State of Play: Commands and Colors: Ancients, Expansion 1: Greece and the Eastern Kingdoms (6/6), and Here I Stand(!)

 

 

So, we played at T’s place again for the last Commands and Colors: Ancients – Greece and the Eastern Kingdoms (GMT Games, 2006) for the year. Probably. When I got there, T had set up the Jaxartes River scenario. This is a tough one; I’ve heard a lot of people complain over the years about hour unbalanced the scenarios for Commands and Colors of any stripe are. Jaxartes River (328BC) is one of those set-ups that lend a specific example to that complaint. I’m inclined to think, if you insist on balance out of the gate in every game game, stick to chess. Or draughts.

Hopelessly outnumbered.

The situation was as follows: Alexander, having defeated the remaining Persian states, began building a settlement on the Jaxartes to anchor the defence of his northern border. The Scythian tribal leader Satraces thought the works looked ripe for a quick smash ‘n’ grab – apparently, he hadn’t got the memo. Historically, Alexander lured the Scythians in with some puny-looking light troops on foot, then when Satraces took the bait, he sent his own Macedonian cavalry to cut off the Scythians’ routes of escape and set upon them. Satraces fell in battle, and with his death his army lost heart and fled. While most of the Scythians survived, their spirit was broken, and they never again bothered Alexander’s army.

Disposition at start (from the Macedonian side)

T began the game bringing his cavalry up on my right; the river is fordable but stops movement, so he had to fight from the river, rolling no more than two dice, reducing the hitting power of his Medium horse. The result was no block loss, but with two units pushed into retreat (lucky the withdrawal for the Scythians is so deep or this would have been a much shorter game).

This game saw war machines come out for the very first time in all the C&C: Ancients games we’ve played, and they were devastating. I think I took hits every time they were deployed, fortunately, that was only once each. The way the cards played out, T never had the opportunity to get his Heavy Infantry into play, and I’d already decided at the beginning to sit on the shore of the Jaxartes and attack anyone that tried to ford it while they’re still in the water. If I’d had some Medium horse, I may have tried to cross to the other side of the river and take the fight to the enemy, but that would have amounted to handing the Macedonians two or three banners with the Light Cavalry I had to hand.

Near defeat.

T was hamstrung with his choice of cards; with a good hand and welcome draws, he would likely have been able to collect on his five banners in three to four rounds. That’s not hyperbole; early on, when we’d been playing C&C: Napoleonics (base set) for less than a year, we were replaying Rolica second French position), I won the game 6-1 in five rounds, taking the last three banners in the final turn. As it transpired, a combination of poor hands and indecisive actions drew our altercation on the Jaxartes River out to nine rounds. In round seven, after he’d dispatched the third unit on my left, I managed to get my three centre units activated to swarm the Companion Cavalry and actually destroy the unit (though Alexander escaped the entrapment and formed up with his Auxilia across the river), at a cost of a single block of my Light Bow, for my second and last banner of the game.

It was a good win for T; he played a solid game with what he had to work with. I chose to look at every round I survived after the first three as a Pyrrhic victory for the doomed Scythians.  

End state: overwhelming Macedonian win.

In the scenario, Alexander’s Macedonians hold several advantages. The Macedonians have a numerical advantage on the board, with thirteen units to the Scythians’ nine. This is compounded by the weight of the Macedonian forces. A completely arbitrary but somewhat useful tabulation of the force available to Alexander might look like this; if we say that, purely based on punch, Light units are uniformly weighted at a value of 1, Medium troops/cavalry at 1½, and heavy units of all stripes are weighted at 2, the Scythian forces add up[ to roughly 9½, while the Macedonians clock in at 17, and that doesn’t take into account the bonus granted the Companion Cavalry (they can ignore one sword hit in every engagement). The Scythians only had two things in their favour; starting the match so far forward, so as to mitigate any single retreat results on my Light horse, and the river, which somewhat levelled the initial blows dealt.

The intention is to create a situation where the historical outcome is the likely one. That doesn’t mean it’s unwinnable, but it is going to be an uphill slog, and will require both cunning and luck (in both cards drawn and dice-rolls). I went into the game under no illusions about the likely outcome, but I did think that I should be able to make two or three palpable hits on the Macedonians before suffering my own fifth hit; and I managed two banners, including Alexander’s Companion Cavalry, though Alexander himself slipped through my fingers.

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After a couple of weeks’ absence, I returned to our Wednesday game. This week we began our first foray into Here I Stand (GMT Games, 2006), Ed Beach’s classic multi-player concerning the political and cultural upheaval of the Reformation period in Europe. Were all new to the game, but B assigned us all some homework; Beach’s C3I article on learning the basics of the game, and Filippo Cipriani’s video introduction. There are six factions and five of us, so B – our host and owner of HIS – is handling both the English and the Protestants. K, the junior member of the household played the Papal States; D, the Hapsburgs; H the Ottoman Empire; and yours truly as the French.

We played out the first round. The English put down a rebellion of uppity Scots, the Ottomans built up their forces and glowered across the border at the Austro-Hungarians, the Protestants made some gains in the northern reaches of the Holy Roman Empire, and France acquired Florence and eyed Menz. The year ended with me getting unsubtle hints of excommunication from the Pope, but I think he will have bigger problems to deal with in the next round.

As mentioned, HIS is new to all of us, so we’re all feeling our way at this point. We fully intend to see the game through, but based on Wednesday’s performance, I can’t see us getting through more than a turn a week. Regardless, I’ll bring weekly reports to this channel with a little more depth than this quick sketch.