Medieval Military Combat

 I have been reading 'Medieval Military Combat' written by Tom Lewis and recently published by Casemate. In case you don't want to read any further, I'm going to give it 3 stars: not bad, worth a read, borrow rather than buy if you can.

The recently published military history that I have read all seems to have been lacking a proof reader. By way of a change, Dr Lewis could have done with an editor; someone to mould his arguments into a better structure and chop out all the repetition. He also needed someone to point out the weakness in claiming to be setting right widely held misconceptions about a quite niche subject, namely that a lot of those interested and motivated enough to read the book won't actually have those misconceptions in the first place. So, he comes to the conclusion that there weren't as many combatants or casualties at Towton as the chroniclers of the time said. Indeed. And he reveals that a fully harnessed man at arms could probably only have fought for about ten or fifteen minutes at a time because it was such hard work. Quite so.

Anyway, that aside, he is quite clear on the direction from which he approaches things. Although an  academic he is not a historian, but rather had a career in the Australian armed forces (he finds room to tell us on several occasions that he served in Iraq), has lots of experience of relevant(ish) fighting techniques such as fencing and riding, and has observed and interviewed re-enactors at length on the physical aspects of what they do. He has mashed all this together, read the secondary sources extensively - the bibliography is good - and with an added dash of Inherent Military Probability has laid down how he thinks it worked. It might be right, it might not, but it makes one think.

Despite the title, and subtitle come to that, this is mainly a book about the man at arms wearing plate armour and fighting on foot, and is none the worse for that. He believes it likely that they would have operated in a less formal version of the triplex acies used by the Romans during the Punic Wars, relieving each other in the front line turn and turn about, thus allowing them to fight for longer periods. It's certainly plausible, but he doesn't have anything specific to support it beyond the fact that it seems logical to him and, as he points out, the commanders would all have studied Vegetius. 

As I said at the top, it's worth a read.

I'm working like a Trojan

Although clearly not at writing blog posts. Partly that is because the Seven Years War campaign is not currently happening  - not dead, just sleeping - and also I have been, in a small way, engaged in trying to prove that democracy in this country is likewise merely resting with its eyes closed rather than completely moribund.

Indeed, the only thing that has appeared on here recently is a comment from Iain that 'Arms and the Man' was also set in the Balkans. I haven't seen the play for many years; in fact the more I think about it the more it seems to me that I am confusing it with 'Man and Superman' and that I have probably never seen it at all. Shaw's plays do still get produced these days - I have seen both 'Pygmalion' and 'Saint Joan' in the last couple of years - so let's hope it comes round soon.

There are a couple of tenuous connections (and you know that's the way I like them) between the play and the specific opera concerned (which was 'Idomeneo'), with a second opera as well plus a tiny, tiny bit of wargaming relevance. The phrase 'arms and the man' comes from the opening line of the Aeniad, Virgil's poem in which a member of the Trojan royal family sails off after the fall of the city to follow his fate by indirectly both founding Rome and causing the Punic Wars to take place. In Mozart's opera it is another Trojan, Aeneas' cousin Ilia, daughter of King Priam, who, having been brought back as a captive to Crete by Idomeneo, provides the romantic sub plot and causes Elettra, daughter of Agamemnon,  no end of grief; although as I pointed out previously her family have already done more than enough to tip anyone over the edge.

Kurt Weill wrote an opera called 'Der Kuhhandel'. A literal translation of that is 'cattle trading', but a more idiomatic one might be 'horse trading', e.g. of the kind that politicians are prone to. Anyway, the plot about arms dealing actually does prominently feature a cow. Its original English title was 'A Kingdom for a Cow', which is, of course, a Shakespearean allusion. Opera North performed it some years ago, but changed the title to 'Arms and the Cow', a Shavian reference which rather nicely sums up what the work is all about. At the time I rather annoyed my ex-wife by going on at length about how accurate was its depiction of the world of weapon sales based on my own experiences of the same; but let's face it, if I hadn't been that which irritated her then it would have been something else.

Enough of that, let's have Dido's Lament:

Gaming in 2018

I started this blog as someone who didn't wargame, but would like to. As 2018 draws to an end I find myself in much the same position, real life events having conspired to prevent any gaming for the last six weeks or so. Working on the assumption that things will perk up a bit in the New Year I have taken the opportunity to remind myself of what happened this year. Despite the weather (unusually bad at the beginning and astonishingly hot in the middle) I played or umpired twenty one games, many of which ran over two or even three evenings. Details - and these may not be entirely accurate, but they're the best I could come up with - are:

Punic Wars                                               2
Crusades                                                  1
15th Century Central/Eastern Europe      2
Italian Wars                                               1
Seven Years War                                      8
Napoleonic                                                7


To the Strongest!                                      5
Black Powder                                           4
Piquet                                                     10
C&C Napoleonics                                    2


The split by period is interesting and anyone who reads James' blog will notice the correlation with what he has been painting and building. Notably there was no Romans vs Celts, Wars of the Roses or 20th Century. I'm not complaining - if the god of wargaming decided to limit me to one period I would always choose Horse & Musket - but that's a lot of unused toys. I have had a game set up in the annexe for a while now, just crying out for a solo run through to alleviate the lack of games elsewhere; which needless to say I haven't done, although I have tinkered with the layout. Here's what it currently looks like:

It also demonstrates that much of my painting this year has been producing extra WWI figures and terrain to provide the forces for a game of Square Bashing; still no tanks though. And for anyone remembering my promise to spend some of my recent windfall on wargaming, I haven't yet done so.

I wandered away from boardgaming during the year, and then towards the end edged back towards it a bit. Boardgamegeek tells me that I played 65 different games a total of 89 times, which feels about right. The one game from that lot which I would recommend to the blog's target audience of wargamers is Medieval, a game whose tagline of 'Wage war, unleash the plague, excommunicate the unworthy, and drive back the Mongol hordes' is right up our street I think. My own experience of Quartermaster General: The Cold War with six players wasn't very good, but others whose judgement I trust confirm my impression that with three players it would be excellent.

Ilipa

“We find that the Romans owed the conquest of the world to no other cause than continual military training, exact observance of discipline in their camps, and unwearied cultivation of the other arts of war.” – Vegetius

None of which was to any avail last night in the refight of Ilipa (see here for James’ report and photographs). It was, as he says, a good game and very close until the last turn when the wheels rather came off for the Romans. I really do like ‘To the Strongest!’ and they’re even better once you remember them correctly.

It’s odd that James is going to play the Romans next week and most of the changes to the scenario favour that side, but then I suppose that coincidences do happen. I don’t think I’ve ever played a game where the elephants achieved any success whatsoever so it will be interesting to see how that rule change plays out; still badly for the Carthaginians I’m sure.

Tweetle Beetle Bettel Battle

 “I know it is wet and the sun is not sunny, but we can have lots of good fun that is funny.” - Dr Seuss

Whilst I have no immediate plans to play C&C Napoleonics - we will be back in the Holy Land this week - I have taken advantage of the traditional British Bank Holiday weather to set up another game. I had decided to create my own scenario both because there weren't any others on the website featuring the forces that I had available to fight the French (Russians and Prussians) and because I have always found the official C&C scenarios to be unbalanced. It is only logical therefore that the historical episode which I chose was part of the battle of Eckmühl on April 22nd 1809, specifically the action between the Bettel Berg and the village of Oberlaichling. This features Austrians - which I don't have - defending against a much larger French and Bavarian force. The Austrians will on this occasion be replaced by Prussians.

My record on creating scenarios is not good; I have a tendency to over elaborate somewhat. I am hopeful however that by restricting myself to simply translating someone else's scenario for a different ruleset I might have better luck. Thus I have based this entirely on an article in Miniature Wargames in October 2009, which in turn is reproduced from 'Battles for Empire - Napoleonic Wargames Scenarios 1807-1809' by James R. Arnold and Ralph R. Reinertsen, published by Napoleon Books.

The table layout is straightforward enough. The map is in the proportion 8x5 which translates closely enough into 20 hexes by 12, which is a convenient arrangement of Hexon tiles and is close enough to the C&C Epic playing surface (the latter is 20 x 11 hexes) to not require any rules revisions. It includes a double height hill and some woods defended by fieldworks. Neither appear in C&C, but common sense indicates what their effect would be if they did.

The forces indicated in the article are too big for a C&C game and need to be scaled down. After some thought I decided to take as a starting point the use of all the Bavarian infantry units that I own and make everything else proportional. Further adjustments are needed to reflect the fact that Prussian units are smaller than the Austrians were and, being a mix of front line, reserve and Landwehr, some of them aren't very good. I've also allowed for the fact that in C&C Prussian cavalry units are smaller than the French. I shall probably use plain vanilla combat factors for the Bavarians, with no national characteristics, thereby making them, as they should be, inferior to the French.

Defining victory conditions is one area that I have always found odd in C&C, particularly the fact that the target number of victory points is always the same for both sides; regular readers may remember this vexed me quite a lot during the Punic Wars campaign we played a few years ago. In this battle Davout's objective was to cut the Eckmühl to Ratisbonne road. The scenario as published mandates the defenders to counterattack against any unit which reaches the road. I think a better alternative is to offer temporary victory points to the French for any unit they can place across the road at the end of a turn. I'm not sure how many; perhaps a bonus for having units contiguous rather than separated.

Call to me all my sad captains

The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water; the poop was beaten gold,
Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that
The winds were love-sick with them, the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggared all description; she did lie
In her pavilion,--cloth-of-gold of tissue,--
O'er-picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature; on each side her
Stood pretty-dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-coloured fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did.

                      - Antony and Cleopatra Act 2 Scene 2

Thus it is that Shakespeare describes Cleopatra's favoured means of water borne transportation. Sadly despite James' renowned modelling skills all he did was take one of his galleys and stick a bit of cardboard on the back saying 'Cleopatra'; rather prosaic I felt. The bard may have been OK at the poetry ["May have?"], but he was as careless of the historical accuracy of his description of the final naval showdown between Octavian and Antony as he was about many battles. However, he was right in his judgement that Antony in becoming a "strumpet's fool" had lost the plot somewhat. It is only fitting therefore that he should be represented in the refight of Actium by moi, a man whose complete lack of spatial awareness accurately reflects - through the medium of the rules - the man's shortcomings as an admiral. Woe, woe and thrice woe.

Having said that, I am - as things stand after one evening's play - winning, entirely due to my success at setting Caesar's ships on fire (1). I have consequently warmed to the rules somewhat. It was noticeable that we had a lot less successful raking than in the previous game and I think this was simply a reversion to the mean. I suspect a similar statistical anomaly in the 'going on fire' situation and am not sure whether a rule change is particularly required. A large ship with a full complement of marines will cause a fire test approximately half the times it shoots, more if it is targeting smaller ships. Of those half will catch fire, and of those that do half will sink. So a large ship will cause a sinking by shooting - with an uncertain time delay - say one in six times. It can fire twice a turn and a game will last five or six turns, during which time smaller ships can easily out manoeuvre it to keep their distance.

I like playing galley actions for nostalgic reasons as much as anything else. In my teens Len the Ink, one of my early wargaming buddies, and I made 2D fleets from black paper and fought actions on the living room floor. Despite knowing little about the historical reality (I still don't) what we did then seems pretty similar to what we're doing now; the big improvement is the use of the hex grid. I'm not sure what prompted our interest then, although watching Ben Hur at Christmas would probably be a good guess. What we knew about Roman history often came from the television:

(1) I have discovered why I don't remember setting so many ships aflame before. Apparently our previous game was a scenario from the Punic Wars, a time in history when the idea that fire was detrimental to wooden galleys had not occurred to anyone.

Surely not?

And so to the wargaming table. I can pretend no longer that I don't play with toy soldiers and so need to report on activity in both the annexe and the legendary wargames room. In the latter we have spent a couple of weeks having another stab at Trebia using To the Strongest!. James tweaked the scenario and it worked much better, although the Romans are still somewhat up against it. That is of course historical, and we got a more or less historical result with much of the Roman infantry getting away, but a large number of their allies not doing so. Very unusually the elephants were still there at the end.

I continue to enjoy the rules, although rather embarrassingly we didn't play it right in either sense of the word. Despite having played a fair number of times before and James being a confidante of the author, we got a couple of important rules wrong. Commanders died twice as often as they should have - they play a role in the initiative part of the game so that's quite a big deal - and we allowed skirmishers to pin formed units, which they can't. On top of that I still don't think we have the tactics sorted out yet. The Carthaginians had significant cavalry supremacy, but instead of just riding over the Romans I tried a series of ambitious manoeuvres that would be too complicated if performed as part of Trooping the Colour and which achieved nothing. The main issue however, in my opinion at least, is that we never pull units back from combat in order to rally them. One assumes this is what should be done because a) there are no support bonuses in melee and b) it is easier to rally if you can't be charged. Add to that the fact that withdrawal will also require the enemy unit previously in contact to activate twice if it wishes to attack again then it seems the logical thing to do. But we don't.

In the annexe the latest solo run through of the trench raid scenario ended with the Germans running away before the British got anywhere close. I've probably squeezed as much as I can out of running through it myself. We're going to have a try next week, and hopefully with more player input all will become clearer. Blinds are an important mechanism in the game and they're difficult to deal with if you know what both sides are doing. I have knocked up another couple of machine gun posts in order to give the Germans a choice of where to put things and the latest layout of their trench can be seen above. If I have a reservation about the scenario it is the worry that it might turn into a long range duel between the the two machine guns. Perhaps, in a Sidi Rezegh stylee, the British must be obligated to just get on with it.

Très bien

We reconvened last night in the legendary wargames room after a short break. James had dotted his cloth - it's an old Yorkshire dialect term - and so we had a crack at To The Strongest! for the Punic Wars. The dots were not at all visible to the casual glance - indeed I occasionally found them hard to see whilst actually looking for them - and the combination of unit strength and base size filled the squares to overflowing, meaning it didn't really look like a normal grid game (pictures here).

That link also leads to historical details of the battle in question - Trebbia in 218 BC - and scenario details. Having won the draw to choose sides I went for the Carthaginians because they have elephants. Having now played it I would choose Hannibal again because the Romans are never going to win in a month of Sundays. The elephants, needless to say, did nothing of any value; their only real contribution was to trample one of the Carthaginian commanders as they ran amok after being fatally wounded. The cavalry on the flanks were more successful, and Mago's ambush put paid to any remaining hope the Romans had.

The devil is in the detail in wargames rules. The Polybian Romans seem to cause much angst among those with any understanding (real or imagined) of the period and James had a new rule hot from the author regarding the legionary Hokey-Cokey which is at the heart of the debate. It seemed to my uneducated eye to deal with the issue satisfactorily, and certainly maintained the simplicity of the overall rules while adding a bit of chrome to playing the Romans. It is this simplicity that appeals to me, plus the element of push your luck of course. Like all the best wargames and boardgames the real secret is to discipline yourself to not do the things that don't matter.

Old campaigner

"One of the things I learned in the military is sometimes you don't know what mistakes you make for a long time." - Wesley Clark

I managed to blog every day when it was physically impossible so to do because I couldn't charge the laptop. As soon as the new charger arrives I go down with a virus and miss a day. During my very brief absence my order from Warbases arrived and, as predicted, the paintbrushes came out and the new arrivals have been painted green. There as an error in the order - the first time this has ever happened to me when ordering from them - but they have promised to immediately dispatch the correct stuff and told me to keep the incorrect. So once again excellent customer service from Warbases, who I would highly recommend. The mistake related to some stuff for the Great War project, which will hopefully now kick back into gear.

Also upon rising from my sickbed I note that the Seven Years War campaign is about to kick off again. Unlike General Clark we realised our mistakes pretty promptly and are going to have another try. I appreciate that approach won't work in the real world, but after all this is only a game. I shall write about this campaign in due course - James outlines it here - but there have been others; James seems sensibly enough to be working through the periods he collects.

Many years ago now James ran a multi-sided campaign using his Italian Wars collection. I was the Pope, but had little chance to do anything beyond declare myself a Warrior Pope (which actually gave quite a significant benefit) and ally with the Spanish before I had to go to abroad on an assignment. From memory the campaign was fought to a conclusion, but I seem also to remember the consensus was that it went on a bit. James and Peter fought a crusades campaign which is detailed on James blog, which seems to have been very successful, but I wasn't involved so I can't tell you what made it work so well; probably not all the silly names that James invented and that you have to wade through to find out what happened. Then there was the Punic Wars campaign of a couple of years ago. That was also rather extended - a bit of a theme developing here - and in the end was a dead-heat and decided on the tie-break included in the board game used for the strategic rules. The big unresolved issue for me was the translation of the outcome of battles back to the strategic level. I always felt that one was actually handicapped by managing to engineer an encounter where one heavily outnumbered the enemy, where all logic suggested that the opposite should be true. Once again write ups of this campaign are on James blog.

Now, readers of James' blog may believe, based on the steady stream of WWII western desert postings, that we fought Operation Crusader as a campaign . But no. Shane Warne famously said that Monty Panesar hadn't so much played fifty test matches as played the same test match fifty times. We didn't so much refight Cunningham's whole action as plough through Sidi Rezegh fifty times. Wikipedia quotes someone as saying that Sidi Rezegh is 'the forgotten battle of the western desert'. Not in Ilkley it isn't. Anyway, I hope that in due course we perhaps have a crack at the whole thing.

Galia est pacata

I have mentioned before (a) my opinion that in grid based wargames it is crucial to use the game tactics that the rules writer had in mind to replicate real tactics. We ran into this problem when first playing C&C Ancients and again with TtS!. We have played the latter with Wars of the Roses, Punic Wars and Early Imperial Romans against Celts and the problem is far less in the first case. Logic suggests this is because in that case we have two essentially identical forces using essentially identical tactics whereas Romans versus others is asymmetrical. Last night the wargaming annexe saw the same issue replicated.

Now this could all be, as I have heard suggested, because the rules writer loves the Romans. It could also however be because the Romans were simply better at fighting than everyone else; and given that in the periods that we're discussing they won all the wars and had a huge empire there may be something in this. The implication of which is that the Celts need to be slightly smarter than simply aiming for a straight up fight.

Note the crapness of the chariots

Anyway, a straight up fight is what happened, and as usual they lost. The post game discussion revolved around how they might do better next time. The rules give warbands three hits before they die, meaning that they last longer; specifically that they are less likely to be defeated in one melee. It seems to me that the tactics have to be to take advantage of this by withdrawing behind the chariots following disorder, to rally and come again. Being deep units they can't interpenetrate and therefore the deployment must be wide and thin rather than narrow and deep. Meanwhile the chariots and skirmishers can press against the Roman line because should these charge them they will almost certainly move forward, making them more vulnerable to being attacked by the warbands.

(a) The page to which that link directs you is one of those from which the photographs are now missing. You may recall that I was trying to establish what had caused images to disappear across a number of posts. I failed, and the only upside of my efforts was a gratuitous photograph of Agneta's backside; for which I can only apologise and promise not to do it again.

Hot street tongs

So, we had a third game of To The Strongest!, and once again discovered that we hadn't been playing it properly before. Basically it seems to be a well thought through, internally consistent set of rules hidden within a somewhat disjointed and oddly laid out document. Every time we think that something doesn't quite seem quite right as it plays out on the tabletop we dive into the text and discover that it doesn't feel correct because it isn't correct. So far the problems seem to be on our part rather than the rules.

The posh bases are no longer required

Of course one not only has to learn the rules, but also the tactics that the designer had in mind. This seems to be especially true in grid based games (that's a personal opinion, I have no empirical evidence that I could point to). I'm not sure that we are there yet and it took us quite a while with C&C. The first games of To The Strongest! were Punic Wars and this one moved us on to Early Imperial Romans against Celts. With hindsight the best tactics for the latter are hit and run rather than trying to slug it out, with even the ordinary auxiliaries saving on a six. Things weren't helped by the forces being created by using all the Romans that I had and then just adding more warbands to the Britons until the points matched. I also overdid the veterans on both sides, which possibly accounted for the stalemate that ensued along much of the table, and massed the barbarian cavalry rather than spreading them out as disruptive skirmishers. For the record the Romans won in the end.

So, they are definitely good fun, but a final decision on them has to be postponed until we're clear that we're playing the rules properly with at least vaguely optimal tactics. Next up for this period is to buy some more chariots I think. Next up for the rules is to give them a go next week with my Wars of the Roses figures.

Testes Thong Rot

We have been trying out the newish 'To The Strongest!' rules with James' Punic War figures, or at least a small subset of his stuff. James has already given them the thumbs up and I would like to concur. We've played twice now and I am happier that we got the rules right the second time through. They are quick, give a fun game with what seems to be a nice balance of luck and judgement.

Command and Colours is the obvious reference point and I think these have the edge. Comparison points would be:

• Squares are better than hexes, primarily because one can go straight forwards towards the enemy.
• I prefer having multiple - OK, two - units in a space and for facings to be important.
• The points above mean that the Roman three line system (which in the manner of the three musketeers seems to have contained four separate elements) can be more effectively modelled.
• The command and control system means that one could hypothetically order all one's units in a turn, but is very unlikely so to do. I found this less annoying than getting stuck with the wrong cards at C&C. It also made me more prepared to gamble that my opponent wouldn't be able to do what he wanted.
• The cumulative difficulty effect on activation works well.
• The rally rules, coupled with the low number of hits that units can take, prompt a cagier style of play involving withdrawing and the re-entering the fray which I found to be to my taste. Of course it makes no difference at all if you are playing the Romans with their surfeit of small units destroyed after one hit.

There are a couple of bits that I'm not entirely convinced by yet.

•  Shooting seems so ineffective and has such short range that one hesitates to risk the command failing its activation in order to do it. And yet ancient armies were full of troops who engaged in missile fire.
• Officers are just as expensive to lose as in C&C ancients, are far more likely to be lost than in that game and yet seem to be of much less value while one has them.
• The logic of the demoralisation rule isn't that clear to me.
• The victory banner concept appears to have been lifted wholesale from C&C and has all the faults of that system - too few, too arbitrary etc.

For the record the Carthaginians won both times.

Sin titulo

Ignoring all previous experience I have been to the Henry Moore Institute to see their latest exhibition: Line as Object by the Venezuelan artist Gego. It is not really my cup of tea, but the galleries of 'negative space' did actually provide an interesting half an hour, so not a complete wasted journey. The Claude Cahun photographic exhibition in Leeds Art Gallery is worth a look as well.

Drawing without paper

The Punic Wars campaign ended with a whimper. It was like a high jump competition where everyone has cleared the same height and the medals have to be decided by some arcane countback mechanism. The decision went in favour of the Carthaginians so congratulations to Peter. This has to be the longest campaign that I've ever played in and I had mixed feelings. I enjoyed both the strategic side and the tabletop games - especially when we switched to straight out of the box C&C - but the two aspects didn't mesh for me.

And finally a quick picture of your bloggist on top of Haw Pike. For the avoidance of doubt that isn't my magic hat.

I look pretty tall, but my heels are high

It is time to write once again about the Punic Wars campaign. Yet another battle is taking place at the gates of Carthage which if I win will effectively end the campaign.

Even the readers of a blog as loosely related to wargaming as this will have spotted the photos don't quite look right. Well none were taken last night so I shall illustrate with a few from my solo re-fights of the crossing of the Berezina.

So where was I? Ah yes, if I win the battle then I win the campaign. Well, not for the first time, I shan't win the battle - probably about ten minutes from completion when we knocked off last night - and therefore the campaign staggers on. However, it's half way through the last strategic turn and so one way or the other it will end soon.

What actually happened last night was that the elephants suddenly came good and rampaged through my right wing. My cavalry had great success on my left wing so it's fairly close, but not, sadly, close enough.

As for the Berezina, one resounding Russian victory and one close French victory. And not a line of sight problem in, er, sight.

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.  

Pot30pouri

Amid all the theatre and gallery going some boardgames have been played: Say Anything, Rokoko and Sail to India. The first is even less intellectually challenging than the Meeples' normal starter Apples to Apples. The second however is rather good, as befits a nominee for the Kennerspiel des Jahres. Naturally it has very little to do with the ostensible themes of dressmaking and, oddly, watching fireworks, but it has plenty of decision making and multiple ways to score victory points. Oh, and I won. Sail to India continues to impress, but for some reason we still didn't get the rules right on what is a relatively simple game.

And the Punic Wars campaign has flickered back into life. I'm fairly sure that I never wrote up the previous battle in which Scipio Africanus attempted to march on Carthage and failed, having to retreat to the only area under Roman control in North Africa. Following the summer break the Carthaginians have gone for broke and attacked Scipio. The risk is that while Scipio's army is real, as it were, theirs is just a couple of CUs backed up by allies that only appear for battles. Even a win could see the evaporation of the whole lot. As we left it last night the Romans were ahead, but these things have a habit of changing. If I had to make a forecast I'd say that Scipio's larger hand of cards should see him through. We shall get a result one way or another next week.

I am Scipio

Before writing about Scipio's glorious (or ridiculous) victory at the gates of Carthage, just a quick word to say that it's like an ants nest outside the Casa Epictetus: frenzied activity, but everyone seems to know exactly what they are doing. Readers can rest assured that no one can put on a major sporting event like the British.

A fire engine gets stuck under the finish line at this week's Otley Cycle Races

Anyway, Scipio defeated a force three times larger; a fact that made no more sense than his defeat at the hands of a force half his own in the the previous battle. It was a combination of the terrain, the effect of having a higher command number and the allocation of victory points. The three of us involved have different interpretations of the exact issues, but I for one really don't think it's working. We shall certainly be changing the rules for the hastati - redesignating them as medium - but whether the triple acies is reflected in any movement or morale sense is up to James and will come as a surprise next week.

Peter's favourite film

Anyway, I have finished yet another turn in front and have an established - if small - base in North Africa with a reasonable sized force in place to first destroy the Carthaginian field army and then besiege Carthage. That's the plan anyway.

In other news my walls have turned up so a siege is back on the menu. Still missing are my War of the Spanish Succession troops. Regular readers will recognise the irony in this, because I didn't really want to do it in the first place. If ever there was a benefit to being a major Stoic philosopher it is now.

"It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters" - Epictetus the Stoic

"We will find a way..."

As Hannibal didn't say "We will either find a way or, much more likely, we won't". James has described the latest events in the Punic War campaign in some detail, so I will restrict myself to a few observations.

Firstly, James has been rather kind in not pointing out the somewhat rash nature of my strategy; or to be more precise the fact that I didn't abandon it when it started to go wrong. As we've been playing for some months I no longer have the excuse that I lack experience. Ah well.

Nope, never read it

More importantly, I still have a number of  reservations around the fighting of the battles using Command and Colours. James mentions the issue of how the Romans are represented. I frankly know nothing about the period, but I was rather assuming that James and Peter did. I was therefore rather surprised when first playing C&C as written to find that it differed in troop classification and also didn't have any specific rules for the triplex acies. No doubt James is on the case already.

The new formula for allocating morale chips

However, I am less sanguine that we are on the right track regarding victory conditions. There is merit in James' current suggestion of a fixed element plus a variable bit, but absolutely no science behind the choice of six and one per five. To my way of thinking the problem is fighting every battle as if it is simply about destruction of the opposing army with one victorypoint per unit destroyed rather than allowing for other objectives. If the Carthaginians had been allowed to have troops off table, but keep the morale for them then we would have had the previous week's paradox in reverse. this time the smaller army would have been unable to win no matter what they did. I can't speak for the C&C ancients scenarios, but the Napoleonic ones include examples of allocation of VPs for holding terrain, exiting off either baseline, and only on destruction of multiple units.

Now those scenarios are obviously playtested and that's a luxury that we don't have. My own current half baked thinking is that at least in cases of mismatched forces (and remember that the last two battles have been 2:1 and 3:1) that there should be a sort of matrix game element where each side separately pitches to the umpire what they would like to achieve in the context of the strategic situation and he defines victory conditions accordingly. He would of course also have to change the post battle outcome. So, for example, in the current battle - which I tried to evade - I might argue that my objective was to withdraw and the umpire might determine that the subsequent retreat losses roll might be adjusted depending on how many units were indeed withdrawn. Peter might argue that he didn't want to deploy all his troops and should be allowed to not retreat if he lost (I'm assuming that the arguments are made separately so he wouldn't know I was retreating) and immediately offer battle again, or perhaps (if he guessed my intentions) that he should be allowed to immediately pursue with the uncommitted forces. Just my twopennyworth.

Defeat is an orphan

James had marked his table into an offset square pattern mimicking a hex grid and so we played the latest Punic War battle with the Command & Colours rules as written. It took some getting used to as they were somewhat different to James' free-form version. I don't think any of us had truly got our heads round the appropriate tactics by the end and my narrow loss (of which more below) was to some extent caused by making more mistakes than Peter. In particular I hadn't appreciated that warbands could move two spaces and thereby lost a cavalry unit.

The real reason for my loss was victory conditions that, in hindsight, didn't make any sense. Rome outnumbered Carthage two to one at the beginning and by four to one at the end and yet I was declared the loser . In fact I had more units at the end than Carthage did at the beginning. I think the problem was in trying to give both sides a chance of success on the table whereas as part of a campaign, with the forces as they were, the Carthaginians actually shouldn't have had very much chance of success at all and we shouldn't have worried about evening it up when setting the battle up.

Anyway, I have once again ended a campaign turn in front and I can't be the only one to be surprised by that.

"It is the part of a fool to say, I should not have thought"

 So said Scipio Africanus, current hero of the hour in the Punic Wars campaign and he was right. Far from being the odds on Carthaginian victory that I predicted, the battle turned out to be a rather easy triumph for the Romans. I didn't have any cards to enable my legions in the centre to do anything so I took advice from, who else, one of the great Stoic philosophers. 'The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious' was  what Marcus Aurelius said when I asked him and therefore I turned to my units of Velites, all five of whom were at the back of my army, the Triple Acies having been cycled appropriately. A sequence of 'Move/Fire/Move', 'Darken the Sky', 'Move/Fire/Move' and then 'Order Light Troops' saw two of them move to the right in a giant sweep that saw off elephants, cavalry and balearic slingers and reduced Carthaginian morale to zero. Naturally the post battle rolling for casualties left me losing just as many CUs as the enemy; I really do think that having defeated Hannibal in two battles running I'm entitled to be in a stronger position than I am. Still, the campaign has swung back a bit.

Not much news on the wargaming annexe due to 'A' level exams, but the table has been painted blue to enable naval games to take place. I don't actually have any ships you understand, but Peter sagely pointed out that if I didn't paint it now then I never would.