More Pulse of Battle - 15mm

On Saturday and Sunday, Matt was over and we played two play test battles of Pulse of Battle using the Three Kingdoms period of ancient China as our environment.

In the first game, we played with Matt's 15MM Chinese armies based for DBA. The PoB system worked absolutely fine around that basing style. We considered one DBA element a "unit" in PoB. We rated up the troops and had at it. Also, we used half-distances for the battle. So a 5" range was played as a 2.5" range, etc. That seemed to work well for us, easy too.

Matt, representing Wei, took an army of 18 units. My buddy John came over about this time and joined me in running a 14 unit army representing Shu.

We set up using the Field of Battle deployment system, the Fate and Command Decision tables and about the only thing that came out of that was that Wei had a huge deployment advantage in terms of being allowed a very forward deployment in one sector of the field.

Wei's army had a Skilled sequence deck and Shu had a Poor sequence deck - so the odds were stacking up rapidly against Shu. The commander of Wei had a D12 for Leadership while Shu had only a D8. Wei ended up with 23 morale points and Shu with 18.

So, as you can see from the deployment picture below, Wei was able to place a large force very close to the Shu lines. John and I, co-generals of Shu - John was the "General of the Left" and I was the "General of the Right" - decided to huddle up in the middle with the bulk of our forces but to deploy some crossbowmen in the woods to harry the flank of the most forward enemy units.

When the action started, the initiative die roll difference was nine! Nine! Ouch. The armies of Wei will have a lot of leeway on the first turn! Matt quickly tossed out a strong screen of horse archers and really was able to use them very effectively! He put a hurtin' on the horse in our defensive line - weakening them before the inevitable assault of his heavier horsemen (yes, we had to improvise with puff balls for shooting markers, sorry).

Our own missile troops were able to return some damage to the barbarian horsemen!

At that point, the battle quickly escalated. The heavy horse came in and we had many desperate situations developing, before we knew it we had lost 12 of our 18 morale points - to just 3 or 4 of Matt's being lost!

Shu's lines held and we drove off the horsemen assailing us. The heavy foot we had ended up being rated pretty high and were real monsters! Even the elephant of our Annam allies got some good action in!

Things slowed down a little as Matt's remaining forces got into position - they were not able to deploy so far forward and had to march to the fight. Wei's heavy foot crested a hill and their missile troops crept around our right using the woods for cover. On our left, the heavy horsemen of Wei's allies had been dealt with and would not return - but - the light horse was still there as a threat.

When Matt sallied forth a few unsupported units of foot, I took the opportunity to hit them.

Sadly, this little battle did not end up well for John and I. Let's just say that the enemy will be eating elephant flesh for a week. Yummy. That ended the fight as we had lost all of our morale points and failed the test roll on the Army Morale Card. Matt had lost 10 of his 23 points, but had 1 returned to him through our losses.

It was fun - a little weird to get used to playing with units that are "one element" due to the DBA basing - but we managed. We made lots of notes for Brent during the game and resolved to play another game in the morning - using the 28mm Chinese troops!