May 5th 2009

This is the first of weekly posts (so I hope) listing the games I have played at the club. There won't be any photos, since the terrain there isn't very good and the lighting is terrible, but I wanted somewhere to keep a record of the games. May 5th was a practice game of Callinicum, reduced to 1:100 from Tactica II's 1:60 figure scale. The plan is to try this out a few more times as practice for running the game at Claymore in Edinburgh this August. In this particular fight, the Romans triumphed, mainly because the Persians couldn't shoot straight and forgot their lances. Translation: Persian shooting and melee dice were less than average right across the board for the whole game. And, to add insult to injury, the Ghassanians wiped out the Lakhmids. We have introduced one tweak as a result: the Persian right flank needs to be better able to contain the Roman infantry and help out in the centre, so we will divide the Persian light horse into a larger number of smaller units. This should make them more manoeuvrable. It does go against our initial decision to keep the units as large as possible for public participation purposes, but that wing is important. If it comes to it, we'll make sure that the light horse are played by a veretan of the rules. This is not unique to Tactica II; many players find it hard to make maximum use of a purely light command under many other rulesets as well. The only other comment might be that if Roman command control problems make them unable to advance in proper formation, then the Persians might want to delay contact as long as possible so as to take advantage of their missile superiority. The corollary for the Romans would be to try to close as quickly as possible and play for a draw without taking too many hits from archery.