I worked with Ian last night on the deployment for the game, revisiting the deployment we tried out last year, and making a few minor tweaks to it. The game will be played with (slightly adapted) Command and Colours boardgame rules. We used single C&C blocks to work out exactly where the units will be positioned (each block represents 8-16 miniatures, or roughly 400 to 1000 real men).
Roman Left (above): the player will command the left flank cavalry and the left Allied Roman legion. His Carthaginian opponent will have a relatively small and somewhat outnumbered command!
Roman Centre (above): The Romans are deployed, behind a screen of velites, with gaps between the maniples to counter the Carthaginian elephants. The Roman centre player will command the other 3 legions. The Carthaginians are in three lines (mercenaries, levy, veterans) behind a screen of elephants. Pencils show where the section boundaries will be.
Roman Right (above): The Roman right player will command Masinissa's Numidian infantry and cavalry. Again, they heavily outnumber their Carthaginian/Numidian opponent.
We have also tentatively agreed a small number of special rules that, we hope, will recreate the poor performance of the Carthaginian elephants and levy on the day (I'll publish these later). What we need to do next, is to playtest the scenario two or three times to make sure it is balanced....
One small by-product of the planning is that we added a few more units of Carthaginian light troops, taking the total number of minis past 1400! At the same time, we reduced the number of elephants to 10, which will save me a fair bit of painting time. The width of the board remains unchanged at 16 feet.
5 comments:
Your planning via the C&C board looks quite professional. I'm not so much into grand scale battles, simply due to a lack of appropriate masses of miniatures. So, I stand in awe when watching your battle lines unfold. Keep up the great work!
Cheers
SG
Thanks, SG.
My mate Ian said last night that one of the benefits of C&C for very big wargames, is that you can playtest everything extensively using the blocks that come with the boardgames. Especially handy in this case, because I won't see half the miniatures until the day of the game!
This is going to be a lot of figures!
Can't wait to see it!
Hi Simon, I like the way you use the boardgame to provide a "feel" for the whole thing; good luck with producing the boards for the day itself. And of course once you have those, you've got them permanently!
We are going with something extremely close to your suggested deployment. We will be "tweaking" the Carthaginian cavalry wings to make them last a while against the masses arrayed against them. The Carthaginian right wing will be composed of "heavy" cavalry against "medium" equites. We are alos thinking of making Hannibal's Numidian contingent superior quality; I came across a reference in Brian Todd Carey's book to the effect that they were considered to be the best light horse in Africa. They will also of course be well outnumbered, but we want to make the game close, which means trying to find a way to model the interaction of the various components of both armies. It's going to hinge on whether or not we can get the balance right between what seems to have happened historically on the one hand, and the rules constraints on the other.
And it's going to be run on several occasions at shows, so it needs to be able to draw people in okay, and still be easy to understand.
Good luck with yours!
Paul
Thanks Paul.
We've left the Carthaginian wings relatively weak. In our game, the Carthaginians will be under pressure to win in the centre, before they (probably) lose on the wings!
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