Field of Glory Wargaming at Britcon 2009 - Sunny Manchester 2009
The afternoon just about dragged itself into life, as I steadfastly refused to throw up before the looming 6th and final (at last) game of the series. This time the Romans were batting somewhat out of period against a Belgian-led Nikephorian Byzantine list (which is available there)
Pictures of Byzantines from my Ancients Photo Directory
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The Byzantines had hoped to open up the field by deploying a river before any of my terrain picks, but even so the terrain had fallen kindly for me with a steep hill reducing the table width on the left, and a large patch of ploughed field channeling the expected hordes of enemy cavalry and heavy foot down a central bowling alley - allowing me to place my legions all in (hopefully) the right place for once.
The Byzantines had a very strong cavalry right hook, and a few block of infantry in the middle who looked rather underpowered set against my superior legions. Both sides struggled to maneuver their skirmishing light horse as the two armies raced towards each other.
On my right the Byzantines were doing little more than delaying, and a thin line of auxilia moved up remorselessly to sweep them from the field.
For a while it looked like the auto-pilot theory of throwing out a skirmish screen was going to trip up the Byzantines as their light horse started to feel like sandwich filling.
But the Romans boiled forwards like an advancing tide sweeping up the Byzantine beach ....
Some of the Roman light horse meanwhile had circumnavigated their own advancing legionaries and had gone off to help hunt down the flanking screen. The rest of the legions rushed headlong at the quivering mixed enemy spear and bow units.
Even without bowmen of our own, there seemed little hope for the Byzantines to hold up our advance for long...
My opponent had claimed the "yellow jersey" last night at the Pub Quiz as the overnight leader, making him one of the few gamers to be definitely wearing fresh clothes that day. Somewhat concerned that the Byzantine Cavalry might evade, the I had left the end of my line semi-deliberately weak to encourage the enemy horsemen to chance an attack.
Oh look! The Byzantines took the bait! The Bow* cavalry rolled up and started to pour fire into the unprotected bowmen and one of the two protected legions.
Inevitably, the 6-strong legion decided the rain of arrows was too much, and their morale faltered as the skies darkened with incoming fire.
Encouraged by the opportunity this represented, the Byzantine cavalry charged home immediately - but their infantry had advanced to protect their flanks, putting themselves in range of the vengeful legionaries who waded into the Varangian Rus spearmen without any hesitation.
Even with generals shoring up the line, the impact of the cavalry change had rocked the Romans back on their heels and although some of the cavalry decided to regroup and fall back, the main body continued to fight toe to toe with the legionaries in a bitter death struggle..
But the Varangians were cursing the rules writers who had decide they could be only protected at this juncture of history, and were taking a right pasting from two full legions overseen by Caesar himself as their Byzantine spear-armed colleagues stood by and watched, waiting their turn.
Things generally looked pretty bleak however over on the cavalry battle -
even with more legions committed to the fray to try and deflect the onrushing
Byzantine lancers, the main battle line was teetering, and the Roman auxilia on
the far hillside had even prepared themselves for the imminent departure of
their bow-armed colleagues and hoped to get in a flank charge on the pursuing
Byzantines. . 
The paucity of opposition on my right allowed even more Roman units to filter back into the middle, and soon only 2 or 3 auxilia units were needed to sweep up the small packets of litter that constituted the Byzantine left wing.
Moving slowly to the left, the bulk of the Byzantines skirmishers had also moved towards the middle of the table, but they could find no respite from the advancing wall of Romans even as they desperately attempted to stop a determined legion driving towards the quivering spearmen all whilst the Roman Light Horse occupied the Byzantine cataphractoriooioioiiiii unit.
By now the Varangians had turned tail and fled, allowing the Roman legions to crash into the second unit of Byzantine spearmen, and begin to engage the end of the Byzantine cavalry line.
But the Byzantines were on the move - right through the middle of the Roman
army !! The legion with the funkiest shield patterns had cracked, and with them
the Eastern Bowmen leaving a couple of quaking auxilia units either side to
watch as the train of Byzantine lancers pursued victoriously! 
Now quite as happy were the remaining Byzantines, as the disappearance of the bulk of their cavalry to pursue 2 roman units had left the others isolated and facing the wrath of the entire Roman army. Spearmen and lancers recoiled in pain as the legions crashed home.
But even as the trap tightened, the victorious Byzantine lancers had rallied in a decidedly un-Rupert-like manner and swung round to take the Romans in the rear (insert joke here).
By now the game was getting strung out with both sides taking huge bites out of each others lines. But the Romans were still winning on balance, as they munched the second big infantry block and the auxilia did what their legionary colleagues could not and stood firm against the onrushing but slightly exhausted ex-pursuing Byzantine lancers.
But even that suddenly seemed a distant memory, as the auxilia's morale started to falter.
Things were however getting dicey for the Byzantines on my right, as the third infantry speedhump was contacted by the advancing Legions, and the skirmish wing started to rapidly run out of table.
With only skirmishers around to support them, the Byzantine Clibanaphorioissiiiisiisiiii found itself surrounded ....
Assailed from all sides, they fought as only Elite heavily armoured cataphracts can ...
But as they eventually fell, and the final Byzantine infantry unit also collapsed a jubilant legion continued its pursuit of the hapless routing Varangians - and on killing the last one of them found themselves nicely positioned to eat the Byzantine baggage! With that, the tiny 13-unit Byzantine army looked around and discovered that it had crumbled to defeat ! A 19-6 victory for the Romans - leapfrogging me into a spectacular 2nd place!!
Post Match Summary
As
Caesar, I'm delighted to be able to claim yet another trophy - and even more
delighted that this one isn't quite so big, and doesn't need to be taken home on
a plane as hand luggage either.
This game was in the end a rather good matchup for my lads - the Byzantine infantry were optimized for keeping enemy cavalry away but the legions cut through them all like hot knives through butter racking up 6 VP's in short order, and once the extra 2 for the camp was added the enemy army suddenly looked very, very close to its 13 point break point.
It seemed a shame to lose so many units to the enemy lancers, and I was surprised to find out just how dangerous a Bow* / Lance combination could be as it allowed the Byzantine cavalry to sweep away 4-5 pretty decent units after just one spot of disruption-inducing shooting. However if I'd not created a weak point in my army, they may have been tempted to evade and muck about for the whole game like a bunch of evil Skythians, so all in all it was worth it.
Yet again the decisive element was in the end weight of numbers. The armoured auxilia are usually more than a match one-on-one for enemy skirmishers yet can also contribute to combat in a very useful way as well - especially when turning and moving to hit flanks of course!
I'm unconvinced that I have gotten the best out of the archers - maybe there are just not enough of them and 2 units would do better - but they have fought more than they are really supposed to, and on the up-side they have generally tempted the enemy to commit to combat when perhaps otherwise they could have declined to. But what is really satisfying is that the games have generally been won (and lost) on the anvil of the 5 Legions - and were I braver, I might downgrade myself to an FC or TC and spend more points on replacing auxilia with more legions, and sneaking in another LH unit or so.
At the end of the day, this is 2 tournaments and 2 placings, after a previous run of abject disaster lasting nearly 2 years - so I think that I as Caesar have to take credit for this (even though technically I was commanding some of the Roman armies used before).
Hannibal's Post Match Analysis
Now,
run this past me again. You came 2nd by 2 points. And you dropped 6 points in
this game, by losing 4 or 5 units in what you yourself describe as a "weak
part of my line", yet everywhere else you mopped up the enemy with 45
minutes to spare for zero losses.
Look you muppet - I'm all for the "pretend to have a weak point to tempt the enemy to attack - I in fact used it fairly successfully myself at Cannae (although to be fair that was under a set of rules where units can get pushed back - even a genius like me couldn't recreate that in FoG). But the theory is that you draw them in and then crush them on their flanks - not lose abjectly across around half the width of the table whilst beating up their rubbish stuff elsewhere. You knew the Bow* Lancers would shoot you, so if you'd put an ARMOURED legion in that spot instead of a Protected one - and maybe placed yourself and your Magic IC's Umbrella in range to cover your troops all this could have been easily avoided, and you'd have won the whole tournament as well as this game - and with even more time to spare.
And what was with this "The enemy might skirmish" rubbish - even I know that lance armed cavalry can't skirmish, and I've been dead for over 2 millennia!!
At least this time you managed to follow up your success and pursue the Varangians to take the baggage - although quite why you needed to use a full legion for this is beyond me, surely an auxilia unit could have been spared to do this - and they'd have made it quicker as well.
I still think that in the end the army is doing the hard work here, not you. The 5 units of legions are more than a match for literally anything you faced in any of your 6 games, so as long as yu can get them into the action you should do well - and the 2 games you lost are those where the legions failed to do all the hard fighting, which just proves my point. OK, so you got a prize, but you did it by copying someone else's idea but doing it differently only because you don't own enough auxilia units to field the full MBDR list. That's not really skill, its more constructive incompetence.
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