What is your opinion of the WADBAG Manoeuvre ratings?

So, how would the die rolls work? I think for campaign gaming and historical battles (you and I are not tournament players, so I don't care too much about what armies get played) this isn't as big a deal: you can mandate terrain pieces per region for campaigning, and for one-offs, you would be approximating historical terrain, no?

Curious; didn't your random terrain selection generator largely solve the problem? It is an idea I quite liked...

Also, terrain is not the only reason an army may refuse to advance. Campaign dissimilar forces for example...? Unfavourable matchups?

Curious, why not 3 difficult hills, a small hamlet and a road? And where do you get the 75% chance from? That's a lot of conditional probabilities. On every roll, there is a 1/3 chance of likely losing a terrain piece. One chance that the roll double places it, one chance that your opponent calls the same quarter. So maximal terrain is tricky to place.

Now as the Roman, I can still fight your solid Ax with my solid Bd in bad going. 3 vs. 3 (I recall you making the comment that Hypaspists could be Bd precisely because they can still fight in bad going). Your 4Ax still have the maneuver edge, but if I as Rome maintain my line along ont of those hills, now you will tell me you refuse to advance up a hill to attack an entrenched defender as well? But you ARE the bad going side, and you CHOSE this board.

I am of the opinion that the onus for a win should be on the defender (who chose the place of contest) and NOT the invader. Why? Well the invader's women and children are enjoying a nice day at the beach. The defender's? If he doesn't hurry up and clobber these invaders, theybwill soon be being raped and shipped off to slavery.

No it is the defender who MUST fight or lose his homeland. And you saw this exact sequence at Plataea. With the Greeks pinned against Mt Cithaeron, the Persians marched around and raided the countryside. You saw the same with Caesar's conquest of Gaul. If the Gaul's didn't deal with Caesar, he just went around them, slaughtered their civilians and burned their towns.

It is the aggrieved party who must fight, or bend the knee...

Pretty much nailed it Stevie.

For a more period example just ask Hannibal how well those Fabian tactics work.

Stevie, your diagram is wrong: all of a BUA (including Edifice) must be placed within 6 BW of two adjacent board edges.

Second, I can send consecutive Sp elements up the road in the "road torpedo", with Cv or LI in reserve, ready to pounce on your troops that may try to descend from the hill to take them in the flank. Since Ax can't make group moves in bad going, and if they are solid, it may take you a few bounds to engage. Don't underestimate the ability of a road to allow troops to blitzkrieg past your Maginot Line... which as I have just shown you, has gaps around it.

Now if we examine your diagram more closely, sorry, quarter 3 for a second hill, and third hill discarded is VERY problematic for your Spanish. Unless the Edifice is your camp (in which case only one element is allowed in it) you have a camp worth sacking against your back edge.... and an open plain in front of it, and road leading more or less straight to it. Hill in q3 is ENTIRELY owned by me, say, so it is NO GOOD to you, even if you DO end up with a hill in q2 as well. The only way you build a Maginot Line, is hill in q2, edifice in q4. Now if you set up your entire army in the Edifice, or on one hill, I submit I can surround you, and attack troops that even though I am in bad going as Sp, you are likely jammed up and hard flanked. 2 vs 3 with a hard flank QK on you is worth the chance of bagging two elements on a lucky roll. Also the hill benefit is highly axis-dependent. (As you can see, I am a highly aggressive DBA player...!)

Heaven forbid I have Fast Hd or Fast Pk in my army. Remember, I can encircle your hill and hunt down that general of yours... potentially...and he is likely sticking out at the back somewhere. You have to survive EVERY ONE of my attacks against a surrounded general of yours. I just have to get lucky once.

I am not saying that any of this is trivial, but I believe your 75% claim has not been thoroughly battle-tested.

As for your other claim - that the invader must win... sorry mate. Bollocks! The invader dictates the pace, and typically has the initiative. Your statement about guerrilla warfare is dubious (as a former COIN ops intel guy, I can speak to this with a little experience). Successful guerrilla warfare as enunciated in chairman Mao's little red book, is about successfully invading and overthrowing a nation and its government (Vietnam,, which was naked aggression by North Vietnam against South Vietnam, using the Viet Minh as front line storm troops comes to mind) as does the successful insurgency in Rhodesia. Defensive guerrilla wars - for the vast majority of cases - fail. And succeed primarily due to outside intervention, such as in Afghanistan (the equipping of the rebels with the MPAWs) or in the Spanish Peninsula War (when France withdrew after the catastrophes in Russia and Prussia) or the American Revolution, where Britain fought a half-hearted campaign against what was in all intents and purposes an invasive insurgency against loyalist enclaves. People make much too much of the notion that guerrilla warfare is a successful way to defeat and invasion. The vast majority of invasions that do fail, do so because of fanatic, line-in-the-sand resistance, not pinprick raids.

In Germania, you are conflating the inability of Rome to pacify the far bank of the Rhine, with the desire for Rome to secure their borders against invading barbarian and Gothic hordes.

Hannibal and Spartacus by their nature only had to survive. In both cases, the Romans had to hunt them down and destroy them, not just to win, but to survive. Fact: if Hannibal had won, it would have been the end of Rome. But Rome won, and the Carthaginian State endured. Heck, Hannibal even got pensioned out. History shows that Fabius was only a marginally successful general, even AFTER the disaster under Varro. History shows that it was the repeated, desperate ATTACKS by the defending Roman Armies that really did the damage to Hannibal, who was popular with many Italians, and quite frankly, his army's foraging skills were quite adequate to sustain his forces in most cases. Absent the constant battles by Roman Armies, Hannibal would have rallied all the Roman regions one by one to his cause, and forever reduced the Roman State to a small city rump state in the Western Mediterranean.

And the best two examples supporting my case: France in WW1, and the English Wars of Imperial Expansion in South Africa. Germany parked their army on French soil, and dared the French to dislodge them. The Boer guerrilla war was unsuccessful, because the British just avoided the Boer forces, rounded up their women and children, and burnt their farms to the ground... As a ruthless invader will do to a defender who persistently avoids battle...

Well. some sources still give Fabius some credit.

As any rate then, there is Darius the Great's invasion of Scythia. Herodotus at least describes that as a Persian defeat, again without the defenders allowing themselves to be engaged.