A novelty for the blog as I played a couple of games at the weekend.
Paul and Peter came up from Wellington for the day and we got in acouple of games of big battle DBA.
This was the first time I have had a chance to play Version 3 and I was looking froward to seeing what had changed. Paul brought up his 10mm armies c.1415.
The first game line up. Closer side is 100 year war English on each flank and Low Countries in the middle.On the far side are 2 medieval French commands with Burgudians on the far flank
Battle is joined in the center. Theres one plan with pike and thats go forward and try to cover the flanks with the rest of the army. The Low countries command had a single Psiloi element which was the lone light troop on the table, making them king of any bad going (which there was a bit of a lack of).
This was a high tide mark for my army as it died in a hail of 1's (which for those of you not conversant in DBX is a bad thing to roll in an opposed die combat system).
A quick-ish fryup for lunc and then a second game where we swapped sides with Peter playing the bad guys and Paul and I taking the French/Burgundians.
This possibly went worse than the first game as at one point all 3 of our commands were one stand off breaking and we had killed 1 stand of English.
So having played 2 games of DBA 3 I'm quite comfortable with the changes that have been made in combat factors and results.
I'm now pondering starting a DBA project but I'm not sure what form it will take. I do like the look of 6mm troops on 25mm bases (having a knights of St John army done for 20 years and a pile of lead for the Ottomans). I did consider the possibility of rebasing my 15mm onto 25mm bases (which woud give a similar look to 10mm figures on 15mm bases). This quickly ran into an issue of not having enough figures to do even 1-2 armies well and the price of 15mm figures (Essex now 8 foot for 4 quid).
More thinking required I think.....
Interesting to read of your experiences. While I am sometimes tempted by the additional features of DBMM, such as weather & stratagems, they don’t offer enough extra benefit over what BBDBA provides. Well, at least for me.
ReplyDeleteBack in the day I played a lot of DBM starting at version 1.3. When DBMM came out I had a quick look and decided I was not interested in addimg complexity to an already complex system. I've never played a game.
DeleteI mostly enjoyed DBM as well, but not so much the opponents in Christchurch. They were to interested in list building, strong armies and competitive games to sit comfortably with me. I have a strong interest in playing games between historical or near historical opponents.
DeleteAs to DBMM have played about three games. They really are a good set of rules in my view, but not so much I want to play them. I think for me BBDBA provides enough of the feel of a larger battle. Here are two summaries. First a game of DBMM and then a couple of days later BBDBA.
DBMM:
https://thewargamesroom.wordpress.com/2016/06/06/dbmm-reflections/
BBDBA:
https://thewargamesroom.wordpress.com/2016/06/08/successor-comparisons/