Some more of Sumer

This Tuesday we got to play with Jon's newly finished Sumerian armies, all in glorious 28mm. Jon has produced a variant of Basic Impetus for use with his figures on hexes. I lobbied for "To Ur is Human" for his new army's first outing but Jon is more comfortable with BI and has used variants of it successfully across a wide number of periods. When running an on-line game being comfortable with your rules system is very important.

Will and I were the red and black diced units nearest the camera. Ian and Phil opposed us. Will had our left, I the right. We faced off against Phil & Ian respectively. We started with a general advance. I held my Lugal/Battle Carts back, as Jon has put in a rule making it slightly difficult to stop them immediately if needed.

Phil & Will's skirmishers got into it on the left. Will lost out. Skirmishers are one thing I think BI doesn't get quite right as they have to close to hand to hand to have any effect, rather than stand off and chuck missiles at each other.

Ian and I sent our skirmishers forwards to fight it out too, and I cleared some of them out of the way. I tried to shoot with my massed archers over on the right, but couldn't hit an infantry target at that range. I think Jon needs to look at the factors he is using there. Note in the distance that Phil is sending his cart out wide to the left.

The time had come to send my Lugal forwards. My skirmishers are positioned as a speed bump + support to degrade Ian's cart should he try to attack my Heavy Infantry with it.

Ian does, indeed, launch the inevitable charge. My skirmishers are driven back, but they do cause disorder, which I hope will tip the balance in the following combat.

It does! Ian is driven back, but alas out of range for me to catch him if I follow up.

Which means it is time to unleash my equids, and hit Ian's Heavy Infantry.

For this game Jon has modified BI so that you fight rounds of combat until one side is pushed back. We then saw one of those sequences that can happen in BI because of the way that the Cohesion Test works. Now I like BI, and have used it quite a bit. I like it for Medieval warfare particularly, and I used it for a big refight of Paraitacene a few years back. We had it in reverse in the ancients game, but here I fought and won three rounds of combat, in terms of inflicting more hits form initial dice rolls. In one case I scored 5 hits from 7 dice. Ian then rolled three successive 1s on his Cohesion Tests, thus taking no hits other than those through Disorder, which I was also getting. Okay, this is an extreme outcome, but it is almost worse than using saving rolls. In the case of the 5 hits, you would have needed to roll 5 saves. Here, you only need to save once.

Then of course, Ian finally flukes a small win, I fail the Cohesion test and am bounced. I was not happy.

Ian's foot followed up, clipped the edge of my foot, which lost the combat (Ian got another Cohesion Test 1) and was forced back. Out on our left, Phil has got his cart where he wants it.

Phil smashes through Will's massed archers in short order. He now needs to rein his fellows in and swing them round. This is really hard to do. Possibly too hard.

Will counterpunches with his battle carts.

Alas he is repulsed. It isn't looking clever for us, although Jon assures us we are ahead on points.

From this position Ian wins the initiative. His infantry in the centre attack and hit our skirmishers on the right centre, and Will's heavy foot left centre simultaneously.

He defeats both of them, throwing everything back. Then Phil gets the initiative, and contacts Will's carts, left of centre. In a series of combats Will is driven back and broken. 

In his follow ups he contacts Will's heavy infantry and my carts on the rear. These are both broken and are off the table. Game over.

Not the end I was expecting about 15 minutes beforehand. If we had got the initiative in either of the last two phases we lost at the end, we'd have been  on top and in with a chance of winning. As it was we just sat there whilst the enemy stormed across the table at us. Oh well.

We had a discussion on the evening and after about whether BI is a good model for Sumerian warfare. Phil remarked he was okay once he realised he was just playing BI, and did what he normally does in a BI game. Jon argued then, and subsequently, that it worked as well as "To Ur". 

As someone who obviously has a dog in that fight as I am selling a set of rules specifically for the period, I'm biased. I think that you should have a specific set of rules for the period, rather than use a generic model, but that isn't how most people see the wargaming world. I would happily play with BI again with Jon's Sumerians. However, I can't see that it is something I'd ever put on my table, as BI is now firmly filed under medieval for my purposes, and I saw nothing here to change my mind.

But the game di look good, and it played perfectly well.