The alternating activation thing I mentioned elsewhere in regard to Hail Caesar was something I was thinking about trying on my own. Hail Caesar has a more WFB-like, "Player A Turn; Player B Turn" structure. It has some similarities to Warmaster, but is different in many other ways. Quick rundown:
Hail CaesarAny scale of miniatures can be used, and it can be used with almost any basing standard as long as both side are based similarly. Armies are broken up into Units, which are collected in Divisions. Each Division has its own Commander. Units are the basic building blocks of the game, not individual figures. Each unit has a given number of dice it rolls for short range or long range combat, "Clash" combat (first round) and "Sustained" combat (subsequent rounds) as well as morale and stamina stats.
Player A goes first. They issue orders to a unit, or if they are close enough together, they can issue a group order (everyone doing the same thing) to multiple units within a division. Orders are simple directions like, "Move to the top of that hill" or "Charge the unit of orcs with red shields." A roll is then made against the commander's Leadership rating (plus/minus modifiers). Depending on how well the roll succeeds or fails, the unit will try to carry out their order, or potentially blunder about if it's a really bad roll.
To put it very simply, missile and melee combat are done by rolling the number of dice equal to the appropriate stat. The number of dice and the target number to hit are modified based on a variety of things. Depending on how many wounds a unit takes and what their stamina stat is (think of it as a wound threshold) different things can happen -- they can hold, they can be pushed back, fall back, rout, be removed. They may become temporarily Disordered or become Shaken (permanently impaired.) That's really a simplification.
A pool of special rules helps further define troops as stubborn, getting special attacks, etc.
Personal observations:
I've only played a few historical games using HC, but I'm gearing up to try out the Shadow Storm fantasy mod. soon (along with a couple other games.)
http://adyswargamesden.com/At its core, it's fairly streamlined but with a decent amount of detail, and lets you get on with the art of pushing toy soldiers around and rolling dice pretty easily. The game play feels right, and has enough of a random element (command rolls, combat dicing) but without being too over the top. Still, it's probably not for everyone. It's definitely a battle game, along the lines of Warmaster. So if you want to roll separate dice and determine the fate of each individual figure/soldier as with skirmish games and/or whatever WFB is, then this is probably the wrong game for you. Also, if you're looking for a universally accepted "standard" game or tournament game, this isn't going to be a good fit either. Especially as it's an unofficial mod. of a historical game.
I'm basing my figures using a standard 8 across. For simplicity and economy, I am sticking with two deep for all infantry units for now. Depth isn't as important as width (or so I hear
) so I'm not going to worry too much about the extra figures/ranks for spear, pike and warband type units at the moment. But this means that my basic units are 16 figures. That makes it fairly easy to get armies together -- even if I did go with 24 figures for the deeper formations. I will also have far more units on the table than in a WFB game. I like this in terms of gameplay (waves of troops, holding back reserves, etc.) and army proportions or composition (so I might have 4 or more units of regular troops for every elite unit or monster -- but still field a decent number of those elites/monsters!)
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The other games on my radar are Legion of Battle and possibly some retro 3rd ed. WFB. I have the misfortune/luxury of focusing on solo gaming (devising scenarios with "programmed" opponents) at the moment -- so I don't need to consider what anyone else is playing. If I find any opponents, I'm not likely to care what people elsewhere in the world are playing, so I'm not as hung up on officialness, how popular or widely accepted a given game is, etc.
