The Battle of Teutoberg Wald

I came across some old photos from last year on my computer of a game I took part in with the Bournemouth Warmaster Ancient's from "Rick's Warmaster". This was one of their periodic huge battles where we re-fight a historical battle with as many troops as can be mustered.

These games are great fun, and well organised by Jim and Gareth. You can read a narrative report of the game here

I've put the best photos below, but I can't remember exactly what was happening now!!

Forces deployed, the board is 14'x4'! Romans on the left bank of the river, Germans on the right. I commanded the 6 brigades from the river to the marsh in the centre.

Peace loving Germans survey the Roman column

The Romans attempt to reform out of column and secure the far bank. The Germans race forwards on the right, but stall a bit on the left.

Fearing the German advance the Roman Commander in Chief collapsed in his left flank around the village to secure his position, but effectively abandoned the commander on the extreme left

Roman Left Flank collapse into a defence position...

..but Jake's forces, including the lion's share of the Roman cavalry are boxed in on two sides by the Germans and are in danger of being cut off to their right.

German's press forwards in the centre. Note the Roman left flank has collapsed further

The Roman cavalry regroup towards the fort on their left flank, but with Germans now lapping around 3 sides and cut off from the next commander by over 4' now their fate is sealed

The view from the German right confirms the Roman's here are few and far between and there are waves and waves of Germans waiting to attack the hill the Romans collapsed their line onto (top left of photo)

The Germans attempt to force a crossing

Crucially at this point, although the head of the Roman column is lost the centre is holding the banks of the river, with a strong counter attack to the right of photo above pushing the Germans back and following them up. The tail of the column is in trouble, as they look potentially outflanked by bowmen, but as yet is holding.

We are not all aware of the victory conditions at this point (often they are not revealed until the end of the game by whoever is GM'ing the scenario), but the Germans will only categorically win if they can break the line and gain the far bank. This will cut the column in two and ensure the historical massacre will be repeated.

Another turn and the Roman line still holds the far bank and has beaten back the first wave of Germans comprehensively

The final turn and the base of the Roman column repels the German attacks and holds!

I was fortunate to still have a fair chunk of warband still left in the centre and so threw them all forwards to try and force a crossing at the last

The warbands throw themselves into the river again, all the commanders joining fighting units to add crucial attack dice.

In a wonderfully cinematic moment the centre combat was won by the Germans by a single wound! The German commander makes all the difference!

As I'm sure anyone familiar with WMA will know, once a warband is winning they are hard to stop! The Germans won the initial combat by just one wound, but following up they lapped around the Romans and butchered them to a man. The column was broken and the general cut off from retreat. The GM informed us that the commander of the base of the column (the only part not cut off) galloped home for Rome abandoning his troops and his report painted a very unflattering picture of the Roman C-in-C!

A great battle at Jim's place, really good fun and fantastic that such a massive battle essentially came down to a single combat in the last turn! I recommend reading Jim's report as well.

Roman Artillery

Continuing the Roman theme, these guys are my scorpion unit for my Imperial Roman army

Again they are Pendraken figures. I've not put them together right as I thought the little box was an ammo box so I mounted the bows on a piece of balsa wood, when in fact I've since found out the little box is supposed to be the weapon mount! These paint up quite nicely as the crew have nice definition in their scale armour so a wash and a quick pass with a drybrush really brings up the armour.

In the game they are pretty rubbish! The ability to ignore armour saves is useful against 5+ save units, but there aren't a lot of them around. Typically as well people will only line up their troops two deep, so the best their ability to penetrate ranks gives you is 4 shots (2 on the front rank and 2 penetrating through to the rear rank). They could be good against heavy cav which generally are 5+ save, but they can't stand and shoot so tend to get the worst of that. I haven't been able to find a decent use for them and generally don't take them, they are not as good as a unit of archers in my opinion.

Of all the rules in warmaster I think light artillery is the one which doesn't work. I know the Bournemouth guys who play a lot of the WMA and maintain Rick's site now have their eyes on updated pike phalanx rules and house rule it at the moment, but I think these need looking at.

Possibilities could be to increase them to 3 stands to give them an extra shot (for a modest pts increase), or giving them a rule in the roman army to reflect their combined arms usage in the legions. Some way of negating their penalty of being unable to retreat (and thus being wiped out if anyone basically contacts them)?

Let me know your thoughts on light artillery

Roman Heavy Cavalry

Thanks for the comments on the recent posts, very much appreciated!

These two units are again Pendraken Imperial Romans. And again a combination of one unit I got in the 1000pt starter army and another I picked up from a friend in a bag of unwanted Romans.

As with a lot of Pendraken packs there is just the one pose in there, which can make like a little boring, I have painted up one unit with red shields and one with blue so I can tell them apart. A lot of people tend to paint small blobs of paint on the rear edge of the base so they can see which stand belongs to which unit as they move them, however I always prefer wherever possible to make slight variations in the paint job so it is obvious.

I've got another unit of the same to paint up, but as with yesterday's archers they are a 0-2 choice for Imperial Rome so the 3rd unit would only ever get use in a campaign or 2000pt scratch game, neither of which happen very often and even in a campaign the odds of getting a territory allowing you to select heavy cavalry is slim!

These guys were again quick to batch paint, but there are some routine casting errors on the horse's bridle that appear on a lot of the models which is a shame. I also think in hindsight they have a horsehair crest on top of their helmets? I've just painted it in silver...

I'm hopefully having a game of Infinity tonight, so if I can get any pictures I'll report back.

Roman Archers

I've got a fair few units of archers in my Roman force. You get one unit in the Pendraken 1000pt starter army, and I then picked up another 100 or so Pendraken figures from a friend who wasn't using them, which gave me a second unit. Finally I picked up a couple of packs of Pendraken greek archers at Colours one year. I thought with the addition of some Pendraken Roman command figures they would make great auxiliaries.

Unit 1 - "The Blues"

Both Roman auxiliary archer units

Greek/Cretan auxiliary/mercenary archers. For these I gave the command stand a complete first rank of Roman figures with the 3 command figures and a "1st archer". I wanted to make them stand out from the rest of the Roman force which is a bit homogeneous, hence the green tunics! I've still got one more unit to paint up, but to be honest as archers are a 0-2 choice in an Imperial Rome army for Warmaster Ancients I will only use the 3rd unit once in a blue moon for a 2000pt game, so it doesn't seem necessary at the moment!

The figures for both types from Pendraken are solid without being spectacular. Obviously only have one pose does make for a slightly boring job painting them, but on the flip side you can race through them batch painting. The tunics and hat brims on the greeks are nice, as there is enough recess that a base-wash-spot highlight really make them "pop".

German symmachiarii - Warmaster Ancients

Sticking with the Warmaster theme for now, these are some of my first 10mm figures, but I've never got round to taking pictures of them until now.

They are part of Pendraken's Imperial Roman starter army and are two units of German javelinmen symmachiari. I painted and based them before I had any rules or any idea, so the base size is a little too big (~45mmx20mm) and I've based them pretty densely for skirmishers. I could easily have got 4 units from these figures. I've never really been too bothered about re-basing them though. I don't tend to use them much really and I'd rather just buy some more skirmishers for Rome than rebase these.

They are nice little figures though, the pose is a little odd, below is a side on version from the Pendraken website:

But they paint up fairly quickly and Pendraken seem to use a much harder white metal mix than say Magister Militum, so the spears stay rigid and don't bend when you look at them! The main disadvantage is the single pose. However this can easily be got around with a bit of foresight. If I was going to do skirmishers (for pretty much any N/W/E European ancient's army), I'd buy one pack of each of the above mentioned Germans, the Dacian javelinmen (which I used as part of a mixed warband project) code:AD6

 & Greek javelinmen GRE10:

For £12 you would get 90 figures, in 4 different poses, all of which have javelins, bucklers and bare heads, so are pretty much indistinguishable. If you based them with 5 figures per stand (pretty normal for WMA) that is 6 units with a fair bit of variety.

Gauls - Warmaster Ancients

I'm hoping to get a bit more organised with my blogging in the future, I think I need to try and blog smaller and more often, but we'll see how it goes. I've been doing a lot of Infinity recently, but there is still a fair bit of Warmaster Ancients love around. These are my finished Gauls for my Carthage army. I'm hopeful eventually of expanding these out into an army in their own right, maybe Gauls, maybe ancient brits.

I have painted up 5 more units (15 stands) in total.

These guys are 2 units of Magister Militum gallic nobles, so in my Carthage army they are just standard warband, but if I field a full barbarian army they would be inner circle infantry with an armour save.

I've really gone to town on these and painted individual shield designs freehand, some of them have striped, or tartan effect cloaks, full works!

A super-close-up of the detail work.

I've also done a more basic job on 3 units of Pendraken Gallic warband that I picked up from the Colours wargame show for about £6 for the lot last year. Excellent bargin bin rummage!

All in all that gives me 10 units of allied gauls for Carthage, or 8 units of warband and 2 units of nobles for barbarians

Hannibal

This is my general stand for the Carthage army, I've put it on a slightly bigger base so there is room to pack out the stand with some extra figures and make it stand out.

 

Figures are Magister Millitim. Mostly from the Carthage command pack, but with a couple of spare veteran infantry (white shields) as a kind of honour guard.

This weekend I was lucky enough to take part in a fantastic refight (organised by Jim Brown and Gareth Harding of Purbeck Brotherhood of Ancients) of Teutoberg Wald, when Varus' 3 legions were ambushed and destroyed by Germans. There were well over 100 german warband units alone (3000 figures!), plus archers, cavalry, skirmishers and all the Romans and their baggage train. It must have been close to 7000 figures all told* on a 12 foot long board. I'll have a full report with loads of fantastic pictures as soon as possible.

* - as one guy said, "between all of us we've painted nearly three and half thousand 10mm warband figures....we must be mad."

Narrative Game

Apologies for the time since the last post, I've got distracted with various projects, some of which I'll probably get round to showing on here. I've built up a ~6000pt Vampire army made up of ebay purchases and lots of Mantic's fabulous undead range. I've also been sculpting some of my own figures for a zombie survivor game (more to come soon on this).

I did get together with a couple of my good gaming friends last month though and finally managed to persuade them to have a game of Warmaster Ancients with me. I pretty much used all the figures I have, didn't worry about points values. It was Imperial Rome against Carthage, and I'd guess it was about 3000pts vs 2000pts respectively.

I came up with a quick narrative scenario that the Romans were on a patrol from a main camp and starting cutting up rough in a local village (OK it was a Dark Ages village, but we won't worry about that). The Carthaginians with a sizeable quota of Gallic allies appear on the scene and ambush the patrol, and the main Roman army then turns up to save the day.

6x4 board with the village about 8" square set up ~24" from the Roman board edge and 30" in from the left hand board edge (so roughly central just in the Carthage half of the board). The village is surrounded by a stone wall and so all units behind this count as defended.

The Romans deploy first with 1 unit of legion, 1 unit of archers and 2 units of auxilliaries and 1 leader. The rest of their army deploy as normal near their own board edge.

The Carthage forces deploy as normal.

The objective of the game is to control the village by having 1 or more core units inside it and no enemy units.

It is quite a challenging scenario tactically, because the both main armies need to decide whether to try capitalise on successful commands to try and get forces into the village (either to support or attack), or to try and advance as normal with a solid battle-line. The Carthaginians also have a difficult decision of how early to commit their best units 

In this battle I took command of the Carthaginian forces and Jon and Jan took command of the (evil) Romans.

As the initial ambushers Carthage moved first, but only the Numidians on the left flank moved at all! The Gallic centre and the Spanish light cavalry on the right wing stayed put. Not the start they needed to try and sieze the village before the bulk of the Romans could arrive.

In response Rome got one big legion brigade moving and in the village the commander sent the archers out to get a range on the gauls and moved the auxiliaries up to the wall.

Roman Archers looking a little exposed.

The middle period of the battle saw a lot of manoeuvring but no deceive combats. The archers frustrated the gauls by inflicted confusion on them and the Carthage skirmish screen began to lose odd stands to the main Roman force's artillery and archers.

The Gauls, strangely reluctant to move off their hill and get stuck in.

With the main Roman army now forming a solid battle line to either flank of the village and with their cavalry wing threatening to sweep through the Carthage left flank it was looking decidedly dodgy for them, even though at this stage it was still 0vps each.

As were playing to a time limit the final turn was predictably silly! I charged with most things that could into the village, but despite taking some stands off the Romans all the fights were lost and the Gauls pulled back, the Romans deciding to hold their ground. The Spanish light cavalry on the right managed to sweep right around the Roman's flank and attack their skirmishers in a rare moment of success.

In their last turn, as we knew it was time to call it a day Jon and Jan declared charges with anything that could! The Romans in the village leapt over the wall and charged the demoralised Gauls, while their cavalry on the Carthage left smashed into the Numidians. Both main wings of their battle line also piled in. The results were predictably devastating. Most of the Gauls were wiped out and there were break-through charges aplenty. The only real bright spot for Carthage was the Spanish cavalry chewing through the skirmishers on the hill at the back.

As an impenetrable mist descended onto the battle field the picture was far from clear cut. A count back showed a narrow Roman victory on VP by 85. However no-one was left in control of the village due to the hot headed leader of the patrol!

This was a fun game to play and it was a shame we had to call time on it when we did. I've played a lot of tournament/campaign games where the player going last almost always wins due to being able to call charges where they can wipe out a unit, but leave themselves horribly exposed, knowing there can be no counter-charge as they know it is the last turn.

In this game it was fun to do and I'm glad we got stuck in and rolled some serious dice, but it always feels a tiny bit unsatisfying when a game is nicely balanced and you don't get to see how it would have played out normally. I'm keen to try out a similar scenario in the future though, its good to play something a bit different as most of the games of WMA I play are 1250pt tournament style ones.

Dark Age Buildings

I bought four buildings from a company called Total Battle Miniatures a while back and have got some paint on them now

This picture is of the "Great Hall" and a small wattle and daub dwelling. I've also got a 2nd dwelling and a "workshop" which is about half-way between the sizes of these two. The Great Hall is definitely the star of the show and will make a great centre-piece for a game.

Even though they are sold as Dark Ages, I don't see any reason why they couldn't be used for Late Roman, Northern Europe setting and possibly the workshop and dwellings all the way through to ~1600AD. As I understand it the Romans in Britain encouraged the move away from round houses to rectangular ones, so I'm happy to sub these in for a game of Gallic types against Imperial Romans as a rebellion or something.

On to the buildings themselves - they are not too expensive and I think they are worth it for the cost. I bought them from Maelstrom Games; unlike most MG stock they are not discounted normally, but I waited for one of their frequent 16% off vouchers and bought them then. So it was Great Hall - £6.75; Workshop - £4.20; Dwellings - £2.10. The resin casting quality is not too bad, but there are some problems with bubbles up around the eves of the thatch and the base of the buildings.

On balance I'd recommend them though. A nice quick way to populate a 10mm table.

Carthage Commander

I've been very quiet recently, got sucked into 28mm for a while; Mantic Undead, Dark Elves for Warhammer and some zombie survivors. I think I'll start to post stuff about these as well. I figure its probably better to post regularly and be a little less focused, than to drop the frequency of posts and keep it restricted to Warmaster/10mm only. If you've got any thoughts let me know in the comments.

Meanwhile I have finally finished my Carthage army to 1250pts, which is the level that is commonly played round here. This fellow is one of my Leaders - he's a magister millitum Numidian commander figure.

 

I tend to use him to command skirmishers or the Numidian light cavalry on my flanks.