Battle of Zama solo report 2'x2' table with own rules on blog (last one for now)

[Shaun Travers]

Hello All,

This is another game in play testing my ancient rules by replaying historical battles. This one is the Battle of Zama.  I am play testing the rules by chronologically replaying all the Peter Sides scenarios from his Historical Battles books.

I have been slow in play testing these rules for the last few years.  For November 2019 I set myself a challenge to play the 10 First and Second Punic Wars battles from the book.  This battle is the tenth and last game in the attempt.  I did play all the battles by the end of November and have been working through writing them up.

The battle report is here:

https://shaun-wargaming-minis.blogspot.com/2019/12/battle-of-zama-202bc-using-ancients.html

 

And here is a shot of The Elephants clashing with the Roman heavy infantry:

 

[Whirlwind]

Thanks very much, I enjoyed that.  As you say, closer than one thought it was going to be!  Did you feel all the combats worked plausibly?

[Shaun Travers]

I am biased as I wrote the rules 🙂 so I would say the combats are all fairly plausible.  I have probably played around 150 games with the rules and my constant tweaking to the rules are only ever to get them closer to what I think are plausible results.  These days the tweaking is less, and the changes more to tighten up the mechanisms than to change results.

[Whirlwind]

Ah yes, I worded my question badly.  I meant more whether you were pretty much finished with the combat interactions and were only tweaking for playability or if there were any combat interactions you were still mulling over.

[Shaun Travers]

I would like to think I am finished with the combat interactions but I know I am definitely not finished *testing* combat interactions 🙁  I am fairly done with any up to about 600AD as that is the years I have played all the games. So it covers chariots, pikes, elephants, archers, cataphracts, heavy and light infantry, heavy and light archers etc.  The rules cover later than this but I have not tested Medieval games so such things as Vikings, Huns, Longbowmen, Knights etc remain an unknown in actual play.  I think the rules will manage fine as I had this epoch in mind while writing them, but they still need testing.  I am very tempted as my next goal to play some games from the book “As Told in the Long Hall” as I get to play about 15 scenarios set in England from about 600AD to 1100AD which will test some of the early western medieval interactions.   It includes Hastings which i have in my mind whenever I made combat changes so hopefully the rules will survive a Hastings replay 🙂

Warbands are my nemesis.  While the combat value, combat reaction etc and movement rules for them have not changed, I vacillate on how to easily represent them in the rules.  I have finally just recently gone with creating a “Medium Infantry'” type that is for Warbands and some other infantry that were also exceptions such as Samnites and Thracians.  Having a hew troop type got rid of about 4 exceptions in the rules.

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