Macedonia vs. India- Fight to the River- Part 1

Hello again,

Returning to ancients, some of us couldn't wait to get another game of Hail Caesar under our belts.  We'd already played one game with these protagonists before, but I didn't get to write that one up due to a catastrophic camera memory failure.  Anyway, after playing what I thought to be too many pitched battles, I thought it would be a good time to see what these rules could do with a more interesting set up.

So here we have it: during the Macedonian invasion of India, a column of seasoned troops is moving to rendevous with a supply fleet.  Some local Indian warlords/princes have attempted to seize the cargo, but have been thwarted when the fleet saw them and departed, and so they will have to content themselves by sacking the approaching Macedonian column instead.  It's not the easy target they hoped for, but they had to give their followers some promise of loot after mustering them.

The setup is as below.  In the earlier game, we'd found that, even with indifferent commanding by the Macedonian leaders, the quality of their troops would fairly inevitably crunch through the Indians, and so it was time to mix things up a bit.

Here is a view up the board- the river at the fore represnting the rendevous point between the Macedoian column and fleet.  There's a very out-of-period stone watchtower in the middle- staffed by some peltasts who in the event did nothing at all really.  At the far end, you can see the Macedonian troops.  There Indian Army was split into three separate commands, representing the forces of three individual leaders, so no swapping or changing them about halfway through.  From this picture, you can see two on the left and one group on the right.

Here are the Macedonians above, set up in two lines, each reprenting a 'division' in the rules.  To keep things simple, we used stats out of the rulebook, each of the troop types being either medium cavalry, pike phalanx, generic heavy infantry (for the Greek auxilliary types), or light cavalry.

And here are a couple of pictures of the Indians.  I made up stats for the Indians, based on the Rulebook suggestions but the infantry tended to have a worse morale save than their type usually gets.  The Elephants represent commanders of each contingent, rather than units.

I was planning to run the game myself, but this was just as the latest bout of heavy snow kicked in, and we were without a couple of players.  As it turned out, we had 3 other people interested this week, so I gave each of them an Indian division, whilst I took the Macedonians myself, seeing as how their objectie was to drive up the middle and reach the river.  I confess now that I had no idea whether the scenario would be balanced or not- the way the command system works could see either side crush the other.

The first moves saw the Macedonian right column fall into a battleline in response to the nearest Indian contingent heading straight for them.  As shown below, the Indian Chariots (established in the previous game as the tanks of the battlefield) managed to crunch home on the greek auxilliaries.

Sheltering behind their shields, though, the heavy infantry managed to weather the charge, then crush the Indians in a single round of combat.  Taking advantage of the awesome luck I was having, the Macedonian cavalry in that same division went crashing into the Indian Archers, suffering light damge, then onwards into the infantry block behind them.

On the other side of the narrow battlefield, I was concentrating on moving as far as possible up the field and away from the bottleneck before the Indians on my left brought themselves to bear.  After some false starts (bad command rolls) I managed to end the evening with them deployed in something approaching a decent formation, as shown here from the point of view of the approaching Indians.

Anyway, this finished the first week's gaming- having to set up and decide upon unit make up and sizes had cut down on actual play, but we can leave games up for as long as we need to.  The nearest Indian division on my right had been shattered by some above average luck, the Indians had been stalled by their own stuttering commands- units had been engaging piecemeal, then gradually broken down.  This freed the player of that broken division up to join another game going on at the same time though- which I will be reporting on in the future, believe me!

Anyway, there'll be more photos in the next update, I assure you.

Cheers,

Leigh