Post by nangwaya on Feb 10, 2020 21:25:12 GMT
A friend of mine came over last weekend to help playtest one of the battles I want to run at CanGames this year, and also to have a good time while we pushed some lead around.
We ran the Assyrian civil war battle between the forces of Ashurbanipal and his older brother Shamash-shum-ukin, the ruler of Babylon.
The pic below shows the setup with Ashurbanipal's forces on the far side, anchored between a difficult hill and some woods with a gentle hill just off center:
We used 45 stands per side, with each side divided up between 3 Generals of 15 stands per General.
I took the side of the trouble makers from the South, while my friend took control of Ashurbanipal's forces which were defending.
We also used Stevie's Time Of Day Display.
It started off fairly good for me, or at least I thought it was going well for me, especially when I saw that many of his archers were lined up behind many of his heavier foot. I really thought "I better take it easy on him"; due to his odd looking (at least to me), setup and also that my friend, although a fellow gamer, had not played DBA before.
Below, things are about to get bloody:
Needless to say, I got pasted! By the time the sun had set, my entire left wing had collapsed (12 stands lost to 2), and although my center was still relatively intact, I had no more reserves to plug up holes (had to send them to try and help the left wing), and my right wing had enough to deal with and could not lend support.
In the end, Shamash-shum-ukin lay dead under his wrecked chariot, and the only remaining General of the Civil War Assyrians fled the battlefield, and with any sense, fled FAR from Babylon.
Ashurbanipal may have been victorious, but the battle did take a toll on his forces, including the loss of his Turtan.
Below, end of the last turn.
A few things that I found interesting:
My friend plopped 2 Hordes on the gentle hill, and they were essentially unmovable and just wasted my time. If I had clued in earlier, I should have just ignored them.
My friend decided to role play his side, and rather than placing the Tartan's personal forces in the center, decided to have them on the left and kept the Urartians and Zagros Highlanders beside each other, as they were in the same geographical area in real life. Here I was thinking about numbers and odds, and there is my friend playing the way Phil Barker envisioned playing...
"Victory as well as realism under these rules is most likely to be achieved by thinking of elements as bodies of real troops rather than playing pieces, and using them historically"
Well, as one fellow gamer mentioned in an article in Slingshot "The Play's the Thing"
Looking forward to more playtests!
