Impetus; Berbers vs Late Romans

It's been a while, but my game of the week this week was what turned out to be a bit of a re-fresher course for Impetus.

I trotted out my slightly altered list of Berbers (using the Later Andalusians Beta List) against Kev and his newly painted Late Romans.

Since more a reminder to the rules, we kept the table simple and played a straight forward pitched battle.

I knew the game would be a tough one for my Berbers being a pretty light force and up against lots of FP infantry with Shortbow A support and some Impetuous Heavy Cavalry the forces VDs pointed out the difference with my force at 27 for 300pts and Kevs at around 34 I think, a small but significant edge.

We played the game un-subtly and generally put the hammer down and laid into each other. The game was interesting and indeed enjoyable and perhaps more to the point, though provoking with several lessons learnt on both sides.

My medium and light cavalry surprised us both and managed to destroy his general and take his other two units of heavy cavalry down to a wound a piece. My Infantry was however outnumbered and pretty descively out classed but went down fighting.

In the end, with a couple of units gone on the flanks but my general and the other infantry in the centre being destroyed I reach the army break point and we called it a day with Kevs' Late Romans the victors and in what appeared at first glance a final walk over despite early swearing from Kev as his General and other cavalry managed to get a good doing from some riff-raff. However, if the final shooting from some light cavalry had just scored a couple of hits on his cavalry then he would have lost another 6 or so Vioctory points and so would have been in a pretty shaky position too.

A few points on army composition did come out of the game for us both, with Kev thinking about how exposed his general is in a single unit of bodyguard cavalry and me deciding (probably just taken me a while) that skirmish screen is really a waste of points, so will give the supporting archers behind spear a bit of a go.

Light Cavalry is definitely very powerful in the game, possibly un-realistically so, but I'm not tempted to power game and have lots of them charging about the table. I'm going to keep the historical balance in the force and try to see if I can develop the force into a game winner. We'll see.

As a slight aside, the post game discussion led to us deciding to try the same game but using the Crusader Rules to see how they compare. To date they are the rule set that my Berbers have had any noticeable success in. We'll see how they fare up against some Romans soon, with a report to follow of course.