Two Rounds of Hydaspes

by on April 27, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: CC:Ancients

After my quick defeat in “Armored Car Savikurki“, we went for another round of Commands & Colors: Ancients. This time, it’s Alexander the Great’s final battle, Hydaspes from Expansion #1. The river is at one edge of the board, squeezing in that flank slightly, and the Macedonians have the usual rules: Alexander provides one extra die in combat, and the Companions (of which there’s two units), can ignore a sword and a flag on their own. The Indians have no infantry heavier than Auxilia, but do have three Elephants and two Heavy Chariots.

I had the Macedonians first, and Ordered Lights to bring up the flanks. The Bow Cavalry forced an Elephant to retreat, but the rampage did no damage. Patch Ordered Three Left, with his LB doing a block, and his Med Cav doing another to an evading LBC. I Ordered Three Right to drive off the Chariots, and do a block to his MC. Patch Ordered Four Center, and did a second block to a LB with archery, while moving forward a LB and Aux. I Double Timed my center forward, but which thoughtlessly put my heavies in range of his elephants.

Patch used Leadership any Section to slam his Elephants into my heavy unit center. The first one did three hits to a heavy, and then died to battle back, while the second Elephant finished them off, forcing Antigenes to retreat, and used momentum to do three hits to another heavy and force it to retreat. I Out Flanked to drive off a MC on my right, and bring Antigenes up to an Aux, who got First Striked by the Elephant for a block, and then did a hit and a banner, with the rampage doing another block to the Aux.

Patch Coordinated an Attack between his Chariots and Elephant, finishing off the weak heavy, but losing his Elephant to battle back on a failed momentum attack, but the Aux was finished off by a Chariot, forcing Antigenes to flee again. The other Chariot did one block to Companions (who ignored a second hit), and was eliminated by battle back. I Ordered Lights to sort out the flanks a little, and use the Indian army for archery practice, doing a block to a LB, and wiping out the second Chariot unit. Patch Ordered Three Right to move forward, while I Ordered Two Left to attach Antigenes to a Light and drive off his LC. Patch Ordered Two Right, and forced the other Light left on that flank to retreat, while I Darkened the Sky to do a block to his LC and to a MC.

Patch Coordinated another Attack to bring his MC behind his lines and do a block to my remaining Heavy. I used Move-Fire-Move to drive off his LC, but otherwise couldn’t do more than single banners to supported units. Patch Rallied his MC and an Aux to full strength, and then used them to get his left flank forward. I Ordered Lights, and drove off his MC again (losing a block at the baseline), and did a block to the rallied Aux and a LB. Patch Ordered Three LB Center to do a block to my LB. I Ordered Mediums, and brought two left-behind units up, while Alexander did two hits to the rallied Aux, and forced it to retreat; he used momentum to hit them again and finished it off.

Patch did a Mounted Charge, which killed Alexander’s Companions, with momentum doing a block to a LB while they evaded; the other Companions successfully evaded the last unit of Elephants; and a LC and Light traded blocks. I followed up with… the Mounted Charge I had just drawn. The Companions drove off a LB, Alexander (attached to the intact LBC) did a block to MC but retreated to the baseline on a two-banner battle back, and my one-block LBC did… two banners to the Elephants (there would have been a hit if Alex hadn’t been driven off), and thankfully the rampage did nothing. Patch had Inspired Center Leadership to do two hits to each of a Med and the Companions, while taking a block on each of two Auxes. I used Line Command to engage the center, and wiped out his LC, and finally got an Aux after losing a Heavy. 7-5

Patch opened the second game by Ordering Lights, with the LBC going toe-to-toe with the Chariots on my left flank (“Boy, my head is not in this. What the hell was I thinking?”), but they did not attack. I Ordered Lights in turn, and did a block to a LBC as it evaded. Patch Ordered Three Right, drew back the other LBC, and drove off the Chariot with archery. I used Inspired Right Leadership to move forward a bit, and drove off a Light with archery. Move-Fire-Move let Patch re-work his right flank some, but did no damage. I used Move-Fire-Move to solidify my center, and do a block to a Light. Patch used Line Command to move up his center and right, and drove off my LC with a banner. I countered with my own Line Command, but only moved up a single Aux, while everyone else fired into Patch’s line, doing a block to an Aux, two to a LB, and forcing a LBC back with a banner (where it lost a block at the baseline).

Patch Double Timed his center into my line, reducing two Auxes to one block each, and a third to two blocks (one hit caused by a blocked retreat…), while having his Med reduced to a block, two Heavies took two hits each, and a third also took a hit. I used Order Two Right to pull one Aux out of the line, and sent in the Chariot, which finished off the three-block Heavy; momentum did no damage to another Heavy, and the Chariot took a block and retreated. Patch used Order Three Center to have his damaged units finish off two my my damaged Auxes, but took another hit on a Heavy in the process. I used Order Heavies to send in the Chariots and Elephants to mop up, and eliminated a Heavy on the first attack… and then did no other damage, losing a Chariot and a block on an elephant, and on a LB on rampage in the process. Patch Ordered Two Center, and killed one Elephant, but lost his Medium attacking another one.

I Ordered Three Center, sending two Elephants forward, and a spare leader over to command the remaining Chariots. I drove off a LB with a loss, but did no damage to a Heavy and lost the Elephants in return. Patch used Coordinated Attack to get the remaining Elephant, and drove off my LBs, while Alex’s Companions attacked an Aux for one hit, and took two in return. I cried “I Am Spartacus!” to order a LB, Aux, MC, and Chariot. I did a block to a Heavy (ranged), finished off the Companions, drove off a LBC with a loss, did two blocks to the other Companions… and lost my MC to a two-banner battle back. 4-7

Afterword

The first battle really dragged out longer than you’d expect. After forgetting that I probably wanted to hold back my heavier units until the Elephants could be dealt with, there wasn’t a lot of offensive power left in either army. The second game, I tried to screen the Elephants until the time was right. Patch obliged with the Double Time and thankfully rolled relatively poorly. Unfortunately, it was a situation I couldn’t sort out in a hurry, and my dice with my heavy units were absolutely horrible, blowing the chance that I’d had there with Elephants going down after completely missing attacks on depleted Heavies.

Overall, its an interesting scenario, and probably the biggest concentration of the ‘unusual’ units there’s been. Like with most Alexander scenarios, it’s really unlikely he’ll lose (as show by these two games), but there are some possibilities here.

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The Shattered Stone

by on April 23, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

The Children of Ynell series was originally published from 1977 to 1981, and was the first time I got involved in a series that wasn’t finished yet. In fact, I never did get the final book in a series I greatly enjoyed at the time.

The Shattered Stone is the first two of the five books of the (retitled) series, and certainly the ones I remember more strongly. They really affected me when I was young, and I’ve carried a memory of them and the author’s name for decades now as I occasionally think to hunt for copies. Make no mistake, these books deserve to be much better known than they are. They’re reasonably ‘adultish’ YA fantasy novels that are basically epic fantasy, though the focus is entirely on individuals.

The Ring of Fire introduces the world, focusing on a small town and and nearby village. It is largely a tale of growing up, and realizing your parents can’t or may even not want to solve everything. It starts out jumping between two viewpoint characters, which I didn’t remember, which I think is because Zephy takes over the entire book as it goes; Thorn is still there and important, but he slides out of being a viewpoint character. It’s not a pretty setting with a repressive (false) religion, and other methods of control while Zephy is the irrepressible free spirit, and her internal struggles do a lot to make the book. Things get worse, naturally, but at the same time, she and a few stumble into something of the truth, and features about the only religious experiences that have ever had any power for me.

The Wolf Bell, surprisingly, happens centuries earlier. Many dimly known, or distant past events are either recent, or just happening at this point. Most notably, the town of Burgdeeth that is the setting of most of the first book is just being built during this one. I’m not sure if this was planned from the start, or if Murphy decided to explore the ‘back story’ or what. Though it does make some sense to come second, as it would spoil a lot of the early-book reveals of the first book to read this first. That said, they’re only tenously connected books, and one does not really lean on the other. Also, the amount of magic available is much higher here, along with a consistently higher amount of action. On the other hand, the major characters aren’t quite as sympathetic, though this is presumably on purpose, as Ramad is impossibly mature for his age (and needs to be), and his mother is ruled by a strong selfish streak.

I don’t recall much of the next two books, so I can’t say where it goes from here, or how these two fit within the whole, but I remember that they are more dependent on these two than the second one is.

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Team Smashup

by on April 20, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Back on March 24th, we finally got a group day together. Better yet, it’s looking like this is the start of a much more regular schedule of FtF gaming for me; something that has been seriously lacking for the last two years. Mark, Jason, Dave and I got together for a game Space Empires 4X with my new set. I got Dave up on the carrier rules (that me, Jason, and Mark had tried out in our last multi-player day) to add to our usual mix of Pipelines, Heavy Terrain, and Warp Points. I also had us try out a 2-vs-2 game, though I should have looked at the actual rules options for that, so we were halfway between uneasy alliance and blood brothers. We basically ended up in various seats around the table, took a color based on what was handy to us, and then I drew two markers from a cup to define the teams: Red and Green (Jason & me) vs Yellow and Blue (Dave & Mark).

Dave and Jason got off to the best starts, with readily available planets to colonize. My start was slightly slower, but I quickly got going and built out my main space in pretty good order. Mark’s planets were all on the outer fringes of his space, which delayed finding them, colonizing them, and getting pipelines out to them, and he had the weakest economy for the entire game. Dave made up for it by getting the strongest economy, and being very effective all day.

Despite various efforts into deep space, it took a while for any of the areas between players to open up, and the initial contacts ended up in the center of the board. Dave discovered a Wreck there, and eventually brought it home for the technology bonus, but only after a few turns of angst after I showed up with a couple fleets to contest the area. Thanks to the betwixt-and-between multiplayer we were doing, Mark and Dave couldn’t properly join up to tackle me while my third fleet moved up. There might have been less hair-pulling if they’d known I just had a pair of SC there, but of course, they didn’t know, and they didn’t necessarily have anything better. I forget what exactly drove me out, but even the third force wasn’t worth a lot, so it turned into a delaying action on my part.


Mid-day; guarding the space wreck.

Mark and Jason also came into contact along the board edge, and Jason readily got the upper hand through a combination of his better economy, and better die rolling. The fighting there continued back and forth all day without any permanent advantage being gained. Towards the end of the day, it was petering out on that front.

My initial sparing with Dave went well, as I’d gone for CVs again, but of course, I ran out of fighters and was having some trouble recycling carrier groups. Dave then used his economic might to put together strong fleets of BCs backed by numerous SCs with PD1. Not only was it effective, but he was outbuilding me fairly effectively as I got back onto the main tech route. And exploration had finally revealed other problems.

Early on, we found a Warp Point 2 between me and Jason. Then we found a second one in an adjacent hex (the definition of redundancy). As the space between me and Dave got explored, we were dealing with a chain of what would turn out to be five black holes. This helped keep us from directly accessing each other. Given time and opportunity, I might have established a pipeline route through the barrier (though I was running out of Pipeline counters, so that had problems), though my preferred strategy at the end of day was to colonize a planet found at the edge of the board as a new jumping off point.

The real problem was when a third Warp Point 2 was found on Dave’s side of the black hole line. This gave him ready access to a completely different area of space, and our end had plenty of targets to defend (which couldn’t even be done by standing on the warp point, thanks to the adjacent pair). Along with taking a couple of drubbings from Dave’s forces, this ended up diverting much of Jason’s efforts, and forcing him off of smashing Mark.


End of day, with many things revealed.

At the time we had to call it a day, things were less certain than usual for one of these. Dave had the best economy, with 73 colony + 12 pipeline coming in on the next (14th) econ phase. He had raided my space once, and was about to do it again, and much would depend on how far that got. He was up to BCs @+1/+1, Move 2, Tactics 1, PD1.

However, Jason was earning 61 + 9 and had gotten up to BBs @ +2/+2, Tactics 1, and had some examples on hand to help defend against the next raid. The BBs would outclass the BCs, and the SCs wouldn’t help much there (though we’re finally remembering the fleet size bonus). And Dave was going to need to continue using SCs as part of his fleets as I was keeping carriers active. I was earning 76 + 10, and had Fighters 2, BCs @ +2/+2, Move 2. It was just going to take time to get an actual BC force built; I had actually continued building CAs as I could afford pairs of them, and wanted multiple ship fleets. If I’d ever remembered some of my other thoughts while actually doing production, I’d probably be at CAs and Move 3 instead. My best immediate option was probably threatening Dave with more mobility. Meanwhile, Mark was earning 55 + 3 and was at BCs @ +0/+0, but he had gotten to Shipyard 3 (everyone else was 2) to crank out the less advanced ships.

It’s a pity we had to break up at that point, as it was very much undecided. Dave smashing my navy, and geography put him in a dominant position, but I had the economy to recover given a chance, and Jason had a fleet to give me that chance. The problem would have been finding a strategy for me to stalemate Dave, which geography was making hard; then Jason could concentrate on Mark again, and given his weak economy, that should end poorly for Mark in short order. But that needed things to go well….

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The Roman Empire and the Silk Routes

by on April 17, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

This basically a follow-on to McLaughlin’s study of trade across the Indian Ocean. Despite being almost the same size, it feels like an appendix to it.

Whereas his former book spent a lot of time giving specifics of particular trade goods and where Romans were going to get them and trying to get an idea of the overall Roman budget, this is more of a jumbled history of some of the land area between Rome and China. He starts off with a discussion of what Rome had to get from China, which is interesting.

The obvious part is silk, and he goes into the difference between ‘domesticated’ silk, and ‘wild’ silk, where the latter uses threads from cocoons where the larvae ate it’s way out, cutting the strands. Chinese ‘domesticated’ silk is so good because it has extremely long single strands to work with. At any rate, the lesser version was produced in many places, including the Greek island of Cos. More surprising is the assertion that Chinese steel was superior to what Rome could produce, so high-quality steel was an import. I’d like to see some sort of study of the history of metallurgy to check that. The most surprising part is indications that Rome was exporting silk to China. It wouldn’t have been much, but the Roman world had access to some brilliant dyes that China did not, so dyed silks left the Empire again.

Most of the rest of the book takes a look at various areas and regimes along the northern trade routes that made up the Silk Road(s). He starts with China’s troubles with the Xiongnu (Huns!), which started China exploring to the south of their territory looking for potential allies against them. This eventually gets them to Bactria… but just as the post-Alexandrian nation there is dissolving into fragmented city-states.

There is some look at the Chinese economy, but it’s not nearly as well developed, and most of the book he seems to try to avoid discussing their currency. (“Han revenues: 12,300 million cash”, without saying cash what.) At one point near the end he does define the wushu, which seems to be the currency base for his calculations. He spends some time discussing the differences between revenue collection between the two, which could probably stand to be more in depth, though I’d have to spend a fair amount of time thinking about it to make sense of everything he does have there.

All that is basically the ends of the book. In between, there’s a discussion of various regions in between, their contacts with other areas, trade routes through, but mostly little on the actual trade itself. It makes for a good history of central Asia from ~200 BC to ~100 AD, also with some helpful notes on the geography involved, but it doesn’t integrate them with each other very much except for a time line given in the front. So, it’s nowhere near as useful as The Roman Empire in the Indian Ocean, though it is interesting, and good books on this region are rare.

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A Final Polish

by on April 14, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Computer games

This is the second in a series of reviews looking at the evolution of Hearts of Iron III. See the previous review here:
Hearts of Iron III: One Plus Two Equals Three

A year after the previous expansion, Paradox announced a third expansion for their WWII grand-strategy game, HoI III. As usual, it targeted a few particular subjects, and Their Finest Hour came out in September 2012 for PC, with a Mac release following two months later. Since the Collection was for the previous release, and there no further expansions, it was never included in a collection of its own.

Doing it Your Way

While HoI III starts in 1936, the main event usually doesn’t get going for at least three years. There are options to begin at that point, but one reason for the 1936 start is to work on production, politics, and research how you want them, rather than what happened historically. So Paradox added the ‘Custom Game Mode’ which allows some reworking of all of that, starting with a particular scenario as a base.

It’s an interesting idea, if not one that I’ve done much with, though I’ve seen it noted that its especially handy for a multi-player game, so you can start with the action about to get underway, and still have things set up as you want, as if you’ve played from 1936.

Combined Arms

Generally speaking, at any point in history, armies have been aided by having different elements which synergize with each other. This especially true in WWII, and was well recognized at the time, as well as in a variety of different games on the subject, all the way down to Panzer General’s rock-paper-scissors model of combat that made it such an effective game in a very simple format.

HoI III tried modeling that by each type of brigade have being ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ depending on its type, and then granting a bonus to a division that had a mid-range ‘softness’ rating, even if the elements of that division didn’t add up to anything special.

With TFH, they’ve gotten rid of this arbitrary rating, and now look for a combination of infantry and the other arms. Everything’s color-coded on the production screen, and there is a bonus to a division that contains armor, artillery, ‘direct fire’ (AT and AA assets), and engineers. This much more like how some operational-level wargames look at the problem, and an easier to understand answer to the problem.

Landing Craft

Amphibious invasions came in for a round of extra detail. Now, invading forces must disembark from their transport craft, and in addition to the normal amphibious invasion penalties, they suffer a reduction to damage dealt and taken while they unload (granting extra time for a naval battle to disrupt everything). Unloading progresses through several hours until the troops are fully unloaded and operating normally (as normally as possible during an invasion combat).

In addition to this, two new unit types were added to the game. You can still invade using normal transports, but can now research landing craft, which are much more effective, and also lead to research to reduce the amount of time a landing takes, and the defensiveness of all transport-type units.

The landing craft are really transports with associated landing craft, as they can do everything the transports can, including shift units across an ocean. They’re better than the base transports in every way, including speed, defense and carrying capacity. Researching the improvements to invasions mentioned above then allows research of assault ships, which act the same as landing craft, but with better defense, and some bonuses for armor unloading from them.

This is one of the more visible changes to the game (as long as you’re not playing a fairly land-locked game like Russia). And it is a nice bit of extra detail that helps make amphibious operations flow a bit better.

Special Units

The main seven nations also came in for special treatment by getting new unique units. These are all slightly better versions of regular units, and can only be built in fairly limited quantities (no more than 4% of all infantry brigades). Three of them are better mountain brigades than normal (though the British Gurkhas can also airdrop), two are improved infantry, and US Rangers are a paratroop brigade, and the German SS units are improved motorized infantry (which, despite the reputation, is not appropriate for SS units as a whole… the number of well-equipped and trained SS units is about right for the number that you can build).

They’re a neat idea, and well into the ‘why not?’, range of things. Though there might be something to be said for being able to just spend a bit more on a unit to make it better trained/competent in general. Though that is pretty much what the division composition, and the flags for ‘prioritize upgrades and reinforcements’ already does.

Conclusion

TFH would be the last expansion for HoI III, and certainly the game had come far from it’s initial extremely buggy release. It’s a fairly decent package of changes, and seems to have sold well, and certainly gets recommendations from fans of the game.

Certainly, if you like HoI III, it’s worth getting, as everything it does is an improvement, and there are no backward steps. Furthermore, if you’re just getting the game (or rather the Collection, which has the previous two expansions), and you can get this in a package deal, get it. It does not make the game any more complicated or harder for a new player; it just reworks a few things that needed it. At the same time, it’s not going to change your mind about it either; it took a while for me to start noticing what had changed at all.

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