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Post by leberechtreinhold on Jun 23, 2023 9:47:04 GMT
Hi! We have been organizing for the last 4 years a tournament in Pamplona, Spain, and for the last 2, the format has been that every round you get a random table that represents a specific historical battle. Therefore, you dont bring an army (although some participants have helped us out to make some battles), and we spend the previous months researching, playing and tweaking each scenario so its balanced enough. All the scenarios and several photos were written here and here, but I decided to start translating them (I will translate as well the ones from the previous year). This year, the scenarios were: Raphia, Trojan war, Ichi-no-Tani, Mantinea, Raid on Seville, Murten, Bibracte, Qadesh, David vs Goliath and Beneventum. The scenarios were all played on DBA2 but should be usable on DBA3 with some tweaks. Starting with Bibracte, a straightforward battle with a twist: the helvetii, which can put the terrain, can also reserve up to 4 elements and make them deploy on one of the sides as if they were a litoral army. This makes the roman position very dangerous despite the power of the blades. Historically, the romans were up on a hill, held the position against a phalanx-like attack of the helvetii, then they were charged in the flank by the Boii and Tulingi when chasing the helvetians up to their camp, but the romans just fought in two fronts and won on the two of them despite being outnumbered by ridiculous numbers. Of course, this was written by Julius Caesar so it should be taken with a good pinch of salt. In any case, we tried some rules were the romans had a gentle hill to use, but it was way too powerful. A Bd is +5, with height advantage +6 and psiloi support +7. There was literally nothing Warbands can really do, no matter the flank attack. So after many tries we ended up with this scenario, where the romans don't dictate the battlefield but still can try to get an advantageous side. By having troops in the reserve, including chariots, the Helvetii can be a very strong threat, and the difficult terrain makes a roman offensive hard to do. The final result was that the battle is very balanced and fun, since you have many options as both sides, but still the gist of the battle is there. |
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Post by Baldie on Jun 23, 2023 11:11:21 GMT
Sounds fab
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Post by gregorius on Jun 24, 2023 0:05:29 GMT
This is a fantastic initiative. I look forward to following your project with great interest.
Cheers,
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Post by jim1973 on Jun 24, 2023 6:54:19 GMT
Firstly, welcome to Fanaticus!
Secondly, what a fabulous concept! Looking forward to seeing more scenarios. It is wonderful to see DBA3 used for historical scenarios with only the minimal changes to the rules and it will also help "evolve" the game by showcasing these tweaks.
Cheers
Jim
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Post by martin on Jun 24, 2023 8:45:02 GMT
Sounds like an excellent tournament. Is it always around first week of June?
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Post by skb777 on Jun 24, 2023 10:40:25 GMT
Helvetii for the win.
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Post by Brian Ború on Jun 25, 2023 12:05:33 GMT
Great! I'll bookmark your thread... And welcome to fanaticus.boards.net! Here are a few scenarios I developed with the help of other fanatici. Have fun! Brian |
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Post by leberechtreinhold on Jun 27, 2023 18:18:12 GMT
martin We have done the last tournaments on the first on June and it's likely that the next year will be around the same time, either last of may or first of june. We did scenarios last two years, but the year before those we did a draft on the Lamian war: you got cards to create your army (either on the greek or the macedonian side) and you had special rules for aggresion and terrain depending on your general. So for the next year we dont know if we will repeat scenarios or maybe go with another draft. We will see. jim1973 Do note that they are balanced for DBA2, not DBA3: the terrain most likely could use some tweaking in most cases to adapt for the larger table and longer moves.
BTW we also uploaded videos testing the scenarios during the months preceding the tournament, but they are spanish only.  This scenario was an unexpected surprise. We had a viking army but we didnt want the standard shieldwall stuff as that can get too straightforward/plain. We also had an andalusian army without any historical opponent to give... until we realized that Vikings, in their viking-ing spree, they also raided Seville (as well as some other cities on the mediterranean). Historically, they went up the river, destroyed a garrison, pillaged the city without sieging the fortified part, and got crushed near the river when the Emir of Cordoba arrived with his army and burned their ship (and supposedly, also hanged the vikings from the palm trees). For the battle itself we have little details. We do know the muslims took a hill south of the river and that the battle happened near Talyata (current Italica) which is sort of a sister city to Seville, on the other side of the river, much much smaller since most of it was Roman ruins. We do know that the area around that is very fertile and rural, and even today has a lot of crops so the terrain is kinda obvious - but this happened on November, so no crop at all. There's a problem though: Andalusian army is mostly psiloi, against a full army of vikings (Bd). It's extremely difficult to make this a fair fight. The andalusian need terrain to do anything. So we came up with the ploughs, which are nonexistant in DBA2, but we just used the Arid terrain rules, assuming that, being November, those areas could be very muddy and messy. This terrain was tested a lot and we carefully selected position and size: they are in the middle of the board, and the space between them is sliiighty less than 3 bases, not allowing the vikings to form a strong centerline there.
The battle turned out to be a full on riot and a headscratcher. Lots of different strategies to make. If the viking holes up in their open terrain near their river they end up without space very soon and the andalusian can just freely attack without risk: even if doubled he just flees. A full on offensive means death on the fields, where cavalry could be surprisingly powerful, as Bd is +3 against mounted, but in bad terrain that is just +1 - exactly the same as a Cv. Flanks are very powerful of course, but very vulernable from the fields.
Judicious use of ZOCs and tactical assaults in this asymmetrical scenario makes it fairly technical, and probably wont translate that well to DBA3, but it became one of the favorite scenarios in the tournament.
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Post by leberechtreinhold on Jul 4, 2023 10:45:40 GMT
Expanding with the Raphia scenario, which was probably the most "controversial" of all of them. The special rules were fairly straightforward, but the key thing was that it was played in 2mm. Each 40x30mm pike base had two 16x16 pike blocks, literally 1:1 with the Alexander's pike blocks. Each pike base was therefore 512 small dudes, and the battle was actually thousands of troops duking it out. The Knights, Companion cavalry, was simirlarly in a 1:1 wedge formation, which meant that its actually 6Kn instead of 3Kn, to represent the depth of the formation versus the pikes. The force representation was a bit forced, but with 12 elements, you have to give up accuracy in some areas to be more accurate in others and make the scenario playable as well. We decided to represent the more numerous and influential Seleucid cavalry while giving Ptolomy his egyptian Pikes, but that's the only element they differ. Sadly things like african vs indian elephants rules got dropped in testing as they added more complexity but little benefit.  As for the terrain, we just looked at Polybius. Technically it happened outside the city, since we know the distances between armies and probably happened to the south-east of the city, but I think battle happening closer to Raphia, or west, near the city, are proper posibilities to we allowed it. It also gives some interesting tactical choices in an otherwise close to mirror matchup. Overall, the result was quite incredible, because it played really close to what historical matchups between sucessors do. The power of 8Pk makes Companion cavalry go to the flanks by nature (as one player found out too late), as they should, while cavalry has a strong harassment and flanking role. However due to the size of their base, they cannot traverse the battlefield willy-nilly as they are awkward to move (note that this is DBA2 where all corners are measured, not just the front like in DBA3, as well as bases moving much less), so even if the pike battleline isnt as long as it should be (because reallistically, the battlefield for raphia should be something 180x60cm), it properly captures that moment. Elephants are very strong in the reserve and in the flanks as it happened in Raphia, while the allied hypapist were very valuable. So from a historical perspective it was good, but for a couple players, they disliked it for... basically the same reason. There's very little geometric ploys or ZOC'ing games with bad terrain, so from a game-y perspective, this scenario was somewhat lacking. You make your biggest decisions while deploying, and it's all readjusting after that, it's not like normal DBA where you can get 6 PIPs and readjust your whole line. Still, I think the novelty of the game and the visual component of it was very spectacular and its very cool seeing formations 1:1. Gives a different perspective to battles.     |
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Post by Brian Ború on Jul 4, 2023 10:51:27 GMT
Looks really fab!
And some very interesting thoughts on tactics.
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