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.

 

Battle of Charonea 86BC: a Polemos SPQR Refight

I managed to get in an all-too-rare game earlier this week - this time, a refight of the Battle of Charonea 86BC. The scenario is taken from the Polemos: SPQR rulebook, of which more anon.

 

Essentially Charonea features a large and varied Pontic army taking on a significantly smaller and simpler Roman army, helped out by Thracian allies. This works out as:

 

Pontic Army: 18 bases Pike, 11 bases Stratiotas, 4 bases javelin skirmishers, 4 bases Archers, 6 bases Cavalry, 4 bases Light Horse, 3 bases Scythed Chariots

Roman Army: 12 bases Legionaries, 5 bases Thracian stratiotas, 2 bases Cavalry

 

The SPQR scenario gives some more details, but that gives a raw summary.

 

Set-Up: 

The Pontic Army is on the left, with a huge phalanx in the centre - flanked by archers and preceded by javelinmen, a smaller phalanx behind and to the right (i.e. bottom-left), cavalry to the right and then some stratiota coming down the slopes of Mount.. at the bottom of the shot. Top-left (i.e. on the Pontic Left) is a 

The Pontic flanking detachment on the slopes

The main Pontic force: one main phalanx, one smaller phalanx in reserve (top-left), a cavalry detachment on the right (bottom-left) and the light cavalry and a supporting foot detachment on the Pontic left (top-right)

The Romans have the legionaries on the right (top) and the Thracians on the left (right); each wing has a small cavalry detachment

And another view

The Battle:

The initial set-up  - plus the logic of the game mechanics - make this a game of blow-by-blow; so Pontus moves forward with its Scythed Chariots and its Cavalry and its flanking Stratiota.

The battle lines have clashed! The cavalry fight is sort of even so far, with the Roman cavalry pushed back, but the Thracians have formed an effective block and repulsed the bulk of the Pontic horsemen; the Scythed Chariots have caused some disruption and losses, without sweeping the legionaries aside.

A little later, we find that the Thracians and Roman Cavalry have had rather the best of it on the Roman Left (near); the Legionaries are tidying themselves up as the Scythed Chariot attack has lost its impetus somewhat on the Right (towards the top)

The Roman Cavalry on the Left counter-attacks, causing severe panic amongst the Pontic horsemen! They are putting themselves in some danger of being cut off though...

Meanwhile in the centre and on the Roman right, the Pontic light troops (horse on the Pontic Left, top; foot in the Pontic Centre, centre) are skirmishing with the Legionaries and other Roman cavalry, without much effect other than slightly delaying some of the Roman line-straightening moves, having dealt with thre remnants of the scythed chariots

The Romans have (surprisingly) chose to charge home, to try and get the initiative away from the Pontic phalanx (centre)

The Roman Cavalry pursuit on the Left (bottom-left) ends when faced with the phalanx of Bronze Shields comprising the Pontic Reserve

The action hotting up in the middle - the Romans take the fight to the Pontic pikemen, causing some disruption, especially with the Pontic javelinmen intermixed; the Roman Horse on the far right (top) have charged home, but the Pontic Light Horse have fought back surprisingly strongly

The remainder of the Pontic Cavalry (foreground) have been worsted by the Thracians (bottom-right) and are in severe danger of being entirely routed

The battle of legionary and phalangist in the centre ebbs-and-flows

Game Notes:

I stopped the game at this point, feeling a bit disheartened.  This was a clash I had been waiting a while to do and was looking forward to playing, but it didn't really click. There were a few issues I had with the specific scenario and a few with the rules, which didn't help - although I have played and enjoyed Polemos: SPQR many times, so I don't have a general issue with them, so it might well have been my brain at fault rather than the rules on this occasion. 

In any case, it makes sense to concentrate on the scenario first. In general, it is a very good scenario, decent background and lots of options - 'small', 'medium' and 'large' scenarios are detailed (essentially more or less bases on a bigger or smaller table), but I would argue there are in fact four: the units given on the scenario map imply a 'regular' scenario, situated somewhere between the 'small' and 'medium' sized battles. However, the map, although attractive and clear, has a couple of obvious issues and one more subtle one, which ended up being the main problem I had in my refight.

The first obvious issue is that of dead space: over a sixth of the not very big battlefield is impassble, because the River Cephisus is  considered unfordable. Not an issue, with a little re-orientation of the map, it can be seen that it will/should fit on a fairly small board indeed, hence my selection of a 2'x2' board for this particular game. But doing this reveals (more clearly) the second issue: the deployment of the Pontic Left. I think it seems a bit unlikely that any army would deploy like that - facing an unfordable river, and with no space for it to advance, whilst refused behind the Centre. Obviously the latter wouldn't be a problem per se, but it is a problem if it means the Left can't actually do anything.  The whole army lines facing each othere are at a very strange angle, which becomes quite clear if you orientate the scenario map so the unpassable river is the top-edge. The Romans, if outnumbered to any degree, would seem to have been unlikely to choose such an angle of deployment.

The more subtle issue was how the deployment on the map fits with the concept of the group in Polemos: SPQR and the concept of orders. I got into a real muddle with the phalanx - this is the first time I have used one in a game (since this is the first time I have had pikemen available - more anon!). The SPQR rules allow mixed troop types in the same group, but within limits. This implies that the skirmishers preceding the phalanx have to be a different group (you can't have unformed and formed troops in the same group). Presuming the skirmishers to be unformed and the phalanx to be formed, they therefore operate differently. But also, if the skirmishers are ahead of the group, it is very different for the phalanx to pass through the skirmishers, because the Phalanx has to break apart into separate groups to pass through the skirmishers (or have the skirmishers pass through them). To pass through, the leading rank of the phalanx must separate from the remainder, which then becomes a separate group.  This ends up costing a huge amount of Tempo Points (i.e. command points) for a Phalanx five bases wide. Perhaps the intention is that the Phalanx leads the attack with the skirmishers in position? But that is tactically so sub-optimal (the Legionaries will make mincemeat out of them) that it feels difficult to imagine that is what was intended.

Now, there probably are some sensible solutions to this. But I reached the point where I felt I was trying to master a euro-game rather than refight Charonea as a wargame, so I decided to stick a fork in this game and maybe return to it later with SPQR when I had it more sorted out in my head.  They are a reasonably intuitive set of rules, but there are a lot of factors in some of the tables and it has been a while since I had had a game.

As a last thing, I thought the scenario might have been a little more informative about troop types - for example, Pontic Cavalry are definitely Raw (in the scenario) but they might also by Armoured/Unarmoured and Formed/Unformed. I expect that they should be Unarmoured Unformed (this would be the logic from the Army List), or perhaps Armoured Unformed if the Roman Cavalry are counted as Armoured; and whether the Roman Cavalry are Formed or Unformed. It was easy enough to make a ruling, but it is always good if the scenario designer lets us players know what they used. 

On a more positive note, perhaps regular readers will notice some new troops in action! These are a bunch of some of the 6mm Baccus ancient figures that the Polemarch had deemed surplus to his requirements and kindly offered them up for players wanting to re-home them. So I was really pleased to get this new army to the table. I am still deciding whether to rebase them or leave them as is. I had originally intended to do the former - I find the 60x30 bases more handy for gaming, and they would fit in better with my own armies - but OTOH I now see possibilities of using them entirely separately, since the collection is maybe big enough to do that. Still thinking this one through...