Pharsalus 48BC - A Lost Battles AAR

Finding rules to play the bigger battles of the ancient period has always been on the to-do list, since many of the more popular rulesets seem to be geared more at the level of 1-3 legions or equivalent per side (i.e. c.4000-15000 troops each).  A few of the battles seem to have been on a much larger scale than this, including the concluding battle of the Roman civil war between Caesar and Pompey: Pharsalus.  Games designer and academic Phil Sabin includes a scenario for the battle in his book Lost Battles, which also contains a ruleset for playing classical ancients' period wargames.

A very interesting book and set of rules, I had been promising myself I would get this to the table at some point for ages and it felt like a good battle to get some newly-painted up Roman Legionaries into action!

Order of Battle:

Lost Battles uses a system where each side is about 20 units strong, give or take, but as in a couple of other games (e.g. Grande Armee), lower quality troops are worth less than better troops, so a single unit represents proportionally more of them.  So Pompey's army was numerically stronger (c.40000-45000) at Pharsalus, but the scenario proposes that Caesar's army (c.22000-32000) was higher quality, so the number of units per side is pretty much the same:

Pompey's Army:
Pompey (Average Commander)
15 units of Average Legionaries
2 units of Average Cavalry
2 units of Levy Cavalry
1 unit of Average light infantry

Caesar's Army:
Caesar (Brilliant Commander)
Mark Antony (subordinate leader: Average)
15 units of Veteran Legionaries
2 units of Veteran Cavalry


The Set-Up:

(n.b. I played this in the garage at night where the lighting isn't so good, so unfortunately some of the pictures don't look the best)

Pompey's army (top) faces Caesar's army (bottom)

Pompey's army (closer view)

Pompey's left (closer view)

The view along the line, with Pompey's army (left) facing Caesar's army (right); because of the River Enipeus, the cavalry is all on one flank for this battle.

Another view

The Battle:

The battle begins with Pompey getting his horsemen and skirmishers re-organized

Caesar responds by moving the left and right of his legionary line forward, but refusing the centre.

A view of Caesar's left moving forward

Pompey takes the bait and advances his legionaries forward to meet them, causing some quite heavy casualties in a couple of turns of combat (note the casualty markers by most of the Roman units)

Caesar responds by throwing his right-hand legions forward, accompanying them personally (centre)

Despite suffering casualties, Pompey's troops are the first to begin breaking (see unit fleeing in the centre of the line above)

The previously refused centres advance and clash

The first cohorts on Caesar's left are shattered and run!

A look along the line at this point - Pompey has withdrawn some of his cavalry from the left to act as a mobile reserve in case of a breakthrough by Caesar's army (left)

The blooy fighting on Caesar's left continues, and more of his legionaries break and run (centre)...

But Pompey's men are at the end of their spirit and only a few cohorts (centre-bottom) are still in the fight

Pompey's legionaries start to flee around him (centre)...

Pompey's reserve wavers...then routs without a fight (top)!

More of Caesar's men have broken (left) but Pompey's right wing has almost entirely vanished, with all the legionaries dead or fled...

And Pompey's left-hand legionaries (centre) have had more than they can bear too...

The last of Pompey's left-wing units breaks and flees (centre-left)

Another view

Another view: note that Pompey's centre is still quite strong and has inflicted considerable casualties on the Romans

The morale of Pompey's army collapsed at this point, with both flanks of the infantry line now turned

Game Notes: A very interesting battle and something quite new too me: if this wasn't the first Roman civil war clash I have ever done, it can only be the second. It took a little while for me to get into Lost Battles but once I had got the hang of it, it was pretty quick: I had stopped using the rulebook for the most typical actions by halfway through the game.  It is reasonably simple when you crack what he is getting at.  It combines familiar mechanisms in a slightly unusual way.  Thinking on it, it resembled Grande Armee in many ways.  The command mechanism is based on action points, which is a die roll plus a constant based on the fighting strength (not numerical strength) of the force.  Movement is based on a square grid (you can't see it in the photos, but I had some grid markers at the edge of the board) which makes movement easy to calculate, if fairly abstract.  There is very little chance to micro-manage the combat mini-game, unlike many other rules, where if one has skill in handling the individual units, that can partially compensate for incompetent generalship.  Combat is based on a modified 2d6 roll to 'hit',  In certain circumstances both sides can be hit, in others a side can be hit twice in a combat.  Leaders have the potential to rally away losses in certain circumstances.  The mechanism is actually really nice, it has some good subtleties in - there is a neat way of spreading losses between all the units in a square to simulate the management of whole forces, not individual bases.  Various conditions trigger morale checks.  These are simple to execute (a modified d3 roll), but very well calibrated to make certain units more or less vulnerable to panic and running.  Again, I was pretty impressed.

The rules are specifically designed to be scalable, so a "unit" might be anything from 125 veteran horsemen to 8000 levy foot soldiers (but not in the same battle!).  With most rulesets I am very sceptical of the idea of calling what is nominally a cohort of 500 a legion of 5000 because the rules will still make it play like a cohort.  Combat isn't fractal in that way.  I don't have the same objection to these rules: because of the way combat and movement is abstracted, then all decisions are more resource management than tactics as usually understood.  The board is divided into 20 squares (a 5x4 pattern) and this can be used for even the biggest battles, so no army needs more than c.20 units.  Other ancients rules, even those nominally designed for big battles, need a lot more troops than this game does.  I am very impressed on a first look, so I will be returning to these rules shortly.

Figures by Baccus 6mm.