Pot31pouri

The Punic Wars rumble on with the populations of Rome and Carthage, their commanders and, I suspect, the umpire all suffering from war weariness. Last night saw Rome finish off Carthage in the battle left incomplete the previous week, fail to achieve anything while besieging the city itself and then get defeated by reinforcements from Spain. Once again while the battles are fun to play out - and we are definitely getting better tactically at C&C - they don't seem to move the campaign forward terribly much.

I have abandoned the last theory on line of sight using squexes as quickly as I did the previous one; any fool could have seen that it opened up the possibility of two artillery batteries being positioned such that A could fire at B while B couldn't fire at A. What idiot keeps coming up with this dross? Anyway the latest attempt is to go back to drawing a line from centre to centre with addition of one particular circumstance. If the left hand side of a square is part of the same line across the table as the left hand side of the the target square (or the right hand sides of the two squares are similarly aligned) then terrain in any square similarly abutting the same line across the table will not interfere with line of sight. Terrain in squares sitting across the line across the table will still block line of sight as normal. I hope that's clear.

I have seen the future

I am using one of those laser plumb line contraptions (bought cheap during the dying days of Woolworths) to test all this. Unfortunately the process is suffering from the use of doormats as playing surface. One of the benefits of carpet built of man made fibre is that it doesn't reflect the light so that dirt marks - which naturally don't reflect light - aren't obvious. My tabletop isn't therefore showing the path of the light emitting from the gizmo and the whole thing is useless.