Andy and I played a couple of games of DBA this afternoon using version 3 of the rules. We spotted quite a few more changes that a cursory flick through the rules hadn't uncovered. These included:
- defender rolls for terrain placement (like DBM)
- attacker then chooses their battlefield edge (with no dice roll)
- defender can no longer swap 0-2 elements around after the attacker has deployed
- deployment limits allow elements closer to the centre but further from the edges than v2
- overlapping elements can shoot and be shot at
- Bow is more effective with a 3 basewidth (BW) range
- single elements conform to groups, even if they are partly in Bad Going; now has to be completely in Bad Going to not conform
These generally feel like good improvements and the increase in movement (now counted in BW rather than inches, so 40mm instead of 25mm) means that battle is formed swiftly.
The Knights of Malta first battled their historical opponents, the Ottomans.
We forgot a couple of movement restrictions and Andy's cavalry and light horse left the dunes far quicker than they should have done, and so James' spears and knights hadn't really formed up before they were being engaged. However, after a string of extreme rolls in the first bound (6-2, 5-1 etc) Andy lost three cavalry to James bowmen straight away. A few turns later, James had won 5-1.
Andy kept a tally of all the dice rolls, and although his PIP dice totalled 23 against James' 18, his combat rolls were only 33 against 47.
In the second game, Andy fielded Burgundian Ordonannce. James deployed a defensive line and used his army's Littoral option of deploying two spearmen on the edge of the waterway on Andy's flank.
These spearman defied Andy's two bowmen and artillery piece all game, and killed one of the bow, strengthened by the flank support they gave each other. Andy's knights eventually reached James' defensive wall and slammed into the infantry. We made another mistake of allowing the bow flank support from the blades, when that is only against foot not mounted, so the two knights that were destroyed were only one if we'd played that properly. So a second win for the Knights of Malta with 2-0, as we played a timed 60 minute game rather than playing to 4 elements lost, as per the rules.
The rules are still written in legalese but there are more diagrams to explain things in this version. I may be biased by today's result, but I think it plays well. We played slowly as we wanted to test the rules properly and not play a version 2 rule without checking, so I think future games will be quicker. Good fun though!
