After our recent outing to the Hydaspes, Simon put it on again using the Ancient Warfare expansion for Table Battles. We wondered if this treatment of the battle might let Alexander get his historic victory. So far we've done Bosworth and Little Round Top with Table Battles, and its interesting treatment of command options in eras where troops are very constrained by their initial deployments, seemed ideally suited for Ancient warfare.
Here is the Indian Army. Two cards respectively of Elephants, Cavalry and those scary Indian archer/swordsmen who slaughtered the phalanx in our last game. The Indian infantry can only come into action once the elephants have been defeated, and the Indian cavalry is also deployed in two waves. The Indians have 28 strength points, and a morale of 3, so they can afford to lose loads of units (like those elephants).
Alexanders Army is a much more complex beast. The Phalanx is deployed as three units, two in front and one in support (who can absorb hits). There is a unit of Hypaspists who turned out to be pretty handy, a couple of decent cavalry units and the mysterious Craterous poised to attack the Indian flank.
Craterous needs to be activated by the Hypaspists getting two doubles on the command dice, then his unit needs a triple to do anything. If they do attack they pretty much obliterate the Indian left wing, but getting them going is very hard, so they can be discounted.
The Macedonians have 20 strength points (excluding Craterous) and a morale of 1, so they can't lose anyone. Each phalanx is also worth two morale points, so the Macedonians need to kill at lest two Indian units before they can afford to lose a phalanx.
Simon helpfully laid out the cards in something approaching the formations they were deployed in. Myself and Mark took the Macedonians, and John reprised his role as Porus while Tim once more got to be the Mahout General and run the elephants.
The Indians are fairly constrained by their unit types and deployment and only really have one option - keep the Companions busy with their a cavalry and get the elephants stamping all over the phalanx. Which they duly proceeded to do.
The Companions are really very, very good. They can attack at no loss to themselves, and activate on any double so are trivially easy to get into action. That is all fine and dandy until the Indian cavalry perform their 'screen' action and negate the Companions charge. I wasted a lot of good dice trying to get the Companions to grips while the Indians rang rings around them.
Meanwhile back in the phalanx, we built up the attack dice on the two front units, ready to carve up the elephants. What we should have done was put the dice on the reserve phalanx first, to enable its hit absorbing properties, as when the elephants did crash home they tore huge chunks out of the pleading phalangites. Ouch. We did eventually manage to kill the elephants off by throwing in the Hypaspists, but by then the leading phalanx units were down to 3SP between them. We boosted out morale up to three by killing the elephants, but then those big scary Indian infantry units rolled into our weakened phalangites and it was game over.
Alexander loses again.
On Wednesday, we tried the scenario again as we could apply the benefit of hindsight to the Macedonian tactics, but once again, Alexander was stomped into the dust by the Indian elephants.
Oh well, perhaps Alexander was never supposed to win the Hydaspes, but somehow managed to pull it off. There was a reason he was Alexander the Great after all.
Table Battles come through once again. I think I understand how it works well enough to design a scenario of my own at some point now. I am sorely tempted to try the Hydaspes with Lost Battles and see if the massive bonuses that system gives to veteran troops and good generals is enough to tip the balance, but I'm not sure I can be bothered.
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