I realised today that I haven't posted a picture of the elephants that will stand (possibly all too briefly!) before the Carthaginian front line in the Zama game. Here are 6 of the 10; a mix of Essex, Gripping Beast and (converted) Renegade. The other 4 are in the collection of Dr. Simon.
15 comments:
Super stuff!
Good luck with these - hope they don't wreck your army
Looking great, Simon. We're going to use twelve elephants, at a relatively poor morale rating to reflect their performance during the battle. The casualty figures you made will come in really hand.
Cheers
Paul
Hi Paul, we've had trouble balancing the performance of the elephants. In a play test last night, they made a considerable (and rather un-historical) mess of the Roman lines; we'll need to downgrade their impact in the next game.
Hi Simon, that's interesting. I think we'll definitely need to test the game around the time of the battle day before we take it to some of the Scottish shows. Was your problem a result of the relative unpredictability of the game system, or more to do with the "weight" of the units?
Maybe we can learn from your experience!
Cheers again
Paul
Very nice. I like the mix of figures which gives them a much more 'real' look.
As for balancing them out, fry Field of Glory rules. They seem to treat elephants in a way that works well.
Hi Paul,
We doubled the number of elephant units from 5 to 10, whilst decreasing their combat effectiveness. Despite this decrease I found that, by concentrating the charge on one point of the Roman line, I was overwhelm the velites and a couple of elephants broke through and inflicted more casualties on the hastati and principes than I'd like to have seen.
I imagine we will either revert to the original 5 units, or increase the fighting value of the velites. Other than that the game went very well.
Hi Allen, I'm afraid I didn't take to FoG; found it a bit slow and slightly serious. Beer'n'pretzels, for me! ;-)
Excellent work on these guys. Though I really hope they die in the game. The amazing dead elephants deserve their place in the table as well!
Cheers!
Thanks Dogui. Last night some were still alive 90 mins into the game, which felt like too long to me!
I couldn´t stand more than 10 minutes in front of those elephants...
Fantastic work, BTW ;)
firstly great work on the Elephonts, quick question, Why is one dude holding like a mallet and chisel/ nail thingo ??? whats with that ? cheers.
Thanks Hetairoi!
Hi Extraordinarii, it is the emergency braking system. In case of panic, sever the elephant's spinal cord using the mallet/chisel provided.
Are you using any special rules for the jumbos, BRB? I have one or two tweaks that we used for a Zama scenario somewhere and could look them out if you'd like a gander. Your models, as always, look magnificent. Cheers
Hi Prufrock,
More or less as C&C (which handles routing elephants quite well), except additionally:-
"Raw Carthaginian elephants- when activated, or able to conduct a momentum advance, they must advance as far as possible. If they end their movement adjacent to enemy Light Infantry, they must battle these in preference to other troop types."
We hope to be able to channel some of them down the lanes we have left within the Roman Legions.
Nasty, I new I should not have asked the question, I had a feeling... lol
Hi Ex, I guess they were a bit of an unguided missile!
Post a Comment