From: Markus Stumptner Subject: Belisaire (Vae Victis #5) first experiences Intrigued by its obvious similarity to Alexandros, we tried the Belisaire game from Vae Victis #5 last night. We played two scenarios, the introductory Africa one and the one about the final defeat of the Ostrogoths. Although the game is very interesting, and the rules are reasonably clear, we ended up shelving it pending the arrival of errata. The basic similarity to Alexandros is clear if one looks at the game, but there are many differences. All activities are governed by the spending of activation points (which are determined by markers drawn each turn out of a cup, with the top commander's strategic rating added). Costs include 1pt for moving into an area (a maximum of six areas per force per turn is allowed), intercepting an enemy, laying siege, assaulting a city, 2 for moving into a mountain area or moving a fleet. There are lots of other things to do (reducing fortresses, devastating areas etc.). Supply rules are mostly based on tracing to your home area (northern Italy for the Goths, off the map beyond Dalmatia for the Byzantines), otherwise you may suffer attrition. Combat may only result from successful interception attempts (which, based on leader ratings and a dieroll, may fail, succeed, or result in an ambush for either side). Strategically, the game is quite interesting, since you don't know how many points your opponent has to spend each turn, and in principle one can set up some neat deceptions using dummy units and the movement sequence. The main decision to make seems to be whether one wants to spread out to achieve several missions, or stay bunched up so one cannot be defeated in detail (but which makes you vulnerable to having your main army bypassed and supposedly secure rear areas threatened). The fact that they put the leader boxes on the back of the counters to be copied before the counters are cut has been already mentioned. In a similar vein (merely amusing though), we found out after playing the game that the designer's notes are hidden among the club news on the back of the map! :-) Combat is pretty abstract, with successive alternating rounds of firing and melee. In each round, each player finds out his strength (cataphracts and heavy cav are multiplied) and rolls a die on the appropriate column that may result in percentage losses and morale checks. Oddly enough the losses are not in percentages of the attacker but the defender (this is not visible from the rules, but shown by the examples of combat included). This may help the Byzantines a bit since they strongly depend on the force multipliers and are usually weaker in number. A battle ends when one side calls a voluntary retreat or is completely routed, at which time a pursuit stage follows (this time with light cav having the largest strength modifier). The Africa scenario saw the Byzantine player mostly experimenting with sieges, as the Vandal player quickly saw what was coming his way and bottled up in the cities. Sieges are quite effective in the long term, but since siege attrition is 10% at worst (we found no rounding info, so we assumed rounding up was intended), if you need to take a city quickly, assault (or the highly effective treason marker :-) are the way to go. An odd aspect are the sorties, since they allow the besieged player to reduce a much larger besieging force on even terms by repeatedly sortieing. (The rules are not quite clear though on whether there is only *one* sortie allowed throughout a siege.) The _Defeat of the Ostrogoths_ scenario started with the Byzantines advancing but for all intents and purposes ended on turn 2 when the Goths met them in a large battle that ended with a massive defeat for the Byzantines. This disappointing outcome caused us to examine the mechanisms a bit more closely. Overall observations from our few battles, in particular the large one that killed off the Byzantines: - The CRT is screwed. Unless your army and/or your DRM's are monstrous, you will cause direct losses on the order of 10% or 25% per round. On the other side, a T2 result (morale check with 2 subtracted from the dice) will cause half your army to run with average dierolling and a +1 leader. Yet, the morale checks are placed in the upper left quadrant of the CRT (i.e., towards weaker attacks), followed by purely numerical results and then numerical results plus morale checks in the lower right half. On the first firing round of the battle mentioned above, the Byzantine player was at first happy for scoring 25T in the first firing round, but the Goth, with half the firepower, an army of comparable quality (since its somewhat weaker composition was balanced by a better leader), and a worse dieroll scored a T2 result and had already achieved a decisive advantage after that single round. Further observation seemed to confirm the effect. We'll wait if the promised advanced combat system brings any improvement before we try this game again. - Combat is very bloody (all kinds), not a bad thing per se. But since the Goths will usually get much more reinforcements than the Byzantines in the campaign game, the long-term aspects look pretty dull for them also, but that is just an unconfirmed estimate. An interesting aesthetic issue: something kept disturbing me a bit about the map. When I compared it to the Alexandros map, I finally noted that the Belisaire map uses much more simple geometric curves and sharp corners where areas meet. Despite the fact that it has more graphic "glitz" (don't you all like the port icons?) than Alexandros, the slightly wriggled area borders of the latter look much more natural to my eye. Markus