Hobby Update - 10 Nov 25

Work and home are still very busy, and I haven't always been feeling great recently, but I have, in fits and starts, managed to get paint on at least a few figures.

 

First up, some more Baccus 6mm WSS figures. I just really love painting up these little gentlemen! 

Firstly we have six bases of Bavarian Infantry. Very pretty, nice colours (although since I tend to use natural rathern than exaggerated colours, they tend to blend rather than pop in photos). The only thing somewhat disappointing about the Bavarian Army of the WSS is that it seems to have mainly consisted of actual Bavarians! This compares unfavourably to the rest of my Franco-Spanish, whose words of command could be just as well in English, Italian or German as French or Spanish...

 

Although having said that, this base of Horse consists of actual Spaniards - Queen's Regiment.

I have been doing rather more painting for the bairn than myself - a big batch of Romans.

First contingent is a bunch of Caesar's Legionaries - from Warlord.

 

Followed by a contingent of Early Imperials, accompanied by a Scorpion (right)

Happily, that finishes the backlog of 28mm Romans for the bairn!

 

So, still in the backlog for him are some English infantry for Agincourt (Perry), some Gallic Warriors (Warlord) and some WW2 US Marines (Warlord). I have made a start on the Gauls already, they are coming along really nicely. I have never even attempted plaid patterns in 28mm before, so that at least is a new challenge! Luckily the remainder of the models are quite simple, so I don't mind spending a little extra time on the trews...

 

For myself, my backlog has continued its inexorable growth, following the pattern of the last couple of years 😔.  Anyhow, the plan is to try and get the bairn's stuff cracked by the end of the month, and then have three months really concentrating on my own collection. One thing I aim to do is to try and focus on the little outstanding batches to round out existing armies, rather than tackle whole unpainted armies - not that I have many of them, but they can go to the back of the queue at present.

 

On the plus side, I have managed to get back into actually playing a few games, so hopefully a few more battle reports coming soon. 

 

 

Squad Leader: Bucholz Station

I have been on holiday for a few days recently, and took Squad Leader along to see if I could get a couple of games in during the quieter periods. It has been a while, so I refreshed myself on a relatively simple scenario. I have done the Guards Counterattack loads of times, so I did #7, Bucholz Station, instead, which features a German infantry attack at the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge. 

 

The Germans are bascially two companies strong, positioned behind a hedge and ready to attack!

The Americans have some defensive positions to the left and their Coy HQ and vehicles to the rear (i.e.) right

The Germans are basically going to attack the Americans right flank, although the Americans will just have enough time to shake out into a slightly more appropriate defensive position

I won't do a blow-by-blow, it was too disjointed for that (as it was such a while since I played) but just a few random thoughts it brought back about Squad Leader.

1.     The basic combat and movement systems are simple and effective, easy to learn, recall and use.

2.    The first layer of complexity is in the LOS, which feels approaching a meta-game skill (like games which feature range estimation as a key player skill, for example).

3.    It captures very well the combat, movement and morale features of WW2 fighting, but the uncertainty/surprise element, as well as - highly relatedly - the command element is much less well represented. It really reminded me that I have an ambition to design a WW2 Company level game which is ultra-focused on the company commander himself and his experience.

4.    Adding in that element of surprise was a key part of why Steel Panthers was easy to love. 

5.    It is funny (to me) to think that a typical TooFatLardies' Chain of Command scenario is, by scale, a bit like a vignette within a Squad Leader game, which you could play on a 4x4 hex grid (maybe an 8x5 grid, if you are feeling expansive). I genuinely want to try this out!

6.    Relatedly, I think the thing that moved me away from Squad Leader when I was a bairn were the constraints of the mapboards, i.e. I wanted to make my own. I wonder if I could actually do this now, to a reasonable standard and in a reasonable time, given modern technology?

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. 

Battle of Charonea: an Ancient & Medieval Warfare refight

Since my first game wasn't entirely satisfactory, I decided to replay Charonea immediately with the Neil Thomas' Ancient & Medieval Wargaming rules, with an improvised scenarion based on the previous game. I supposed that the much simpler and more intuitive Neil Thomas' rules would probably suit my brain state much better!

 

 

 

I used the following forces:

 

The Pontic Army:

1 unit of Pike (Elite, Medium Armour)

4 units of Pike (Raw, Medium Armour) 

2 units of Auxiliaries (Raw, Medium Armour)

1 unit of Heavy Cavalry (Raw, Medium Armour)

1 unit of Light Cavalry (Raw, Light Armour, Javelins)

1 unit of Heavy Archers (Raw, Light Armour)

1 unit of Light Infantry (Raw, Light Armour, Javelins)

1 unit of Scythed Chariots (Special) 

 

The Roman Army:

3 units of Legionaries (Elite, Heavy Armour, Javelins)

1 unit of Auxiliaries (Average, Medium Armour)

1 unit of Heavy Cavalry (Elite, Heavy Armour)  

 

So some heavily outnumbered but stronger Roman units facing a variety of weaker Pontic units.

 

One side of the board is the slopes of Mount Thurion, whereas the other side is the bank of the River Cephisus (not represented, but keep in mind that that flank was fixed for both sides). 

The Set-Up: 

Pontic Army to the left and bottom, Romans to the right, with the Thracians on their left, slightly refused (i.e. right of the photo); the Pontic camp is to the top-left.

Another view

And another of the main Pontic host

Looking past the Pontics towards the smaller Roman force

The Battle

The Pontic advanced forces (chariots, cavalry, stratiota detachment) advance on the Romans and Thracians.

Another view

The Roman Cavalry takes the initiative on the far flank (bounded off-table by the River Cephisus) and charges the Pontic Light Horse; ordinarily the Light Horse would have avoided being in charge reach of the heavier Roman cavalry, but they are somewaht boxed in by the Stratiota and the archers.

The scythed chariots did their work well - note the damage done to the centre unit of Roman Legionaries (right); now the Javelinmen are moving up to take their turn

On the far (Pontic Left) flank, the Pontic Light Horse have inflicted more damage than might have been expected; they are still getting the worst of it, however.

Meanwhile, the Stratiota are fighting the Thracians on the Roman left (centre-bottom); the Thracians might be thought of as being ahead on points, at this stage.

The left-hand Pontic phalanx is moving up, to try and get at that disrupted Roman centre

The Roman leginaries have taken additional casualties from the Pontic archers and javelinmen in the centre; on the other hand, the Thracians seem to have gained the upper hand on the Roman Left (centre-bottom right)

Taking a calculated risk, the right-hand Legion attacks the leading Pontic phalanx in the flank, exposing its own flank to the Pontic bowmen; its rear is still protected by the threat of the Roman cavalry, who retired to regroup (top-right); the flank attack has been somewhat successful, but the phalanx is still intact

Proving once again that fortune favours the bold, the Pontic archers ran off!! The left-hand phalanx is therefore in a sticky situation; with the defeat of the Stratiotas imminent on the Pontic Right (bottom right), the Pontic Cavalry advance in support (centre)

And in short order, the left-hand phalanx (see gap near Roman L-shape, top-centre) and the stratiotas (centre-right) have been defeated and run-off; the Pontic reserves move up to compensate

The battle has run on a little here; the Pontic Right (bottom-centre) sees the Pontic cavalry engaging the Thracians; two more phalanxes have engaged the two central, and quite weakened, Roman legions (centre); the stratiotas on the Pontic Left (top-left) are facing off against a Legion and the Roman Cavalry; the Pontic javelinmen have moved to the back to get out of the way (bottom-left); the Pontic reserves (a Phalanx and a group of Stratiotas) are moving towards the centre to assist.

The main fight in the centre is weakening both sides equally; in the bloody struggle in the foreground, both Thracians and Pontic horsemen are falling in droves, but slighly more of the latter than the former

However, that Pontic Cavalry unit seems to be fighting down to the last man!  This was matched by the heroism of the Stratiotas on the other flank (top) who have seen off the Roman Right in its entirety - just!

Can't be long now for the Roman centre...

And another legion goes down! The Romans are defeated, with only one legion and the Thracians still in viable units, and both of them heavily understrength

Game Notes:

A nice, fun game with a distinctly lower level of complexity than Polemos SPQR. Because of if, Neil Thomas' Ancient & Medieval Wargamning is really easy to pick up and play from the shelf after a period of absence, because there really is not that much to remember; in particular, there are very few exceptions and special rules. It does probably lead to an unrealistically 'zippy' game, with the mighty phalanxes easier to start and stop; but on the other hand it didn't seem to make that much difference: in this game, maybe some of the actions on the Pontic Left (top of the board) were slightly more complex than a set which focused more on command would allow, but apart from that, it wasn't so jarring. Neil Thomas' rules are generally fairly attritional, and these are no exception, although the possible of cascading unit morale failure is always there and happened a few times in this game.  Light troops are much easier to use and more effective than in other games, although other troops will crush them if they can catch them. The 'no interpenetration' rules do ensure that there are significant control, if not command, problems. Of course, given the emphasis on attrition, the Romans in this scenario were always going to be in for a thin time, it is extremely difficult to win in these games unless a force is at least 75% strong as its opponent, with some morale or tactical advantages to assist.

But genuinely really nice to get these rules to the table again.