Thanks all,

Will pass on your recommendations

John

Hi there,

Does anybody know of any companies in the business of buying painted wargames figures - a friend of mine is thinking of selling up his Kushite and Late Roman armies

John

I think there is a reasonable amount of evidence that the Companion cavalry as fielded by Phillip II were a) new and b) fought in a distinctive manner to previous Macedonian armies, where cavalry do not seem to have had a shock role and often seem to have fought on foot as hoplites - in an army othe...

Hi, cast my vote for interpenetration - nobody has tried this against me but I would be pissed off if they did. I have done a bit of gentle stats on the BRITCON results and there is no evidence that any type of army does significantly better than would be expected by chance, not Dom Rom swarms and n...

Just to amuse myself, I did some stats on Britcon - the late period, I could do the same with early if people are interested. The tests were with a non-parametric test (Mann-Wilcoxon rank sum test for those who know what that is) The armies in the late period consisted of 4 cavalry armies (Merovingi...

And an even simpler solution is the one that Pete mentioned was thought about at playtesting, that roads go down last in the order of terrain placement, after all other terrain is placed. That would also make them more useful for the Roman practice of driving roads through unfavourable terrain.

And, having visited India a couple of years ago, I can confirm that Indian fortresses (in Rajasthan at least), very often have specific defences to stop Elephants pushing down gates (spiky stuff riveted firmly to the outside of the gate and narrow corners to make it hard to maneuver one's elephant)....

Or just say that not every single Roman legionary unit is veteran. The average ones are not nearly so tough, without the Skilled Swordsman. Also, it seems from a cursory examination of the Wikipedia article that there may have been some fortifications involved at the end, when the Romans are trying ...

Hi Mario,

The map for the Successors game is pretty good - covers the area you are interested in, with an area movement system and major cities shown.

Just reissued by GMT games

http://www.gmtgames.com/success3/SUCCESSORS_MAP-3.jpg

As I understand it, the advantage of the large number of BGs are two-fold 1. The army is harder to break - thus the player using it is less likely to give his opponent 5 pts for defeating his army, and his opponent needs to kill more BGs to remove points from him in normal play. The downside of this...

Logically, though, the requirement to fight the combat in the next impact phase is just a game design convenience to avoid resolving combats in any old phase, so shouldn't prevent the cav getting a whopping before they break off

John

Alternatively just move up the unit causing the damage on the assumption that they are pressing in on the trapped enemy a la Cannae - maybe this is the nearest thing in FOG to a pushback

Thanks for the thoughts Dave, Actually it says 'Commanders bases represent only the commander and a few aides. Therefore they do not obstruct the movement of other troops. Commanders can interpenetrate any friendly troops in any direction and vice-versa' So, the interpenetration is specifically frie...

If he could squeeze past the Bosporan LH and the Roman Cavalry to get to the routing cataphract 2 unit he is OK if not he is kaput. All of this is on Pg50 Well, not quite, it says nothing about how big a gap a general needs to have between enemy troops to allow him to pass through. We know they int...

http://s716.photobucket.com/albums/ww166/jcmedhurst/FOGDeadCommanderQuestion.jpg Hi there, Question that came up in a game today. Cataphract Unit 1 breaks in the melee phase and routs, he can't deviate round Bosporan LH (max 1 base slippage, and this is not enough) so the unit disappears. The quest...

That was against Romans so not the same issue, there they would be even at impact, up in melee so more likely to win and less likely to take base losses. I am thinking about Raphia, Paraitacene and all the others, where when they were opposed by a phalanx the elephants tended to be deployed on the f...

I agree with you that we don't want Hellenistic armies putting the Heffalumps in the middle of the line, not realistic and not historical, my problem is with the performance of Indian elephants at the Hydaspes where the phalanx had a pretty hard time of it. Disruputed pikes obviously don't do so wel...

Hi there, The problem isn't that they lose, that is right, the problem is the speed and severity of the loss. About one in three combats, by the end of the first impact and melee phase, the elephants will be fragmented or broken, vs 1 in 20 for the pikes. This is pretty savage and is mostly due to e...

As best I can calculate it, using a spreadsheet with a probability tree approach, and taking account of minuses on cohesion tests due to elephants and front rank elephants counting as 2 bases Assuming 2 wide 4 deep pike vs 2 wide 1 deep elephants in open terrain, with no prior disruption For Impact ...

Hi, are the Abyssinians covered by the Axumites?

John