"Tell me about ADLG" Topic

Now that I'm pulling out my ancient galley collection to finish painting it, I'm thinking about the Punic Wars and the Diadochi. I have armies for these periods painted, and even more reinforcements in bare lead, but they've been gathering dust on shelves for more than a decade. I've owned the original (2014) edition of ADLG for most of that time, but never played it. Now that it's been around a while, and ancients gamers have had a go at it… I have questions.

1. What did you dislike about ADLG, and why? No rules set is perfect. I'm always interested in the criticisms, and especially in how they get dealt with by players who played on regardless.
   
2. I'm interested in published house rules. I'll read anything any group uses to fix perceived problems. It's always interesting to see what other people think needs fixing.
   
3. ADLG is now in its 4th edition. Have there been any real changes since 1st ed? Clarifications and errata are expected (esp. in a translation) and probably low impact, but even slight changes in mechanics can change the fundamental feel of a game.
   
4. For Roman legion players – how well do you think ADLG represents legions on the table? 1st ed. appears to have no special rules for manipular or Marian legions, which is disappointing but certainly not unusual. Am I missing something subtle? Was anything added in a later edition?
   
5. ADLG is (was?) heavily slanted toward 2-player gaming. Has anyone made house rules or changes to make it a better multi-player game?
   
6. Has anyone tried ADLG with Impetus bases, or other REALLY BIG stands? Other than needing a big table, it's hard to see what could go wrong, but if there turn out to be unexpected problems with oversized stands, I'd love to hear about them.
   
7. How well does ADLG work for assaulting fortifications, or conducting siege operations? The wars of the 3rd through 1st C. Mediterranean involved an awful lot of city assaults, I'd like to be able to play them out. The DBX system has traditionally been pretty awful for this kind of fighting, but maybe ADLG does it better somehow…?

I'm specifically disinterested in tournament play. My last ancients tournament was over 20 years ago, and I'll never play another one. I'm only interested in playing battles of history, "what if" battles, grudge matches that should/could/might have happened, etc.

I'm particularly interested in using ADLG for resolving campaign battles. I miss DBA campaigns, and I'd like to do that kind of gaming again (but maybe without DBA). If you have or know of published campaign reports, links welcome. I'm all ears.

I'm also interested in ADLG adaptations – like a naval version, or siege/fortification rules, or a campaign system, or even just a period-specific set of house rules (e.g. the Trojan War, the Anabasis, Arthurian Britain, etc.).

- Ix

PS: Before anyone suggests alternatives – I'm specifically interested in ADLG, not alternatives to it. If you have to ask "Have you tried <Insert Rules Here>?", the answer is likely "yes". I've tried every ancients rules family except MEG. Some I rejected outright, some I'll play on occasion, none are substitutes for ADLG.

What's an ADLG…?

L'Art de la Guerre

Miniatures rules for ancient/Medieval battles by Hervι Caille.

ADLG is short for "The Art of War" , translated from French (L'Art De La Guerre"). I just received my copy of 4th edition two days ago and am still going thru it. It is extremely popular in my club (Colorado Military Historians) and have watched dozens of games of it. There now is even a second edition of a Napoleonic version recently published. Now to address your interests:

My first impression is that knowing the difference between say LI (light Infantry), HI (Heavy infantry) etc. and how they operated, were armed and armored, you will be a large step ahead of those who don't. While those specifics are very well explained in the rules, such explanations take up a decent amount of print/pages. Newbies should not be discouraged as that information (while as anyone who leans to ancients thru mid Medieval periods already know, it can get complicated. ADLG (I feel) you will agree on this once you have a copy to examine in your hands.

Your army is point purchased. That said, I see no reason why you could not play it without the points and do historical battles, sieges, campaigns etc. Like in other genders, point buying is for competitions, 200, 300, 400 and 500 points can be the "balance" of scenarios played. The author operates a website where players get rated from the games they won in competitions across the world. So you will see many references that seem to try to limit armies to historical proportions. There are 300 army lists in the book! The author claims (and I have to believe him) that there will not be any additional supplements to come out. (My gosh, what more would anyone want/need- while ancients is not my real area of interest, I cannot imagine what is not covered in this book!)

The sticker shock ($50.00 from OMM) almost put me off! But once I saw what's inside, I feel I did get my money's worth. What really pulled the trigger for me was seeing how much enjoyment my fellow club members were getting out of that set. Never overheard any "discussions" about the rules, and many were old ancients players with experiences from WRG 5th, 6th, DBX as ADLG has left them in the dust! So THAT really speaks to me about how much fun they must be to play. After all, isn't that the three letter word we all seek from pushing around little lead soldiers on the tabletop for a couple of hours?

That's my take so far. Hope that helps a bit.

Tom Dye

You state that you've played many ruleset. I think that ADLG basically borrows from all of the most recent rules and combines them into a cleaner, more even rule set. They rules that have influenced this set is DBM, FOG, Armati, WRG all in some way.

1. Personally, I like rolling more than 1 dice (never say die) at a time. Also since the factors aren't very high there are some wild fluctuations in the outcomes. While some combats should statistically be a 90% chance for one side to win, I have seen way too many times where it doesn't follow the pattern based on a roll of 5 v 1.
2. I only joined in the 3rd Edition and there are some signifcant changes in 4th. I'm still making some adjustments. Flank charges are much more deadly for example.
3. Many of the changes for 4th have fixed some of the perceived problems.
4. I've only played 3 games with Romans and 1 game against them. No manipular rules, but I played Imperial era so didn't have any contact with that type of legion.
5. We have played numerous 2v2 games and there are rules to allow for that. However I have been involved in a 4v4 game which took a while because two of the players are slow players. However, it still finished in about 3.5 hours.
6. No idea because I have single DBx bases and infantry uses double depth bases. So I have to use 2 bases to represent one unit.
7. I think that siege rules are not developed. Basically FOG rules about fortificaions. They shouldn't be too dificult to house rule. I think ADLG sieges are better than DBX but not sure how much.

Here you can read two campaign stories of Punic War and Macedonian Campaigns, played on a weekend with DBA. They are in german, but Google translation is nowadys very good.

link

link

I haven't played a huge amount of ADLG so take what I say with a grain of salt. Overall, I will say that I have enjoyed the games I've played (4th ed only), but I just don't think they really grab me the way other rules have. They are well enough written that there aren't too many disagreements over rules and they deliver a game in a reasonable time frame (but those have been equal point games at a smaller point value than say, a typical DBx 400AP game).

1. Dislikes
No recoils. I hate this. You speak of Romans. You don't get the 'phalanx pushing the legions into the bad going' that is so well documented at Pydna. I hate this aspect. It's subsumed within dice rolls in a static combat once engaged, with attrition points taken off the element instead of recoil. It doesn't break the game but I think it was a mistake.

Comparing to DBM/DBMM (I'm one of those rare people who prefers DBMM), I don't like the static, less dynamic nature of combat. Once engaged, recoils don't apply until next bound, so there is very little decision making for the player once engaged.

Cf DBx, Ps and mounted shooting doesn't really add enough in my opinion relative to the extra time required in the game. The light/mounted troop shoot, evade cycle feels like a throwback to WRG editions pre DBx. I've seen some perverse results, including a game where Huns won without suffering a single loss. They didn't ever have to commit, which doesn't sound like actual Hun battles.

You can't deploy one command behind another, so a traditional reserve command doesn't really work. It's a game device, but I see no historical justification for this rule.

Camels are dealt with more or less exactly as in old WRG, which was unrealistic. They didn't hover around upsetting enemy cavalry – I can't think of a single battle where that happened – but as with the old WRG, that's exactly how they're used in ADLG, only more effectively because they can be a single element. DBMM radically revised camels (as, essentially, second rate cavalry with some allowance for their 'smelliness factor'). They're now worthless in DBMM – the pendulum went too far – but seeing them in ADLG feels like a time warp to earlier times, before significant reevaluation of their impact took place.

3
My impression is that new additions have been incremental rather than revolutionary – the changes from 3 – 4 seem to have corrected some balance issues. I could be wrong on this as I have only heard this in conversation.

4
No maniples, in fact the static nature of combat in ADLG means if anything, even less than in DBx. A second rank is penalised if too close behind by taking a hit if the element in front is destroyed. Essentially, being a DBx game, ADLG subsumes manipular combat into the troop classification. A legionary element is 2 DBx elements so much bigger than a maniple.

7
ADLG makes no attempt to cover this to my knowledge. In fact even assaults on camps are much less detailed that in DBx, with a camp being either a fortified or unfortified feature of standard size.

I think ADLG would be just as good as DBA for a "DBA style campaign". If you like the rules, they'd work fine in that context. Armies could be recorded in points or in specific elements (my preference), still meet on the battlefield, and there are terrain placement rules if your campaign map doesn't determine that.

Interestingly, I recently saw a discussion (here? on FB maybe?) about the overrepresentation of built up areas in ancient and medieval games. DBx is guilty as charged in that respect. ADLG instead, from my observation, has a massive overrepresentation of fields. I have seen very few games (none that I can think of) where there isn't some random field or three in the middle of nowhere, which strikes me as odd.

Of course these are only my observations as a player of a small number of games. I have bought the rules, split them and rebound them into rules and lists volumes, as is the custom here. but haven't played since I got them due to a change in my hours of work, which has got in the way. I will play them again because it's the only way to get a game with most people at my club, but if it were up to me they wouldn't be my rule set of choice.

Regards,
John

1. The common gripes have been very well covered already – in essence ADLG is a DBM-derived system in which the author has taken a number of executive decisions in order to speed up and simplify gameplay, and also to bring back a handful of "old school" concepts as well (armour as a damage mitigation characteristic, light troops and cavalry actually rolling dice for shooting, units having to wheel rather than having DBx-style "pick and place" movement etc..)

If you are attached to the things that Herve has chosen to sacrifice for a more streamlined faster game (ie recoils), and aren't fussed about the resulting "upsides" then "other DBx sets are still available" :-)

2. I'm not sure I've ever seen any in use TBH. There are a number of optional rules in v4 that are mostly about making the opposed die rolls in combat a bit less swingy, but again I've not really seen these played either.

3. The version you have (from 2016) is Version 3, with previous versions 1 & 2 having been produced in French only. The v3-v4 changes are fairly minimal and are more tidying up corner case stuff, and minor gameplay tweaks than anything else.

4. As others have said its a DBx system so the Maniple/exchanging ranks thing is dealt with abstractly by giving early era Roman Legions better factors than their opponents.

As we all know, there have been thousands of threads on every forum about this, which all end up as "we don't actually know how it worked, but I think …" etc etc, and at the end of the day all rules authors approach this by abstraction or by a literal representation based on their best guess, so any set you buy will mean you pays your money and you takes your choice…

5. It's a DBx set with fixed commands and IGO-UGO mechanics, so it's really, really good at scaling up as a multiplayer game. You can just give each player a command or two and off you go.

6. As long as base width = 1MU then the game plays exactly the same with any size basing. The 25mm version uses 60mm bases and MU distances, compared to the 40mm for 15mm game and allows all the same tactics and armies to do well. Beyond 60mm you just need a bigger table … and beyond 80mm you may need longer arms too!

7. Its a field battle set, so there is no mechanism to do sieges.

I'm not sure I've ever really played (or even seen) a field battle set that "does" sieges anyway however, so this is not really a shortcoming specific to ADLG.

Thanks all for the feedback. This is really good information, and I value your opinions.

- Ix

No recoils. I hate this. You speak of Romans. You don't get the 'phalanx pushing the legions into the bad going' that is so well documented at Pydna.

Or Roman legions pushing back Hannibal's center at Cannae, or the Argyrapides pushing back the Antigonid phalanx at Paraitakene, or Pompey's cavalry pushing Caesar's cavalry back to reveal a 4th line that attacks in the flank at Pharsalus… and so on. Ancients rules need a recoil mechanism.

- Ix

..to which the usual counterpoints are;

- 'that's only a handful of examples, no ruleset can recreate everything'

- 'you can achieve the same overall outcome by mechanics that allow the wings to push forward and then turn in on the enemy centre'

- 'base depths in ancients games are wildly out of scale to frontages, so do we really know if these noted examples of pushbacks covered enough distance to even exceed this base/groundscale mismatch?'

But, as with Roman line replacement, if the visual representation of pushbacks (sufficient to allow otherwise static wings to envelop a retreating centre) is important for you, then we are fortunate to be in an era where there is a plethora of rules choices to suit all tastes and priorities

I see ADLG as far more a descendant of Armati, than DBx.

Triumph! is more a descendant of DBA and when scaled up (which it handles well) DBM

I suspect "DBM, simplifed and with some bits of Armati cherrypicked and bolted into it" is pretty close to the mark for ADLG.

Looking at the timeline of when it originally first came out in France, and seeing that some of the early players had backgrounds in both rulesets also seems to fit.

Triumph is pretty openly a DBA descendent.