Hydaspes

 Simon put on a game of the Hydaspes using a squared version of Neil Thomas's Ancient rules. These are the more standard rules which we've used for Nineteenth Century, Napoleonic and Pike and Shot, but not so much the Ancients version as we've generally use CnC Ancients. Sadly CnC Ancients doesn't work too well over Zoom. I was interested to contrast these with the OHW game that Mark put on recently.

I got to play the Macedonians, being no less a personage than Alexander. Tom had the  various light cavalry and skirmishers, Tim C had the pike phalanx, while I was left with the Companions. Well, it is a tough job, but someone has to do it...

The wicked Indians were commanded by John as King Porus, while Tim G  had the elephants and  Mark the Indian Cavalry (which included some Heavy Chariots). The bulk of the Indian Army were massed archers.

Here we are all lined up. Indians on the right with cavalry on each wing and elephants out front. I went with Alexanders historical deployment with the phalanx weight towards the right and cavalry on each wing. I was with the Companions on the left. 

Nellie the elephant and her friends rolled forwards in a menacing wave. We set about enveloping them.

A big scrappy fight developed as we tried to deal with the grey menace. The movement and geometry rules got a fairly good outing at this point. I remain unconvinced by the buckets of dice close combat system NT likes to use. To exaggerates some effects while underplaying others.

The Indian cavalry weighed in at this point. I'm sure Veteran Companions will soon make short work of them. Well, evidently not.

We managed to get rid of the elephants anyway. The Indian cavalry were busy rolling all over us instead now. I just had to hope the cavalry held on while our infantry won the battle for us. 

It was all down to our veteran pikemen now. The Indian archers shot half of them down on the approach march, so that could have gone a bit better.

The last of the Companions went down in a tide of Indian horseflesh, although Alexander survived to live another day. The excitement made the camera shake.

And, heavily outnumbered, the veteran Macedonian pikemen were massacred by the lightly armed Indian archers.  Ooops. And that was that, back to the boats boys!

TBH, if it had been any other battle or army, the result would have been predictable from turn 1 but I genuinely thought that Alexander and his Macedonian veterans might roll right over the Indians. Unfortunately this set of rules suffer from the same problem as the Neil Thomas Pike and Shot ones, the 'per base' dice system overly emphasises equipment differences instead of experience/morale differences. I can forgive that in the nineteenth century set, as breechloaders really do make a huge difference, but not so much in periods where motivation mattered so much more than kit. 

Yes, I could fix it but fiddling by with the various combat modifiers, but I really can't be bothered as CnC Ancients or Lost Battles are perfectly good for f2f Ancients games. It did inspire me to re-visit  the One Hour Ancients rules again with a view to remote games though, so we shall see how that turns out in a future post!