Scenario 3 Holding Action (1)

Two months without a post? That’s more like the kind of pace I expected from this blog. The usual real world excuses plus, in keeping with my refusal to do anything until it has long ceased to be trendy (see this blog), I managed to have Covid. Not a severe case, but enough to give my mojo a severe kicking. However, with a little help from a long weekend, I managed Scenario 3 and my first Ancients game of the project.

With my Byzantine army still awaiting its trip to Sri Lanka for a coat of paint, if I was going to get a game of Ancients in it would have to be an all Sassanian affair. Fortunately, Sassanian history provides plenty of examples of civil conflict. I'll admit that my knowledge of the Sassanian empire had, until recently, a very narrow military focus, but I've been rectifying that with this excellent book.

Yes, I know the author (or his editors) use fewer s's than me, but I'm sticking with Kaveh Farrokh (or his editors).

So my Byzantines are for the early 6th century CE, or at least they will be when they're painted, and conveniently around this time the Sassanian Sahansah Hormizd IV, who favoured the landed gentry (dehgans) over the nobility (savaran) was being overthrown in favour of his son, Khusro II. So this scenario pitches a delaying force of the savaran trying to hold out against Hormzid’s army until nightfall.

Scenario 2 Positional Defence (2)

A first outing for my ImagiNations inter war forces of Syldavia and Borduria. A low grade conflict between these two countries sputtered throughout the late 20's and early 30's, long before the involvement of an interfering boy reporter from Belgium. This scenario represents an occasion on which Borduria seized a mountain pass on the Syldavian side of the border, for complex reasons to do with the internal politics of the intelligence service, the ego of the local commander and the disappearance of his mistress's bichon frisé. Unsurprisingly, the Syldavians were quick to send a force to eject the invaders.

Using CoC Up, my modified (bastardised is more like it) version of Chain of Command, I'm calling each stand of figures a 'platoon', so that infantry units of 3-4 stands are 'companies' making each force: 

Borduria (Blue)

1 Battalion HQ (Senior Leader)
3 infantry companies (1 Junior Leader each)
1 stormtrooper company (1 Junior Leader)
1 tank squadron (2 Pz38t) (1 Junior Leader)
2 77mm batteries (1 Junior Leader)

Syldavia (Red)

1 Task Force HQ (Senior Leader)
5 infantry companies (1 Junior Leader each)
1 machine gun company (1 Junior Leader)
1 Jaeger company (1 Junior Leader)
2 tank squadrons (each 2 FT-17, 1 MMG armed, 1 37mm armed) (1 Junior Leader each)
1 cavalry squadron (1 Junior Leader)
1 105mm howitzer battery (1 Junior Leader)
Pre game bombardment

Given the force sizes, the traditional 5 command dice of CoC may make for a very slow and uncoordinated game. Now, slow and uncoordinated may be exactly the effect I am looking for in this period, but I might allocate 2-4 extra ‘red’ dice to each side depending on how things are going. (In CoC ‘red’ dice count for activation on a 1-4, but 5s and 6s which generate CoC points or extra turns are ignored.)

This is what the terrain is supposed to look like…

Inter War

A long time ago I purchased a couple of boxes each of the Revell WW1 French and Germans simply as an excuse to buy the fantastic Revell WW2 German artillery set, with vague notions of WW1 skirmish action. These sat unopened and undisturbed for years with a little reinforcement by Emhar, until a combination of the novels of Alan Furst, Beevor’s book on the Spanish Civil War, the appearance of ‘A Very British Civil War’ and some fantastic sets of plastics (one by Pegasus and two by Caesar) produced an unstoppable momentum towards gaming the interwar period. Hät provided the hallmark of the era: useless tanks, Italeri chipped in with German motorcycles just begging for conversion, and my ‘Furst Wars’ project was born. ImagiNations are courtesy of a well known Belgian reporter.