We had a couple of hours to spare on a wet Friday, so I threw together an 800 point Mid-Republican Rome v Carthage FOG game to demonstrate the rules to Tom. I hadn’t appreciated before how many units the Romans can have at 800 points (16 to the Carthaginian 12) which made my job as Hannibal even harder – breaking superior Legions is difficult enough at the best of times 🙂
Clash of battlelines
Tom was quite impressed with the rules, even when he couldn’t seem to make a kill roll to save his life. I got myself into a bit of a pickle trying to work out what would happen when a unit of African Veteran Spearmen got broken by a unit of Hastati half their size who then pursued them through a unit of skirmishers. I took it as a pursuit into fresh enemy, and even though the skirmishers broke themselves and ran through the spears who had burst through them, I stopped the Romans short of pursuing into the spears again. I need to do some research to find out if that was correct or not.
Pursuit
We got to try out some elephants as well, and Tom failed to kill any even before I remembered you had to add 1 to the kill roll when rolling to lose a base 🙂 Nonetheless it was great to get elephants back on the table again – last time was using my 28mm Hinchliffe Sassanid elephants with WRG rules in the late 1970’s.
Elephants rampant
We finished after 3 turns, with neither side winning in the centre (though the Carthaginians had killed the most stands and the Romans were 6 points towards their breakpoint while the Carthaginians were 4 towards theirs). My right flank was up in the air, though my elephants had penetrated and wiped out a Roman Hastati unit there – meanwhile on my left flank, I was winning the large cavalry melee with the superior Gallic chaps.
What was interesting was how effective the Romans could be in one melee and really brittle in the next due to their small unit sizes – I may need to combine the 4 base infantry units into 8 base units to make them more durable.
Cavalry melee
We’re keen to give this set another go soon, though I’ve just got an e-mail from Lancashire Games – the new Ancient rule set “Pulse of Battle” from Brent Oman is available for pre-order – oh-oh…..
This War without an Enemy 
Really nice looking figures. 4 bases Romans can be brittle (especially in version 2) I tend to put Superiors on 4s and Average in 8s with 2 & 4 Triarii respectively. Roman Cavalry is very weak part of army being only average when most others are superior and generally more plentiful. Glad you are enjoying FOG.
Pulse of Battle is inbound from Brent as we speak 🙂
Hi Gary, the Romans were superior with elite Triari so I guess the unit sizes were about right – just the dice rolls that were rubbish! I was looking for a pre-order deal on Pulse of Battle to get the quality sequence deck but never saw one in the Piquet store or Brent’s blog – how did you order yours?
The pre-order deal was through the Piquet Yahoo group. Brent posted the offer there and you had to email him that you wanted in. He then sent you a PayPal invoice when the product was ready. He also signed the copies.
Thanks Dave – missed that. Even though I am a member of that group, with the advent of Blogs and TFL setting up a forum, I don’t tend to go on Yahoo Groups much these days. Hopefully the cards will appear in the Piquet store at some point. Norman