Diary entry #004

Monday saw me at the club again.
My usual oppo, Dave, wasn't there this time as he was visiting family way down South somewhere so I was glad when David turned up unexpected.
After exchanging a few pleasantries, we resolved to play an impromptu game of Impetus, a recently discovered set of ancient war games rules that have a very different approach to this genre.
I dug out my Early Imperial Romans to take on David's Palmyran. Heavens, they look mean when you look at the meagre Roman army for the same points.
So, referring repeatedly to the rules and to Ken and Paul our resident experts on Impetus, having competed at Derby, we fumbled our way through. As the object was to improve our understanding of the mechanics, this approach seemed to work for us.
The game was strange. I was the defender and placed two woods and two difficult ground patches on the battlefield. David then removed one of the central woods, leaving a battlefield very reminiscent of Agincourt.
I had only one command and David two. I deployed across the gap between a wood and some difficult ground. Legionaries in the middle, flanked by cavalry and, further out, the auxiliaries. Two elements of slingers took up position in front of the legionaries. David deployed two commands, the first had three cataphract units placed on his left and 5? light cavalry placed across his centre front. The second command had two cataphracts deployed on his right and 5? archers behind the light cavalry in the centre.
To cut a story short, David threw his LC forward to skirmish with little effect, I countered with the slingers, forcing half the LC to evade. I charged another with one of my MC and it stopped short of the Palmyran line. Expecting to have them 'blown away', I was amazed to see the massed archery from the enemy infantry totally fail to even cause a disorder. So David charged them with some cataphracts with a general attached, lost the melee and to cap it all, his general was captured with a collapse of his command. Effectively that would have ended the battle in the second turn, so we chose to ignore the collapse leaving the command intact but without a general.
The battle then moved very slowly with David trying to reorder his left without a general and me unwilling to approach over the open ground with all that super heavy cavalry out there. The skirmish battle ensued at long range during this time, and the Palmyrans were winning that. Eventually, David was persuaded by the onlookers to send in a cataphract unit against a legionary unit. He went straight through as the legionaries were disordered and had a casualty their effect was minimal.
We called it a night at this point and I conceded the battle to the Palmyrans though it was far from over.
Impetus, as a rule set, deserves further experimentation. There's going to be an Impetus Day at the club soon, but I can't do Saturdays.