My Blog List

Sunday 13 January 2013

Dux Bellorum with Double points on Impetus bases doesn’t work


Particularly when using 2 shieldwall based armies.  I took Romano British against Kev’s Late Romans and after a couple of hours of play we had each lost a skirmishing cavalry unit and I don’t think that any of the other units had lost more than 1 or at the most 2 cohesion points.
The issue remains the use of leadership points to negate hits, particularly against units that already have a high cohesion value.  Hitting on fives or fives and sixes when up to three hits can be taken off is vicious amusement.  The problem is that given the choice of an additional attacking dice roll (hitting on a 4, 5 or 6 depending on troop type) or a 100% chance of negating a hit the maths will always favour negative use

Earlier games, using 32 points and normal base sizes, had been too short for a good evening’s play, which is why we increased the numbers so substantially.   One other change to the rules is that instead of using base widths for moving and shooting we used half base widths giving most cavalry a 24cm which did not seem too excessive.
My plan was to use superior numbers of cavalry on the flanks to win there and then sweep round whilst my centre of shieldwall and the better cavalry held back to suck the Late Roman centre in.

What actually happened was inconclusive sparring on the flanks and then once the two lines closed more inconclusive sparring in the middle.  In short one of the most boring wargames I have ever played.
We have not given up on Dux Bellorum though.  Our intention is to try again with some restriction (yet to be decided) on the negative use of leadership points. 

The one substantial improvement on the other games we have played was the look of the battle.  Much more impressive.  I think we will be keeping the Impetus bases.
I had some photos but it seems blogger no longer allows one to copy a photo in from your PC so I will have to see what other options there are.  Something about Picassa albums???

5 comments:

  1. It sounds as though you've reached the storage limit on Picasa if you can't upload pics directly from your PC. What size (pixels x pixels) are the pics you're trying to upload? If they aren't less than 800 x 800, you might want to try reducing them to that size and then uploading.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Don't think you've reached your limit dave as you've not posted very many. It may be as TamsinP says, the piccies may be too big. I always reduce mine to no more than 1200 x 900, which is still pretty large BTW.I think your having a few IT probs with blogger. I think you may need tp play about more. :-)

    Interesting batrep and rules review BTW.

    ReplyDelete
  3. When using LPs to negate hits roll a die for each LP - 4,5,6 negates the hit. Otherwise, nothing.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks for the comments - I will have a look at picture size

    ReplyDelete
  5. Excellent observation about how the math does not work. When playing Saga, I always look at the odds for a Defense die saving versus using the die for Attack. An auto-save is too powerful.

    ReplyDelete