Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Field of Battle: Ancients Playtest Photos

I'm too lazy to flip back and forth to identify the specific game pictures - so the game report photos will be intermixed between the 15mm Punic wars game and the 25mm Late Roman game.

Late Roman - army deployed.  Note the mixed spear/armor units.


Carthaginian phalanx rolls forward


View from behind the Carthaginian forces towards the Romans (booooooo).  The red pipe cleaners indicate the pilum capability of the units.  I think there might be less dominating markers!  In this game, each stand is a unit.


Late Roman cavalry square off.  Units are multiple stands in this game.

The lighter cavalry routs!


View from behind one of the Late Roman armies.  Love the look of these guys!


The Carthaginian line starts to fragment.  The Roman line looks organized...and ominous.


Barbarian unit prepares to engage in shock combat against a ballista.


I'll post the balance of the photos later.  The 15mm armies were provided by John Mumby and Terry Shockey; the 25mm armies were provided by Greg Cornell and Eric Miller.

Both games lasted approximately 3 hours and had a definite conclusion.  I'm currently working on the FoB: Ancients rules, hoping to publish by later this year.

7 comments:

  1. Later this year would be great! I thought nobody but me still had any Heritage 15mm Ancients. Cool!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Later this year sounds good to me..
    How well does it work using 1 stand to represent a unit..?? I'm asking because this might be an attractive scale for those of us with existing DBM/MM sized armies, and would even make DBA armies viable for smaller games.

    ReplyDelete
  3. It works fine with 1 stand per unit. The Punic wars game essentially had 2 DBA armies per side. A pretty big game, in effect (24 units per side). With single stands you end up using markers (or a roster...shudder) since you can't mark unit status by replacing or removing a stand, but the game plays the same otherwise.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Brent,

    The option for 1 stand per unit sounds like a winner to me..
    In addition to casualties/no of hits, is it necessary, when using single bases, to track unit formation in some way?

    ReplyDelete
  5. I am so glad to read that you are moving forward with this project. Out of curiosity, what base sizes do you plan to use(suggest)in the final product? I ask because "Basic Impetus" uses single stand units, with no stipulation as to how many figures must represent a unit. The unit base foot print is four times what it would be for the same thing in DBX /FOG e.g. four Samurai"blade" elements would make up one unit of samurai foot in Basic Impetus. Since there do not seem to be any fiddly formation rules in this game I figure I could use units based up for Basic impetus to play FoB:Ancients. Multi system basing is always a plus.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Your basing (Impetus) would work just fine with FoBA. My own units are on 3"x3" stands, with the figures to the front of the stands with space on the back edge for placing loss and status markers. FoBA doesn't allow formation choices, but rather assumes that troops fight in the best formation for their function.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Hey Brent,

    Any new progress on this project? I am really keen to see your take on Ancients/Med.

    ReplyDelete