"FOG:R 15mm Samurai - smaller battle pictures" Topic

The Centurions wargaming group out of Minneapolis, MN met up on Black Friday for some Sengoku action using Field of Glory Renaissance and 15mm Samurai.

We had a Hojo, Otomo and Oda force clashing with an Imagawa, Date and Ii scoundrels. (I know, not 100% realistic allies, but it was a die roll for who was fighting who. We have guys representing a large majority of clans across Japan so who shows up to play dictates our sides instead of history.)

We are still ramping up and learning these rules and plan to hit them pretty hard next year. This being our 2nd test battle with FOG:R we had some mistakes, but that in no way stopped us from having a lot of fun.

We are having an interesting time with the Warrior ++POA in melee combat for overlaps. That will probably get house ruled by the way it's starting to look. Anyone else have more gaming time in with that and how it has effected your Samurai battles?

Here's a link to my flickr gallery. I apologize for some of the blurry photos… I'm still getting used to my Galaxy S4 and it's settings.

link

-Joe Knight

Be careful what you alter with those rules. It's rock paper scissors, if you start taking away certain one-on-one advantages that certain units have and don't reduce point costs, you throw out game balance.

FoG: AM did this somewhat with the new edition as many complained that barbarian units stood little chance in a heads up one-on-one fight. Unfortunately, this is fairly historical as the barbarian foot lost time and again against trained legionaries. They won only when severely outnumbering, outmaneuvering or surprising legionaries, not in upfront assaults. Yes, I am a bit of a Roman "fanboy" but this doesn't diminish what happened historically.

I don't have the FoG: R rules or lists in front of me but I would say that Japanese samurai very much outclassed what would be their contemporary opponents (even if they never fought each other!) You defeat the heavy samurai through shooting and probably mounted troops. Most other foot (with the exception of Keils and other mixed pike formations) units should lose to samurai in hand to hand melee.

I get a kick about players that complain that their units stink in head to head action against some other troop. Well, yes, they do; do something else ;-)

Nice photos of nice figures. FOG-R is my aim for 2013 in terms of gaming. Who made the figures on show?

The Colonel

Nice pics
Thanks, the battle looked great!
Clif

ancientsgamer – We'll be careful. I have no argument with what you are saying, but it's not quite on the mark here. We had two situations that were 'flagged' to check up on later. Both involved ashigaru. (who are classed as warriors) The first was a 8 stand ashigaru bow (armored, average, bow) unit being hit by a 6 stand unit of hatamoto. (guard samurai – determined foot, armored, elite, spear, spear) Because of the 1 base overlap on the frontage, the ashigaru were able to easily defeat this unit. (after weathering the impact phase.)

A second, smaller WTH gaming moment came with a mounted samurai unit (heavily armored, superior, light lance, swordsmen?) hitting an ashigaru teppo unit (armored, average, arquebus) actually hurting it in impact to cancel breaking off. This one could be blamed possibly on bad dice rolling as 3 dice for 3s vs. 6 dice for 5s wasn't "unreasonable". However the warriors prevailed again after a couple melees.

Please don't think I'm complaining, I am just following up as we didn't know if: 1) we did it wrong, 2) we did it right but missed something else, or 3) we did it right.

If we did it right then that's fine as people will just change tactics or troops. However it's also likely we will make some adjustment to reduce the drastic loss window of the first scenario. As we rarely point up our forces this shouldn't impact our gameplay adversely. (I hope.) :)

The Colonel – All the figures are 15mm Old Glory. I hope to get a lot more familiar with FOG:R in the coming year as well.

Thanks Clif!

-Joe

Thanks for the report. I love to see huge armies of Samurai on the board.

The ++ for warrior overlaps only applies to one base / dice which is in overlap. So in your first example you should get:

Samurai – 6 dice at single + (same armour, spear vs no Mele weapon) hitting on 4s and re-rolling 1s& 2s for an average of, say, 4-5 hits, vs Ashigaru, 6 dice on -, needing 5s to hit and 1 overlap file with 1 dice at ++ needing 3 to hit, no retools, so say 2-3 hits.

So, The Ashigaru should get shredded basically…. Even with an overlap base. So I suspect you may have been getting his wrong?

Madaxeman,

My goodness that makes so much more sense. Yes we were in fact doing it incorrectly. I'm quite happy to see that we were as I wasn't happy with that combat behavior and I very much appreciate the example and correction.

btw… I really dig your web site. :)

-Joe