Warrior Ancient and Medieval Rules

[Ewan McNay]

Mark Stone wrote:
> For example: if you want to play on mostly open terrain, the optimal 4 terrain
> picks are: road - open space - open space - hill. You can reason through why
> that's the correct answer in the abstract, without having an actual game
and/or
> opponent.

So, I've been trying to steel myself up to pick a road at H'Con.
'Bite the cheese' so to speak . My guess is that the best way to
take it in terms of terrain reduction is within a flank sector, placed
to eliminate most terrain items from being placed (because of minimum
size) on the medial aspect of the road. But, I confess that I've been
reluctant to get into this yet . So, other thoughts? One obvious
one is to place it transverse, across roughly the middle of the table,
but I haven't though through yet why that might be better or worse.

[And part of the reason for posting this is just to back up Mark's
comment on being able to do Warrior thinking on this kind of stuff
away from the table. Who needs a day job anyway?]

> In terms of on-table play: I have a lengthy piece I've been working on about
> skirmisher doctrine in general, but I'll put this thought out to the list for
> now: If you have a reasonable cavalry army (at least 4 units of lance-armed
> cavalry and at least 16 figures of light cavalry serves as a good reference
> point for what counts as "reasonable"), then you really can't go wrong by
> adding as much shielded light infantry with bow as your list allows.

Add to that 'don't try to do everything.' You won't have enough
troops to cover the table *and* fight in terrain *and* be mobile *and*
manouvre *and* skirmish *and* be resilient... and so on. So play to
the army's strengths, rather than trying to kludge together a way to
do things that your army is not good at. A caveat to this is that you
must have *some* way of dealing with terrain, which is going to happen
some of the time no matter how many roads and open spaces you pick.
My last two battles I have missed my first two open spaces both times
. So my Seleucids, for instance, take every regular loose foot man
I can possiby find. It's still not really going to win by fighting in
terrain - the pikes and elephants are just not built fot that - but at
least I can not worry about it in at least one, maybe two small,
terrain pieces.

[joncleaves]

>So, I've been trying to steel myself up to pick a road at H'Con.
>'Bite the cheese' so to speak . >>

Ewan, as a Sassanid, a road is your life's blood...lol And it certainly is no
more or less cheesy than, say, a minor water feature...lol

One thing I will ask Scott to do is to state up front his view on the words
'unrealistic angle' as they apply to road placement, as we will clearly have
some being placed.

My recommendation to him will be no more than two bends and none more than 90
degrees and not within some distance of each other like 240p or some such. But
in any case, i think he should make clear to you highwaymen how your roads can
be legally placed...

And yes, I will make whatever he uses at HCon an interim clarification and then
nail that down in the next printing...

Jon 

[scott holder]

My recommendation to him will be no more than two bends and none more than 90
degrees and not within some distance of each other like 240p.

>Go with that for this weekend.