2.5 hours. You can however play smaller games with the points system such as I did here: link

T2 is much more flexible that the original game, but there are still some things some of our group dislike. The "Committed Zones" being a prime example where you cannot wheel if an enemy is within eight inches directly in your front. The actual mechanics of the game are quite simple allowing play to move along quickly.

Overall I like how T2 plays. It captures much of the drama of the original yet still keeps units somewhat restricted from moving anywhere they please.

I'm s big Tactica fan, played a really good game of Tactica 2 ,Republican Romans v Late Carthaginian , those involved were impressed on how well the rules represented Republican Roman Tactics as described by Polybius [ desclaimer I,m too young to be there at the time) any how we don't use points , just use the figures we have and conform to published army lists etc.
Playing 100 years war game tomorrow Tactica 2 , but didn't have a problem with the original Tactica other than the lack of Army lists.

Have any additional army lists been published?