‘These dice are not Spartans’

The ACW Greek campaign has, after a hiatus, continued. I had considered stopping after the Athenians captured the Spartan capital, but decided that would be boring. A rethink of the strategy for both sides was clearly necessary, however. The situation was this.

Spartan army S has ceased to exist. Spartan strategy needs to account for this, and the fact that Athenian army A, the red pin in the centre of the map, is 20 bases strong, having just captured the Spartan capital. Looking at the troop strengths of the armies, the two Spartan forces, if combined, could easily defeat (at least in theory) Athenian armies D (top left) and H (top centre), at least in detail. The problem is to combine them, and so both Spartan armies have started a retreat to town B, at the southern edge of the mountain range.

The aim of the Athenians is, of course, to trap the Spartan armies with army A and eliminate them in detail. As the shot above shows, it is a close run thing. Both armies are converging on Spartan town J. Whoever gets there first will have an advantage. The other Athenian armies, weakened by their combats, have withdrawn to their respective bases, ordered to defend them if the Spartans tuen up.

Things went wrong for the Spartans from the off. They failed the next initiative roll while the Athenians made theirs, and so blocked the road which led to Spartan safety. One of the interesting things about campaigns, aside from yielding unequal wargames, such as this one, is that they do generate their own scenarios as well. Here, the Spartans needed to get past the Athenians without necessarily defeating them.

The terrain dice rolls were not kind to the Spartans either. They had to get across an impassable river with an Athenian held ford, as well as crossing a stream to get there.

The picture shows both sides struggling to deploy. The Spartan columns became separated by crossing the stream (I rolled 2 sixes for the rightmost column which delayed it considerably). The Athenians simply did not have that much room and had to juggle the deployment of the cavalry to cover the hoplites, the changing of the hoplites into line as well as the movement of the peltasts and light infantry into useful positions.

Eventually, the Athenians were ready and the Spartans were across the stream. The Spartan general was the first casualty, going down to a javelin shot from the skirmishing Athenian peltasts. That rather inhibited the Spartans, but they carried on in true Spartan style. The Athenians hoplite attack was met with some initially desperate resistance, but numbers told, except by the river where the Spartan hoplite base disposed of its foemen. In turn, however, it was charged and routed by the Athenian cavalry who were hanging around in the rear without much to do since the hoplite deployment.

The Spartan casualties were sufficient to cause the Spartan army to rout, and so that was, as they say, that. Neither the initiative dice. Terrain dice nor the combat dice were kind to the Spartans this day, hence the pseudo-quote at the top.

As a result of this, the Spartans are going to have to negotiate. They only have around 8 active bases left on the map in their army B, and this is heavily outnumbered by the Athenians. While one of the lessons learnt from the campaign battles has been that slightly smaller forces can successfully hold off and even defeat larger ones in defensive actions, there are limits, and the Athenians have learnt to surround outnumbered enemies.

Overall, I enjoyed the campaign. It created some intriguing wargames with a point and they, in turn generated some unexpected results and threw up problems for the respective generals (who were both, of course, me) to ponder. The movement was simple and straightforward. The campaign set-up was controlled by dice, hence the rather radically uneven initial deployments.

One of the godd things about the campaign was its simplicity. I could pick it up and put it down on a whim. The campaign diary only records which armies got the initiative in a given move; the location was designated by the pin in the map board. With only three armies a side I could keep track of which was which without straining my brain cell.

The initiative rolls worked well in providing unexplained delays and permitting strategic opportunities to slip by. They introduced a nice bit of ‘friction’ in a very simple way. Similarly, while in a face to face campaign the initial strengths of armies would have been hidden, as a solo game I did not need to bother, and it probably did not matter. The map was sufficiently large to prevent reinforcements from being rushed across the board.

Was it anything like the prototype, the American Civil War? Of course not. For a start the northern armies advanced, in the end, down the far side of the mountains and then across. The victory conditions in fact encouraged that, but the deployment dice decreed that the Spartans were gambling very heavily by holding their capital very lightly. This might have worked in Sparta, but probably not in the Confederacy.

Still, I did learn quite a lot about campaign games from this. The first lesson was really about the time and space movement on a map a bit larger than I am used to. When the Spartans looked like punching past the Athenians in the west I spent a fair amount of time counting hexes for Athenian army A got get across to protect the flank and, indeed, their own capital. I am not sure they would have made it. As it turned out it was unnecessary, but it was a bit fraught.

Would I do it again? Yes, of course. Further campaigns are already in pondering mode. I think that switching period does not detract from the campaign, and by stripping away some of the external historical context, it might even help to concentrate on the bare bones of the strategic situation.

Or maybe that is just pretentious.