"Escape from Troy?" Topic

Inspired by the short discussion of ancients urban conflit rules: TMP link

Remember the bit in the Aeneid, in which Our Hero wakes up to find the Greeks are over the walls, and he's trying to rally Trojans and beat them back, then get out himself with his family when he knows this can't be done? If you wanted to put that on for a game, what would be your choice for rules?

These look they might work, although I've never tried them.
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I briefly dabbled in a Gangs of New York game. Ignore firearms, obviously.
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Another Gangs of New York set of rules is "B'hoys" by our own Virtual Armchair General.

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I agree, I think Gangs of Rome would be my first stop.

Knights and Magick using hero rules but limiting the number of heroes.
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or

En Garde by Osprey.

How could I forget this…? 😄
I played in a WAB Trojan War game at Historicon, years ago.
I was Agamemnon. I had 5 chariots, and useless Mycenaean infantry. (Don't tell them I said that!)
My chariot unit took 2 kills, so I took them off the flanks. That gave me just enough space to scoot through the Trojan army.
Huzzah!
The Trojans had only Artemis guarding the gates. I gave her *1* wound, taking one myself. The scenario rules said that Gods taking a wound (after Saves!) immediately scooted back to Olympus to whine to Zeus. See Chapter 5 of The Illiad. Agamemnon had 3 wounds to take, so I had 2 left.
So, I went in to Troy, "rescued" Helen… And as I exited Troy with the bodacious Helen by my side… I saw that the melee at the Achaean camp was in dispute.
So, I turned left and headed South to Tyre.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

So. WAB worked for me, but it's really a mass battle game. I lucked out with it being reduced to 1:1 combat. Hero vs God. Dice worked for me.
If I were to run the game, I MIGHT use TSATF, and it would work, with a few tweaks. 🤷

Obviously, any skirmish game would work. Just provide for armor, and different weapons. It's not that difficult.

We've played many ancient urban warfare games with QILS, including the one in the OP.

A game like that is about scenario design – objectives, terrain placement, environmental conditions, etc. – not the specifics of combat interactions. You could probably play it using the WH40k rules, or almost any set of rules (they need to allow units to have low effectiveness and no ranged combat capability), if you like how they play.

I'd probably use SoBaH, but as etotheipi says, the designing of the scenario would be much more important than what rules you chose (allowing of course that the details of the scenario design would depend on the rules chosen).

If you want to get Aeneas to first try and organize resistance and then flee, you probably need some tolerably clever victory conditions. If Aeneas can win simply by escaping, he'll do that right off the bat. And if you do something like that he has to kill X Achaeans before he can win by escaping, he'll be the more prone to run away the better the resistance goes, which is silly.

Our scenario for this went pretty much like this:

Aeneas starts in the SW corner of the board and exits the NE corner (maximize the use of the field).

The hero had to gather and safely escort out his family and friends. Family scores more VP, but are non-combatants (well, very poor at combat). Friends are good combatants, but can't move into out of the block where they live until they have LOS to Aeneas and are initially scattered about the board.

Civilians start evenly distributed and can only leave through the N, S, E, and W points of the board. Squads of Acheans and Trojan militia enter at the N, S, E, and W points of the board at random intervals. (We did this with a deck of cards, pseudo-randomized, and divided into four piles.)

Invaders get big points for Aeneads and family, small points for civvies. There are enough civilians on the board for the Acheans to win if the combatants just completely bag on them.

You can actually do a lot with differently weighted victory points. I haven't seen many players actually counting VP as you go along, or even talking about the numbers. It's usually "those are more important to protect" rather than "go after the 5 pointer instead of the four one pointers".

"Gang Warfare in the Age of Bronze"

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The OFM's post left me in hysterics! Very funny stuff, must have been a howler of a game!

Well, *I* enjoyed the game. And, let's be fair. The GM did not hinder me. 😄