The Ballad of Bradicles

Oh, that was rough!

The first mistake was leaving my cavalry in charge range. I honestly didn’t think he’d charge, I thought he’d shoot and retire. None of my cavalry should have survived but enough did that at least I had something to threaten him with. The Hetairoi aren’t a scout unit and harrying through the backfield isn’t really their thing. But countering the Roman cavalry and secondarily securing the backfield became their de facto role.

The one group of Psiloi did well to take out the Roman cavalry but that’s more to luck and is tricky to pull off. Missile troops suffer a penalty when shooting at moving cavalry so reactive shooting is only hitting on 6+ most of the time.

The other group of Psiloi didn’t fare well. With so many Roman units with the Overlapping Shields rule, cracking that formation is tough. The slingers were also uncommonly ineffective. Usually the only unit to survive a battle, they got slaughtered to a man. I think they only got one or two kills.

The pikemen were a mixed bag. One unit survived intact but did little more than push one unit back. The other did weaken an enemy unit but got trounced in turn. In general they performed subpar in getting hits, have weak armor and lack the overlapping shields rule. And are more expensive than Hoplites. Really not sure what to do about them.

My veterans just whiffed. They should have wiped out that disrupted and fatigued Roman unit in one round. After two rounds of combat they managed to kill two of four soldiers then died to a lone soldier on horseback. Even with re-rolls.

At this point of the battle, turn 3 or maybe 4, I had lost 3 break points and the center objective giving me 4 total. Brett had lost 1 plus my cavalry in the backfield for a net 2 break points so we called it there and the Romans got a major victory.