M. Kirschenbaum
United States
College Park
Maryland
-
've had Command's old Kadesh in the poster frame for the last week or so. I'm not an ancients kind of guy but I was in the mood, it caught my eye, so I gave it a spin.
Muwatallish activated early, which helped the Hittites, who promptly sent their two main divisions boiling towards the unsuspecting Egyptian encampment. Elsewhere on the map the Hittite chariot division caught a column of Egyptians in open march and did the ages-old drive-by thing (the game calls it "chariot pass-through attacks"--what fun). Eventually things came down to a kind of Alesia-style donut, with the Hittites surrounding the beleaguered Egyptian encampment, and various Egyptian reinforcements pouring in from the four corners of the map trying to break the ring. Ramses II was killed in the fighting defending the camp, perishing bravely at the head of his royal entourage. I called the proceedings in favor of the Hittites about 2/3 through.
I don't know squat about ancients so I won't presume to say anything about the "realism" of the system. The counters are pretty enough, even by current standards, the map (probably necessarily) bland. Command and control exists at a basic level (units have to be within range of their respective Kings to be guaranteed activations), but as most leaders have initiative ratings of at least 3 or 4 they'll still be able to activate more often than not. So lots of zipping around the map to respond to developing situations. There are no formation rules to speak of, but everyone has to remain adjacent to remain in command and the normal stacking limit is one, so divisions tend to coagulate into giant ameoba like blobs as they traverse the map. Units have four levels of combat effectiveness, and are never in danger of actually being eliminated unless attacked while in Rout mode (in which case they're subject to Slaughter; gotta love a wargame with explicit Slaughter rules ). Anyway, the result is a great deal of elasticity as units get Shaken, Disrupted, Routed, but then climb back up to full effectiveness over the course of a turn or three. That also makes the wristage a killer, as you're rolling d6 rally atempts for what eventually amounts to dozens of units per side, every turn.
So a mixed appraisal. I had some fun, Kadesh scratched my ancients itch, but I doubt I'll revisit it any time soon.
-
|
|
