Another FOG Campaign Game

We played another Field of Glory campaign game today. This game pitted the northern Carthaginian force, commanded by Hasrudal against two of our newly-raised legions. These legions are comprised of average troops instead of veterans, a force which Hasrudal had already previously beaten soundly in an earlier game. This time we were fighting in the mountains in a heavily terrained area of the map. The battlefield featured a fordable river and many dense woods and hills. All of this terrain, and the numerical advantage seemed to be in the Carthaginian's favor with their myriad of light and medium troops. Having two legions in the field and two Roman players at the game, Mike and I each took a legion and half of the battlefield to cover. I took the more heavily terrained half on the left, shown in the photo above. Mike drew the more difficult assignment, the open terrain on the right half of the battlefield. I shifted a couple of my legions toward the center and Mike took two of our three commanders and our only cavalry to help cover the larger area. We also chose to deploy our only unit of Triarii on the right flank where we expected the Carthaginian African Veterans to attack.

Early on things looked like they were going to go badly for the Romans. I failed my first five complex move tests, and in the opening skirmishes I lost a velite unit in two turns by rolling a death roll of '1' in ranged shooting in my bound, and then rolling another death roll of '1' in the melee the following turn. Having paid my dues to the luck Gods, things turned around for me and I had much better luck the rest of the game, starting with winning the impact against a unit of Baleric slingers on our extreme left flank. I took a photo of this as it was the first time I got to use one of my new status markers in the game.   In the center the victorious Carthaginian skirmishers pressed forward through the void my dead Velites left with a large unit of Gauls also crossing the river. I turned a battle group of hastati and princeps to face them while the only Roman cavalry rushed to my aid and helped by intercepting the Gauls. After the impact and one round of melee the cavalry left, as the melee was a stalemate, neither side becoming disrupted. On my left two units of medium infantry pressed the flank. I shored up the area by putting a single battle group of hastati and princeps into the only clear gap in the terrain, hoping they would hold.  You can just seen them in the lower right corner of the photo above. The enemy are just out of sight behind the river.

This photo is after a few more turns. I was lucky enough to win the melee with the Gauls thanks to the Roman's skilled swordsman factors and superior armor. On the left flank, sheer luck allowed me to out-last the slingers and some good fortune and crowding on the battle lines allowed my heavies in the gap on the left flank to turn one unit of Carthaginian mediums to the rear as well. In the center my over-confident extraordinarii pursued the Carthaginian skirmishers one turn too far and had to spend the rest of the game running from elephants while suffering the indignity of being pelted from two directions by Carthaginian javelins. Isolated and disrupted, they would probably have eventually fallen prey to the four battle groups pursuing them had the Carthaginians not fled the field.  In the center both side's heavies stared at each other across the disordering river terrain, neither side wishing to blink. On the right my partner Mike lost his unit of extraordinarii to a particularly rabid unit of Spanish scutari who rolled five (5) hits in one turn of melee! The dice were hot on both teams left flank this day. That's for sure. With his left flank mostly collapsed, Hasrudal chose to leave the field rather than continue to press on in order to keep his invasion force in tact. A wise choice for sure, that is bound to provide us with more good battles to fight in the future.  

For a lot more photos you can visit the Northern Conspiracy's Photo page.