Field of Glory
Ancient & Medieval wargames rules from Slitherine/Osprey
Well I think I can safely say our
normally sedate little wargames
world had never been subjected
to such fervour before as it
has recently with the arrival of
Field of Glory (FoG). This rule
book actually made it onto the
Amazon top sellers list and the
pre-orders apparently (so those
wonderful rumours would have
us believe) actually outstripped
the original print run, which in
turn created more hype and
demand. Whatever the reality, FoG has actually caused
a bit of a stir!
People were pre-ordering the army list books before
actually getting to play a game. Everyone it seemed
couldn’t wait for the rules and boxes of ancient figures
were being dusted off and got down from the loft. People
who hadn’t played since WRG fourth edition and Shock
of Impact (which were out when I was still at school and
playing!) were getting revved up to play a new set of
rules.
The forums (especially TMP) were buzzing with posts
predicting that FoG would do for ancients what FoW
had done for WWII gaming. You know, drag back the
youngsters from the dark side of fantasy and sci-fi gaming!
The tantalising teasers from the publishers seemed to
support this... an excellent hard backed book written in
a Games Workshop/Flames of War style of presentation
- lots of pictures, diagrams, examples and hobby support
information was to be on offer.
After the official release date the hype (by this time it
seemed to be more like hypertension as people were not
getting their pre-orders on time) seemed to give way to a
bout of depression. It seemed that the kids were not going
to get as excited by a ‘BG’ (battlegroup) of ‘HI’ (heavy
infantry) that moved 3 inches at a time as they were a
whopping great KING TIGER which could shoot the entire
length of the battlefield and have a ‘Tiger Ace’ capable of
doubling your rate of fire as commander!
Also, the reality of just what ‘quick play’ rules seemed to
set in. Quick play in regard to most other ‘popular’ ancient
battle rules didn’t necessarily mean 1-2 hours per game,
as some would have hoped, but more like 3-4 hours,
which I guess for some is an improvement over 5-6 hours!
One thing was agreed on though: FoG isn’t just a remake
of DBx as some had feared/hoped. Instead punters were
complaining it was an amalgamation of other popular rule
mechanics, such as Armati and Warmaster Ancients, set
against a backdrop of WRG 6th Edition.
So were does that all leave us … well in my opinion it
leaves us with a set of rules which are going to take the
ancient wargame world by the scruff of the neck and give
it a good damn good shake but are they enough to lure the
younger player back into the historical fold? The simple
answer has to be; unlikely.
Before I go on to discuss the actual mechanics a comment
about the layout and production. These are without
doubt the highest quality set of ancient rules I have ever
seen. The production and presentation of the rules is a
major draw card. The 170 odd pages packed with rules,
examples, terrain and painting guides as well as a section
on tactics for the ‘newbie’ are packaged inside a very nice
hard cover. Inside the combination of Osprey’s expertise
in publishing and Slitherine’s in all things computer has
produced a heady mix of computer generated diagrams
and pictures and hand drawn ‘Osprey’ prints.
GAME PLAY
So how do they play? Basing wise the designers have
stuck, not unsurprisingly, with DBx style basing so that
at least most people do not have to rebase their armies.
Unfortunately this means that Warmaster Ancients cavalry
and ‘shock’ troops need to be rebased or ‘fudged’. The
standard unit is a ‘Battlegroup’ (BG) which consists of
a number of stands (normally ranging from 2 -10) and
a starter (approx 600 point) army will have approx 8-12
Battlegroups. The game is designed to be played on a
basic 6’ x 4’ foot table, which is standard fare nowadays.
This does mean however that the unit of measurement
(the MU) is an inch for all scales of figure. While double
moves are possible when you are not near the enemy and
with a commander once your opponent has worked out
what their light troops are for (more of this later) you will
be moving between heavy infantry at 3” and light cavalry
at 7” coupled with shooting ranges between 2” (javelins)
and 6” (longbows).
In 28mm these distances have irked a lot of people. Indeed
in our first two test games when we got our Roman Legions
on the table it left us deflated as it seemed the troops
were not really doing anything and everything seemed
so cramped. This feeling rapidly left us though when I
dragged the 10mm forces (cavalry rapidly rebased) I had
for Warmaster Ancients. Suddenly everything looked right
and it looked more like a battle; in 28mm it had looked like
a very slow skirmish game. Now it looked like a massed
battle. But did it feel like one?
One of the designers has said that their aim was to: “Make
the player feel like a General and not a lawyer.”
So the rules have clearly been designed to oust all those
niggly little measurement mechanics which always seem
to cause so many ‘debates’, especially in competitions.
They have achieved this really well, once you have your
head around the movement system everything is straight
forward, you can ‘shift’ up to a base width on a ‘simple’
forward move which gets rid of the oblique measurement,
series of tiny wheels etc. Moves are classified (by troop)
as simple or complex and a complex move needs a simple
test, fail and you have to stay still or make a normal full
move advance.
This simply limits (along with a ruling concerning undrilled
and ‘difficult’ moves) the amount of micro movement you
can do within dangerous range of the enemy and also
models how drilled troops found it easier to make complex
manoeuvres in the heat of battle. A player can use the
commanders to form ‘battlelines’ which is a number of
battlegroups moving together. This means you can keep
your line of battle fairly regular until you get close and your
28mm games look superb on a table this big. Using FoG for this type of game would be huge fun!
impact troops decide not to wait for the order (more of
this later). The commanders can also be used to perform
a double move if it occurs outside of 6 inch of the enemy.
So you can readjust your formations if you do it quickly or
send some light troops on a flanking mission, again this
seemed impossible to achieve in 28mm as the bases took
up most of the width of the table, but in 10mm (and we
used the same bases as the FoG rules prescribed 15mm)
there is room.
Commanders are used well – you can have them fighting
on the front line, where to be honest they are a nice bonus
as they effectively make your troops one class better. As
this normally means you being able to reroll ones or twos
on your ‘to hit’ and ‘cohesion’ (morale in a way) dice then
they can often make a big difference. Once they are in
though there they stay until that melee has ended (which
can be quite a while) and you can’t do any of the other
handy things with them. These include ‘bolstering’ your
troops when they have gone down a cohesion level or
two (catch them before they break), helping undrilled
troops manoeuvre better (well they are out to impress
it seems) and keep everyone in line. So it is a personal
decision – as they can be killed if fighting in the front line
it is risky, but sometimes it just needs doing. I find with
my Romans they don’t need the additional help fighting,
but they often need a bit of a morale boost after a bit of
a nasty session. Conversely my warband normally needs
to make a BIG impression in the impact stage and having
your commander fighting along side can make all the
difference.
ON THE FRONT LINE
Melee is well handled. There is an ‘impact’ phase which
models the man to man HIT of the first impact – this is a bit
of a leveller and the most even part of any of the fighting.
Survive the impact, which is at the start of the turn, and
you can later fight again (or continue on) in the melee
phase. Here the quality, quantity and skill of the troops
play a greater part. Some troops, like the warband, need it
BIG in the impact, they need to break the cohesion of the
enemy as normally they will be fighting at a disadvantage
in the following melee phase if they don’t. Cause a bit of
cohesion loss and the enemy begin to lose dice big time
and your warband numbers will begin to tell!
Basically you are hitting on a 3-5 on the die depending on the
Points of Advantage (POA) you have over your opponent.
The chart for calculating this looks complicated at first,
but we are finding you soon know what to look for and
after the first melee stage the POAs tend to stay the same
anyway, as it is the amount of die thrown that is reduced
due to the cohesion of a unit. The purpose of melee in FoG
is two-fold really and taking bases occurs quite slowly,
while it is the cohesion you tend to whittle away and which
eventually causes breaks. I haven’t actually kept score,
but I seem to suffer about equal amounts of breaking from
base loss as opposed to cohesion loss. It is for a unit to
break without taking any stand losses. Battlegroups auto
break when they have lost a percentage of their stands,
based on quality. What this does mean is you often have
two long battlelines clashing and grinding each other
down, there is no push back mechanism, which actually
means far less fiddling.
What you can do is feed troops into the combat and sooner
or later someone is going to turn tail and run! In our games
so far this has led to some very tense fights where they
are balancing and then something just tips one side over,
be it a flanking unit hitting, loss of a commander or even
just a bad round of dice by one group. Clive, a member of
our club, who is a repository of ancient knowledge and a
competition player of various rules summed the fighting in
FoG up by saying:
“At last a set of ancients rules which look and feel as they
should …”
Indeed this is the way I am feeling. Yes it is a grind, a
slugfest if you like, but surely that’s what it was really like.
Doing away with small push backs and moves also speeds
the combat resolution up. Even large multi-battlegroup
(BG) combats are easily worked out on a BG by BG basis
and give a set of results which ‘feel’ good. But it is this
‘grind’ that my best wargaming mate, Shaun, doesn’t like
– things don’t tend to disappear quickly. It just isn’t bloody
enough for him, although he does admit this niggle is far
outweighed by the things he does like about the system.
It would be unfair to enter the debate of which mechanism
comes from what set of rules and which are truly unique.
Frankly who cares, even if they ALL came from other sets
the authors have mixed and cooked them all together to
create a gourmet treat. The specific things I am finding a
breath of fresh air (although I imagine someone can tell
me what other rules do them) are the way that terrain
is handled and its effect on troops; the way cavalry can
break off from steady infantry at the end of the turn to
charge in again; the way commanders are used in subtle
ways and the way skirmishers are a hassle, but can’t hold
up a horde of adrenalin topped up heavy foot!
In fact skirmishers and shooting are an area where I suspect
people are going to love or hate the rules depending on
your view of the effectiveness of ancient ranged weapons.
It fits in well with my view, at the level FoG is pitched you
are going to be lucky if a little firing is going to reduce a
BG base wise, it may however cause a loss in cohesion
which in turn if not dealt with can be added to next
shooting stage (both armies fire in each shooting phase)
and eventually it will take its toll. Softening up troops with
firing (and getting them to lose dice in combat) before
charging in with foot/mounted troops is a good, and dare
I say, ‘historical’ tactic. How armies with masses of bow
do I have yet to see but give us time and our English
longbowmen will test it out for you!
So mechanics wise the rules are very sound and to me
play really well and, to be quite frank with you is just what I
have been waiting for. Presentation wise you would be hard
pressed to wish for more … the rules are well described
and seem to be written so that the rule lawyers have very
little to work with, everything has an example and are is
easy to read. There is an amount of acronyms used, less
than in other sets maybe, but I was out of practice with
the whole ‘armoured, HF, Imp, ss’ stat line world, but have
picked it up again with gusto! The rule book does include
sections on collecting and painting an army, tactics for
new Generals and reams of definitions all of which may
well help a new player to the genre.
There is a lot of ‘defining’ situations, again obviously aimed
at cutting down on ‘rule lawyering’, which to be honest
does make it a bit of a turgid read. If you skip through
the book, see the pages of ‘defining situations’ look at
the number of charts in the QRS and you could well be
discouraged from actually trying them … unless you are
a DBx type competition player you really do need to give
them a couple of games. There are some very subtle
mechanics in the rules which do not jump out of the page
at you; you need to play a few games to see how they all
meld together.
I think they are going to be quick to play, note I didn’t say
a fast play set. At the moment we are playing a 700 - 800
point game in about 3 1/2 hours, veterans are saying they
easily finish a 800 point game in about 2 to 3 hours. If you
can get a standard 800 point game down to 2 ½ hours
they certainly will take the competition world by storm.
There was a lot of debate on the Internet about the rules
being a 28mm set, fuelled by the fact that a manufacturer
had joined forces with the ‘team’ to produce high quality
plastic 28mm figures. My thought is that the main core of
players are definitely going to be 15mm and below, 28mm
on a normal table just looks too packed and most people
Although this is the wrong basing for FoG... 10mm scale does show how a ‘large battle’ can look. 6mm Romans from
Baccus and based for The Battle of Zama. Here 40 figures to a 40mm square looks rather imposing.
I have spoken to have the same opinion. In the UK the
standard competition scale is really 15mm which will have
a bearing I imagine. But time will tell…
So what, if anything, is going to spoil this ‘ancients
revival’ party? The initial hype possibly has proven to
have a slightly negative effect now they are out. After
such fervour the rules would have had to have been really
innovative and have ticked everyone’s collection of boxes
to live up to it. As I alluded to people were thinking this
was going to have people converting to ancients in their
masses – they were deemed to be the set to do a Flames
of War for ancients. What they have turned out to be is an
excellently produced set of ‘proper’ wargames rules that
will be familiar to old time gamers, but innovative in their
game delivery.
Will they deliver a horde of new players to the fold? I think
it is too early to tell. There is a lot of enthusiasm, but is it
just disaffected gamers being pulled back to ancients, or
does it show the arrival of new blood? I doubt the rules
are off the kind to convert the 40K or Warhammer crowd –
what it will do is pull gamers from other ancient rules over.
Then there is the issue over army lists … only 4 in the core
rule book the rest of the lists are being supplied in a large
amount of army list books. Now I have no problem with
this … I have a limited period interest which are already
covered and the army point builder section will see me
through the urge for samurai lists. BUT not everyone
feels this way and comparisons to GW codexes are being
made. This is slightly unfair I think as the army lists will
not, as I understand, have rule update or modifications in
… but the moaning will go on I suspect.
So I am waiting with baited breath to see how the rules
do … I really like them, they have dragged me back into
ancients and I am actually considering competitions
which is something I never would have thought was going
to happen! An old friend of mine, in fact we were playing
WRG and Shock of Impact back in ‘the old days’ said the
major thing for him (he is an avid DBM competitor) was
that in a competition overseas he played 4 games in a
day and didn’t feel like he had been dragged kicking and
screaming through a ringer or lost his mind with geometric
puzzles – in fact he wanted to play another game!
Let me know what you think …
Rich Jones
Written by: Richard Bodley Scott,
Simon Hall, Terry Shaw
Cover Artist: Peter Dennis
Price: £25.00 UK / $34.95 US/ $44.00
CA
www.fieldofglory.com