Pike & Pilum: a Polemos SPQR battle

After my recent refight of (second) Charonea, there was a discussion in the comments about how, within the Polemos: SPQR rules, best to employ skirmish troops preceding a phalanx was. This required one specific rules change, to allow skirmishers to 'group' with formed pikemen. So I set up a battle to test this out, featuring another engagement somewhat like Charonea, but simplified.

 

 

The Forces:

 

Pontic Army:

 

Two wings, each of 12 bases of Pike, 4 bases of javelin-armed skirmishers.

The left-hand wing is commanded by an Average officer, the right-hand wing by a Poor officer.

 

Roman Army:

 

Two legions, each of 12 bases of Legionaries. Each legion is commanded by an Average officer.

 

The Romans are adopting a strictly defensive posture - they may only make local counter-attacks.

 

The Set-Up: 

 

Pontic Army to the left, deployed in two phalanxes; the Roman Army to the right, deployed in two legions.

A closer look at the Pontic pike

And another angle

And the Romans

Another angle

The Battle:

The Pontic Army gets its left-hand phalanx moving first. On this side, the skirmishers are going to move first to go and, well, skirmish; with the Phalanx following up and then punching through.

Another angle. The marker (I tend to think of these as 'the champions') to the side indicates skirmish orders.

And off we go! The Pontic commander and his subordinate officer then try and get the phalanx moving

Having set them off, the Pontic general goes to confer with his other subordinate, to get the other Phalanx moving.

Here we are - the Pontic Army is now fully advancing, with the left slightly leading.

Ok, the Pontic Left's skirmish line is just heading up to the edge of javelin range...

The Phalanx closes in behind it

Okay, a lot depends upon how you interpret the interpenetration(!) rules about what should happen next...I will discuss this in the Game Notes, but I think the most logic interpretation is this one to make this work - the Pontic skirmishers have to be within 2BW of the Romans in order to make a 'Skirmish move back' through the phalanx; the phalanx has to break apart into separate lines in order for it to do this (the only other way would be for the skirmishers to turn about, but that seems too staggeringly unlikely and dangerous to even be attempted - I am playing 'dumb Romans', but not that dumb.

Okay, the skirmishers have passed through a couple of lines of the Phalanx - the officer will have to get the front of his phalanx to charge and then get the rear to follow up; OR spend a couple of turns getting his skirmishers to about face and then move to the rear - both are possible within the rules; or they can be left where they are to form the third rank (this is possible with the suggested rule change to allow groups of both formed and unformed troops)

Both phalanxes are in a position to charge - the only trouble is, they don't wanna (it is quite difficult to get pikes or skirmishers to charge home)

The Romans let them have a few turns to see if they can roll well enough to achieve it.

After a few turns, the right-hand phalanx manages it! Well done them. The left-hand phalanx will just have to advance to contact instead.

Ok, worked well, knocking back some of the Roman cohorts who retire shaken, but nothing decisive - one of the central cohorts holds its ground.

More pushing and shoving. 

The left-hand phalanx moves into action at a more leisurely pace, whilst the battle between legion and phalanx continues to ebb-and-flow in the foreground

A similar thing has happened on the Pontic Left as it did on the Right - the Pontic phalanx got rather the better of the initial contact, but not decisive enough to actually break the Romans.

The tide begins to turn on the Roman Left (foreground), as the Roman legionaries start to push forward - most of the Pontic skirmishers are killed, fled or captured by this point (although one base is still manfully fighting on the left of the right-hand phalanx)

And something similar starts to happen on the Roman Right (top) - having just about held on after the initial onslaught, the Romans are starting to push forward and a couple of Pontic elements are starting to break...

Game Notes:

I left things there in terms of photos, although I did play a few more turns just to make sure that nothing too surprising happened (it didn't! - the Romans just became more definitely on top...).

The rule change worked on its own terms and although I don't think the skirmishers were particularly better than just using more pikemen, they did work fine. If they can be persuaded to charge, the rules modifiers to give decent bonuses for charging and being unformed in the first round of combat so assuming roughly equal skill, the skirmishers do have a pretty good chance against a Legion - IF they can be persuaded to charge in the first place. By contrast, skirmishers  as a preceding group are hard to get right. The key difficulty in the rules is this - it states:

 

Unformed troops may move through or be moved through by others (on the same side) facing in either the same or opposite direction.

 

Taken in isolation, one might think that 'others' means 'any others' i.e. any other friendly units. However, the rules later specify:

 

Unformed troops may pass through stationary, friendly, unshaken formed troops.  

 

Taken together, it seems reasonably certain that the 'others' in the first instance only means 'other unformed troops'. 

 

This makes it that formed troops cannot pass through unformed troops (i.e. pike cannot pass through skirmishers); skirmishers can pass through stationary unshaken formed troops. However, especially in combat, it is very likely that the formed troops will not be stationary, even if they are unshaken. This was essentially what helped the Romans in the melee - the Roman cohorts could more effectively do passages of lines. So, ultimately, having skirmishers in front of a pike phalanx did not really help either way.

 

This did lead onto another difficulty, however, and somewhat more serious. This was a new one on me, essentially since I have tended to use Polemos: SPQR with smaller base counts, say 2 sides of 20 with a variety of troop types - often irregulars, rather than the 56 mainly formed troops here.  The issue is hinted at above - interpenetration is linked to being stationary. But how do you know if a base is stationary (since the physical artefact is always stationary)? You must recall when the last time each base moved. And when there are a lot of bases in a push-and-shove melee, that ends up being a hell of a lot. And because each combat outcome is usually highly linked to this, then the amount of  states that you have to recall gets large very quickly. 

 

I think there is a fairly generalizable insight here. The key to manageable large games is for the number of states that any base can be in needs to be as small as possible, and ideally require as little additional action and/or recall as possible; this is in addition to the number of characteristics that a base can have. So being 'light infantry' or 'elite' is a characteristic, being shaken is a state. To know whether bases can interpenetrate in Polemos:SPQR you need to know: formed/unformed Y/N; shaken/unshaken Y/N;  stationary/moving Y/N. Being formed/unformed is an easy to see characteristic, so no issue; shaken/unshaken is also easy to see, using a casualty or other marker; but stationary/moving is very difficult, because the criterion would have to be 'has this base been static since its last opportunity to move'. So the bigger the game, the more we would wish for a stateless game, i.e. the position and number of the models, perhaps with a very limited number of additional markers, tell you everything that you need to know at a glance. For instance, perhaps the Polemos rule could be:

 

Unformed troops can interpenetrate any other troops.

Formed troops can interpenetrate unshaken formed troops.

Shaken troops passing through other troops add one shaken level to those other troops.

Troops which cannot interpenetrate when they would otherwise be forced to do so when recoiling instead remain in place at the point they meet and both bases of troops take an additional level of shaken.

 

I think this would cover the majority of the intended cases as currently wanted. And to return to where we started, if we wanted formed troops to be able to push through skirmishers, then we would modify the line about formed troops to read:

 

            Formed troops can interpenetrate any unshaken troops.

 

The alternative here would be to make unformed skirmisher movement more permissive, i.e. allow skirmisher bases to move backwards 1BW.  Since the rules on 'Skirmishing' basically permit this anyway, it doesn't seem much of a stretch to permit it as a generally legal move.

 

There is one more thing that I would like specified as what exactly was intended. The wording of the rules as written indicate - by absence of implication otherwise - that it is only the attacking base in contact which follows-up a defeated enemy. I have always found this odd i.e. that a column of 3 pike bases advances, forces its enemy to recoil, and then only the lead attacking base moves forward (and if it is a merely recoil result, becomes very vulnerable). But to me it would be more logical that all the bases that advanced and were supporting it push forward as a column together. (Actually it is more complicated than even this: in strict RAW, if the chargers are light horse, cavalry or tribal foot, then all the units which charged *must* follow-up, all others *can*; but if it is an advance to contact, or in a subsequent round of combat, then only the leading base, not the supports, follows-up).

 

In any case, I don't want to mislead anyone, I still really like these rules - the tempo/command system and the combat systems and the morale and rallying systems work very well. Like other games in the Polemos series (notably not including Ruse de Guerre, which really smoothed out a lot of these issues - not a coincidence that the author uses them for big multi-player games) there is quite a lot of intricate complexity in how some of the systems interact. But I think I might need to make a few tweaks to make these bigger battles a little smoother.

 

Figures by Baccus 6mm.