War & Conquest - Further Trials

Last week myself and Dave K wound up the WaC machine and had another outing for our Berbers and Andalusian's for another trial game with a bit more knowledge behind us.

We went for 2500 pts a piece to give a bit more scope for troops on the field even though this was probably a bit too large a game to be likely to complete on a club night.

My line up was fairly similar to the previous game but the change was to ditch the skirmishers and add a small unit of mercenary knights plus a unit of Mercenary Spear. The Archers being added to the spear units to make up two large combined Spear/bow units, and the addition of a Captain. The General upgrade was ditched as well. Dave's line up was pretty much the same as before with the addition of more jinete types to fill out the points values but still went for the big unit of knights.

We went for clear and boring table to simulate the plains of Spain (and more importantly, keep the rule's simpler so we could concentrate on the moving and combat).

With a better understanding of the rules this time round we got much further through the game but still didn't manage a conclusion, though this was more to do with army size than rule checking this time round, though there was still a fair bit of that.

The game was much more balanced this time and produced much food for thought.

The combined arms units were quite powerful but more aligned for defence as the bows massed fire could only be used stationary so Dave pretty much avoided these keeping clear of their fire power especially the Merc's. In future I would probably field more but smaller units to give a bit more flexibility.

The small unit of Merc Knights proved to be too small to be really useful (at 6 Figs) but still held up the cavalry flank but were really too fragile.

The Berber Cavalry faired pretty well against the Knightly types causing mild casualties and remaining out of contact with their feigned flight and would hopefully draw the knights off the table or put them out of position for long enough for the game to be decided else where.

With the bulk of the Infantry not coming to blows before we ran out of time, not much was picked up here, but I did do a unsupported advance with my Guard Cavalry to see what would happen and a few points were noted here in rules terms mainly about counter charging.

Another interesting game with much food for thought, though Dave has a slightly jaded view of the rules we will have some more games to try and at least get a game to a conclusion. I find the rules fairly light and quite easy on the brain, just needing some familiarity to smooth things and certainly take out the extreme results that WaB was prone to quite nicely.

War and Conquest - Four Year hiatus

OK, its took a bit longer than I thought, a lot longer in fact. Four years in fact. That is to say when I said four years ago we would have another trial game of War and Conquest rules, I didn't think that it would take that long, but it did. But at least it finally happened.

The game was a 2000pt affair keeping things simple with my opponent of four years ago Dave K taking the Andalusians and myself the Almoravids again, probably with similar lists.

We did take a bit of time to get into the swing of things with both of us struggling to find rules we were looking for but knew existed but managed to track things down eventually.

We did struggle a bit as the first contact produced a fairly complicated melee with light troops fleeing through friends on both sides and a strong flank attack with multiple knock on effects, so this did pose a good test of the rules and a stronger test on ourselves to find the appropriate solutions to the problem. As a result we didn't get very far through the game which is probably just as well for me as things were looking pretty dicey by the end of round two.

We'll dig the rules out again (soon this time) to have another, more informed bash with the rules as they do have some nice points though as last visited they are very WABish. Looking at the army lists, I think these need to be re-visited but no tinkering with these until another couple of games under the belt.

I suspect we did get a few things wrong but thats all part of the process, we even talked about digging out WAB 2nd edition to see how that compares.

War and Conquest Trial Game

With this being long overdue, myself and Dave K were looking for a game for this Monday night and I suggested a trial game using the War and Conquest rules that we had been talking about doing for ages.

We duly drew up a couple of small 1750pt army lists for El Cid period using the newly available lists from the WaC forum just to keep things simple.

As with any new rule set there was the usual checking to see if we were doing things right but almost immediately fumbled on a couple of points and sought to clarify what the rules wanted us to do. The main one which though really pretty clear on the rules was, I suspect just our luck picking an odd situation right at the beginning of our game where Dave's Jinete's charged my Tribal Skirmishers whose response was to Shoot and Flee, and subsequently Dave's cavalry failed to contact.

Now, all was fairly clear in the rules what we should do, it was just that it appeared the outcome was 'odd', in that Dave throwing how far he moved after failing to get the charge in (throwing 4") meant that he would not have got into missile range of the skirmishers javelins in the first place. We concluded that the outcome was really only a mechanism of the rules and the cavalry had in effect rallied back from their failed charge. Fair enough.

There were, after that, the usual leafing through the rules to check what we were doing was right, so things took longer than usual which was expected, but what we did notice through this process was that although some rule details may have been in odd places perhaps, the fact that the rules were very well annotated and cross referenced with page numbers etc that all in all the rule details were pretty easy to find. To a certain extent a bit of foreknowledge probably got in the way a bit as things were wrapped up sufficiently differently to cause the odd stumble in the flow of the game and a tussle through the rulebook.

We didn't get the game finished which we had expected but did get four full turns in (which is not bad for a first time go with a rule set), which was really just getting to the crunch but the effort did throw up a couple of questions to be looked up for next time and over all the game gave us the flavour and feeling of the rules, which is what we were looking for on the night.

The basic game mechanism of move/shoot/fight/combat resolution/run-away/rally was easy enough and very familiar and WAB-esque with a couple of tweeks to make it a bit different. The rolling for initiative (or Strategic Advantage as called in the rules) is a nice simple amendment which I like. The strategic advantage points for personalities/characters is interesting enough but not fully developed in the rules, though Rob does lean towards you making up uses for these yourselves. The other point here is we both felt that personalities appear to be a bit over costed relative to their effectiveness/value in the game, though it may be a bit early to really gauge their value just yet. There were a few other noticable differences but these are mainly a simplification from the WAB process

There were a few things in the rules which are not expanded upon but refer you to your particular army list for details but as there aren't many fully developed army lists, this does present a bit of a dilemma in that to get into the rules you need the Army List's as a starting point but the army lists are to be developed by the community who would only do this once engaged with the rules.

Over all we found the rules to be as expected for a first run through, it is very WAB like which we had expected, perhaps I found them more so than I had expected. Perhaps the game is more the game that WAB 2 should have been, as there are definite improvements and several points we both liked over WAB. (It still has the runaway and get destroyed and the pursuers can instantly re-join the fray mechanism from Warhammer, that I really don't like though, but that can be easily ammended).

We were both up for another trial game to add to the knowledge of the rules following a refresher on the finer points in the rules, particularly in relation to personalities, but we will wait for version 2 of the army lists along with the promised Andalusian list to flesh things out a bit before we do.