Lockdown Workbench #4-ish

So down here we're out of lockdown in Wellington (kia kaha Auckland!) so I did get out for a gaming day with some of the bloggers in which we tried out L'Art de la Guerre as a replacement Ancients game for Impetus.

 Victory at Sea

And it is done. The last of the planes and the battleships are complete. And I still hate the planes.

The Conte di Cavour, the smaller of my two battleships, is actually a really lovely model and I'm quite pleased with how it came out.

Secondly, a repainted Vittorio Veneto which has come up much better than it did the first time and I'm quite happy. Blogger Pooch has suggested we have a battleship-off at some point which I think is an excellent idea.

L'Art de la Guerre

I didn't actually play! Bloggers McBeth and I rulebooked for Bloggers Tank and Scotty who had both recently rebased their Impetus armies for ADLG having never played a game. Scotty used a pike-heavy Seleukid list and Tank his Western Early Imperial Romans. Eventual victory went to the Romans after they rolled the Seleukid left flank more quickly than the Seleukids (thanks to some appalling CP dice for Scotty) could clear out the Roman left.

This is the only photo I took which was us working through the wheeling rules after working out what happens when a unit makes a 90-degree turn straight into the side of an enemy. 

It took us most of the day as we had to look a lot of things up and learn as we were going along. I think we must have come up with every single thing that needed checking. We also discovered quite late in the piece that there are some implicit abilities for troops that aren't in the actual lists (Cataphracts have the Impact and Heavy Armour abilities by virtue of being Cataphracts) which means I suspect we may have made some other mistakes but for the most part, it was pretty successful. 

I enjoyed the look of the board and so won't have any qualms about tearing my Byzantines off their bases and putting them on new ones. The fact that, unlike Impetus, I think we'll struggle to go board-edge to board-edge also makes for a more tactical game when everyone is going to have flanks to protect.

I also learned that my preferred method of combat calculation (work out all the modifiers and then add them to the die roll) was much more complicated for everyone but me!!

Next Time

I've started on a couple of projects that have been hanging around, painting up a collection of DnD characters for a Frostgrave Warband with a deliberately limited palette on each model, and getting some Crusaders done for my Imperial Guard so it'll probably be Workbench #5 if I can't somehow wrangle a game of Victory at Sea this week...