A day out with Lost Battles -

Work's finally starting to ease up, and yesterday I headed off down the road with my 15 mm Successor armies in the boot of the car to play a couple of battles of Phil Sabin's rules (Lost Battles).  Since Aaron was keeping the record of what went on, he'll no doubt be posting a proper write up on his blog soon, but here's my brief recollection. (edit: Here's the link to his first post, on Raphia)

First up was Raphia.  We followed the scenario booklet OOB, despite my misgiving about it in several key points; most notably in that Phil arbitrarily reduced the fighting abilities of the Seleucid phalanx to give the Ptolemaic side a better chance of winning the battle.  I took the Ptolemaic side while Aaron played the part of Antiochos III.  My left crumbled as in real life, forcing Ptolemy to seek shelter behind my phalanx; unlike real life, Aaron wasn't forced to pursue my defeated troops, and thus his cavalry were free to sweep around my rear.

Young Ptolemy has managed to extricate himself from his stricken left, and is attempting to urge on his central phalanx, who are alas being sorely pressed by their Seleucid opposites.  At the top, my victorious right is taking time to mop up the Seleucid left wing.

On my right, I broke his left, although not as swiftly as was required, and the central clash of pike was resolved in favour of the Seleucids, as my army's morale was shot by being surrounded and having my camp ransacked (there is no possibility of defending a camp in Lost Battles with just "baggage guards",  a very different handling of things to one of Phil's previous rule sets: Legio ; you need to leave out some of you normal troops to do the job in Lost battles - a point I had forgotten).  As a result my entire army routed (i.e. real-life surrendered) with the exception of a single pike unit on my right, giving Aaron a comprehensive victory.

Here's the scene just before my army broke and ran.  The unit on my left didn't make it off the board in time; that pesky elephant on the Selecucid left held up my victorious right.  Not a great day out for my lads!

Next up was Ipsos.  This isn't one of the scenarios featured in Lost Battles, due to the lack of decent sources - numbers and troop compositions can be ascertained reasonably reliably, but deployment details are very murky, so we used the free deployment rules.  I took the Antigonids while Aaron took the allies.  Each side had two generals, and the Fighting Values were somewhat larger than for Raphia: 72 for the Antigonids and 79 for the allies.

Here things also went well for the underdog - which happened to me this time around...  Demetrius' charge on my left was well supported by high dice rolls, and Seleukos was killed attempting to rally his cavalry.  The Allied elephants were deployed across the battle field, but didn't achieve all that much, and my right also put in good work, so Lysimachos was well boxed-in in the allied centre.

Hmm, this scene looks familiar!  Obviously Antigonos being on a horse instead of a litter has lifted his army's spirit!

Once Demetrius's horse swept around the allied rear, with the allied elephants in front of their phalanx rather than behind it, the allied morale collapsed, handing me as big a victory as Aaron had extracted from me in the previous game.  A great couple of games.

Zombicide

Still flat-out at work, what with it being the busiest week of the year in terms of teaching hours for me, but I did manage to take time out on Sunday to go to a beer festival, and while I was at it, get a couple of my non-gaming friends introduced to Zombicide.  This is a very much tongue-in-cheek boardgame pitting the players ("survivors") against swarms of game-controlled zombies.

The game comes with 70-odd plastic minis, which is one of the reasons it also comes with a rather hefty price tag...

The photo is courtesy of one of my friends who is keen to have some more games - we couldn't play all that much given our kids running around, and other people muscling in on our precious table space under the shade (it was over 30 degrees, so being out in the sun would have been death).

The minis are begging to be painted up properly, but that of course means I now have the makings of a plastic pile to complement the lead mountain sitting in the bottom of my gaming cupboards.  Such is the price of progress, I suppose!

The Notitia Dignitatum -

Work-wise (as in "real" work), this is the busiest time of the year for me, so I've not being doing much in terms of modelling, to say nothing of gaming.  But I have spent a while pottering about in one of the dim corners of my long-neglected website - updating some of my Notitia Dignitatum pages.  The so-called Notitia Dignitatum (Latin for "Register of Dignitaries") is a unique document dating from ca. 400 AD (albeit only in various copies made a bit over 1000 years later) that describes the bureaucracy of the late Roman Empire.

And why is this of interest?  Because a great deal of that bureaucracy involved the army - by far the most important component of the Imperial machinery.  And more specifically, the document records not only the names and stations of all the many hundreds of units in the army, both East and West, but also their shield patterns.  In colour no less!  Not all of them, alas, for some units' patterns are missing for reasons still unexplained, particularly for the Eastern cavalry, but there are still quite a few illustrated.  Over 280 in fact...

Click to see the page enlarged and read the unit names.

Here, for example, is a page from the manuscript copy currently lying in the French national library in Paris, showing the shield patterns of 12 legionary units assigned to one of the Eastern central field armies, that under the command of the "Magister Militum per Thracias" - the Commander of the Soldiers in Thrace (you can also make out images showing through from the other side of the page, most notably against shields with white backgrounds).

So this truly is a unique document.  If you own a late Imperial Roman army, you don't have to make an educated guess as to which units carried what kind of shields - this thing tells you!  (Let's just ignore for the moment the almost endless possibilities of manuscript corruption over the long centuries...)

And I've been slowly adding images taken from the various manuscript versions of the document to my website, so people can compare and contrast the various versions (some are clearly better than others - but what constitutes "better" is often in the eye of the beholder...).  I'll probably never "finish" the job - because with hundreds of units, each shown in multiple manuscripts - the task I have undertaken is truly vast in scope.  But I'm clearly an obsessive idiot at times, so why not?

OT-62s -

I've just received some print-outs of the TOPAS and OT-62 models I described in my post of December 12.  They've come out quite well, given I ordered them in the cheapest ("white soft & flexible") plastic, although the wheels were really too finely sculpted to be very noticeable.

OT-62 variants...

If I'm bored one day I might make up some alternative versions with deeper wheel cut-outs purely for the WSF plastic - but this will necessitate making the tracks wider than scale.  It might also be a big job, time wise - I'll have to inspect the (virtual) model and see, because sometimes shifting a bunch of components laterally is a doddle; sometimes it is almost impossible, depending on how they are connected together.

...and Polish TOPAS variants.

I've also made up and printed out some bridges that I will use on my terrain boards - I want them to be removable in case they get blown in-game by engineers.  Bridges make excellent scenario objectives, because it doesn't matter how many amphibious vehicles you have in your attack force, the logistical train will be carried on trucks - lots of trucks - and they need bridges. 

Making terrain boards -

I've been asked to describe how I make my terrain boards - but since this required a lot of explanation, I've made it into a complete new new section: it can be accessed from the menu at the upper right.