Recently my friend and I undertook the second playtest of my homebrew rules. The pictures are a few quick snaps and are in no particular order. The real challenge of the rules was whether they could be played with multiple distractions namely in the form of a demanding and fussy child as well as a puppy. In that regard I think they were good.
I opted to set up a Punic War fight set in Sicily with Rome gaining some Sicilian Greek allies. The armies were fairly equal with Carthage having more cavalry and Rome having better infantry (see the list below). This time we tried out some deployment rules. We diced off and the highest roll had priority, then each player alternately placed units by type, firstly light infantry once both players deployed all their light infantry would they move onto the next troop type. It was simple and it worked well.
I tweaked the rules in an attempt to make the initial skirmish clashes more decisive. They felt right but in the context of the full battle they could be even more decisive. I'm considering allotting "Hit Points" to units and removing the 4 step status of each unit so skirmishers may have 2HP and cavalry 3HP, it can also be an indication of troop quality.
Eventually the heavies came to blows and we came to the conclusion, after quite a bit of successful combat that was being rallied away by Generals, that rallying needs to be riskier and limited, either by per turn or per battle. To wrap the battle up we called that the generals had exhausted their rallies.
In the first playtest the morale tests for units breaking was punishing especially for levies, while I stripped them back for this test, I will bring them back next time and just do a single morale roll when units are lost to combat results to prevent too much cascading as there was not a lot of sympathetic routing resulting in a mutual bloodbath.
We did begin to find that quite a few combats were starting to break both opposing units, this is probably due to me changing the turns to simultaneous phases rather than each plyer completing a full turn. so I have been since working on a mechanism to prevent that so each combat will have a "winner". Of course this will bloat the rules a bit and will require testing.
I am also thinking that command and control is too "easy" currently armies can pretty much do what they want with a few to quite a few spare commands to spend on attack bonuses. Perhaps the command points should be more restrictive since all opposing units will combat or restrict combat to individual units that can be activated, more to mull on.
There was a bit of fun with the Elephants, one unit went berserk and prompted me to tighten up the rampage rules a bit, but in game with some excellent battlefield marshalling, the elephants and the infantry units nearby managed to avoid each other before the elephants found a route away from the battle without trampling anyone!
There was no clear winner, as the Carthaginian cavalry began to make serious progress the Legions began to make theirs. So some kind of morale or army break point is needed to discern a winner of the field. There was some great suggestions provided in the comments of the last play test post that are being carefully considered. However the game survived the stress test of many distractions, played relatively quickly with lots of figures and raised points that needed worked on for the rules to progress as well as providing entertainment.
On the painting front there's been barely any progress. I'm working on individually based skirmisher marker bases for Strength & Honour which seems to be just about ready to release their new supplement. I'm also ready to have a solo re fight of Lost Battles Magnesia, just need the opportunity to set up and play through!
