TTS AAR: Gauls versus Early Imperial Romans
/A second battle using my newly finished Gauls: this time against a formidable Early Imperial Roman army consisting of five units of veteran legionaries (red shields) supported by a couple of units of standard legionaries, auxilia and cavalry. History would suggest that this was going to be a big ask of my troops!
Despite winning the scouting, Peter managed to play his usual trick of weighting his men onto one flank (my left) in an attempt to fight only a portion of my army with all of his. Not a problem on this occasion, however, as I used my initiative to start moving warbands left whilst holding back my main line.
After an initial slow start, the Romans got moving pretty rapidly, and it looked as if it was going to be a race between his veterans attacking my left flank and the main body of my troops trying to punch through his centre.
Battle was joined right the way across the left hand side of my line, with my Gauls taking the worst of it in the initial clash but, showing a fine bit of resilience, surviving to start giving as good as they were getting.
A big turning point was Peter replaying a natural “10” only to draw an Ace whilst attempting to turn a legionary unit onto the flank of my cavalry…
…and soon the centre-left was looking decidedly bare of troops with the action in that part of the field now fully focused on the bottom left hand corner of the table. It’s worth noting that at this point Peter had lost two Roman generals and was feeling the pain of that “+1 for out of command” penalty.
The schwerepunkt now switched to the area just in front of the Roman castrum, where units from my central command, backed up by those I’d switched from the right flank, were now threatening hard. Once again, it was a unit of slingers adding their weight of fire at the critical moment that made the difference (pictures top and bottom right in the gallery, below) and I was also being helped by the cards allowing my somewhat unwieldy warbands to manouevre just how I wanted.
Kudos also now to the troops in the bottom left hand corner of the field, where the Gallic cavalry managed to disorder their legionary opponents, with the warband next to them going one better to defeat the Romans in the woods in front of them!
The battle was now reaching its climax, with both sides nearing exhaustion. The Gauls survivied a final push from the Romans…
…and then, with a mighty roar, broke into the enemy camp to take three coins and the win!
(Looks easy, but start with a base 2+, add two for moving diagonally makes 4+, add two for the rough ground of the camp makes 6+, add two for crossing fortifications makes 8+, and I drew an ‘8’. Oh, and you have to ignore the lights defending the parapet right in front of you!)
To show you how close it was, I had lost 11 coins by this stage, so if one more warband had broken, victory would have gone to the Romans.
As it was, a very satisfactory result, with the Gauls proving both manoeuvrable and resilient right the way through the army from the warriors to the cavalry to the lights. Another cracking game!
