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Post by hodsopa on Mar 26, 2024 18:08:18 GMT
First, what a great venue! I travelled from the city by bus, up and up onto the moor. And the hot sandwich shop at lunchtime was excellent.
Second, my six games:
(1) I invaded with Pete D's Lusitanians (9 Ps...) against Pete with my own Numidians (6 LH 5 Ps El). I invaded; we both discovered that Ps v LH is a stronger matchup than we'd expected; I won 4-1.
(2) I defended in the deep dark forest with the Tamils and Singhalese allies - 5 El, a Hd, 3 Bw, 2 Ps and a Cv - against Baldie. I am not sure what he had - early Germans? - but in any case he has well described my sorry performance. I lost 5-2.
(3) I defended with the Attalid Pergamenes (mostly Ps) against Rory who commanded the Samnites, delightfully embellished with two lots of Samnite allies (all 12 elements Ax). I got on his flank at the start, but couldn't make it pay before the solid Ax arrived. I lost, killing 2 (including a camp).
(4) I defended with the later Moors (3 fast Ax 3 Ps 6 LH) against Tim Kohler with the medieval Irish (3 LH 3 fast Ax 6 Ps). In the context of this tournament these armies were each balanced. I won for the loss of two elements.
(5) I defended with the ancient British (6 Wb...) against Colin A with the Tamils. He skilfully lured me onto his tusks, and I was foolishly aggressive in addition. I lost three and a general, all Wb, killing 2.
(6) I defended with the Scots-Irish (nearly all Ax) against Martin M with the Alans (mostly LH). Losing draw, 0-3. I should have played more aggressively against the LH, I think.
Third, what do we players think makes a weak army, based on this evidence? Low aggression (apart from the Mongols, I was not aware of any army with aggression more than 1); allies who don't bring anything new; few Kn, Bd, Sp etc (obviously) but also few Bw, and more El than you would expect.
Several players brought an army whose camp did not include a CF. I ran over two of these. This I think is historical - in the ordinary game, the reward for breaking through to make contact with an enemy camp seems to me too small/risky.
Keen to play again next year
Paul H
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Post by hodsopa on Mar 24, 2024 18:14:36 GMT
Baldie How do you make a Samnite force worse , when adding allies ? Ask the PIP dice…😁…there were two allies, I think, so three PIPs minimum to move the whole army. (?). The answer: by adding (two pairs of two) Samnite allies!
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Post by hodsopa on Mar 23, 2024 21:51:07 GMT
Ken, you and I can't agree on camels but we can agree on one thing: no one can reasonably be expected to win with a Tamil army with Sinhalese allies (5 El). At least if defending in the deep dark forest. I think you’ll find you can Paul as I won with them against you. You did, Bigus Yinus, and deserved to, as my Ancient British warbands fell into your cunning trap. (Killing the screening bows and charging your elephants.) But although you had to get out of the enclosures, you were at least not obliged to wend your narrow way between large patches of foul forest.
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Post by hodsopa on Mar 23, 2024 19:06:35 GMT
Ken, you and I can't agree on camels but we can agree on one thing: no one can reasonably be expected to win with a Tamil army with Sinhalese allies (5 El). At least if defending in the deep dark forest.
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Post by hodsopa on Mar 23, 2024 8:35:42 GMT
I'm in Starbucks in the city centre - sun and rain are fighting it out. The ground is about to thunder with the marching of my Psilois' elegant little feet and the falsetto neighing of my light horse as we head for the bus stop and Stannington.
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Post by hodsopa on Mar 18, 2024 16:34:44 GMT
I would instinctively play that it remains in column, but I think it has to be a FAQ because the rules seem silent.
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Post by hodsopa on Mar 16, 2024 19:55:55 GMT
You can play DBF with different points values, you don't have to go to BBBDA sorts of levels of army size. Playtesting, I was mostly around 24+ elements, though, and I don't know if others have tried it with fewer elements.
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Post by hodsopa on Mar 8, 2024 16:23:52 GMT
I once played in a DBA competition at Rueil (near Paris) where one of my opponents had an army of Asterixian Gauls. The figures had come free in cereal packets. He must have eaten a lot of the French equivalent of cornflakes.
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Post by hodsopa on Mar 4, 2024 17:13:15 GMT
Tom Whitehead, of course, is a lurker with only two tournaments played so far. He beat me fair and square in our game in Newark on Saturday.
I'm looking forward to Steel Warriors. Checking the laxness of my psiloi's slings and the smallness of the pebbles they will fire. Pete, are you sure you can't make it?
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Post by hodsopa on Mar 1, 2024 15:50:15 GMT
I think you are right about the Artillery point, Menacus. I've seen that in the beta version of the DBF rules the authors address this by saying that you can never shoot from good going to good going if any part of a hill is in between. That seems to me to be a good rule.
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Post by hodsopa on Mar 1, 2024 15:48:29 GMT
I think we need to distinguish between where the rules as written need supplementing and where they might need changing. There seem to be plenty of examples of things in the rules that need supplementing. Having no definition of “uphill” for close combat is clearly an example. Players have to decide how to interpret this and it is good that a common definition has been reached. There are also, in my view, plenty of things in the rules that could advantageously be changed. To give one example among many, when two LH in column receive a “flee” result, both should flee rather than the front one being destroyed. But I think that the advantages of playing the rules as written, of having a single reference point that everyone can turn to, outweigh the advantages of changing them on particular points. Concerning the way in which gentle hills affect shooting and command distance, I think the rules are clear. Hills are required to have “a centre line crest”. You can’t shoot, and command distance is reduced, if the element you are measuring to is “entirely beyond” a crest. Up to now, I have found it helpful to think of hills in DBA as being shaped like cornish pasties. The crest line runs all the way from one end to the other, rising to a bulge in the middle and then falling. This has seemed to me a natural interpretation of “a centre line crest”. With hills shaped like this, the shooting rule as written certainly produces an anomaly. An element at one end of the hill can shoot, over the bulge, at an element at the other end, provided that both are on the same side of the crest line. But I think this is quite a rare case, and not worth changing the rules for. Maybe I’m reading the rules wrong, and they are not as clear as I think. Maybe they’re clear but the anomaly, for example in the case of conical hills, is bigger/more serious than I think and is one of the cases (which should presumably be rare if at all) that could justify moving away from the rules as written. In any case, interested to hear your view. Depends slightly which way the pasty is pointing, hodsopa . If the crest (?crust) is roughly parallel to the base edge troops can hide behind it. However, if it runs parallel to the side edges, one could get some improbable results, including Artillery being able to hit troops on flat ground (Good going) on the far side of the hill.
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Post by hodsopa on Mar 1, 2024 15:46:46 GMT
I think we need to distinguish between where the rules as written need supplementing and where they might need changing. There seem to be plenty of examples of things in the rules that need supplementing. Having no definition of “uphill” for close combat is clearly an example. Players have to decide how to interpret this and it is good that a common definition has been reached. There are also, in my view, plenty of things in the rules that could advantageously be changed. To give one example among many, when two LH in column receive a “flee” result, both should flee rather than the front one being destroyed. But I think that the advantages of playing the rules as written, of having a single reference point that everyone can turn to, outweigh the advantages of changing them on particular points. Concerning the way in which gentle hills affect shooting and command distance, I think the rules are clear. Hills are required to have “a centre line crest”. You can’t shoot, and command distance is reduced, if the element you are measuring to is “entirely beyond” a crest. Up to now, I have found it helpful to think of hills in DBA as being shaped like cornish pasties. The crest line runs all the way from one end to the other, rising to a bulge in the middle and then falling. This has seemed to me a natural interpretation of “a centre line crest”. With hills shaped like this, the shooting rule as written certainly produces an anomaly. An element at one end of the hill can shoot, over the bulge, at an element at the other end, provided that both are on the same side of the crest line. But I think this is quite a rare case, and not worth changing the rules for. Maybe I’m reading the rules wrong, and they are not as clear as I think. Maybe they’re clear but the anomaly, for example in the case of conical hills, is bigger/more serious than I think and is one of the cases (which should presumably be rare if at all) that could justify moving away from the rules as written. In any case, interested to hear your view. Depends slightly which way the pasty is pointing, hodsopa . If the crest (?crust) is roughly parallel to the base edge troops can hide behind it. However, if it runs parallel to the side edges, one could get some improbable results, including Artillery being able to hit troops on flat ground (Good going) on the far side of the hill.
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Post by hodsopa on Mar 1, 2024 11:25:58 GMT
Looking forward to seeing the boards in real life!
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Post by hodsopa on Feb 27, 2024 11:34:59 GMT
I think we need to distinguish between where the rules as written need supplementing and where they might need changing.
There seem to be plenty of examples of things in the rules that need supplementing. Having no definition of “uphill” for close combat is clearly an example. Players have to decide how to interpret this and it is good that a common definition has been reached.
There are also, in my view, plenty of things in the rules that could advantageously be changed. To give one example among many, when two LH in column receive a “flee” result, both should flee rather than the front one being destroyed. But I think that the advantages of playing the rules as written, of having a single reference point that everyone can turn to, outweigh the advantages of changing them on particular points.
Concerning the way in which gentle hills affect shooting and command distance, I think the rules are clear. Hills are required to have “a centre line crest”. You can’t shoot, and command distance is reduced, if the element you are measuring to is “entirely beyond” a crest.
Up to now, I have found it helpful to think of hills in DBA as being shaped like cornish pasties. The crest line runs all the way from one end to the other, rising to a bulge in the middle and then falling. This has seemed to me a natural interpretation of “a centre line crest”. With hills shaped like this, the shooting rule as written certainly produces an anomaly. An element at one end of the hill can shoot, over the bulge, at an element at the other end, provided that both are on the same side of the crest line. But I think this is quite a rare case, and not worth changing the rules for.
Maybe I’m reading the rules wrong, and they are not as clear as I think. Maybe they’re clear but the anomaly, for example in the case of conical hills, is bigger/more serious than I think and is one of the cases (which should presumably be rare if at all) that could justify moving away from the rules as written. In any case, interested to hear your view.
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Post by hodsopa on Feb 25, 2024 22:35:42 GMT
Dear all, as the issue of hill rules came up in my game with Diades yesterday, I've just had a read in Fanaticus of the Great Uphill Debate that followed the Bakewell Winter Warmer in February 2020.
Not having run into this discussion before, can I – at the unintended risk of reopening settled issues - tentatively summarise as follows?:
(1) Elements in close combat get an advantage if they are uphill, but the rules do not define what "uphill" means. This has made it necessary for players of the game to agree on a definition.
(2) The definition which seems to have concluded the Great Uphill Debate, at least for tournaments in England, is the one given by Simon in a pre-Bakewell post on 21.11.22: "An element will count as uphill if any part of its front edge is on the hill and if a straight line drawn from the central point (conical hill) or the nearest point of the ridge line (ridged hill) to the centre of the combat passes through that element first."
(3) Some think it is better for hills to (a) rise to a single point and (b) take the form of a cone when they do this. (a) is compatible with the requirement in the rules for hills to rise to a "centre line crest”, because a point is just a special kind of line. But this is not a necessary part of defining “uphill” – the definition in Simon’s post applies to both types of hill.
(4) The Great Debate only dealt with how hills affect close combat. It did not deal with how they affect shooting or command. That makes sense because, unlike for close combat, the rules on shooting and command are already complete and clear. Hill crests can block shooting and line of sight, and the rules explain under what conditions this happens. There is therefore no need to supplement or alter them.
(5) It is worth pointing out, however, that under the rules a (non-difficult) hill will only be able to block shooting or line of sight if it rises to a full crest line and not a single point.
Am I missing something?
Paul H
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