Slitherine

I recently played 25mm FoG at the challenge. They were all at 650 points using armies from Storm of Arrows and Rise of Rome. The competition had 10 competitors.

To start off with I would like to say I had five great games as well as one practice game on the Friday night, which means I have now played six games of 25mm. Although I have played lots of 15mm.

What really struck me thinking about my games afterwards was that at least three of them were decided because when a BattleGroup broke, it caused the units around it to drop cohesion and because of rear support that got broken through this caused about three BG's to break immediately afterwards.

I don't have any problem with this, however, I took (what I thought) was quite a small, powerful army. It turned out that I was by no meanst the smallest army with only 9 BG's. In fact, I think all of the armies ranged from 9-11 BG's.

The upshot is that if you do get a bit unlucky at some point (and this did happen notably in one game to my opponent) then the game is over.

I realise that we are only using a small sub-set of armies available at this time - how have other 25mm players found using different armies and what is the ususal size of your armies?

Has anybody tried 700 points?

I think 700 would be Ok on a 6x4 table , any bigger and I think you might need to go 7x4 or 8x4 so you can fit everything on and have some room for manouver.
800 points in 25mm would be good on an 8x4 table.

Would agree that there is probably different things to take into account when designing a 25mm army for a competition game at 650 points in 25mm, have not really managed to conclude what the factors might be.

You are correct in saying that the armies were quite small, this however may be a function of people getting carried away with the thought that a 6 x 4 table is small for 25mm, so people are choosing and designing narrow armies. In most of my games I doubt if any of my opponents armies covered only about half the table - as did mine. As for the lack of reserves, this may be a function of the same thought process, people think the table will be small, take a small 'hard' army and then think 'bugger, thats narrow, best spread it out as wide as possible'.

In our game, my second line of Triarii held your victorious troops that it faced for the rest of the game and I had some Hastati that broke, rally and rejoin the fight. OK I did lose but it was close and it shows that it is possible to keep going after an initial reverse. Would be fair to say however, that it is probably not possible to avoid a defeat by arsing about - you have try to break your opponents BGs to pull the situation back.

When put against some feedback from 15mm that after the initial breakthrough the game broke down into units chasing about to try and get the final few vital attrition points it may be that a 6x 4 table is a little to big for 800 points for 15mm but the game is well designed to give a balanced game in 3 1/2 hours at 650 for 25mm. Which would be kind of funny in light of all the angst about 'how much bigger a table and MU do we need to make the game the same as 15mm'. Perhaps the question should be 'how much smaller a table do we need to make a 15mm game similar to a 25mm one'.

All the games I had, win or lose, were fun which would suggest table size and army size must be about right. The most frustrating game I had was chasing Parthian LH about. The fact that it is difficult to pin down a LH army in 25mm is probably proof that the table is plenty big enough.

Is all very interesting and will be fun to figure out what is the optimum army choice / tactics.

We certainly did not experience any problems with army size at last years 25mm competition.

We found it very hard to have a draw and yes cavalry armies can work in 25mm.

You may not have seen the end of my Sassanids just yet

Don

For a 6'x4' table I think 650 pts is about right. It allows just enough room for Cav/LH armies to operate without totally dominating foot sloggers, and by taking some risks the foot sloggers can occupy the whole table and try to push the Cav off.

We did try 700pts for a few games but foundi it was just too much a clash of heavy infantry to be interesting. Reminiscent of the 25mm DBM competition scene where, say, Parthians were not a viable army. Tried the Parthians last weekend at the Challenge and they worked really well - 3 wins 1 draw 1 loss.

Dave