Warfare Reading

FOG - A rather painful experience for my Marian Romans at Reading this past weekend. Army lists by the end of the week, reports may take a little longer.

Over 100 more pictures added !

Romans, Greeks, Lydians, Indian, Persians, Thracians... over 100 new pics added to my site (many kindly provided by theonetree Painting Service")

New Additions for the Photo Gallery

New photos added to the Ancients Gallery including some Late Republican Legionaries and Greek Hoplites with funky shield designs.

Later Polish added to the FoGipedia

800 ap army list, external links, pictures and brief useage notes

Gettysburg

Well, the technology all worked, and the live report is available on this site. The posts are in reverse order, so when you click through to the Gettysburg pages you need to scroll down to the end, and then work upwards to follow the course of the battle.
All photos are clickable (to make them larger).

New additions to 15mm Supplier Index

50 Paces and War Modelling now added to my 15mm Ancients Suppliers Directory. There are now 37 different manufacturers listed, with details of all their ranges.

Gettysburg in 10mm - Maybe...

I might be posting live updates from a "Gettysburg Day 2" Fire & Fury game this weekend. But only if I can sort out internet access at the venue. Check this this page for details.

African Vandals added to FoGipedia

Reader-contributed content helps me create a page in the FoGipedia on this hairy bunch.

"Hannibal Speaks" coffee mug now available!

Ideal for Christmas - a selection of "Nasty Hannibal" Mugs with the slogan "This Coffee has about it the bitter taste of defeat". Also comes in "Hot Chocolate" and "Beer" varieties Click here to buy this and other bizzarre items!

4 Match Reports from Roll Call

All 4 battles now uploaded to the website. Photos, writeups, lists and the return of Hannibal's award-winning Post Match Analysis - Click Here.

Roll Call

It all ends up a bit flat as I face 4 cataphract armies out of 4 - 78 cats over the weekend !!! Full reports to follow by the end of the week. Promise.

Roll Call - FoG Army Lists

My Foederate Romans, Richard Bodley Scott's Sassanid, 2 Palmyrans, including The UK No1's, and a Parthian.

Roll Call Update:

After the 1st day I am mid table with a big win against Parthians and a big loss to Richard Bodley-Scott's Sassanids. Report next week:

Free Delivery at Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.co.uk has just anounced that it now offers FREE "Super-Saver" delivery on any item over £5!! That means pretty much everything in my UK Bookshop can be ordered with FREE POSTAGE!

FoG Decline & Fall Out Now

The FoG book on the Byzantines arrived today, and looks to have some interesting armies in it - after the rather "samey" Ottoman Book. Order it via this link in the UK, or this one in the US

Central London Club (West)

October's CLWC nights at the Perseverance are: Thur 16th, Wed 22nd, Thur 30th. Club nights at The C___ Tavern in Euston are every Tuesday.

Poles added to the 10mm Gallery

Pitheads Polish range creates a new section in the 10mm Gallery

Visitors now able to add comments to Photos

If you visit my 15mm figure directory or the 10mm one you can now add comments to each picture

Ancients Photo Directory Released in "beta"

The 10mm WW2 Photo Directory has been so popular I've added now an Ancients Photo Directory to his site. There's over 500 photos already, and you can even upload your own photos (so please do so!).

Field of Glory Army Pages under Construction

I'm gradually adding a whole set of Army-specific pages to my website, with links, pictures, army lists and other goodies.

Britcon reports now posted

I've finally got round to posting the Britcon reports on my website. The whole site is now coded in "php" to allow me to add links to relevant books, and other content. This should help with search engine rankings too.

The games are Cilician Armenians vs

Free Company
Crown of Aragon
Later Danish
Early Ach-wotsit Persian
Late Roman (Dominate?)
Ancient British

All 7 lists are posted, together with the usual pics, commentary, analysis, rules stuff and inapropriate you-tube embedded video..

Georgia - Military Analysis

Military Analysis 101

The war in Georgia conclusively proved that having lots of modern Russian military hardware is better than having a small amount of out of date Russian hardware.

dubai

the other (3rd) gamer in Dubai likes a beer

and plays DBM, FoW and FoG

and lives near me

and was the only serious drinker from his club in singapore.

oh yes......

Fo G Comp this weekend

Its another FoG competition this weekend, with carthaginians getting a 800point outing this time

Im hoping Hannibal can inspire the boys to victory - and that I dont have to face too many medieval armies!

Live updates may make their way onto this blog...

What do you think of my Disrupted markers?

These downloadable FoG markers are the latest value-added bonus available from this site. If you like - or dislike - them please comment below. You can buy the actual figures from Donnignton, who now go by the name of Ancient & Modern

Field of Glory now in my possession

I now have the rules and the first 2 lists - both via Amazon, arriving before their scheduled dates.

And they look gooooood !!!

The bar has certainly been raised on production values for both rules and lists.

My DBM lists and rules are now already looking embarassed and shuffling towards the corner of the room

FoG Rules start to ship today

The reports I get on my Amazon UK affiliate bookstore on madaxeman.com show that they have started shipping copies ordered via my website as of 14/01/08. This is (I would say materially) earlier than date that Amazon has always given as its official shipping date of the 18th Feb.

The reports don't give me access to any more information than this, so its imposible for me to know who they have gone to, or even when the copies shipped were ordered, or when/(if?) any more will be shipped, I just have visibility of total ordered and total shipped.

Total orders via my UK site to date include over 50 copies of the rules, and similar numbers of the first 2 army lists since I set up the site in September or October last year – the orders have come in across this timeline, and several are now coming in each day.

Either way, despite the rumours, Amazon UK have clearly got some copies, and they have clearly now started sending them out.

Its exciting that the rules are out there and shipping. For the biggest problem at this point to be too much demand (despite apparently three increases to the print run) is not exactly bad news for the hobby, although it may be irritating for some of us.

I also think it's hard to pin too much blame on either Amazon or Osprey for failing to accurately predict that a new set of rules for the totally obscure hobby of ancient wargaming (priced at 50-100% more than any previous set) would end up (as of today) as the 186th best selling book in the UK, or even more astoundingly, the No3 in the History category – just behind the biography of someone who is looking likley to be the next president of the USA!

See – here's the link to Amazons charts (updated hourly) link

One slightly irritating (potential) delay for a bloke who plays with toy soldiers, but one giant leap in popularity for the whole hobby.

Field of Glory Wargame Rules

Played another game of Field of Glory last night, with my Selikids against Carlos' Dominate Romans. The FoG Army list I used will soon be published on my website here.

The game was a test of whether legions could be beaten by a combination of pikes and elephants - and yes, it can be done! Its a tight interaction though, but as long as the pikemen dont lose the first round, they can grind down the legion... just.

I lost one 12-strong pike block, but crunched 2 blocks of legionaries. I could have tried to keep the pikemen alive, but my general; had gotten into the wrong position and was unable to help them out ... doh!

Field of Glory Wargame Rules - a Review

The Summary and Overall Review of Field of Glory

Whilst there's not too much rocket science in Field of Glory, the rules overall seem (touch wood) pretty simple to get the hang of and also pretty bomb-proof against cheese and geometry - the two worst game wreckers. The long development process, the input of a few wargaming hacks and the addition of commercial-publishing standard editing and reviewing seem to have been worth the effort in producing something that's tightly written, easy to understand, and adequately covers pretty much all eventualities.

How good is it as "History & Simulation", well, to be honest that's a whole barrel of worms I'm not really someone who is qualified to open, so I won't even go there. What I can say however is that I got a definite sense that a lot of thought has gone into FoG to make sure it's "playable" - and by this I don't just mean "is it clear and simple?", but rather there has been effort to make sure, mathematically and game-mechanics-wise, that the balance between "my troops are better so they should win in this situation" and "but if my opponent gets a bit of luck I might lose..." has been set up to create what feel like the right level of uncertainty - which is after all what creates the excitement in wargames as opposed to chess.

The other element of the "its been designed to have playability" that comes across is that there are actually quite a lot of key decisions to be made at many points in the game (especially concerning what to do with Generals) - although it would also be fair to say that it took me a lot longer to work out what they were, and to realise the impact of my choices than in say DBx sets I've played before.

Does it "grip" you and is there depth? Well, right now I'd say "yes" although I was previously (even as late as the end of last year) definitely pretty skeptical on this.

The big change for me came during the competition at Usk, which was the second competition I'd done. I think the 10 competition games have been a lot, lot more important in getting me to a point at which I started to understand tactics and see the "simple to learn / hard to master" depth in the rules than the 10 or so beta-testing games I played.

Maybe there is just something in playing against strangers who also knew the rules and who were trying to win, as opposed to playing my mate Adam with both of us trying to learn the mechanics and decide if we "liked" the rules which also made a huge difference?

Maybe as well it was having the basic mechanics down pat that allowed us to look beyond them into the game itself, and - probably most importantly - I'm sure that using the same army for 4 games on the bounce against different opponents allowed me to starting to see how the same troops performed in different situations, and think what I could do differently next time to improve things.

Differences to DBx & Warmaster - well, lots. No pips for movement, elements are locked into fairly big units that move by wheeling, and morale (or maybe "waver") tests are back are the biggest 3.

No pip-based command and control really surprised me initially, and as I said earlier, it takes a while to realise that there is any command and control mechanic. But, whilst pips (or for Warmaster players, command rolls) used to represent an abstraction not only of command and control, but also (in my mind) of how the key action in a battle can end up occurring in one small sector of the line (where both sides spend all their pips) whilst the rest is inconclusive (ie they stand there doing nowt), they also have their downsides - certainly in that the ability to do long-distance, multiple moves often has excessive influence on deployment, tactics and the overall outcome in both games, and also there is an inherently odd aspect to the idea of troops standing still for ages without lumbering forward to fight enemy they may only be yards (or inches) from. So, you win some, and lose some on this, but you do get a change.

Elements in big units is again a mixed blessing, and one its hard not to comment on without veering into the "is it historical?" debate - but this time I may dip my toe in these dangerous waters.... If you mentally equate DBx "elements" or Warmaster Units to FoG "Battle Groups" (ie units..), FoG feels like a skirmish and DBx feels like a massive battle (viewed from space!) - and this is easy to do, even though the FoG rules insist/imply that a FoG battlegroup is a collection of smaller sized units (represented by the element bases).

But once you accept the FoG argument and see each element as a sub unit, and each Battle Group as the unit of command and maneuver it does start to make more sense, and I found myself thinking whether DBx (or WMA) rules might even be improved by borrowing from FoG by insisting that for any troops to be deployed and moved they had to in multiple-element brigades of the same troop type. And irrespective of the "historical or not?" debate, its hard to argue against a view that so much geometry and cheese goes immediately out the window once the ability of relatively small formations to move and act independently on the battlefield is severely curtailed.

Morale and waver tests - well, that's a dangerous and bold thing for anyone to reintroduce, especially to anyone who remembers 7th. Initially the biggest mental hurdle for me was the reintroduction of morale tests which seemed to reintroduce a large and highly important random element into the game - but gradually I've learnt to appreciate how correct use of Generals, rear support and various other factors allow you to significantly increase your troops ability to survive them - and also to appreciate that by making a basic 2xD6 score of "7" the usual pass/fail baseline, even being able to add (or cause your enemy to deduct) 1 positive factor means you can make a material difference to the probability of succeeding or failing.

The other good news is that they aren't quite so dramatically bad as in 7th - where you could go from steady to broken in 2 bad dice rolls, both on a single D6 with no modifiers, and the are nowhere near as byzantine as they were in 6th and its predecessors, as there's only 6 or 7 simple factors to remember.

The final thing is that by shifting the way combats are resolved away from pushbacks and into progressive slipping - or restoring - of fighting ability via a simple test has also allowed FoG to remove even more geometry from the game, as there is no need for a slew of special rules about troops being pushed back, or conforming in combat or any of that gubbins. So, whilst I was initially reluctant, I can now see the upsides as well.

Will everyone like these rules - well, certainly not. Will a lot of people like them - I think almost certainly - both coming from a DBx and a GW tradition. Is there anything brain-stoppingly brilliant and innovative in them? Sorry, not really - but there is definitely a fair amount of subtle and well thought out stuff that will make sure its a good "game to play.

Is it historical - well, it looks pretty reasonable to me, but I profess no real in-depth expertise and I have no appetite for an endless argument either so I'll sidestep that one and leave it to you. Either way, right now I'm looking forward to my next game and next competition, and thinking of buying some more troops too.... none of which has happened in a long time for me - so something must be good in there!!

To order your copy follow the following links

UK Bookshop

US Bookshop

French Bookshop

Field of Glory Wargames Rules Selling well

Sales of Field of Glory rules are going really well via my Amazon affiliate websites, with over 50 copies sold in the UK, and about a dozen in the US.

Thats only for the rules themselves, so the army lists are selling nearly as well, even those which are only on pre release so far

The UK website has been expanded to be a comprehensive bookshop for all ancient armies, and the US one may be expanded too, basically if enough sales come from the UK to make it worth my while doing the legwork!

The UK site is at http://www.madaxeman.com/FoGshop.htm

The US one is at http://www.madaxeman.com/general/us_store.htm

I've tried a French one, but no sales so far :-( http://www.madaxeman.com/FR_shop.htm

Must be a good sign for the prospects for the rules eh ?