Slitherine

I played my first game against Later swiss last night. My army list was fairly simple, I had loads of light horse, Greek spearmen and some shock cavalry. My opponent had pikemen, skirmishers and erm, more pikemen.

I attempted to hit one wing with all of the spearmen and heavy cavalry whilst skirmishing the rest. My opponent set up with the pike behind a skirmish screen.

Basically the pikemen duffed up my spearmen and my skirmishers butchered the light foot, before starting on the phalanx. I enjoyed the game, although understandably it was a bit slow. Didn't see anything mind bogglingly wrong although it is only my first game! I had difficulty finding some parts of the rules, but I expect this was down to my lack of familiarity (I still can't find the bit about Fragmented groups having to pass a CMT to move closer to enemy!) There seemed a lot of actual information in the appendices which is not included in the main rule book (or maybe more difficult to find).

The main thought was that the Light Horse were extremely powerful (I realise that this is historical). I first of all shot up all of the light foot (mainly because of my smaller units) and then started on the phalanx. The Phalanx can never make contact in a charge and it is therefore extremely easy to take them out of the game whilst concentrating elsewhere. The main trouble for the Swiss was that the light foot were in sixes and I was in fours - therefore he was only getting two dice shooting on each of my BG's and hitting on a four normally resulted in only one hit which was ignored. Because the foot were in sixes I was getting three dice and therefore much more of a chance to actually get their morale to degrade. I realise that there are disadvantages to being smaller - but in this case it was a major advantage.

Another point I noticed is that there was game on the table next to mine and they were using the armies in the rulebook (Later Carthaginian and Roman). They attempted to use the full deployment rules but couldn't because the armies terrain types aren't included - might be worth doing so?

Dave, they will be at some stage, however, the terrain has been done after the lists and hasn't yet been added to any

Dave, they will be at some stage, however, the terrain has been done after the lists and hasn't yet been added to any

Ah. I have just checked the main beta testers army list thingy and they aren't. I was (apparently) given special dispensation to use Skythians - which do have their terrain types included

How is this going to be handled at Leeds?

Swiss vs skythian - a nice extreme starter.

Territories will go up on the wall for all armies used.

Pikes can walk LH off the table once you are more up to speed - so it gets a more even match up.

See you there - I am off to pack my Indians.

Si

Once I get all of the army lists in from people (we are nearly there) I'll ask Richard to provide me with a complete list of terrain for each army. I'll post this with other information on the wall at Leeds.

Swiss vs skythian - a nice extreme starter.

The reason for this match-up was we played exactly the same game in DBM the previous week and the Skythians won 31-1.

Using Art of War, when we finished the Skythians were 4-3 up (fairly drawish), however I suspect that the Swiss would have broken in the imminent future, with the skythians probably losing 6 attrition points in total.