Slitherine

I had the Romans

4 Eq Sagittarii LH A D U bow
4 Illyricani LH A D U javelins LS
6 Alan Merc LH S U U Bow S
4 Archers LF P D U Bow
4 Militia MF P U P LS
4 Equites Cavalry S D A LS S
4 Equites Cavalry S D A LS S
4 Limitanei aux MF P D P LS S
6+3 Field army legionaries HF S D A IF SS
LF S D U bow
6+3 Field army auxilia MF S D P LS S
LF S D U bow
6+3 Field army legionaries HF S D A IF SS
LF S D U bow
2 Light BoltShooters LA A D
2 Light BoltShooters LA A D
FC+2 TC

Lance Flint played the Ottomans with :
4 x 4 Timariots superior Cav Bow Sword
2 x 2 Delis superior Cav Lance Sword
2 x Mobs
4 Janissaries superior LF sling
4 Janissaries superior LF firearm
3 x 4 Akinjis LH bow
1 x 4 Djanbazan superior LH bow sword
2 x 8 Azabs LF bow
1 x 4 Iyalars Superior MF IF sword

Lance took no MF bow troops, so we didn??™t test the new rules for them. I think he designed the list before the new modification came out. The main aim was for me to see what super shooty cav can do as I??™d not come up against them before.

The terrain ended up with my side open except for a small wooded hill to my right rear. His side was open except it was divided into two sections of 1/3 and 2/3 of the width by a pair of vineyards.

My plan was to skirmish with LH on the 1/3 of the table to the left of the vineyards, attack through the vineyards with auxilia (aimed at his camp) and to the right of them with the legions. My cavalry was in reserve to cover the flank of the legions and the artillery were set up one BG on each flank.

Lance??™s plan was to attack with a large force of skirmishers on my left, backed up by one Timariot BG, screen the legions with single-rank Timariots and attack round the open flank with the Delis and a BG of Akinjis. The vineyards were held by a BG of LF archers plus the handgunners with the Iyalars well behind them.

We played 8 or 9 bounds in 3 hours excluding setup time.

My generals were used:
1. CinC to manage the long legion/auxilia battleline, then with auxilia to help CMTs and combat.
2. SG with one artillery BG to get it moving . When the artillery was in range, he moved to a Cavalry BG
3. SG with the LH skirmish battleline to give it an initial 2nd move, then help it fall back facing the enemy, although having looked more closely at the rules this morning I find that the latter was not legal. BL can only advance or do 2nd moves (which have to be advances anyway).

My units with 6 MF/HF plus 3 LF archers were deployed on a frontage of 4:
1st rank: 4 HF or MF
2nd rank: 2 HF/MF + 2 LF
3rd rank: 1 LF

This gave me a bit more frontage at a minimal cost in combat dice and would allow the LF to shoot from the second rank in the shooting phase (in practice they never had enough dice to shoot).

Results:

On my left, my LH were forced back to the baseline and one BG was routed. The Alans made a comeback, broke one BG and had another fragmented by the time we stopped. More detail on this to follow. The Timariots and one LH BG came round behind the vineyard to threaten the rear of my main line, but there was not enough time for them to do anything. Some LF bow rushed forward for a shoot out with my artillery. I had 4 dice to their 3. However, I needed 3 hits to force a test (7 bases) whereas they only needed one to make me test and it was always at -1 for 1HP2B and -1 for being near the table edge. I broke in three shots. This felt as though it favoured the LF too much, but that might be due to perceptions coloured by DBM rather than history.

In the Vineyard, the Aux Palatina caught the evading handgunners and very slowly wiped them out. Then the Iyalars charged and quickly fragmented my BG, then slowly lost while the Auxilia recovered. Weight of numbers counted here in the long term. Even when fragmented, I still had 4 dice plus a general fighting against 4 dice. Meanwhile the Limitanei Auxilia, ignoring numerous LF, turned left to threaten the flank of some Timariots, but the LF quickly broke them by shooting before they could charge.

The legions advanced as fast as possible, occasionally getting close enough to charge the Timariots and cause them to evade, in one case off the table. Three Timariot BG were tied up in this, it was late in the game when Lance realised he could pull one away to go round the flank. Timariot shooting was ineffective against my armoured foot.

On my right flank, the lancers and my cavalry faced off. The artillery disrupted one BG before they charged. I was a bit lucky and survived both impacts, after which I had the advantage in melee due to better armour and broke one lancer BG and was beating the other by the time we stopped.


End state:

I had lost 6 AP from 13 BG, Lance 7 AP from 17 BG.
Foreseeable future 8/13 to 10/17
Longer term I would probably have picked up 6 more AP from the mobs and camp. Lance would have got at least 4 AP from the camp and remaining artillery with his light troops in my rear. A close run thing.

The light horse battle:

My 14 bases of LH were facing a continuous line of 12 LH and 12 LF backed up by 4 cavalry. Initially I survived the shooting barrage, but my shooting back was spread out over several BG so much of it was ineffective. One enemy LH BG was moving around my flank so I had to keep falling back. Then I found myself with the Sagittarii fragmented and Alans disrupted. The Sagittarii BG failed its CMT and had to extract itself with a 180 turn and move. The others just fell back 3 MU with two 180 turns.

At this point, the outflanking BG declared a charge on the rear of the Sagittarii and the front of the Alans. The Alans evaded, the Sagittarii broke. After the discussion on routs and broken troops on another thread, we decided to leave the rout until the end of the phase instead of following the existing rule and routing at once (if we had done that, there would have been no contact).

The Akinjis therefore contacted the broken Sagittarii. At the end of the phase, the Sagittarii routed and the Akinjis pursued, hitting the Alans. After consulting the rules, we concluded that this couned as a new charge and the Alans could evade again, which they did, so the pursuit ended in contact with the Sagittarii.

In the interbound the pursuit contacted the Alans again, this time in the rear. As they were at the table edge, I decided not to evade again, but stand and fight.

Next bound impact phase the Alans dropped to Fragmented for being hit in the rear. Only one element was in contact so it was 2 dice at ++ versus 1. We thought it a foregone conclusion that the Alans would be routed. Despite this, we drew the impact. (Having since done the sums, I can reveal that the Alans had a 72% chance of losing.) The Alans with 3 dice on + versus 4 on - then proceded to win the melee (49% chance) causing the Akinjis to drop to fragmented. I threw in a General to reinforce the success and soon had the Alans rallied and pursuing the broken Akinjis. They then ran into the Djanbazan. This time it was 5 bases versus 4, both sides superior with a general and I managed to get the upper hand again by the end of the game.

Issues:
Visibility: LF in a vineyard are invisible beyond 4 MU, but they can shoot to maximum range 6 MU. We couldn??™t find anything to say that shooting troops can??™t remain invisible (hence immune to shooting back). This is more of an issue shooting from the edge of a wood.

Break-offs: Shouldn??™t LF be able to break off from HF/MF?

Evading twice in one phase (see LH battle above): Is it allowed? Should it be? (My opinion is yes and yes).

Timing of rout of Fragmented troops who break due to being charged (see LH battle above): In this case routing at the end of the phase instead of before the chargers moved made a huge difference to events in the game. The chargers ended up doing a charge and 2 pursuits (so ended up in combat three moves ahead of supporting troops) instead of just a single charge into air. I think this was a bit of an unusual situation though.

CMT +1 for general with BG: Does the general have to move with the BG or can they leave him behind so he can move elsewhere? I think the answer is that he does NOT have to stay with the BG. This seems reasonable if we consider the test is for someone to give the order without the need to supervise its execution.

Broken targets for shooting: If the priority target is a broken BG (against which shooting is not resolved) , can you shoot something else instead?

Fragmented Pursuers: If they would pursue into new enemy, is this allowed? The rules say it is treated as a charge and they are not allowed to charge. Would disrupted pursuers need a CMT if their pursuit contacted fresh enemy?

Who conforms?: Pursuers contact new enemy in the interbound of (after) their own bound. In the enemy bound movement phase, do the pursuers conform or does the moving player conform?

LF charging: Can LF charge the rear of a mixed BG if only the rear rank is LF? ??¦If the rear rank is a mixture of LF and non-skirmishers (and would that depend on which elements they contact)?

Terrain placement: Lance thought it should be made even more explicit that the options to move or remove terrain by the non-placing player are options. Personally I think it??™s clear enough, but he likes things to be absolutely belt and braces clear.

lawrenceg wrote:Some LF bow rushed forward for a shoot out with my artillery. I had 4 dice to their 3. However, I needed 3 hits to force a test (7 bases) whereas they only needed one to make me test.

Not so. Artillery count as 2 bases per front rank base for 1HP3B or 1HP2B purposes.

(I think - don't have rules with me)

Luck:

My Alans, hit in the rear and fighting fragmented, ended up beating two enemy BGs.

Lance??™s handgunners, hit in the rear by double their number of Auxilia Palatina, held out for ages.

Both my armoured cavalry BG beat their protected lancer cavalry opponents.

My fragmented Aux Palatina hung on and beat steady impact foot swordsmen in a long melee.

All of these seemed like luck overturning the almost certain expected result.

However, I think in fact that our perception of an almost certainty is too optimistic. We expect any fragmented troops to have no chance of surviving in combat but if they have numbers in their favour then actually they have a good chance. Calculations show that even the astounding performance of my Alans was not quite as unlikely as a DBM 6-1.

In general (IMHO):

We perceive the games as full of freaky unlikely events. This is frustrating to players.

Those events are in fact not all that unlikely (as game probabilities).

Player frustration is therefore due to unrealistic expectations. In particular, players see game advantages as much more significant than they are in practice.

Example: Lance is always telling me how big a difference being superior makes.
In a 4 dice versus 4 dice at zero POA, the numbers are as follows:
Average have a 36 % chance of losing the combat versus average.
Superior have a 28 % chance of losing the combat versus average.
Overall there is only an 18% chance of superior changing who wins.
Superior makes a difference to the cohesion test about one time in six.
So the actual benefit of being superior is not all that big.

The question is:

Should we change the game probabilities to match our perception of the historical likelihood of various events, or should we change our perception of how unlikely unexpected results are?

For the example of my Alans above, although this was fairly unlikely in the game (about a 1-in-20 chance of them causing cohesion loss to the Akinjis), a historian would have reported the net result as typical light horse behaviour: The Alans apparently fled, but then turned on their pursuers and beat them.

My opinion at the moment is that the level of luck in the game is about right and that player frustration would be reduced if they:
a) recognised that individual advantageous factors in the game have relatively small effects and
b) looked at overall results as a historian would see them rather than the mechanisms that led to those results.

rbodleyscott wrote:

lawrenceg wrote:Some LF bow rushed forward for a shoot out with my artillery. I had 4 dice to their 3. However, I needed 3 hits to force a test (7 bases) whereas they only needed one to make me test.

Not so. Artillery count as 2 bases per front rank base for 1HP3B or 1HP2B purposes.

(I think - don't have rules with me)

Checks the rules:

Artillery do indeed count as 2 bases per front rank base for 1HP3B. Also if artillery cause 2 hits they force a test regardless of the sixe of the BG being shot.

Hammy