3x3 1st Punic War Battle 1. Crimisos River

 I have been following the excitement around Mark Cordones 3x3 super fast play variant of the Portable Wargame and mulling over ways to make it work in a multi-player remote environment. The game system is eminently suitable for quickly resolving campaign type battles and I was torn between re-running some of my old KISS Rommel campaigns (Operation Crusader and Operation Bagration) or re-visiting the Punic Wars as I've hardly done any ancient gaming at all since lockdown.   

I went down an inevitable rabbit hole of trying to write a multi player campaign system as a framework for the battles, and then realised it is far too easy to spend time thinking things over and not actually doing them. We have a  lot more players offering games to the regular remote gaming group, and I want to prioritise my new ACW rules for that, so I thought I may as well just sit down and play some solo 3x3 PW games which everyone else seems to be doing.

Having decided on Ancients and specifically Punic Wars, I dug out Phil Sabins existing grid based scenarios for Lost Battles and translated them into 3x3 format. Phil had already normalised the sides into roughly 20 elements each by cunning variations in troop ratios and ranked them by quality, so turning them into 3x3 Army Lists of six elements was pretty simple.

Lost Battles. Lots of great grid based historical scenarios. I greatly prefer fighting real battles to made up ones.

I started with Crimisos River in 341 BC. Syracuse under Timoleon has surprised the Carthaginians under Hasdrubal on the Crimisos River. Terrain features are a rvier along the Carthaginian baseline and a single hill in the centre of the Syracusian baseline.

Carthage has 1 x Levy Light Infantry, 1 x Average Chariot, 1 x Average Heavy Infantry and 3 x Levy Heavy Infantry plus General Hasdrubal. I gave the HI 3SP, everything else got 2SP.

Syracuse has 1 x Average Light Infantry, 1 x Average Heavy Cavalry, 1 x Veteran Heavy Infantry, 3 x Average Hoplites plus General Timoleon.

The Carthaginan chariots. They should be four horse Cartho ones, but these look a bit like Airfix with replacement wheels. Ahem. Well, there are four horses.  I was using 5" squares and two DBA elements (on a 60mm frontage) per unit. So basically it was two DBA armies squaring off... 'Hasdrubal' is Newline metal figure of Hannibal Barca.

I was using Mark Cordones C3 and combat system. The Carthos rolled 6 PIPs, Syracuse just 2.

Which led to a general move forward of the Cartho line, but the Carthos came off rather worse. I was using the PW missile rules but Marks revised close combat system where you just throw opposed dice with the various modifiers. Highest throw wins.   

The Syracusion cavalry counterttacked in the north and pushed back the Cartho lights and their supporting infantry. I was slightly making up how the supports worked. +1 in combat but then if there was an advance after combat, the second line was engaged too. In this case both Cartho units had retreat results.

The Carthos counterattack, and swung their chariot around 90 degrees to conduct a flank attack. tbh I got in a bit of a mess with this. I'm note sure about having units facing different ways out of the same square, but it seemed to work OK.

There was a lot of pushing and shoving further south. I let units swap place in a square if there were enough PIPs. That seemed to work OK as it gave some tactical choices.

A big push by Carthage went a bit wrong. Syracuse was pushed back north of the hill, but the big attack in the centre was held at the hill (both the Chariots and Levy Heavy Inf are down to one hit each). The real disaster was in the south where the Syracuse heavies stepped forward, drove back one line of Cartho infantry and killed Hasdrubal! Oops.

The next few turns were basically a big dice throwing contest. There didn't seem to be much in the way of tactical decision making apart from cycling retreated units back and forth. Timoleon made a big push in the centre off his hill which broke the weakened Cartho heavies.

Timoleon now had the upper hand and Carthage was forced back across the board as the weakened units had to take retreats if possible. I had put stringent move restrictions on the heavy infantry and cavalry - a wheel cost a full squares movement, which made lateral reinforcement very hard. I don't believe it is possible to swing a phalanx through 90 degrees without a movement penalty however. 

Timoleon got his cavalry over the river in the north. The Carthos had one turn to counterattack or lose.

The Cartho chariots duly wiped the cavalry out, but the writing was on the wall as Timoleons hoplites were lined up for a massive flank attack.

Splat. That was the end with a column cleared of the enemy, plus the Carthos now reduced to one unit! Syracuse wins.

That all went OK and was something of a learning experience. The whole thing took well over an hour, probably because I was figuring things out as I went along. Historically the Carthaginians lost, and given the balance of terrain and troop quality, that is hardly surprising. It seemed to get a very long time to get to that result though and there were basically a whole load of combats which were essentially both sides rolling opposed D6+2 with not much differentiation of troop types. I don't think a bunch of Psiloi can significantly hold up a hoplite phalanx irl. I enjoyed the DBA type opposed combat though, and the area movement coupled with the PIPs for activation worked very well.

OK, onto the next one.