Romans V Brits
Battle comment Tuesday 13th November 2012 (Club Meeting)
When the Romans landed in Britain and trudged up the road to Iwade, they did not expect to get a kicking from a bunch of hairy under dressed savages, sporting the latest cosmetics from Rimmel !!
Last night’s 28mm game of Hail Ceaser was fought by Dave and Bob (Romans) against Rob, Clive and Martin (Brit Celts). It all went quite badly from the beginning with the Roman advance on the left flank and centre not actually advancing at all, giving Rob’s chariots the opportunity to rapidly close across the Celts right. Fortunately, Clive’s centre war band also liked the idea of standing and watching for a couple of turns. Meanwhile Martin and Bob got stuck in and had a good squabble over control of a hill.
Dave’s Roman cavalry on the left flank dug the spurs in and promptly charged the chariots only to get a good stuffing, eventually running off the field after 3 turns of disorder. Closely followed by the auxiliaries, who got slaughtered by a fanatical druidic war band. The clash value of 9 in the first round combined with support from celt cavalry was just too much. However, the legionnaires in support fared much better and hung on to some pride. The Roman centre comprising of 2 units of legionnaires carried the battle to the celts and the lock shield rule for heavy infantry with shields proved very useful. Not so good were the Numidian light cavalry who after hanging about picking oranges from a nearby tree, got wiped out in their first charge.
The squabble for the hill on the Roman right carried on with it swinging both ways. A point of note here is don’t let Clive place the scenery, especially broken ground when he has units that are untouchable in it!! Archery, especially Roman, proved pretty useless.
The centre of the battle field became a blood bath with the legionnaires surrounded. It all came to a disastrous finale with Dave’s commander rolling a double “1” twice successively for break test results and the entire Roman centre disappeared. Helpful comments from Andy such as welcome to the bad dice role club did not make me feel any better !!
An excellent game, thanks to Clive for supplying both fantastic armies.
Cheers, Dave.