Historical War Reenactment - Vandal War

[melm]

Dear armchair generals,

Do you want to act as a general to experience the glorious deeds accomplished by Belisarius? Or do you want to alter the history result to fight as Vandal generals? Here we are. I'd rather not call it tournament because in this reenactment players have to play in a group to act as one side and play against the other group. If you are interested in sort of grand campaign, please join to have a try.

Grand campaign map.

vandal war map.jpg (222.55 KiB) Viewed 2387 times

What's different from the other ongoing tournament is that I limit the scale to the theatrical conflict instead of continental territory conquest. Our main theatre is part of North Africa.


Map Legends and Terrain Movement Cost
For each turn, each player has 12 movement points(MP). The road has the least movement cost and the mountain hex has the highest movement cost. Sea hex is impassable.
Road costs 1 MP
Grassland costs 2 MP
hills costs 3 MP
desert and dunes costs 4 MP
mountains cost 8 MP
As the cities are connected with the roads, so if you move through city, it has the same cost as road.

City

city legend.jpg (2.57 KiB) Viewed 2387 times

grassland

grassland legend.jpg (1.65 KiB) Viewed 2387 times

[melm]

hills

hill legend.jpg (2.44 KiB) Viewed 2383 times

desert

deseart legend.jpg (1.88 KiB) Viewed 2382 times

dunes

dunes legend.jpg (2.37 KiB) Viewed 2382 times

[melm]

moutains

mountain legend.jpg (2.47 KiB) Viewed 2380 times

sea

sea legend.jpg (1.75 KiB) Viewed 2380 times

roads

road legend.jpg (1.93 KiB) Viewed 2380 times

Zone of control

The army that players control and the cities have the zone of control. The city's control radius is one hex and army's is two. That means, one army can't pass through the city or the army within their control radius.

War Points and Victory conditions

Each side has the initial points 4 x #of players each side. For example, if each side has 5 players, the initial points are 4x5 = 20 points.
Each battle victory earns 4 points.
Each city or supply depot conquered earns 2 points.
If the enemy’s army is forced to retreat, the retreat side loses 1 point.
If one player needs to call local ally or mercenary to join the battle, it costs(loses) 1 point. As Vandal list is not a flexible one, Vandal doens't have such penalty for this campaign.

Either side reaches the 20*#of players each side wins the campaign. Or if the Vandals lost all their cities and gain no city in the next turn, Vandals lost the campaign.

FOG of War

The spotting radius is 4 hexes for each army. After each turn, I will post the theatre situation with spotted army on each side.

Engagement Rules

The grand campaign goes like WEGO mode. Each player messages me their movement route to me. If two armies are within each other’s control zone, the battle begins. If more than one army is within the enemy’s control zone, then we have to check whether there is outflank condition. If two armies can outflank one army, the outflanked army has to retreat 1 hex and lose 1 point, if there’s not space to retreat, it gets annihilated. If it retreats to another enemy’s army control zone, it has to engagement the enemy and have a battle.

If one army lost the battle, then it reforms in the nearest city or supply depot, then march to the battlefield.

The battle terrain choice is according to the map terrain. If two armies are in two different terrain hexes, the battle happens
1)in the middle of the hex if two armies are not next to each other but within the control zone;
2)in the hex that the army faces away from the other army

Initial Army Position and Army list
Byzantine Expedition armies start from the supply depot(hex 22,17). Army List: Byzatine 493-550AD
Vandal armies start from Carthago(hex 19,4) Army List: Vandals 442-499 or Vandals 500-534

[ahuyton]

That sounds like a lot of fun. Belisarius has long been a heroic figure for me, but I would be happy to join either side.

[melm]

If you have the interest, please join. If you have questions, please post and ask!

Participants

Byzantine side
Karvon

Vandal side


either side
ahuyton
MadMaxBot

[melm]

Map with coordinates.

Map The Blank 2021-01-30T08_56_23.815Z.png (534.9 KiB) Viewed 2346 times

[kronenblatt]

I really like the concept!

So each player would command an individual army (in this case: some as Vandals, some as Romans) moving from hex to hex?

When do battles occur?

[melm]

I really like the concept!

So each player would command an individual army (in this case: some as Vandals, some as Romans) moving from hex to hex?

When do battles occur?

Thanks for the interest. I finished my posts above.
So yes, each player command their army, with no allies. If the player wants ally in their army, Byzantine or Vandal, it costs them 1 war point. Each player needs to tell me their route from hex to hex and I arrange the battle according to the engagemtn rule.

[kronenblatt]

Excellent with coordinates on the map. And I believe the map would work well (maybe even better) with only the color coding and without the symbols.

Also, here's a LINK to a great hex map over dark age Britain in case someone wants to do something similar there.

[MadMaxBot]

This is really kool melm. What a great idea! Im in for sure bro!

[Karvon]

What sort of time limit, if any, do you have in mind for battles to be resolved? Given my timezone, it's normally difficult for me to do really fast paced games. If you're thinking a turn a day, so roughly 24 days max for a game, I could handle that easily enough.

If so, I'd be up for serving as a Byzantine general.

Karvon

[Nosy_Rat]

Doesn't Vandal list for the period consist of like one unit type or something like that? I suspect playing it in the campaign may become boring pretty fast.

[Karvon]

Doesn't Vandal list for the period consist of like one unit type or something like that? I suspect playing it in the campaign may become boring pretty fast.

Yeah 5-25 armored lancers and 0-2 LH jls. Not exactly a flexible list.

[melm]

Doesn't Vandal list for the period consist of like one unit type or something like that? I suspect playing it in the campaign may become boring pretty fast.

It's a valid point. I didn't know that the Vandals lost their Moorish ally in 500-534 list. We can use Vandal 442-499 list as an alternative army, which has the Moorish ally. I will ease the rule of calling ally for Vandals. Only keep the rule for the Byzantines, who only has Bedouin .

[Karvon]

Why not just eliminate the cost for allies for both sides? There are drawbacks with allies given the reductions in your own troop types numbers and the sometimes not so useful minimums with the allies.

[deeter]

Great concept for a meaningful campaign, but with the DL starting I shall have to sit this one out. If it's a success, I hope to see another campaign maybe with more versatile armies?

Deeter

[melm]

Why not just eliminate the cost for allies for both sides? There are drawbacks with allies given the reductions in your own troop types numbers and the sometimes not so useful minimums with the allies.

Because in my view from DL experience, people want ally to compensate the weakness of the vanilla list. So in general, players who choose ally should have some cost. But I don't want to penalize too much, thus I set it just for 1 point.

[melm]

Great concept for a meaningful campaign, but with the DL starting I shall have to sit this one out. If it's a success, I hope to see another campaign maybe with more versatile armies?

Deeter

No problem. At least I saw people have the interest in such form. Perhaps I don't post it at the right time, but I just can't postpone it when the idea flashes through my mind.

[olin0111]

Very interesting idea for a more hex&counter wargame'y campaign! I'd like to try it, preferably as Vandals.

I also have two questions:

1) How do you take a city? I understand that you just move to a vacant city to conquer it and if there is an enemy army occupying a city then you just fight an open field battle. There will be no siege rules, correct?

2) What timetable would you prefer for campaign turns and battles?

[kronenblatt]

... I just can't postpone it when the idea flashes through my mind. ...

That's good, melm, because this is and should be a great place to try out, refine, and develop ideas together! I, for one, got inspiration from this idea of yours to think about something similar (or maybe completely different, but still) based off a hex map of Dark Age Britain.

Which in the end will make us have more fun and FoG2 to stay relevant and interesting to play.