For a change of focus, we pulled out Rhys' 15th-century figures to give them an outing using DBA, version 2; I'm not sure if either of us own a copy of version 3. We played  BBDBA to be more precise: vanilla DBA never satisfies my desire for "a battle", what with just 12 elements a side, but "Big Battle DBA", by trebling the element count on a double-width board, gives a more substantial game.

First up, Rhys took an early French Ordonnance army with a Swiss ally, while I commanded an Italian Condotta force. As befitting the plain of the Po, terrain was fairly minimal, but did feature a wood on my centre-right that I threw my 3 elements of light infantry into. Both sides had considerable artillery that partly traded shots on my centre left. My centre consisted of a mixture of pikes and crossbows, flanked by the aforesaid artillery on the left and light infantry on the right. My mounted elmeti were on the wings, with some supporting light horse in the case of those on the far left, as the elmeti were less numerous on that side.

Later I found a bombard element as well...

A closer inspection revealed two of the light horse elements were actually my own late 13th-century figures; they'd presumably been hiding in Rhys' figure box for the last 17+ years! 

Rhys' Swiss were massed on my right. He had a mix of crossbows, longbows, and mounted ordonnance men-at-arms in the centre, while his forces on my left were more crossbowmen and men-at-arms, plus artillery. Unfortunately, I forgot to take any photos of the battle, and we can't even remember who won! Presumably it was a closely-contested affair...

I remedied that for second battle, at least. This time I took the French (with no ally), while Rhys took Burgundians; a classic match up.  I had a centre composed of archers and crossbowmen in the front line backed up by voulgiers and dismounted men-at-arms; my right was a mixture of artillery, archers, and mounted men-at-arms; while my left had some more mounted men-at-arms, and some light crossbowmen to seize the wood to their front.

The Burgundian left wing

Rhys' mounted men-at-arms waiting prior to the advance

The Burgundians massed mounted men-at-arms in their centre, along with some archers and dismounted men-at-arms to their left; further to their left were various artillery pieces, some crossbowmen, and also some detached coustilliers (counting as Cv).  Rhys' right was rather odd, consisting of archers plus a small contingent of Low Countries pikemen (4 elements); I had no idea what role Rhys envisaged for the Pk in that position...



I fancied my chances in the centre, since in DBA, archers are rather deadly against mounted knights; nonetheless, my centre received my lowest PiP die, since it required no manoeuvring at all; just a simple dadvance straight up the board. My right didn't have very favourable match-ups. I was the defender, and thus deployed first, and although I got to swap two pairs of elements, this merely made my right wing have a slightly less favourable poistion than before. This wing got my middle PiP die, as moving the artillery would be PiP intensive.

The two forces approach the end of the second turn

On my right, my artillery came off second best against Rhys', but the archers immediately to their left were able to inflict some casualties on the Burgundians in reply. My left quickly advanced (benefited by getting the highest PiP die every turn) and seized the wood as planned.  Rhys troops opposite them didn't really do much in response; he was more intent on boldly advancing his mass of men-at-arms towards my centre, clearly aiming to decide the affair in a manner befitting Charles le Téméraire. Naturally, some casualties were to be expected on the way in, but Rhys had massed them in depth in anticipation...

After the initial charge...

Alas, for the Burgundians, the French line was well-prepared, and the Burgundian charge was largely ineffectual. Just a single company of men-at-arms managed to break through the front line of archers, and it was immediately routed by the dismounted French men-at-arms to their rear... This essentially meant battle over, as it demoralized the Burgundian main command, but, just for completeness, when the Burgundian left wing commander lead his men into the French artillery, he was ridden down by the French Constable's own knights waiting in reserve, adding insult to injury.

Well, it's been a poor year in terms of gaming, but yesterday I managed to get down to Aaron's for three games of Lost Battles. Aaron had stiched together a mini-campaign with him taking control of forces based on 3rd-century BC Ptolemaics, and me with their Selucid equivalents.  Each side would consist of 66-68 FV ("fighting value") of forces, with battlefields taken from the rules book, and simple campaign rules to determine who would deploy first, etc.

The first game used the Paraitacene battlefield, featuring a line of hills along one flank, and open ground elsewhere. The "Aronaic" forces featured a strong Macedonian settler phalanx, with no less than 10 units of average phalangites (APH), plus two of veterans representing the royal agema, etc (VPH). These were supplemented by a unit of mercenary infantry (AHI, average heavy infantry), and numerous levy Engyptian light infantry (3 x LLI). Theer was also two groups  of African elephants (with their integral infantry escorts; AEL); a unit of light horse (ALC), as well as two of settler xystophohori (lancers, AHC). The king (AL, an "average leader") chose to fight on foot at the head of his agema, rather than mounted.

Initial skirmishing; the guys on the big square base are mine.

The "Sarlukids" had a somewhat inferior Macedonian settler phalanx: 8 APH, supplemented by two contingents of mercenary foot (AHI). The Sarlukid infantry argyraspides had eveidently been left at home to guard against potential usurpers... The two herds of elephants were of course Asiatic rather than African (IEL), and in addition to their escorts, further reasonable light infantry was available from the various subject peoples of the empire (2 x ALI). The Sarlukid horse was however definitely stronger than their Aroniac counterparts: two units of settler xystophoroi (AHC), one of Tarantines (ALC), plus the mounted agema and the royal companions (2 x VHC). The Sarlukid king (AL) rode at the head of his companions.

Sarlukid left (foreground) and Aronaic right (distance)

Aaron deployed first, with his veteran phalangites pushing quickly forward on his right wing. The majority of his horse was also on his right, while his left was refused. Since the great majority of my horse was massed on my left, this would lead to a big cavalry fight on my left wing.

Seeing his cavalry inferiority, Aaron skillfuly redeployed his right-most elephant corps even further out to his right (see photo left, out of focus in the distance). This would stymie my cavalry assault for quite a while, giving Aaron time to assault my weaker phalanx with his stronger one, further aided by his commander-in-chief being presnt in person.

However, eventually, my left cavalry wing overwhelmed his right despite his elephants in this zone. However, in Lost Battles, a victorious cavalry wing cannot automatically cease pursuit of broken foes, and the extra turn spent turning my horse inwards to assail his phalanx meant my centre was in dire straits.

Crisis point!

So, it was a race - would I roll his pahalnx up before he could punch through my centre? To the right you can see my cavalry have just cleared my left wing (the unit furthest from the camera is my light horse, advancing into the now-vacant Aronaic zone), but my central zone is in trouble - every unit there is spent (indicated by the "casualty" markers in use - the little round bases with one or two javelins impalled head-first in the earth). Aaron would repeatedly shatter units in this zone in the next couple of turns, but some excellent morale dice rolling rolling saved my bacon here, and I squeezed out a victory, albeit at the cost of my centre taking heavy casualties. A close-run affair!

Deployment, viewed from the rear of my left flank.

My light horse on the extreme right, working the flank.

The flanks are fully engaged, but the centres have yet to meet.

The view from behind Aaron's centre. All figures are his.

Technically not yet "game over", but irretrievable...

An introduction to "To the Strongest!" - Part 2

Following on from the previous battle, next up was 1st-century Gauls versus Roamn, with me taking the Romans this time.  If I remember correctly, I had a single standard-size (i.e. two hit) raw legionary unit, six average legionary units, and four veteran units that were only half-sized - i.e. single-hit units.  There were a couple of allied cavalry units, some camp-guards (armed servants), and a single unit of archers.  The Gauls had three units of cavalry, and 8 blocks of infantry warriors, who counted as "deep" and thus had 3 hits each; there was probably a unit of youths hanging at the rear who played no effective pat in the clash.

The set-up is as on the right, with "my" lads on the left; Aaron supplied all the figures for this game, however.  Single trees are just for show, but squares with two trees counted as woods and therefore rough going, as did the stream on my right. I figured my right was the strongest of my three commands, although when it came to the crunch it didn't quite perform as well as expected...  Aaron had his two right horse units in a single small command, with the rest of the army evenly split between two large commands. All my generals were "detached" (like Lost Battles "commanders") while his were "attached" (like Lost Battles "leaders").

"To the Strongest!", in addition to generals, also has "heroes".  I was very sceptical about these when I first looked at the rules, but they are actually a really good feature. A "hero" costs one point, and allows a single missed attack roll to be rerolled. That's it. A really good way of distinguishing two units from one-another, without the big difference implied by making one of them raw or vetreran, is to give the better unit a hero, as it should given them a slight edge in the attack.  One of the biggest problems with Lost Battles is the massive difference in effectiveness between the three grades of troops, as opposed to the entirely accurate difference in effectiveness between the grades of troops: in Lost Battles you have three and only three levels, so the "army lists" are chock-full of dodges like grading two historically identical "units" differently in an attempt to "average out" their effectiveness away from what a single grading would amount too, which really undermines the whole "model". 

The fight was pretty much a straight-up affair, with the main lines marching forward, and getting on with it. Romans get a definite advantage over other foot with their "heavy throwing weapons" but it's not like as if they are carrying grenades like the equivalent feature in Basic Impetus (written by an Italian, note!), so it's a decent bit of chrome without being overbearing.  It didn't help them much against the Macedonians in the previous game, note!  Also not helping the Gallic cause in this game was Aaron's complete inability to ally any hits.  I probably rallied half a dozen hits over the course of the two games, maybe more, and I don't recall Aaron managing to rally a single hit.  Sometimes Fortune just isn't with you...  Rallying itself is one of those inetresting "decision points" that makes a good game - do you try and rally a hit, or do you try and hit the enemy with your unit's first - and quite possibly only - activation?  Sometimes it's an easy choice, but certainly not at other times.

In this game, I deployed a front line of two-hit legionary units, with the one-hit veterans in reserve. When the front unit took a hit and became disordered, I had a choice between trying an rallying it, or executing a line replacement, and bringing up my fresh veterans, and this worked quite well; it was certainly a flexibility the Gauls didn't have. To the right you can see how a veteran unit has passed through the larger average unit, with general, to take up the lead position - presumably because it still had its pila in hand (which you get to use a single time).  Talking of one-shot weapons, the only real book-keeping involves ammo.  Missile troops do have an amunition supply, so they need to carry around some small chits representing this.  On the other hand, it's handled quite well, so it didn't worry me too much.

The game was quite bloody, and although the Romans definitely had the upper hand, Aaron was in with a chance even at the end.  To the right is the remnants of Aaron's right wing, or the infantry component lestways; the horse having galloped off into the distance trying to take out my own cavalry, who put up some fantastically stubborn resistence.  As you can see, this Gallic unit has not only a legionary unit to their front, urged on by a general, but the unit next in line had broken, and they are about to be rolled up by the victorious unit there taking them in the flank.  As it happened, the Gallic force broke before this combat could be resolved.

I was really impressed by the rules - with the caveat that they are very much a work-in-practice.  Simon Miller is by all accounts a "standard gamer" who, like many of us, are questing for their Holy Grail of games, and, again, like many of us, has decided to write his own set because nothing he finds is good enough. But unlike many of us, he has actually succeeded in putting them into a shape suitable for wider desemination.  But boy, does he need an editor!

Some things are simply sloppy English.  Here's typical example in an passage suppsoed to illustrate play: "the Roman player decides that he must attempt to rally".  This is oxymoronic - either "must" or "decides" needs to be replaced with something else; in this case, presumably, "must" should be something like "would be wise to".  But in other places, there are plain-and-simple rules contradictions, like how under the "Senior generals" section it says, quite explicitly,  that a Senior general must have a "command" (and thus they are no different from other generals in this regard), but under the section "The order of battle", it equally explicitly says a Senior general need not have a command of their own!

Once the worst of these bugs are ironed out, I think "To the Strongest!" could become a very well-rounded system indeed.

An introduction to "To the Strongest!" - Part 1

Aaron had a day's break from the family last week, so I was able to head down to his place for a couple of games, since I was also owed a couple of off work en lieu.  I usually let him decide what we are going to play, and rather fittingly given the title of my blog, he chose Simon Miller's "To the Strongest!".  This an ancients set that neither of us have played before, and is currently available as a pdf downlaod for ten quid; I understand it will be made available as a printed item when it is more fully developed.

Aaron's tried to get me interested in several "new" ancients rules over the past  or so years, but none have really taken my fancy, so I was very pleasently surprised by "To the Strongest!" - there are a lot good things to be said about this rule set.

We played a couple of games, and since Aaron has already blogged about them individually, you should probably read his accounts too; I'll provide links as we go.  First up was a Macedonian-Polybian Roman stoush. We used my Macedonian pike blcoks, but all the other troops we Aaron's; the reasons for which will become clear soon.  The rules have army lists, and given there is a points system that, unlike Lost Battles for example, is not tied into the game mechanics, I assume the eventual goal is to have the rules in a suitable shape for competition play.  We each had 133 points to play with, which didn't allow for a lot of choice, since the army list minmums were very close to that - this is no bad thing, IMO, especially for an introductory battle.

My army turned out to have 5 pike blocks, of which one was veteran, so I was looking at a scale of something like 4000 men for a "deep" unit; the game has no fixed scale in terms of numbers of men represented per figure and/or base, so is similar to Lost Battles in this respect.

I also had two units of normal "javelin"-armed cavalry (I'm a bit dubious about how efficacious these guys should be at shooting... but that's an army list issue as opposed to a rules issue), and one of light Tarantines; a single unit of Thracian infantry, two units of light javelinmen, and one of Cretan archers, who counted as veterans. There were also three camp bases, the maximum allowed.  I set up as shown right, with me on the left. Nothing fancy: the usual pike centre, with lights on the flanks, except that my javelinmen were consigned to baggage guard duty rather than as skirmishers - wisely as it turned out...

The system is grid-based, again, like Lost Battles, but finer grained - we had a 12 by 8 grid.  I think this is a very decent level of granularity for the forces we had.  You can deploy in the rear two rows of squares ("boxes"), but not in the most extreme flank column of squares, giving a 10 by 2 deplyment area.  Each square, or box, can be occupied by only two unts, only one of which may be "deep" (e.g. pike blocks).  One unit must be forward, and one back. Ostensibly, the rules don't care how your units are based, but in fact there is one important issue here. Because the squares are well, square, they are in fact implicitly designed for units that are based wider than they are deep, and ideally at least as twice as wide as they are deep.  My pike blocks, like all my Hellenistic units, are on square bases, so you can only get one of them in a box (unless using truly giant boxes, 18 cm acoss, in which case two could be put together side-by-side as a single unit; Aaron's boxes were 12 cm across, I thnk, or posibly 10; my units are on 8 cm square bases).

Aaron's Romans were a typical "Consular" army with four legions deployed in the usual velites, hastati, principes, triarii formation.  As was completely normal for a 2nd century Macedonian-Roman encounter, the Romans had the slight edge in cavalry numbers (there was no difference on quality).  Deployment is by commands, with each side deploying one command, and then the other side, and back to teh first side, and repeat.  The side with the lowest "scouting" strength has to deploy their first command first. All this was reasonably standard, and completely fine with me. 

The system is a points activation system, which is used both for movement and combat; melee as opposed to missile attacks are resolved ssentially as if attempts to move into an enemy-held box, so if you win, and the result is no enemy in the attacked box, you must perforce advance into it. (I wonder if there is an axception if you are defending a terrain feature, or fortifications?  Will have to look that up, sinvce ot didn't come up in our battles.)  Unlike DBM, where the number of activation attempts is variable, but the chnace of sucess is not, in To the Strongest! there is an element of chance to the activation process in the sense of you are not sure whether an acitvation will suceed or not, closer to the WAB system I undertsand, but nowhere near as random, as there is only a base one in 10 chance of fluffing each units's initial activation, and even that can be re-rolled if you have a general with the unit.

The really interesting wrinkle is that units can be activated multiple times, but each activation score must be higher than the previous one for the unit that turn, and that a single failed attempt will mean no more actvation attempts are possible for any other units in the command that turn (units are organised into commands under generals, pretty well just like in DBM). This system works extremely well given how simple it is.  One downside is you need to keep track of the command "rolls" (or card pulls if you are using cards, or chits pulls if you are using a container full of chits numberd 1 through 10, like we were), but this only needs to be done for a single comamnd at a time, so isn't that bad at all.  The system introduces a very decent fog-of-war aspect, while simultaneously opening a lot of player-input decision points (and therefor chances for skill) that don't acyually need agonizing over too much, sok eeping things moving.  While the game certainly doesn't play as fast as DBA, it is definitely much faster than DBM, and that's just on an inital game; I can imagine it going very quickly indeed with a bit more practice.

The grid system obviously constrains movement, put perhaps not as much as might be anticipated; since diagonal moves are rather easy to pull off. Indeed, they might be too common, although I'd have to play more before judging this. For example we had the following situation in our first game as shown to the left.  My veteran pike (on the right of my line) had been hanging back in case of enemy horse started engaging in some smart-arse stuff on my right.  They duly moved wide, leavng nothing in front of them. So I moved up to get them into action with the enemy foot rather than have my best troops stare at empty ground all day. They then, with another activation attacked the left Roman legion, rolled over its hastatii, and then, with another activation,  drove off the velites who had just retired behind them.  This meant I had to enter the now-vacant square - moving diagonally to do so, putting them immediatly ahead of pikeblockk thay had just come up to support, as shown above right.  I'm unsure if this is something that is "clearly wrong" or in fact something "perfectly acceptable", because we just don't really know enough about the dynamics of pike combat to judge. On the one hand we get commnets about unweildy pike formations, but on the other hand we get also comments about how e.g. Eumenes' Argyraspides somehow rolled up pretty well much an entire phalanx by themselves.

The system's handling of Polybian Romans - line relief and all that - was clearly central to how ths game panned out, and we were both not quite convinced here, especially in comparison to how our second game ("Marian" Romans versus Gauls) played.  The problem was that in this game all the Roman infanty units were "single hit" units - a single successful enemy attack, and they were gone, so there was no time (or need) to swap lines at any point: the Roman hastatii and principes either were at full strength or dead, with no halfway house (DBM has the same problem, of course).  In comparison, the Macedonian pike blocks took three hits each to break. So you could disorder them with one hit, which made them less able to inflict damage, but if you didn't inflict further hits, they would eventually "rally" their hits, and you would be back to square one.  Only you would have probaby lost some Roman units completely in the process, so it was sort of the opposite of what we wanted to see, which was Romans more slowly soaking up hits.  My own AoT rules are rather similar, except because the number of hits a unit can take is at least twice as many as in "To the Strongest",  as a Roman you actually get a chance to survive any initial damage...

During the game the Roman left flank did good work, but couldn't capitalise on their success, while  the pikes pretty-well much steam-rolled the legions in front of them.  But it was a cracking game, so I very much looked forward to the second round!

Finally, a day out - 

It's been an awful long time since I did anything constructive, gaming-wise, so it was with much relief I went to Aaron's yesterday for some gaming.  I had to skip a day off work to do it, but after the weekend last month when I was still at work at 1 am a couple of nights looking after student experiments, I deserved a break.

First up was a new game to me (and Aaron for that matter) - Dux Bellorum, whose raison d'etre is "Dark Age" gaming.  I've got a bunch of 15mm Dark Age stuff still based for WRG-style games, so took them along - I won the NZ Nationals once with a DBM Armorican force back in 1997 - that's the "Sub-Roman British" list with a Saxon ally, with the "British" part being French Britain - Bretagne - rather than "Great" Britain.  The Saxons caused as much mayhem  - and intrigue - in "Little Britain" as they did on the mainland, including establishing bases on some islands off the coast for a while from which to raid from.

We used the vanilla starter army lists from the author's website to represent an Armorican force versus a Saxon force.  The British one is very cavalry-heavy, although that isn't actually too bad for an Armorican force, whose infantry seem to have been almost non-existant, at least as far as source materials go.  This gave 8 units each side.  The Saxons are all foot warband - half standard quality, half high quality.  The Armoricans are half "Noble Riders", one unit of (non skirmishing) archers, and 3 of standard shieldwall.   Aaron took the Saxons while I took the Armoricans.  I parked my shieldwall on a ridge on my baseline while I sent out my horse to do the actual fighting, not too different to how it usually played out in DBM for that matter.

15mm TableTop Games figures; these are 25 years old now.

Dux Bellorum in an activation-points style game, although the activation points are mostly used in practice to save your units from taking "hits" during combat.  You can also use them to try and deal out more hits, and to increase the chance of successfully carrying out a move, but this is usually not as useful.  It played out quite well, and gave quite an exciting game, as you can see from Aaron's account.  The main design crux of the game is clearly the balance between number of units and number of activation points (and what can be done with them of course).  It seems the authors has achieved quite a good balance here - there is a high enough number that you can have quite a big influence of the course of things, which adds to the "Heroic" feel of the period, with its focus on leaders' comitatus units to most of the heavy work - and of course, the mostly small scale of the actual battles in this period.  As can be seen from the picture, units accumulate "hits" during combat (the markers are Aaron's, are a much better alternative than having an unsightly dice tagging behind each unit showing how many hits have been taken); however, a unit fights just as effectively whether it has taken no hits at all, or has taken 5, so it's very binary. All in all, it's definitely worth a look; I feel we will be giving it another go some time.  Sorry about the lack of pictures - we didn't exactly go overboard in preparing any scenery for the day!

Next up was Shipwreck, another new system to us.  Neither Aaron nor myself own any moderns naval models (yet!  They are cheap enough...), so we just put down a couple of counters each on a blue cloth to represent the ships from the rulebook's play-along scenario.  I've heard some good things about the system from a couple of blogs, but in practice, we simply couldn't understand it!  The play test scenario was riddled with self-contradictory passages, some even in the very same paragraph, like when stating a certain ship had better radar when it actually had worse; the data cards had loads of mistakes, etc.  All in all, very frustrating.  In fact, we gave up after 90 minutes, and searched on-line for some clarifications. we found an amendment sheet, which didn't actually pick up all that many of the mistakes, let alone clarify things.  If we want to pursue this one, it looks like we will need a walk-through from someone who is familiar with the system. It's relatively complex - you have to keep track of every SSM fired individually, for example - including who has spotted it, etc.

My Armorican general's comitatus.  Scourge of Saxons!

So then we moved onto the latest iteration of DBA - version 3.0, which has some tweaks to make Dark Age gaming more interesting.  We played Armoricans versus Saxons twice, with Aaron taken the Saxons twice more.  The masochist - for warband have been really handicapped in this edition.  They no longer get rear support versus mounted, so die horribly against cavalry; I can't imagine what you would do against knights with them, which not only have the same higher factor against warband as cavalry do, but quick-kill them to boot!  They desperately need a rear support factor...  Franks wouldn't try and form up deep aganst Narses' Byzantines in a DBA world! 

One of the problems with vanilla DBA is the lack of "heft"- it doesn't feel like much of a battle with just 12 elements a side.  One way around this is doing a "Big DBA" - tripling the number of elements a side and doubling the table width to make it more DBM-ish in scope.  The other is simply doubling all the dimensions involved - including element width and depth so you just play with four times as many figures, with everything else , such as time to play, unchanged.  For our fifth game of the day, we we went this root, using some of Aaron's freshly painted 15 mm Gauls and late Republican Romans.   I took the Romans, and managed to drive my central legions deep into Aaron's warband block, only to see them all evaporate in a single bound of carnage.  Fortuna was not with Rome this day...   "Blades" (ahem: legionaries) in version 3.0 have been weakened since they now have to follow up when they win.  That's probably not too wrong, but they still look a bit silly in DBA - Romans basically should deploy in a single wide line, with maybe one or two elements in reserve.  Definitely NOT with an entire line in reserve, let alone two such lines!  I'll need more playing under my belt before I feel I can evaluate this iteration of the rules.

Big Bases -

15 mm Naismith xystophoroi in wedge formation.

Eumenid battle line in 15 mm.

Some of my Naismith 15 mm Macedonian pikemen.

Another xystophoroi wedge, with some Tarantines behind them,

Who can pass up a picture of a jumbo?!

A day out with Lost Battles -

Work's finally starting to ease up, and yesterday I headed off down the road with my 15 mm Successor armies in the boot of the car to play a couple of battles of Phil Sabin's rules (Lost Battles).  Since Aaron was keeping the record of what went on, he'll no doubt be posting a proper write up on his blog soon, but here's my brief recollection. (edit: Here's the link to his first post, on Raphia)

First up was Raphia.  We followed the scenario booklet OOB, despite my misgiving about it in several key points; most notably in that Phil arbitrarily reduced the fighting abilities of the Seleucid phalanx to give the Ptolemaic side a better chance of winning the battle.  I took the Ptolemaic side while Aaron played the part of Antiochos III.  My left crumbled as in real life, forcing Ptolemy to seek shelter behind my phalanx; unlike real life, Aaron wasn't forced to pursue my defeated troops, and thus his cavalry were free to sweep around my rear.

Young Ptolemy has managed to extricate himself from his stricken left, and is attempting to urge on his central phalanx, who are alas being sorely pressed by their Seleucid opposites.  At the top, my victorious right is taking time to mop up the Seleucid left wing.

On my right, I broke his left, although not as swiftly as was required, and the central clash of pike was resolved in favour of the Seleucids, as my army's morale was shot by being surrounded and having my camp ransacked (there is no possibility of defending a camp in Lost Battles with just "baggage guards",  a very different handling of things to one of Phil's previous rule sets: Legio ; you need to leave out some of you normal troops to do the job in Lost battles - a point I had forgotten).  As a result my entire army routed (i.e. real-life surrendered) with the exception of a single pike unit on my right, giving Aaron a comprehensive victory.

Here's the scene just before my army broke and ran.  The unit on my left didn't make it off the board in time; that pesky elephant on the Selecucid left held up my victorious right.  Not a great day out for my lads!

Next up was Ipsos.  This isn't one of the scenarios featured in Lost Battles, due to the lack of decent sources - numbers and troop compositions can be ascertained reasonably reliably, but deployment details are very murky, so we used the free deployment rules.  I took the Antigonids while Aaron took the allies.  Each side had two generals, and the Fighting Values were somewhat larger than for Raphia: 72 for the Antigonids and 79 for the allies.

Here things also went well for the underdog - which happened to me this time around...  Demetrius' charge on my left was well supported by high dice rolls, and Seleukos was killed attempting to rally his cavalry.  The Allied elephants were deployed across the battle field, but didn't achieve all that much, and my right also put in good work, so Lysimachos was well boxed-in in the allied centre.

Hmm, this scene looks familiar!  Obviously Antigonos being on a horse instead of a litter has lifted his army's spirit!

Once Demetrius's horse swept around the allied rear, with the allied elephants in front of their phalanx rather than behind it, the allied morale collapsed, handing me as big a victory as Aaron had extracted from me in the previous game.  A great couple of games.

The Notitia Dignitatum -

Work-wise (as in "real" work), this is the busiest time of the year for me, so I've not being doing much in terms of modelling, to say nothing of gaming.  But I have spent a while pottering about in one of the dim corners of my long-neglected website - updating some of my Notitia Dignitatum pages.  The so-called Notitia Dignitatum (Latin for "Register of Dignitaries") is a unique document dating from ca. 400 AD (albeit only in various copies made a bit over 1000 years later) that describes the bureaucracy of the late Roman Empire.

And why is this of interest?  Because a great deal of that bureaucracy involved the army - by far the most important component of the Imperial machinery.  And more specifically, the document records not only the names and stations of all the many hundreds of units in the army, both East and West, but also their shield patterns.  In colour no less!  Not all of them, alas, for some units' patterns are missing for reasons still unexplained, particularly for the Eastern cavalry, but there are still quite a few illustrated.  Over 280 in fact...

Click to see the page enlarged and read the unit names.

Here, for example, is a page from the manuscript copy currently lying in the French national library in Paris, showing the shield patterns of 12 legionary units assigned to one of the Eastern central field armies, that under the command of the "Magister Militum per Thracias" - the Commander of the Soldiers in Thrace (you can also make out images showing through from the other side of the page, most notably against shields with white backgrounds).

So this truly is a unique document.  If you own a late Imperial Roman army, you don't have to make an educated guess as to which units carried what kind of shields - this thing tells you!  (Let's just ignore for the moment the almost endless possibilities of manuscript corruption over the long centuries...)

And I've been slowly adding images taken from the various manuscript versions of the document to my website, so people can compare and contrast the various versions (some are clearly better than others - but what constitutes "better" is often in the eye of the beholder...).  I'll probably never "finish" the job - because with hundreds of units, each shown in multiple manuscripts - the task I have undertaken is truly vast in scope.  But I'm clearly an obsessive idiot at times, so why not?